Finding other civilizations by looking for accidents in their warp drives: the suggestion of a curious new research
If a warp drive exploded in deep space, would anyone hear it? Probably not, but new research suggests that humans could one day detect the ripples in spacetime that such a catastrophe would create, potentially aiding the search for alien life.
Warp drives, which allow spacecraft to travel at near-light speeds, are a fixture of science fiction, famously allowing Star Trek's Federation crews to boldly go where no one has gone before. But scientists have long theorized how a warp drive might work in real life; the most famous example is the Alcubierre engine , a design that Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre presented in 1994. This type of propulsion would form a bubble around travelers, contracting the space in front of them and expanding the space behind them to jump across the cosmos.
In a study published online in June, awaiting peer review, a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Germany asked the following question: If an alien civilization uses an Alcubierre drive, could we detect it by looking for the gravitational waves that system could emit ? After all, the LIGO laboratory in Pasadena, California, which is home to the world's largest gravitational wave observatory, can detect perturbations in spacetime generated by highly energetic events such as black hole mergers and supernovae.
Ravitational disturbances in space time (Getty)
Why not search for advanced alien technology this way?
According to calculations by researchers in this new work, yet to be academically verified, humanity may indeed detect signs of alien warp drive, but only with a new generation of gravitational wave observatories.
Gravitational waves are very subtle. It takes extremely sensitive and precise instrumentation to detect the ripples that stretch and compress spacetime, a combination of time and three-dimensional space.
Astrophysicist Katy Clough, Ph.D., and her co-authors came up with the idea to simulate the gravitational wave signature of a warp drive seven years ago. They took inspiration from Star Trek, he says, and in particular the occurrence of warp “breaches” in the show's universe.
An Alcubierre drive – which would theoretically require negative energy (a repulsive, rather than attractive, gravitational force) and exotic forms of matter to function – would not perturb spacetime much while functioning properly. Technically, driving a car on Earth also generates gravitational waves with its own acceleration, but they're too small to be detected or have much of an effect on anything. Waves reaching our planet from space are typically caused by violent events or the movements of massive objects, such as a rotating neutron star. Even a malfunctioning Alcubierre drive could be considered a violent space event.
“If you put exotic matter into a warp bubble, it will naturally disperse over time. So, the hypothetical aliens would need some kind of containment mechanism to keep it in place. And we don't know what it is,” explains Clough. “We said to ourselves, well, in Star Trek there's always a warp drive containment failure. So why don't we follow this idea?”.
In a breach of warp drive containment, Clough says, all the energy and matter contained would pour out and create the kind of disorderly oscillations that generate gravitational waves, like a person splashing in a swimming pool. This would be, to say the least, unpleasant for the ship's occupants.
A collapse of warp drive in Andromeda, the Milky Way's galactic neighbor, could be detectable on Earth.
“You would get stretched and squeezed and ultimately it would be unpleasant,” says Clough.
Clough says the project seemed "fun" to the team at first, but quickly became very complicated. The main problem, Clough says, was choosing equations that led to stable evolution in the simulation and that made physical sense.
At this point, Clough's team discovered that a warp breach on a kilometer-sized ship traveling at 10 percent of the speed of light (30,000 kilometers per second) would create a "very distinct" gravitational wave signal . It could be detected up to 1 megaparsec away, or 3.26 million light-years, meaning that a warp collapse in Andromeda – the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbor – could be detectable on Earth.
Luke Sellers, Ph.D., chief scientist of Applied Physics – an independent research group based in New York City and Stockholm that has proposed its own warp drive designs and studied the search for alien life in gravitational wave signals – says the Clough team's work is a "welcome addition" to the field. The study “just makes sense,” he says, especially the hunch that an Alcubierre drive could explode.
One day, he said, “we might have a menu of all these exotic SETI-type gravitational wave signals” to look for, “one of which might be a very large propulsion mechanism, and one of which might be the explosion of this warp drive."
The next generation
Assuming aliens have figured out how to build an Alcubierre drive and one explodes within range of our observatories, there's still a problem: None of our existing detectors are equipped to detect high-frequency gravitational waves.
Gravitational wave detection is still “a really new field,” says Clough. “It's really like the beginning of electromagnetic observations, where we're only looking at one frequency band.”
The ground-based LIGO observatory at Caltech and MIT, for example, debuted in 2002 and intercepts frequencies in the 10 Hz to 1 KHz range. (If a 1 KHz wave were sonified, it would sound like a high-pitched, plaintive tone.) NASA and the European Space Agency's LISA space observatory, scheduled to launch in 2030, will also listen to lower frequencies.
An exploding Alcubierre unit would give off waves at a frequency of around 300 KHz, which, if it were a sound, would be outside the range of human hearing. We wouldn't notice. For all we know, they could log in now, but we wouldn't notice.
The reason for this initial focus on the lower frequency bands, Clough says, is that there are high-priority objects and events in these ranges.
Thanks to our Telegram channel you can stay updated on the publication of new Economic Scenarios articles.
The article Finding other civilizations by looking for accidents in their warp drives: the suggestion of a curious new research comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/trovare-altre-civilta-cercando-gli-incidenti-nei-loro-motori-a-curvatura-il-suggerimento-di-una-nuova-curiosa-ricerca/ on Wed, 17 Jul 2024 19:00:17 +0000.