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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 29 March 2010 and prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office, is one of a series of FY 2009 advanced technology reports under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. It uses a metric tensor approach from general relativity to catalog the physical effects of engineering spacetime. It covers time alteration, light speed, effective mass, and warp drives. It concludes that these effects are consistent with physics, but that engineering them remains a daunting constraint.
From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/29/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD examines the idea of vacuum or spacetime-metric engineering: the possibility that an unspecified future technology might alter the structure of spacetime in ways useful for propulsion, power generation, or extremely rapid long-distance travel. Using general relativity as a model-independent framework, it explores the physical effects that would theoretically follow if such metric changes could be artificially induced, including altered time rates, changes in effective mass, modified light propagation, gravity-like effects, and warp-drive propulsion. The document does not propose any mechanism for generating these effects and treats these physical consequences as an assumed result of spacetime manipulation rather than as the outcome of a practical engineering pathway. It also emphasizes that the energy requirements predicted by current theory to create such effects are far beyond existing technological capability.
UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOR 0FFI€1Ak Ulili ,u1k¥ craft's material properties would appear "hardened" relative t o the environment owing to the increased bind ing energies of atoms in its material structure. Such a craft cou ld, for example, impact water at high velocities without apparent deleterious effects. SPATIAL ALTERATION The fourth entry in Table 1 (spatial measure) indicates the size of an object within an altered spacetime region as seen by a remote observer. The size of, say, a spherical object is seen to have its radial dimension, r , scale as l/Fi::. In the vicin ity of a dense massM, > 1, in which case an object within the altered spacetime region appears to a remote observer t o have shrunk. As a corollary , metric eng ineering associated with an advanced aerospace craft to produce this effect could in principle result in a large craft with a spacious interior appea ring to an external observer to be relatively small. Additional dimensiona l aspects, such as potential dimensional changes, are discussed below in "Refractive Index Effects." VELOCITY OF LIGHT/CRAFT IN SPACETIME-ALTERED REGIONS Interior to a spacetime-altered region, the locally measured velocity of light , v;_ = c , is given by the ratio of (locally measured) distance/time intervals for a propagating light signal, as expressed in Equation (6) above . From a viewpoint exterior to the region, however, the observed coordinate ratio measurement can yield a different value v1 greater or less than c as given by the fifth entry in Table 1 (velocity). As an example of a measurement less than c, one speaks of light "slowing down" as a light signa l approaches a dense mass (for example, a black hole.) In an engineered spacetime in which g 00 > 1, lg11 1 c. Given that velocities in general in different coordinate systems scale as does the velocity of light-that is, v ➔ .Jg 00 /-g 11v -for exotic propulsion an engineered spacetime metric can in principle establish a condition in which the trajectory of a craft approaching the velocity of light in its own frame would be observed from an exterior frame to exceed light speed-that is, exhibit motion at superluminal speed. Th is opens up the possibility of transport at superluminal velocities (as measured by an external observer) without violation of the velocity-of-light constraint with in the spacetime altered region, a feature attractive for interstellar travel. Th is is the basis for discussion of warp drives and wormholes in the GR literature (References 2-6). Therefore, although present t echnological facility is far from mature enough to support the development of warp drive and wormhole technologies (Reference 22), the possibility of developing such technologies in the future cannot be ruled out. In other words, effective transport at speeds exceeding the conventional speed of light could occur in principle, and therefore the possibility of reduced-time interstellar travel is not fundamentally ruled out by physical principles. UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOR. 8PFISI.t.k U&li 0Plk¥ 8
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 17 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.