An issue I find it necessary to revisit is the concept of the warp drive, and specifically the Alcubierre drive. I don’t know why Bill is so convinced that it is impossible to do the Alcubierre drive, when real physicists like myself and others see that it is within potential reach.
I want to specifically refer to the following video by the physicist Arvin Ash.
He points out that NASA physicist Harold White has been able to reduce the amount of negative matter needed to operate the drive down to 700 kg. Although that is still a lot, it is not an entire galaxy or an entire planet or something like that. 700 kg is in fact such a remarkably small amount that in order to make it into a story plot vehicle with severe limitations, its price would have to be in the order of 100 million dollars per GRAM, which would make the 700 kg cost 70 trillion dollars.
That’s an insanely high price for a warp drive (consider that the Coronavirus rescue package was in the order of 2 trillion), but still feasible. Whether the price of a warp engine is 70 billion or 70 trillion, it is still a non-trivial amount which would place severe limitations on its use, which is realistic.
I really hope Bill reconsiders his negativity to the Alcubierre drive since even by today’s standards, it is consistent with General Relativity and there exists a design that is within technological reach, even with today’s limited technology. It does require some new physics, namely exotic negative matter (or negative energy), but that is not a major leap given that we already have discovered anti-matter. I.e. there is already a precedence for anti-symmetry in electrical charge. The math allows for a similar anti-symmetry in matter as well.