Honestly the amount doesn't even matter. If we could make a baseball amount of negative energy but needed a Jupiter amount, sure, that looks solvable.
But we don't even know if it's theoretically possible to create a baseball amount of negative energy. As long as that question hasn't been answered, any discussion about practical applications seems rather pointless.
That's one way of looking at it. No sarcasm, I'm serious.
But another valid way of looking at it is that scientists have moved it from "impossible", to "impossible", to "impossible", then, with some more work, upgraded it to "impossible". Or, in other words, no progress at all.
The negative mass is still only one problem with the Alcubierre drive concept. Last I knew, it remains unclear how to enter and/or create a bubble without being totally destroyed, or exit and/or destroy a bubble without being totally destroyed. Reuse of any of the components is probably also a problem; in the Einstein equations, playing fancy games with spacetime tends to want to rather explosively go back to normal with the entire mass-energy of the distortions in question. It's also somewhat unclear what would happen to an Alcubierre warp drive in the real universe, where the space between stars is not a perfect vacuum.
It's not a drive being taken "increasingly seriously", unless you mean it's gone from epsilon to twice epsilon. It's a particular solution of the Einstein equations that involves impossible quantities of things and a particularly complicated setup basically already existing. If we didn't have science fiction making FTL drives cognitively available to people's imaginations and perhaps even subconsiously bleeding over into people's impressions of what real is (i.e., the bizarre but clearly pervasive subconscious assumption that seeing something in a sci-fi show means the probability of that occuring in real life is higher), nobody would be taking this seriously right now. Between the actively impossible elements (sustained, enormous quantities of negative mass) and the things that may not be mathematically "impossible" but are probably engineering-impossible, this is just a thought experiment right now.
Now, for all that, it's a worthy thought experiment. I am a firm believer in putting down a bit of money on the very long-shot payoff research. I'm not asking anyone to stop working on it. I'm just asking for realistic assessments of the current state of the art, which is that the probability that this drive will ever work is basically indistinguishable from zero at this point.
> But another valid way of looking at it is that scientists have moved it from "impossible", to "impossible", to "impossible", then, with some more work, upgraded it to "impossible".
I think that description used to apply to a lot of technology, which then progressed to "almost impossible", "slightly less impossible", and finally to "built a prototype". From my laymans' perspective, it's the trajectory that matters more than the current state-of-the-art.
Not the way I'm using the word. The drive is not currently merely like an airplane, where it is obviously possible to fly (at least as well as birds), we just didn't know how to bang the rocks together correctly to do it. The Alcubierre drives requires things that we have every reason to believe are impossible. In English the term "negative mass" may just seem like, oh, someday maybe we'll advance and have this; in math, it's even worse than you may think I'm going to say. It isn't that we don't know what "negative mass" is. It in fact already appears in some of our equations. The problem is that the product of negative mass times the amount of time it exists seems to be fairly sharply bounded at literally dozens of orders of magnitude too small to conceivably be of any use.
We have every reason to believe that stable negative mass is impossible. Not just "we don't know how to do it yet", but impossible. Impossible is like "perfect"; technically, it doesn't admit of "degrees" of impossible. So moving from "impossible" to "impossible" is not progress.
People like to cite a lot of cases of various supposed boundaries being broken over time as evidence that maybe this one will be broken too, but there's a qualitative difference between some "elderly distinguished scientist" opining something is impossible, and the mathematics of physics saying something is impossible. It is not a sophisticated, open-minded position about the technological possibilities of the future to say that someday, man will break the barriers of the laws of thermodynamics and someday produce the perpetual motion machine; it is ignorance and scientific illiteracy. FTL is not quite that certain yet, but at the moment, the smart money is on it being the exact same sort of thing, not humanity someday overcoming it. At the moment I'd say that if you properly understand the science of the matter and just how thoroughly reality seems to stymie us in our every attempt to worm around the speed of light restriction, you are completely unjustified in giving even a .1% chance of FTL being possible, let alone that humanity will ever achieve it. It looks to be a lot closer to perpetual motion than breaking the sound "barrier", which barely even deserves the same English word as the speed of light barrier given their massive qualitative differences.
Now, as I say, the long shots sometimes pay off, so I don't advocate that nobody thinks about this. Even the process of discovering why the <.1% is better thought of as a flat 0% can be valuable scientific progress, plus there is always the chance I'm wrong. However, at the moment, it looks like FTL is a problem that is far harder than just waving a couple of hoary old quotes about scientists at it is going to solve. You're not fighting "scientists", but the math.
Personally, I tend to think Hawking probably got it right with his chronology protection conjecture, and that even if you do manage to build something that goes faster than light or travels back in time, the entire system will literally explode. FTL may not be just impossible because we don't know how to build it, but because it really is fundamentally impossible; spacetime will literally explode in your face even if you do manage it.
> The drive is not currently merely like an airplane, where it is obviously possible to fly (at least as well as birds), we just didn't know how to bang the rocks together correctly to do it.
> People like to cite a lot of cases of various supposed boundaries being broken over time as evidence that maybe this one will be broken too, but there's a qualitative difference between some "elderly distinguished scientist" opining something is impossible, and the mathematics of physics saying something is impossible.
I appreciate your distinction in the use of the word 'impossible'. I didn't actually see what you meant by it before. From what I remember from learning about the development of airplanes, it was considered physically impossible until proven otherwise. It wasn't an elderly scientist saying planes can't fly, it was the best science of the day declaring that something heavier than air was meant to stay on the ground (IIRC).
I'm simply skeptical of claims of impossibility, across the board. I do appreciate and understand the science of the reasoning behind the claim; but to a layman who knows a bit of the history of science, 21st century scientists declaring things scientifically impossible (because science has progressed so far since 100 years prior) sound eerily similiar to 19th and 18th century scientists saying the same thing, for the same reason.
But we don't even know if it's theoretically possible to create a baseball amount of negative energy. As long as that question hasn't been answered, any discussion about practical applications seems rather pointless.