But now, an astrophysicist has said that warp-speed travel is possible, we just need to find the right resources to make it happen.

Professor Geraint Lewis, an astrophysicist in Australia, stated that Star Trek-style space travel between different galaxies is hypothetically possible.

According to them, the spaceship would be suspended within two massive rings that would create a warp bubble bending space around it, implying that the ship would not actually be travelling faster than light speed, but it would only warp space. The only one thing that is evident is to develop this warp drive; the required material should have negative density energy.

Geraint Lewis suggests that high speed space travel actually won’t require upgrading the existing rocket technology, but rather finding a material which has “negative density energy”. As shown in the movies, Warp Drive is a hypothetical faster-than-light propulsion system fitted into a spacecraft.

The bad news? We’re unlikely to be around to see the warp-speed in action, with Lewis speculating that it will occur in “the next 100 or 1,000 years”. Sob.

NASA physicist, Dr. Harold White collaborated with Mark Rademaker to reveal designs of what a potential warp drive spaceship might look like.

The claim made by Lewis is based on the more or less same principle, wherein the spaceship itself will not travel faster than the speed of light instead it would be built by such a material which will help to warp space thus making the destination closer and at the same time abiding the rules of Einstein’s laws. He says that by understanding how space and time can bend, scientists could elevate their space travel ambitions even further. According to Lewis, the theory of Einstein would make it possible.

Lewis says, Einstein’s theory of general relativity was initially called “mathematically fiendish” and not received well in science community after its publication, but later, people realized that this theory not only describes the universe but also predicts some very odd ideas, like black holes. Even if it becomes possible to achieve the speed of light in space travel, it would take four years to get to nearest star and “2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy”.

These distances are big constraints in colonizing the universe, so a way needs to be devised to beat that speed limit.