The ubiquitous warp drive made popular in such shows as Star Trek, could fry any planetary system it stops in.
Faster than light technology (FLT) has been a dream for many sc-fi fans and even scientists who want an easy way to travel the vast distances in space.
Warp drives also solves the problem of relativity where the brave interstellar travelers can explore galaxies without their families back on Earth ageing a hundred years.
While Star Trek's warp drive is still purely a product of Hollywood imagination there are some concepts in physics that explore FTL.
One of those concepts is the Alcubierre warp drive proposed by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.
Basically the Alcubierre warp drive proposes that a ship would be propelled to faster than light speeds by creating a bubble of negative energy around it. Spacetime is compressed in front of the bubble and expanded behind it.
The ship would ride the bubble cruising at faster than light speeds while inside the bubble no faster than light prohibition is broken.
As enticing as the Alcubierre warp drive is or any other means for travelling faster than light, there is still the problem of stopping and stopping an FTL ship is going to wreak havoc on anyone unlucky enough to be in the ship's way.
According to Brendan McMonigal, Prof Geraint Lewis and Prof Philip O'Byrne of the University of Sydney, Alcubierre didn't take into consideration that many types of cosmic particles that the warp drive spaceship would encounter on its travels.
The research team found that these particles can get swept up in the warp bubble and after the ship decelerates from superluminal speed, the particles can get released in energetic outbursts strong enough to destroy anyone at the destination in front of the ship.
"Any people at the destination," the team's paper concludes, "would be gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion due to the extreme blueshifts for forward region particles."
One piece of good news that the team did find out is that while the warp drive is beyond human technology at the moment the theory behind the Alcubierre drive makes this possible in the future.
"Einstein's General Relativity tells us that gravity is the result of warped spacetime," McMonigal told the Register. "This means that simply by being in the gravitational field of the Earth as we are now, we are experiencing warped spacetime.
"What the warp drive equations tell us is what distribution of "stuff" we would need to create the spacetime deformation which would result in a ship travelling to a distant location in a short amount of time. In fact, the question of how we would generate this distribution is the main barrier to this technology."
In other words the drive is possible but researchers will have to figure how to stop the destination of the ship from disintegrating upon arrival.
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