Sonny White’s work on exotic propulsion has galvanized the press, as witness this story in the Daily Mail, one of many articles in newspapers and online venues. I was fortunate enough to be in the sessions at the 100 Year Starship Symposium where White, an engaging and affable speaker, described what his team at Eagleworks Laboratories (Johnson Space Center) is doing. The issue at hand is whether a so-called ‘warp drive’ that distorts spacetime itself is possible given the vast amounts of energy it demands. White’s team believes the energy problem may not be as severe as originally thought.
Here I’ll quote Richard Obousy, head of Icarus Interstellar, who told Clara Moskowitz in Space.com: “Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light. But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light.”
On that idea hangs the warp drive. Physicists Michael Pfenning and Larry Ford went to work on Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 paper, the first to examine the distortion of spacetime as a driver for a spacecraft, to discover that such a drive would demand amounts of energy beyond anything available in the known universe. And that was only the beginning. Alcubierre’s work demanded positive energy to contract spacetime in front of the vessel and negative energy to expand spacetime behind it. Given that we do not know whether negative energies densities can exist, much less be manipulated by humans, the work remained completely theoretical.
Image: A starship (in the center of the ring) taking advantage of the distortion of spacetime. Credit: Harold White.
But interesting things have developed since the original Alcubierre paper. Running quickly through what White told the Houston audience, Chris van Den Broeck was able to reduce the energy costs of a warp drive significantly and other theorists have continued to drop the numbers. White’s team has been examining ways to continue that progression, but what is eye-catching is that he is working on a laboratory experiment to “perturb spacetime by one part in ten million” using an instrument called the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer to create the minute spacetime disruption.
I know of no teams other than White’s who are looking at lab work that could tell us whether a perturbation of spacetime can actually be created. From a NASA document on this work:
Across 1cm, the experimental rig should be able to measure space perturbations down to ~1 part in 10,000,000. As previously discussed, the canonical form of the metric suggests that boost may be the driving phenomenon in the process of physically establishing the phenomenon in a lab. Further, the energy density character over a number of shell thicknesses suggests that a toroidal donut of boost can establish the spherical region. Based on the expected sensitivity of the rig, a 1cm diameter toroidal test article (something as simple as a very high-voltage capacitor ring) with a boost on the order of 1.0000001 is necessary to generate an effect that can be effectively detected by the apparatus. The intensity and spatial distribution of the phenomenon can be quantified using 2D analytic signal techniques comparing the detected interferometer fringe plot with the test device off with the detected plot with the device energized.
So it’s interesting stuff, and it takes us to an even lower energy requirement, from the mass-energy of a planet the size of Jupiter to, in White’s view, a mass about the size of one of our Voyager probes. The reduction in the exotic matter/negative pressure required is managed by optimizing the warp bubble thickness and also by oscillating the bubble intensity, which according to White’s mathematics reduces the stiffness of spacetime. Thus we go from a Jupiter-sized portion of exotic matter to an amount weighing less than 500 kg.
White said the test was an attempt to prove that spacetime perturbation is possible, and likened it to a ‘Chicago pile moment.’ It was in 1942 that the first demonstration of a controlled nuclear reaction produced just half a watt of power, but a year later a four megawatt reactor was already in operation. With no tidal forces inside the warp bubble and a proper acceleration of zero, a future craft would be an undemanding platform in which to travel, and White pointed out that clocks aboard the spacecraft would move at the same rate as clocks back on Earth. It’s an exotic idea, but one that White’s lab testbed will now poke and prod to see if it’s possible.
Addendum: Al Jackson just sent me an email about other matters, but it includes a portion that’s specifically related to the above topic that I want to quote:
“I did my doctorial stuff in General Relativity. When I was in Austin for Armadillocon, last August, I asked my adviser, Richard Matzner, about the Alcubierre deal, since Richard does a lot of numerical GR he knows Alcubierre (who is an ace numerical GR guy), says he never heard him talk about his warp drive. Richard is not much interested in it either, thinks the solution is Lyapunov unstable. I have seen some works from Italy about Alcubierre and other ‘exotic matter’ warp solutions that show the models are unstable. Richard said he thinks Kip Thorne is no longer interested in it. I have never seen a really ‘heavy hitter’ like Hawking or Thorne, or a whole lot of other first string GR theorists ever remark on Alcubierre or the other recent solutions. There was a ‘name’ relativistist, William A. Hiscock, who did, he felt the solutions were not physical, but he thought people should keep trying. Alas that guy died young, only a few years ago.
But it is interesting that these solutions exist. I think, it’s going to take more imagination and further discoveries before something can be made of this.”
I once created a hydrological model that gave results that were many orders of magnitude different with just ever so slightly different initial conditions, very un-physical in that particular case. Sometimes however, slight changes to thinking can produce such very different outcomes that appear quite valid. Let’s hope that the energy requirements under new thinking prove to be many, many orders of magnitude less!
Very interesting! Brings up so many questions in regards to White’s work on the warp field interferometer, is ‘boost’ Lorentz boost or a boost circuit? if so How is he shielding the interferometer from external sources? This sounds so much like ‘capacitor’ drives and so on I would worry that it may make White’s work harder to be taken seriously.
One word. WOW!
Even if we’re able to demonstrate that warp drive is theoretically possible, we won’t be able to build anything remotely like a warp drive ship in the next 100 years.
However, studies resulting from this field of research could have a major impact on communications and engineering if we’re able to develop near-infinite bandwidth, faster-than-light communications in 50-100 years. Who knows, maybe even in our lifetimes.
Telepresence and research in and out of the Sol system would cut down on the complexity of space exploration by half, by reducing the need of two way fares and reducing the cost in human lifetimes needed to achieve even minimal progress.
Pair that with swarms of self-replicating 3d-printing vessels and we have a vastly more promising, near-post-human plan that could possibly work.
The NASA document points to work published in 2011, essentially with the same experimental status. The question is however, as we are approaching Q4 2012, if there are any new experimental results or third party analysis. What was presented at the conference in terms of scientific results and scheduled progression of the testbed? Thanks.
Martin, I don’t know what the schedule for the lab work is, but I’ll ask Sonny White and report back.
A question:
What sort of exotic material are they talking about? It’s kind of nebulous as stated.
Matter made of baryonic nuclei other than proton+neutron combinations?
Matter that falls into the category of dark-matter?
Something else entirely?
I feel like we’re on the cusp of something great, a breakthrough. And with the private sector looking to make it’s mark (and huge profits) it’s a good time to be alive!
Really neat stuff! Read about it yesterday on space.com. At first I thought it was just another misguided hope (like the ‘time machine’ story) but reading the article and noting the decrease in mass-energy indicated by calculations, I really started to hope that you Paul would have something about it.
Kudos to you for your coverage.
Now this is worthy of a kickstarter project to help boost it if needed – I’ll definitely be a big fan. Let’s ask Dr White if this would be helpful? :)
“Even if we’re able to demonstrate that warp drive is theoretically possible, we won’t be able to build anything remotely like a warp drive ship in the next 100 years.”
Probably so, but that kind of statement must have been said about almost every advance. People say “It won’t work”, then “Okay, it works in principle but it will never be useful” then, “Okay, it’s somewhat useful but it will take a hundred years to be really useful…”.
We tend to underestimate how clever people can be with a new discovery.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/18/1133368/-About-that-Warp-Drive
Here is another diary. Lets see how this plays out dont get your hopes up as per Al Jacksons addendum. I hope we find some thing but ….
How would this mini-bubble in the lab would be created? Isn’t it a huge deal that they can create any perturbation at all?
First practical experiment by or before 2050. First manned mission within 5 years after that. Some lucky sod’s gonna be a real-life Zephram Cochrane in the relatively near future! I may not see it (poor health), but I’m excited at the progress going in between this and the development of quantum modulation and other method of quantum mechanics in communications that’s been going on the last few years.
d.m.f.
It is exciting to hear of this actual lab work testing some of the theory behind the Alcubierre paper.
They have some guts calling the device a “Warp Field” Interferometer. Maybe they should have played it safer and used Paul’s terminology as with the title of this article and used “spacetime distortion.” I like the boldness though!
The use of a “toroid capacitor ring” also jogged my memory of all the amateur experiments using the Biefeld–Brown effect, a.k.a. “Lifters.”
Even as a non scientist, I have been intrigued by the notion that space-time itself is not tied to the speed of light. Not even close!
I assume that this scientist is talking about the vehicle being propelled by “dark energy” which is the driver of the expansion of the universe.
Obviously it is decades too soon to pop the cork on the champagne.
But I remain unconvinced that our future in the galaxy is limited to sub light travel.
Basic physics must continue to sort out what makes the universe tick, and meanwhile humans will profit, as they always have, by the minds of people too unenlightened to realize what is impossible.
Cool idea and it’s great that they’re building a nice tabletop toy to explore the concept, but this is still very much more fiction than science:
– If this still requires “negative energy” or “exotic matter” they first have to define them and prove their existence.
– “Only” 500kg of exotic mass needed to be converted into negative energy? Even the largest nuclear bombs convert less than a kilogram or two of matter into energy and they usually leaves a mark on the neighborhood. It’s an improvement over the old Jupiter mass requirement, but still unrealistic.
If this is truly an FTL device, I don’t see how it can’t be used to violate causality.
Given the Al Jackson addendum and the Daily Kos article David linked to, I guess “warp drive” is decades or centuries from being a workable reality at best, or at worst it may turn out to be a dead end. But, I’m pleased to learn that we’re actually funding research into FTL travel, no matter how remote the chances of success may be. We definitely won’t find a solution if we don’t try! http://tranquilitybaseblog.blogspot.com/
Hi Folks;
Would not such a warp drive enable closed time-like curves? If so, this could be used for causality violations. Our universe has not presented any evidence of causality violations and perhaps cannot because it has evolved to be stable.During the very first Planck Time Unit, perhaps causalty violations ran wild but inconsistances where then pruned out of existence.
Also, how thick of a bubble wall is White contemplating? Is it still less than 10 EXP – 32 meters thick.
My field of focus is extreme special relativistic travel for which nothing is causallly contradicted. Extreme gamma factor travel permits us to send emissaries into the deep future as cosmically distance locations.
Nonetheless, the warp drive experiments by White will yield whatever results they provide, positive or negative, and science will march on.
This sort of media frenzy dissapoints me a bit, because it sounds enticing but it is not really sound science. Exciting, mesmerising, hopeful, yes, but bad science.
Allow me to explain myself: there is a big misconception regarding the Alcubierre warp drive. In order for it to work, you need to lay down the required matter over the path between where you are and where you want to go. After a little time, spacetime curved in the desired shape, so the globally FTL tube (a Krasnikov tube) is formed. But how you lay down the matter? well, the matter needs to be laid down over a space-like region separating space-like points. How do you do that? well, you need a FTL drive in order to lay down the exotic matter, so the Alcubierre drive will work. Hence, you need a FTL drive in order to build this particular FTL drive.
I know this is not what everyone want to hear, i speak for myself that something like the Alcubierre drive would be very elegant to travel around, but is really not realistic *even assuming we have the exotic matter available*
On the other hand, if you have exotic matter available, your money is better spent on building wormholes, since they only need a bit of exotic matter inside the throat. Then you can transport them conventionally over the galaxy. Not as neat as a ship that goes over there at will but you still get the FTL benefits on the long term. Also, wormholes makes rocketry a lot more cheaper and accessible, since the tanks do not need to be carried around, you just need a fuel hose going through the wormhole
This, assuming of course wormhole construction is not as unfeasible as the Alcubierre drive, which is a big if
I went and read that NASA document that Paul referenced (I deliberately avoided all the media reports). I’m left in the position of someone who when told that it is better to say nothing than something bad should stay silent. I’ll violate that rule to say a few things.
Where is this spacetime warp supposed to come from? A capacitor ring? And despite the hand-wavy description of the Q-thruster there is nothing to show that there is any propulsion going on. Then I saw (fig 4) that picture of a contraption next to a graph, both of which looked very familiar. The answer was in the references: it’s a Woodward instrument. Is the author of this paper asserting that the Woodward effect is real? He should be explicit since without it the Q-thruster seems to accomplish nothing.
I saw nothing in the paper germane to exotic matter or an experimental test of effects related to an Alcubierre drive.
lurscher wrote: “Hence, you need a FTL drive in order to build this particular FTL drive.”
Burkhard Heim’s hyperdrive makes warp drive is unnecessary, and I have no idea if it would be useful for constructing an Alcubierre drive. Nor do I understand physicist John Reed’s critique of Heim theory, but it may not apply to Extended Heim Theory. See “Burkhard Heim’s Particle Structure Theory.”
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=4385&st=3015
100 Year StarShip Presentation
by Trimtab Management Systems on Sep 17, 2012
“The Necessary Transformation AKA Humanity Must See Itself As One Human Family Before It Can Go To The Stars”, which I presented at the 100 Year StarShip symposium in Houston, TX on Sept 15, 2012.
http://www.slideshare.net/SteveBrant55/100-year-starship-presentation-14312064
Question: how does this relate to the Mach/Woodward effect? Since both seem to be roughly dealing with inertia.
One wonders, how would you detect the operation of a drive like this from a distance? Perhaps it leaves some sort of gravitational wave pattern that is detectable, in which case instruments such as LIGO become a whole lot more interesting. Or perhaps there are side effects such as a particularly unusual type of micro-lensing or some such. It would be fascinating to make use of our understanding of potential FTL technologies to our SETI research.
@Ron S
“Where is this spacetime warp supposed to come from? A capacitor ring? ”
I had the same question. I assume that the ““toroid capacitor ring” is a simple model of the ring used to generate the spacetime distortion in the theory.
Of course there is no exotic matter in the experimental ring, but since the front of the ring is supposed to contain positive energy, I guess that is achieved on the test bench by charging the capacitor? I’m not sure how that satisfies the requirements.
Would it be possible to fully enclose a small star, a la Dyson, and use it as your energy source?
What if the “ring” were shaped like a mobius strip?
The Mach/Woodward effect would be great if it could be replicated at levels well above the system noise. So far, it hasn’t. If, as Ron S. mentions, their “Q thruster” is a Woodward device. If it’s producing measurable (beyond measurement noise) thrust levels, then THAT is a major news item. The closest I’ve seen is this article and while interesting, it’s far from convincing (and has not been replicated elsewhere):
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/06/james-woodward-reports-consistent-and.html
Well with exotic matter you could do some interesting things, but you have to wonder why matter hasn’t decayed to such states already. So this is still basically a mathematical curiosity.
As for Heim “theory”… the most concrete thing to come out of that is that if you combine some poorly-articulated waffle with some vague maybe-prediction of FTL you will be mentioned on the discussions of armchair space cadets for all time…
More hype-rdrive than hyperdrive…
Wedge
There’s a paper by Puthoff (2010) in the JBIS which can be downloaded from the Earthtec website that looks at what being around a space time metric distortion might look like.
“Is the author of this paper asserting that the Woodward effect is real? ”
No, I think he’s asserting that IF the effect is real, it will detectably shift an interference pattern. That’s why they call ’em experiments: You don’t know in advance what will happen. This one hasn’t been performed yet.
A quick look at that document shows that it’s not really consistent with modern physics. The quantum fluctuations can’t drive propulsion ‘off-shell’ – i.e., you can’t get energy for free from the vacuum. As for exotic matter, we’re referring to something with negative energy density – tachyons, or something else which would break quantum field theory and general relativity at the same time – and the idea that a capacitor does this is not at all valid, and seems to come from nowhere.
Is there any possibility of travelling backwards in time, and could one control which past or parallel universe one ended up in? It is not necessary to travel to a precise point along the time line which led to the present, which would be a contradiction. Being off by centuries on a dinosaur safari is no problem, but never being able to return is definitely be problematic. It might be better to first travel centuries into the future at near light speed, so the problems can be worked out.
Speaking of Mach/Woodward, in that article that Dr. Woodward authored (“Progress Toward The Dream of Space Drives and Stargates), it was mentioned in the references section that Centauri Dreams would have more articles on the topic. Here’s the quote:
” Here at Centauri Dreams you will shortly find more recent and less technical treatments available. They will be broken down into three parts. One will deal with the issues surrounding the origin of inertia and the prediction of Mach effects [tenatively titled “Mach’s principle and Mach effects”]. The second will present recent experimental results [tentatively titled “Mach effects: Recent experimental results”]. And the third will be an elaboration of the modifications of the ADM model that suggest exotic matter may be hiding in plain sight all around us [tentatively titled “Stargates, Mach’s principle, and the structure of elementary particles”]. ”
This was over a year ago. What happened?
Hi Folks;
Just thought I’d jump in on the discussion.
FTL travel seems to becomming a hot topic and so I have become convinced that such theories need to be investigated. How ever, let us not forget the use of sub-light speed extreme gamma factor travel.
Special relativiity as we all know permits apparently FTL travel for the crew via accelerated relativistic reference frames. An interesting application would include travel at a gamma factor of say one billion to a distant location and then traveling back in time a billion years. For cases where the acceleration and deceleration was held at one G and minus one G, the trip could be accomplished in one human life-time ship time. Of course, we would then have the paradox of backward time travel not to mention the trouble of figuring out how to do it.
Now what if an ensemble gamma factor can be somehow reach in one human familal generation ship time and the space craft could be cloaked from interaction with the forwardlly abberated background mass-energy medium. Perhaps the ship could travel into a new cosmic phase change era in our universe or perhaps into a new incarnation of any cyclical big bang form of our universe.
Such a space craft could hop from one Big Bang incarnation to another almost forever. For conditions where the age of each cycle is large but qualitatively less than the loose definition of an ensenble, the space craft could travel into and through an ensemble number of future incarnations.
We should keep an open mind regarding FTL methods and also near light-speed tardyon methods.
Mindrust writes:
The best laid plans, etc. The expected articles were never sent to me by their author.
Certainly if this or any other FTL is accomplished it would only deepen the Fermi paradox, right? The reason being that if even a handful of advanced civilizations figured this out in our galaxy, then travel to multiple planetary systems, including ours, would be much easier. Correct me if I am wrong, but hasn’t the lack of evidence for ET visitation been used by some to argue against the feasibility of FTL technology?
Brett: “…I think he’s asserting that IF the effect is real, it will detectably shift an interference pattern.”
The key words here are “I think”. The problem is that the ‘what’ is being measured or tested for existence is not explicitly described. I said what “I think”, an inference based on my reading of the document, which may or may not be correct. The author has a duty to be specific.
Alcubierre’s original paper didn’t address the issue of how a warp bubble could be created, it just analyzed a spacetime where one already existed. I wonder, has White or anyone else actually found an exact solution to the equations of general relativity where a warp bubble is created in a previously bubble-free region of space, perhaps using a theoretical model of the “White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer”? If there are no exact solutions, are there numerical simulations that show this happening? If neither, I’m skeptical that there’s much good basis for the claim that the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer might plausibly be used to create one (I would imagine the argument would be fairly “handwavey” as physicists like to say).
lurscher wrote:
“Allow me to explain myself: there is a big misconception regarding the Alcubierre warp drive. In order for it to work, you need to lay down the required matter over the path between where you are and where you want to go. After a little time, spacetime curved in the desired shape, so the globally FTL tube (a Krasnikov tube) is formed.”
Do you have a reference for the claim that a Krasnikov tube is needed for an Albucierre warp bubble? My understanding is that these were two entirely different spacetimes allowed theoretically by general relativity.
“But how you lay down the matter? well, the matter needs to be laid down over a space-like region separating space-like points. How do you do that? well, you need a FTL drive in order to lay down the exotic matter, so the Alcubierre drive will work. Hence, you need a FTL drive in order to build this particular FTL drive.”
What if you were interested in using the Krasnikov tube for FTL communication, not FTL exploration of new worlds? Then you could just have some slower-than-light crafts travel to different positions along the tube-to-be and park there, then each one could create its own local section of tube at a prearranged time, with the prearranged times arranged so that each craft would create its section of tube at a spacelike interval from the others. So this doesn’t itself seem like a fatal flaw for the Krasnikov tube, although there are probably other considerations that would make it impossible–maybe the exotic matter that would be required isn’t allowed by the laws of physics, or maybe when quantum considerations are taken into account the tube Hawking radiation would build up exponentially on its boundary and perhaps destroy it, as is said to be likely true of the Alcubierre drive in this paper (and something similar is speculated to happen with wormholes if they are moved into a configuration that would allow for backwards time travel–this is discussed in Kip Thornes’ “Black Holes and Time Warps”, for example. Note than in relativity, pretty much any form of FTL travel or communication implies the possibility of sending objects or information back in time, which has led to Hawking’s “Chronology Protection Conjecture” saying that all the FTL/time travel solutions that arise in general relativity will be ruled out by future theory of quantum gravity.)
To answer spaceman, the possibility of FTL travel has no relevance to answering Fermi’s question. Even with travel at only around 1% of c, there was apparently plenty of time for an industrial civilisation to colonise the Galaxy from one end to the other, if one had evolved before us. The time required for such slow colonisation is on the order of 100 million years, while Earth analog planets have presumably been forming up to about 7 billion years before Earth itself did. Speeding up the colonisation time does not greatly alter the picture.
Stephen
Paul Gilster wrote: “Here I’ll quote Richard Obousy, head of Icarus Interstellar, who told Clara Moskowitz in Space.com: “Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light. But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light.” ”
This may be a naive question, but what is “the fabric of space”? It can’t be empty space. It is meaningless to say that nothingness can move faster than light.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/21/1134648/-Warp-Drive-Just-Got-2-6-Septillion-Times-Closer-to-Reality
Here is another post on the subject. There are several new warp drive papers google scholer”warp drive” . There are a number on arxiv
I recall there is a difference between warp 1 and FTL . Its discussed in one of teh new papers but I am a biologist so the physics is over me
Oh Paul forgot to mention this was a recommended diary
Thanks for the feedback Stephen. However, after having thought about it more, FTL travel would exacerbate the Fermi paradox in the following manner: FTL travel could open up the Universe beyond our galaxy thereby leaving us with the question of why they have not shown up here not just from the other end of our galaxy but also the other Local Group members and beyond. A limitation to sub-light speeds would make other galaxies much harder to reach.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/23/1135251/-Ion-Powered-Dawn-Spacecraft-Reaches-Warp-0-033
Here is a recommended diary summarizing the rest and looking at ion engines. There is another link to Sonny Whites paper in the comments
Further to spaceman’s reply to Stephen and with all due respect, the well-known reasoning concerning (maximum) required colonization time at sub-luminar speeds (e.g. 1% of c) may be flawed for another reason, namely that this relationship might very well not be linear. On the contrary. there may be a certain (minimum) threshold value involved with regard to velocity and a (maximum) threshold value with regard to interstellar travel time.
In other words, if the speed is too slow and the time required to cross the interstellar gap too long, risks involved may become too great and/or civilization survival time too short to achieve any interstellar colonization.
I am inclined to think of the analogy of natural selection: higher selective pressure speeds up adaptation and evolution, but up to a certain limit, if selective pressures become too high they will result in extinction instead of adaptation.
Likewise, there may be critical theshold levels for interstellar travel times.
FrankH, Quote: “but this is still very much more fiction than science:”
Incorrect. It is very much science, and among the very best of it for that matter since it’s experimentally testable with cheap experiments with huge payoffs in terms of knowledge-gain either way assuming they don’t give up too easily if initial results are disappointing. Science is a process and set of standards for testing hypothesis and developing theories off reproducible results. What you’re meaning instead, but with incorrect terminology, is this is very much more hypothesis than theory.
As far as what they mean by negative energy, I believe what is being referred to is “negative energy density” from a gaussian perspective e.g. gravity would be one example but we don’t know how to produce and trap gravitons yet.
spaceman, Quote: “Correct me if I am wrong, but hasn’t the lack of evidence for ET visitation been used by some to argue against the feasibility of FTL technology?”
A few possibilities here: (1) Something akin to a “Prime directive”. Even one race sufficiently advanced that believed in no interference would prevent interaction by others simply by their might. (2) We are just so common that perhaps there is little curious interest in us. I consider this one unlikely since I don’t think by the way we explore every nook and cranny that you could assume other races wouldn’t do the same. (3) There has already been visitation and it is just largely ignored or so far in the past that we lost evidence for it. We know of things like the Ark, which could have been part of an ET vessel. We also know that the Mayans had visitors that tought them about the stars (4) They don’t know we’re here. Perhaps they sent their last probe 3 million years ago and found primates and precursors to elephants and whale-like animals said, “We’ll check back in another 10 million years when something intelligent may evolve” and totally missed our arrival.
I think in general, a warp-capable species has probably been around for millions of years (compared to our 100,000) since it’s unlikely their science would evolve the same way ours does. So even if we do find a loophole, chances are other civilizations did things the hard way for a long time. Perhaps they got used to long hundred thousand year voyages of large bio-dome vessels before they had any breakthrough. You could see how time would seem to pass by quickly in such a civilization if they measured projects in hundreds of thousands of years.