Warp Drive

Gene Roddenberry was developing a science fiction television series in the mid-1960s, and he needed a way to get his starship to a different star system each week. Conventional physics of the day said that was impossible. Roddenberry, relying on the traditions of science fiction and some informed speculation, gave the starship Enterprise warp drive.

Forty-odd years later, another STAR TREK feature film is being released, and physicists are arguing about whether warp drive was simply a literary device, or might something like that actually work. A ship can never achieve light speed, according to Einstein, but some physicists speculate that a bubble of spacetime might travel faster than light. Indeed, the entire universe seems to have expanded at faster than light speed shortly after the Big Bang. A ship within such a bubble could then travel faster than light.

Such speculation is interesting, but it brings up a question first asked by Enrico Fermi even before Captain Kirk reported for duty the first tiime. If it is possible for races only a few hundred or a few thousand years ahead of us technologically and scientifically to zip around the galaxy, where are They?