What is warp drive exactly?
By “warp drive”, people are referring to a hypothetical capability to actually create a warping of spacetime that would allow us to travel effectively faster than the speed of light. For example, in the rubber sheet analogy, imagine the Sun and Vega sitting on the sheet. Now imagine you could somehow pull the Sun and Vega closer together by warping the rubber sheet, so that we could get there faster by creating a temporary wormhole to tunnel through hyperspace. Another idea is something called an “Alcubierre drive”: you make space contract ahead of you and expand behind you, so that effectively you move along in space. Now, of course we have basically no idea how to do these things. It might be impossible- perhaps it would require a near-infinite amount of energy. Or perhaps it would have terrible side effects. But in principle, nothing strictly forbids it, as far as we know now.
