[Commodore]

Of course the bubble is unstable, because you would need something to stablize it--duh. Even in Trek, warp drive is only possible with a stable warp field.

But even if Alcubierre's theory doesn't pan out, it hasn't been the first (nor will it be the last) theory about warp drive to fail.

Hamsters in a spinning wheel hooked up to a veterium cortenide-laced coil. I keep telling folks, that's the key to warp drive...

[jerhanner]

600 years ago people thought that if you sailed far enough you'd sail off the edge of the world. 600 years from now, I'm sure we'll have mastered some kind of interstellar travel.

[JSnyder4]

Now, now Jer.
Pirates of the Caribbean 3 just a mere 2 years ago proved you could sail off the edge of the world.

I love movie magic and logic.

[NCC-73515]

Originally Posted by Captain_Archer

But Vulcans arent real

Great, now you spoiled it

[vuedoc]

Nothing is impossible, only improbable.
What? One divded by zero? CRAP!

[Lady Vaako]

I simply refuse to believe that warp drive is not possible... Someone's got to make it work! I just wish I could have been here to see it...

[gornski]

I will say this. Our current knowledge of physics is not enough to rule out FTL travel. But our current knowledge is enough to say that the problem is VERY difficult. I seriously doubt that 2 or 3 hundred years in the future is going to be enough. Add in the fact that we haven't (to our knowledge) been visited by any cultures that have solved the problem, and what you see is the problem is pretty frigging hard. So hard in fact that I don't think that it is reasonable to expect anything like a warp drive solution in less than a 1000 year time frame. I hope I am wrong.

IMO, the biggest blunder Roddenberry made in trying to make Trek plausible is not placing it far enough into the future.

[MonsieurHood]

When I was a kid, we had a Bank close to our house that had a computer in it's basement......it's entire basement. It had tape drive after tape drive and probably took up an area the size of an acre or more, and all this computer couldn't do half of what a modern desktop PC can do now. That was 1970, back then, only the most wealthy and important people had phones in their cars, they were huge and took up a lot of space. If you had told people then that pay phones would dissapear and that they'd be carrying around a phone on their person the size of a candy bar, they would have laughed you to scorn. Now think about trying to tell a Viking or an Ancient Roman citizen about the technology we have now and imagine how they'd react. If you fired up a Zippo in 17th century America, you would have been burned as a witch. The things we have now were impossible then because the stepping stones to our level of technology hadn't been stepped on yet, people back then were still climbing. We too are still climbing those steps. Someday, a step will be reached that makes all of this conjecture obsolete. I personally don't believe there's any problem that hard work and imagination cannot solve, eventually.

[Saquist]

Originally Posted by gornski

I will say this. Our current knowledge of physics is not enough to rule out FTL travel. But our current knowledge is enough to say that the problem is VERY difficult. I seriously doubt that 2 or 3 hundred years in the future is going to be enough. Add in the fact that we haven't (to our knowledge) been visited by any cultures that have solved the problem, and what you see is the problem is pretty frigging hard. So hard in fact that I don't think that it is reasonable to expect anything like a warp drive solution in less than a 1000 year time frame. I hope I am wrong.

IMO, the biggest blunder Roddenberry made in trying to make Trek plausible is not placing it far enough into the future.

True on Both Counts.
He suffered from Idealism.
Who knows maybe we won't have a world war III and a very pleasant 21 century....Nahhhh

[horatio]

Scotty told us how long you need: I can't change the laws of physics. I got to have 30 minutes.

(Words taken out of context are just great, aren't they.)