Lordy - who said that alien visitors are going to be anything like the fictional Star Trek council? That's not what I think - I think that they're millions if not billions of years ahead of us, so they'll be less comprehensible to us, than we would be to a neanderthal.who knows, maybe, but the UFO phenomena is definitely not what it looks like (various interestellar civilizations visiting earth using FTL drives) maybe its still extraterrestrial but something way more alien than an star trek style alien council
That's true of the simplistic Alcubierre model where the warp shell lies beyond the craft.I'm still dubious about warp drive.
The effect would have to propagate at the speed of light.
This would limit you to the speed of light.
But I think that these craft use the hull itself to generate the warp field internal to the material, in which case the warp field gets accelerated as the craft accelerates. That would appear to eliminate the light-speed propagation problem. But I haven't seen a paper about this concept yet so I'm just speculating at this point, but it's a logical argument.
There's also no getting around the perfect fit between theory and observations. These craft behave exactly as gravitaitonal field propulsion theory predicts. So whatever the technical issues may be, others have clearly overcome them...and we can too, eventually.
No, you're mixing up Newtonian physics with relativistic physics here.That is a lot of energy just to get to light speed.
Once the field is established, gravitational field propulsion requires no expenditure of energy to keep accelerating the craft (except for whatever inherent energy losses trickle out of the system via inefficiencies), because technically the craft isn't acquiring any momentum or kinetic energy - the distortion in spacetime is the source of the acceleration. This is also why there's no time dilation with gravitational field propulsion: the region of spacetime within the craft remains flat - there's no Lorentz boost within the bubble, so that region remains identical to that of the observer's rest frame.
The physics of applied general relativity (GR) are in many ways just as exotic and counterintuitive as quantum field theory. We just don't hear as much about those effects because we haven't learned how to engineer with GR yet.