Initial Thought Experiments Involving Warp Drives
Warp Drives are not impossible given known physical laws involving General Relativity, so will assume a starting point that it’s a “mere” engineering problem that future humanity will solve, and considering what the implications are.
The proof of concept of the Alcubierre Warp Drive does not involve “traveling through” Spacetime, but rather bending Spacetime itself. Basically what happens in Star Trek. There’s plenty of published technical/scientific literature and popular articles and youTube videos on this topic of Warp Drives, so I’ll leave to the reader to research that.
1. One Light-Minute Away
To start, let’s consider transporting some ship through this Warp Drive, not a huge distance like millions of light years away, but just a mere 1 light-minute away.
How would that look like?
After the ship is transported, you would gaze in the direction of where you expect it to be there. Let’s of course assume it has radio various beacons on it to make it visible.
In exactly 1 minute, you would start seeing the ship. It would be 1 minute since that’s how fast it takes light to reach you.
