Area of technology-Part 1

http://news.discovery.com/space/warp-drive-spaceship-engine.html

The ability to travel faster than the speed of light. We've all heard about in shows like Star Trek, movies like Star Wars, and so far, it remains confined to fictional universes such as those. However that could all change in the future, if the above article is to be believed. According to it, despite the fact that you would think that such a concept more or less completely contradicts the known laws of physics, it could be done in theory, but just not easily.It suggests that rather than having the ship move at such unimaginable speeds, it would instead be possible to manipulate the space time continuum itself, by creating a bubble around the ship and shrinking space time in front of the ship. The ship wouldn't actually be moving. Instead, space itself would be moving, as hard as that might be to believe. The argument the article provides is that technically, space did move faster than the speed of light on at least one occassion (the big bang), so if it happened once, then it must possible for it to happen again. The ship could reach its destination faster than a beam of light moving to the same destination from the same starting point, without violating any of the laws of physics (ie that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate matter to the speed of light) as the matter (the ship) isn't actually moving at all. However, as exciting as all this may be, there are a few problems that prevent it from becoming a reality any time soon. In order to create this bubble, scientists would need to figure out a way to manipulate something they refer to as the "11th dimension". According to what we know about the laws of physics, manipulating the 11th dimsension would have the desired effect, but how exactly we would manipulate at all, unfortunately remains a mystery. Another problem is that despite the fact that infinite energy isn't necessary, the amount of energy needed is still a huge amount, more than what is currently possible to generate. Despite these issues, as a sci-fi fan, I think it's exciting to think that faster than light travel may very well be possible one day, even if it isn't in my life time. Maybe they'll figure out time travel instead if we're lucky.