Dr. Katy Clough

We had a lot of fun with the project, I have to say.

You know, it's a reasonable size.

So we are assuming that, you know, our aliens are kind of human sized and they might be smaller or bigger.

But, you know, if it's a kilometre across, the kind of frequency of the gravitational waves that we would receive...

would be much higher than where the current detectors are looking.

So actually the strength of them is sufficient that current detectors could detect them if they were in the right frequency regime, but current detectors are focused on lower frequencies that are consistent with black holes.

So if you can persuade someone to build a detector at a higher frequency, in principle, you know, if someone was flying around the galaxy in these warp drives, potentially the signals could be detectable there.

I think, yeah.

Well, yeah, this was one of the other things that we found is that, you know, this turn off is a violent process.

So actually what we ended up saying in our article is really this is the scenario that you often get in Star Trek where there's a collapse of the warp drive containment field.

So, you know,

The warp drive suddenly stops working and, you know, your warp bubble is going to collapse.

And, you know, this happens, as I say, in Star Trek quite a lot.

So they always panic when it happens and they panic for a very good reason.

And that's because all of this stretching and squashing of space time around you tends to collapse inwards.

And it means that you would basically be kind of ripped apart by all the tidal forces of space stretching.

So it's a very bad thing for the Enterprise if this does happen.

In principle, if you really could control with great precision how space curves, you could make it so that it doesn't just collapse inwards onto you, that it kind of disperses in a controlled way.

It's a very advanced technology that I would have no idea how to even begin constructing already.

But yeah, you know, if we're imagining that aliens have constructed this thing in the first place, why not imagine that they have the technology to control it really precisely and turn it off in a controlled way rather than what we did, which was, you know, in some ways just an accidental collapse.