this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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An alcubierre drive is literally folding space around the ship, ST warp drives are more or less a primitive version of the concept. And do currently have an issue (as much as a theoretical technology can have issues) that we don't actually know how you would accelerate such a bubble of folded space.
The answer is you don't. You (the person on the ship) can't do it. That would be incompatible with relativity. Someone else has to set up the bubble for you beforehand. Alcubierre warp works more like a highway than a magical engine.
You all are mixing your metaphors a bit. Wormholes "fold" space; imagine if the universe was a piece of paper. Now fold the paper in half and poke a pencil through it. That's folding. "Warp" engines, like the Alcubierre Drive, do just what they say - they warp spacetime itself around the ship by compressing the spacetime behind the ship and expanding the spacetime in front of the ship, essentially creating a pressure differential that naturally pulls the ship along it's new modified world line. This is what they're talking about any time you hear them mention a "warp bubble".
Futurama may have gotten this "correct" in that the ship doesnt move in warp as much as it lets the universe move past it. The warping ships are held outside of spacetime, and "move" based on the shape of the bubble.
Maybe higher warp is just a more complex bubble that makes the ship more abstracted from spacetime.
That doesn't fix anything. Physics doesn't care if you're the one moving or if you declare yourself to be still and the rest of the universe is moving.
"Held outside spacetime" also makes no sense at all in the context of relativity, but if they want that to be their sci-fi sauce then that's fine.
I dont know why youre so set about fitting Star treks science into the framework of ours science. They either are insanely past our limited understanding of physics, or its absolute bullshit and cant be slotted together.
We see in TNG alone that warp bubbles exist and are generated by onboard ship components. We seem them move great distances inside them, and know they require intense power to maintain. It clearly works because we see it work.
But besides that, TNG has lots of other impossible "move fast" options. We know that there ways of travel that far exceed warp speed powered by "thoughts," and not just one "thought" based hyperspeed either. You have the "traveler sparkly warp" and the "barkley think good" wavy warp, hell you even have gumtoos "spinny warp" that tossed the enterpise and romulan ship way past their top speeds.
Dont get me started on Q or tom paris hitting warp 10 to go "everywhere all at once."
It's what OP's meme is about 😉
Exactly. Well said.