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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document from the Defense Intelligence Agency is dated 2 April 2010 and was produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It is one of a series of advanced technology reports from FY 2009. It reviews general relativistic warp drives, the cosmological constant, Casimir energy and extra space dimensions. It proposes that dark energy may come from higher dimensions and that controlling those dimensions could one day make a warp drive possible.
UNCLASSIFIED//F8ft 8PPIOIIIIL ~91! 8HL'I spacecraft capable of 100c1 for an array of exotic destinations of possible interest. As Table 1 shows, trips to the planets within our own solar system would take hours rather than years, and journeys to local star system would be measured in weeks rather than hundreds of thousands of years. Table 1. Transit Times to Various Exotic Destinations at 100 Times the Speed of Light Destination Transit Time Mars 193 seconds Juoiter 36 minutes Neptune 4 hours Alpha Centauri 15 days Epsilon Eridani 38 days The Orion Nebula 1.3 years Until recently, the warp drive was a concept reserved for science fiction. However, a 1994 paper by Miguel Alcubierre placed the idea on a more solid theoretical footing. Alcubierre (Reference 1) demonstrated that a specific Lorentzian manifold could be chosen that exhibited bubble-like features reminiscent of the warp drive from the popular Star Trek television series. The bubble allowed for the surrounding spacetime to move at FTL speeds, and the inhabitants of the bubble would feel no acceleration effects because spacetime itself would be in motion instead of the spacecraft and its inhabitants. A number of papers have emerged in recent years that build on this original idea. However, these papers do not typically address how one might actually create the necessary spacetime bubble. Our own research directly addresses this question from a new and unique perspective and introduces a novel paradigm shift in the field of warp drive study (Reference 2). More formally, our work approaches the physics of warp drive from the perspective of quantum field theory; this diverges from the more traditional approach to warp drives, which utilizes the physics of general relativity. One of the improvements the model introduces is a dramatic reduction in the overall energy required to create such a phenomenon. The roadmap to this new idea was the observation that spacetime is currently known to be in a state of accelerated expansion, as demonstrated by the redshifting of galaxies, and the belief that if the mechanism for this expansion could be understood, then it might ultimately be controlled. A popular term used by cosmologists today is "dark energy," an exotic and ubiquitous form of energy that is believed to constitute over 70 percent of the matter-energy content of the universe (Reference 3-6). One salient feature of dark energy is its intrinsic ability to generate negative pressure, causing the fabric of space to expand in the way that is currently observed (Reference 7). 1 This speed, while somewhat arbitrary, highlights the fact that our galaxy would become far more accessible if or when one discovers how to surpass the speed of light barrier. vi UNCLASSIFIED,' ,'P81!. 8PPll!lillt 1!19C 8HLY
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 33 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.