Documents / Report
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.
“The Advance”11 pages
UNCLASSIFIED//F8ft 8PPIOIIIIL 1!!191! 8Ftt'I Although we know what dark energy does, we do not yet fully understand its nature. We do not understand why it exists or how it is created; we simply know it provides an ever-present force on spacetime, causing the universe to expand. Indeed, recent high-precision experimental observations indicate dark energy may be a cosmological vacuum energy (Reference 8-10). These observations are based on the magnitudes of high-redshift supernova and have been a source of high research activity of late owing to the unexpected discovery that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing (commonly referred to as accelerated expansion). One tantalizing aspect of dark energy is that if it were fully understood, and if a technology were developed that could generate and harness the exotic effects of dark energy on the fabric of space, then a warp drive would be one step closer to technological reality. While a full understanding of the true nature of dark energy may be many years away, it is entirely feasible that experimental breakthroughs at the Large Hadron Collider or developments in the field of M-theory could lead to a quantum leap in our understanding of this unusual form of energy and perhaps help to direct technological innovations. Our own research focuses on gaining an understanding of the physical origin of dark energy. By exploring novel ideas at the forefront of theoretical physics, one is able to propose a physically viable model incorporating some of the cutting-edge ideas emerging from string theory and quantum field theory. This leads to a deeper understanding of the possible origin of dark energy and allows consideration of a mechanism that would allow a sufficiently advanced technology to control the dark energy density in any region of space, and thus the expansion of space. This work has clear implications for the advancement of warp drive research. This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 reviews the more traditional general relativistic warp drives, the energy required to create them, and the physics required to understand them. Section 3 discusses the cosmological constant, a term featured in Einstein's equation that regulates the contraction and expansion of the spacetime. Section 4 introduces the Casimir energy, which, under certain conditions, may be the phenomenon that physically generates the cosmological constant. Section 5 discusses higher dimensions in physics and their importance in the context of Casimir energy calculations. Section 6 introduces the formulas that demonstrate that the Casimir energies in higher dimensions may in fact be the dark energy that is responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe. Section 7 relates all the previous concepts together and introduces the novel warp drive paradigm. Section 8 performs original calculations of the energy required to create a superluminal warp drive. Finally, the paper speculates about the technological progress that would be necessary to turn this model into a reality. vii UNCLASSIFIED/ ,HZQA 8FFIIIIIIL l!l!E ercc I
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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.