Dr. Katy Clough

And we kind of believe that there should be reasons why you can't do that.

We think that there should be something that breaks down when you start to travel faster than the speed of light that maybe some kind of, you know, quantum instability kicks in and, you know, it prevents you from actually crossing that kind of barrier and traveling faster than the speed of light.

It is pretty hot, yeah.

Well, so this was exactly the question that we asked ourselves when we did these simulations.

We thought about the case where, you know, as you say, maybe we haven't got the technology to build a warp bubble, but maybe someone else out there in the galaxy has.

And so what we can do is we can simulate these warp bubbles and in particular simulate when they kind of turn off, when they collapse.

And that generates gravitational waves.

So because space and time is stretchy and being stretched and squashed, when you turn the warp drive off, when it collapses, it actually creates ripples that travel through space and time.

And they would reach us here on Earth.

And we, quite excitingly, we have the technology to detect those gravitational waves.

So we've had for the past 10 years the ability to see gravitational waves coming from black holes merging with each other.

The question was, you know, could we use those same detectors to see ripples from alien spaceships?

And the answer is, well, unfortunately, probably not.

But actually for an interesting reason.

So although actually the signals would be quite loud, they would be at the wrong frequency.

So if you have a – well, so we assumed that our spaceship was about a kilometer big, which is consistent with Star Trek.

And the Enterprise E is a kilometer across.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

I know, I know.