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Researchers at Baylor University think they may have found a way to deliver a real warp drive similar to the one featured in Star Trek. According to this article at EETimes, researchers believe that dark energy could be harnessed to fuel a warp drive. In theory the warp drive would expand the fabric of space behind a starship while also contracting space ahead of it:

"In modern string theory, dark energy [also called the cosmological constant] is the energy stored in empty space, where pairs of matter and anti-matter particles are spontaneously created and annihilated," said Baylor researcher Gerald Cleaver.

"When the cosmological constant is positive, dark energy is literally pushing space itself apart. When it is negative, then space is contracting. So by arranging the cosmological constant to be positive behind the ship and negative in front of the ship, it should be possible to travel distances that would ordinarily need faster-than-light speeds, even though the ship itself does not exceed the speed of light."

The only downside? The amount of dark energy needed to power such a device is equivalent in size to the mass of the planet Jupiter. In time though researchers believe they can reduce the amount of energy needed to warp space. "Early calculations indicated that a warp drive would require more mass energy than was available in the entire universe," Obousy said. "Later, a more ingenious calculation demonstrated that it would require about the mass energy contained within an entire galaxy. What is exciting about our warp drive paradigm is that we have further reduced the energy requirement to the total mass energy contained in a typical gas giant--the planet Jupiter, for example."

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