The dream of all Star Trek fans is to see science come up with a warp engine. I jokingly call myself the world’s oldest Trekkie, but I am sure there are older ones than me. The thing is none of us know if there are other technologies we should be rooting for which would be even better suited to travel through space, but Star Trek has so indoctrinated us, most of us think a warp engine would be the ultimate space engine. What has given us hope that we will develop an engine like this is the fact we were told we would never be able to travel faster than the speed of sound. Some scientists stated no aircraft could ever withstand the transition from breaking the sound barrier. When Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier during level flight, it was equivalent to being the first to land on the moon. This is how famous he was at the time. World War II had caused great advancement in aviation and many countries were working on the first jet planes even though Germany was first to deploy them. It was said many planes broke the sound barrier in dives, but the pilots never survived, because the planes broke up. A propeller plane can’t break the sound barrier, because the tips of the propellers would cause the shock wave before the plane got through it.

Many people talk about how Star Trek influenced quite a few of the inventions we have today and indeed there is no denying it. A good idea is worth its weight in gold and the show had many of them, but how many people realize we have done some of those ideas one better? Remember the flip top communication device? It is said this is what influenced our flip top phones. When they came out they were all the rage, but today we have improved our phones to the point where they are powerful computers, so yes in this case we did the idea one better didn’t we? Other devices have been equaled such as the needless injection where injections are made with high pressure air. We have actually improved on this, since we now use patches which are painless to replace some injections. We have also equaled some of the Star Trek inventions such as anti-radiation drugs and even an equivalent to the medical tricorder, but admittedly it is not as advanced as the one pictured on the show.

As far as warp drive, science is moving forward every day even though it has a few hiccups from time to time. Scientists want to create a faster way to travel through space and are working on the problem constantly. The methods we have for space travel today are even too inefficient for travel in our solar system and practically useless outside it. There is a new type of engine science is trying to figure out. It has no exhaust, uses no fuel and has been called impossible. It seems to work but no one can figure out why so far. NASA didn’t want to test it, but did so, because of public opinion and it worked. It produced thrust using nothing but electricity and only a tiny amount of that. What makes this so attractive is the fact there is no fuel needed, the cost would be cheap and only some solar panels would be necessary to power the vehicle. It is also assumed that even this low power engine could reach the nearest star system in about 30 years if a beefed up version was made. Some have incorrectly called this engine a warp drive, but a true warp drive bends space.

Einstein said we could never travel faster than the speed of light, because as we go faster we need more fuel and he said if we wanted to travel at the speed of light there wouldn’t be enough energy in the universe to power our ship. I hope this is proved wrong, but getting back to the warp drive in Star Trek, it bent space, pulling on space in front of it and moving it closer. Yeah I know this sounds impossible. I remember one episode of one of the Star Trek variations when warp drive was banned from a certain region of space, because it was destroying it. I have a hard time envisioning how this could ever be created. Perhaps creating an engine which could make a wormhole might be possible, these are shortcuts from one place in space to another, but pulling space toward you in a manner which would make space travel faster seems impossible and very dangerous since you are disturbing the fabric of space and time.

There are other means of travel we have to consider and one is multidimensional travel. Perhaps the secret of speedy space travel lies in the ability to go through other dimensions and not warp space at all. Other dimensions may have different physical laws. If it truly is impossible for someone in our dimension to travel at the speed of light or faster, perhaps this law does not apply in another dimension. If we could figure out how to get into dimension X this could be the key. We don’t know how to do this now and we really don’t know how many other dimensions exist or even if there are more. Scientists suppose there are, but the human brain is a brain which operates in four dimensions if we include time as a dimension and it is not truly capable of understanding more, but this could change as computers get more powerful. Perhaps some super computer will solve the problem of whether these dimensions exist and how to access them.

There is a school of thought which proposes that our brains will ultimately be the engines which will allow us to go to the ends of the universe. They think we will all have much more powerful brains in the future. Our brains are evolving and so is technology, which may be used to make our brains even more powerful. Is it possible we might be able to travel to other worlds someday just by thinking about them? There are those who say the real answer is no, but we might be able to send our consciousness to these places and then return to our bodies. It would be a sort of out of body experience which many believe has happened to people who have had near death experiences. This would be ironic, because our brains would become the engines, but if it became true it seems all we would be able to do is look around without our presence being known to anyone or anything.

I don’t know what the future holds as far as traveling to far off planets, but I do know we need more speed, a lot more speed and it may be so much it will be impossible to achieve. If science is correct and some galaxies are as far as 13+ billion light years from us, we would need to travel 13+ billion light years to get to it in a reasonable amount of time. Good luck with that. On top of all this the object may not even be there anymore since their light is 13+ billion years old meaning we are seeing them as they used to look 13+ billion years ago.