10 Predictions About The Future Star Trek Probably Got Wrong

To get the attention of the Vulcans, Zefram Cochrane — with Geordi and Riker in tow — first had to break the warp barrier. If Einstein had anything to say about it, traveling faster than the speed of light is impossible, but if you can't break the laws of physics, you can always bend them.

One physicist and Star Trek fan — Miguel Alcubierre — took that maxim to heart when he proposed a method for superluminal travel through the expansion and contraction of spacetime in his 1994 paper 'The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity'. Whilst the 'Alcubierre drive,' as it is now known, is a neat theoretical solution to the FTL problem, the practical realities of such an approach will undeniably require far more than 40 years to figure out.

The energy requirements alone would be enormous. The most recent refinements of the idea give energies equivalent to a tenth of the rest-mass energy of the sun to create a 100-metre diameter warp bubble. Warp drives also run on antimatter in Star Trek. Unfortunately, producing antimatter with our current technologies is prohibitively time-consuming — to make just one gram, CERN's antiproton decelerator would need 100 billion years!