"...one can hope that Alcubierre-type warp drives can be physically realized by clever engineering taking advantage of such quantum effects."
Naufrago found a really interesting feature to quote from. The excerpt above is always the part in such blue-sky dream schemes which makes me sigh with dismay: the required, unprecedented engineering / materials science breakthrough that everything else eventually relies upon. One may as well substitute the above-quoted phrase with something akin to "---and then a miracle happens".
I want this to
succeed just as much as you guys do, but since the 1970s I have read optimistic blurbs such as multiple excited rumors, premature news reports, and articles in OMNI magazine (back when OMNI was really awesome) promising us the stars "real soon now, just as soon as we can get a million tons of unobtainium to harness these energies." Hence my jaded tone.
Oh, and somebody earlier in this thread mentioned wormholes as one possibility for FTL travel. Alas, that appears to be unlikely, if Wikipedia is to be believed. I quote:
"The Einstein–Rosen bridge was discovered by Albert Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen, who first published the result in 1935. However, in 1962 John A. Wheeler and Robert W. Fuller published a paper showing that this type of wormhole is unstable if it connects two parts of the same universe, and that it will pinch off too quickly for light (or any particle moving slower than light) that falls in from one exterior region to make it to the other exterior region.
The motion through a Schwarzschild wormhole connecting two universes is possible in only one direction."
What a bitter irony, to safely use this method of FTL travel at all, you will already require
some other reliable method of FTL travel. Man, it makes one's head hurt to chase the logic bunnies like this.
The thought of us being marooned on this warm rock until a big enough asteroid crosses our orbit at the wrong time just chills my spirit. If we cannot find a
realistic means to spread self-sustaining colonies of H. sapiens throughout the stars, we're likely going to perish right where we began. I greatly doubt that our shared distant future is going to even remotely resemble Star Trek, but even a comparatively inefficient, under-performing method of travel at very low multiples of
c would change everything.
Everything.
