Originally posted by astralis
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Firstly the results are negative and no "warp bubbles" are detected in which case they either redesign the experiment or move on.
Secondly the results are positive and the phenomena they are attempting to observe are detected. This would be a break through in theoretical physics and various teams around the globe would seek to reproduce and study the issue. However it may well be that as studies progress the "warp" effect proves to be highly transient or non scalable i.e the bubbles are unstable beyond a few pico/attoseconds and/or prove to be unstable when "inflated" beyond a certain diameter. In this case research still continues in order to understand their impact on physics as we understand it leading in the longer term to practical outcomes in the fields like electronics etc - society progresses onwards and upwards with no radical outcomes.
The last alternative is of course that they do observe warp bubbles (a Nobel Prize awaits), they are studied in detail and do prove to be both scalable and sustainable, in which case the prospect of a space drive beckons.
However in this case I see two big issues pushing any practical outcome into next century at least. Firstly their issue of the "drive" itself. Like nuclear fusion its one thing to discover fusion exists it's another thing to develop practical means of exploiting it - after all how long have fusion reactors been "20 years away". It would I think take another international effort on the scale of CERN or the current experimental fusion project to learn how to build a a device capable of sustaining a large scale, controllable "warp field". The other big hurdle would be generating the exotic matter/or negative energy needed to sustain a bubble in sufficient quantities to be practicable. Anti-matter provides a good analogy, yes we can produce it but only with great difficulty, indeed I believe the entire worlds current supply would barely serve to ignite a match let alone power an anti-matter rocket. Speaking as a layman I don't see how producing quantities of negative energy sufficient to sustain the warp field couldn't be would be anything but harder still, and that's putting it lightly. And then finally to cap it all off even you have to have the capacity to lift all of your warp drive equipment into space since I suspect trying to "fire up" a warp drive on the Earth's surface might just void the warranty - the Earth's that is not the warp drive's.
So in conclusion I see this as a (hopefully positive) step on a 100 plus year project.
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