Imagine a spacecraft that stays still while the space around it moves: contracting ahead of it and expanding behind it. That’s the faster-than-light travel concept described in a 2010 U.S. document.
The spacecraft would remain inside a region where space changes around it. But creating such a region would require an enormous amount of energy. The document explored ways to reduce that energy demand by connecting several ideas from theoretical physics.
Space Itself Is Supposed to Move
In this concept, the spacecraft doesn’t fly at incredible speed. Instead, space contracts ahead of it and expands behind it, while the craft remains inside a bubble, a region where space changes. The movement of space is supposed to carry the spacecraft relative to distant places.
A physicist proposed the basic idea in a 1994 paper. The document examined a different question: how to create such a bubble without the enormous energy required by earlier proposals.
What Does Dark Energy Have to Do With It?
Dark energy is the term for the phenomenon associated with the universe’s accelerating expansion. The document suggested that it might result from effects of empty space. This led the authors to speculate that those effects might be related to extra dimensions: directions beyond the ones we know.
An ordinary direction might be to the right or upward. An extra dimension would be another spatial direction that we can’t see or move through in the usual way. According to the proposal, if dark energy is indeed connected to such dimensions, future technology might be able to alter them. That could affect the expansion of space in a particular region and perhaps create the bubble.
The document was written at the U.S. Department of Defense’s intelligence agency. It summarized existing ideas and knowledge; it did not present original research.
What We Still Don’t Know
We don’t know whether extra dimensions exist in a form that can be altered or controlled, or whether they are connected to dark energy as the document proposed. The idea rests on unproven assumptions and offers no practical way to build such an engine.
The document proposes starting by altering a direction we can’t see. The question is whether such a direction exists at all.
