Erik Lentz (How to build an actual warp drive)

• 00:00:14 The short history of Erik's discovery (and theory) of faster than light speed travel.
• 00:06:20 How Faster Than Light Speed travel would actually work?
• 00:16:20 How much energy would be required for a warp drive propulsion? Is there enough energy in the universe to make faster than light speed travel feasible?
• 00:25:29 Why the 'twin paradox' will be solved with a warp drive?
• 00:32:47 Did Stargate get the 'warp' drive idea right after all?
• 00:39:13 Are Black Holes a form of cosmic pollution left over by 'misconnecting warp drives'?
• 00:44:50 Is time the same for everyone in the universe?
• 00:50:10 What compels us to be pioneers?
• 00:53:05 Do we live in a simulation?
• 01:03:43 What are other 'faster than light' phenomena in the universe?
• 01:14:34 How does 'dark energy/ dark matter' work? What do we know about it?
• 01:25:10 Are there more dimensions than the four we can easily interact with? Does time exist without a conscious observer?

You may watch this episode on Youtube - #94 Erik Lentz (How to build an actual warp drive).

Apologies for the sound quality during the first few minutes - it gets much better after the initial five minutes!

Erik Lentz is a Ph.D. physicist and focuses on the theoretical, computational, and experimental aspects of searching for dark matter as well as faster than light travel.

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Torsten Jacobi: Eric, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time.

Erik Lentz: Oh, thank you for inviting me. Hey, absolutely.

Torsten Jacobi: Eric, you changed the world recently and you gave us faster than lights if you travel, at least theoretically, right? You published a paper recently where you outlined the options, how we can achieve that. And it's been so long and I had many people here on the podcast who were very, very convinced that this barrier can never be broken. So I'm really curious about your thoughts and maybe you can help us a little bit more, how you came up with this, what did you do before and what makes you so confident that this could actually be a possibility?

Erik Lentz: I mean, I've been interested in this field for decades. I think a lot of people who get into STEM as a profession, we're all fans of science fiction in one form or another as children. And for me, it was definitely Star Trek. And I was really fascinated by the whole world that was set up by all the series and movies and whatnot. And I really resonated with the technology that seemed to facilitate all these things. And one that really stood out to me, that was really the physical link between the interstellar community possible was the warp drive. Otherwise, you'd be spending tens of thousands of years just trying to communicate across this vast network of civilizations. And so this seemed to be a really key point. And as it became older, it became obvious to me that someone would have to invent such a thing. And so it's been a fascination to see if something like one of these plot devices like the warp drive technology would actually be possible in the real world. And it took some time in order to build the technical acumen in order to be able to pursue that. But the desire was always there. And so what happened that, say, 2021 or really 2020 became the year that this paper came out for me is that I found the time to actually really delve into the topic. And we can, I guess, thank the pandemic for that because I found myself sitting at home with a lot of free time on my hands trying to find a w