NASA: Warp drive is 'plausible and worth further investigation'

Warp drive, a staple of science-fiction, has just been deemed "plausible and worth further investigation" by the smart and apparently not crazy people over at NASA. And by way of further investigation, they've gone and started trying to create warp bubbles in the lab.

The principle of warp drive is really fairly simple. Nothing that exists in space is supposed to be able to go faster than the speed of light, right? Right. So, the only way to go faster than the speed of light is to not do it in space. One way of going about this is to use something like a wormhole to punch a shortcut straight through one part of space to another, but a more common method (in Star Trek, at least) is to avoid the whole speed limit problem by warping space itself.

All you have to do to travel faster than light is to create a warp field with a ring of exotic matter, encasing your ship in a separate bubble of space, and then get the space to move faster than the speed of light. Technically, since it's the fabric of space that's moving, nothing in space itself is breaking the light speed limit. It's a loophole, yes, but it works. Or at least, we're not sure that it doesn't not work. In terms of powering a spacecraft this way, you'd just shrink the bubble of space in front of you and expand the bubble of space behind you, pushing your bubble along lickety-split.