I want this to happen, desperately...I was the little nerdlinger in 6th grade with a TNG Starfleet uniform who read the Technical Manual over and over until I could recite it from memory. If this ever worked on a macroscale I'd be willing to kill my cat to get a seat to Alpha Centauri.
But, within the currently known and accepted mathematical structure of the Universe, it's not happening. Exotic matter is a purely theoretical construct that doesn't exist *outside* the rules but rather in *violation* of the rules, at any kind of scale that matters. MAYBE we can exploit vacuum energy and the Casimir effect to work this on a nanoscale, but that would make sending a man to the stars as possible as teleporting a human is today even with men in white coats demonstrating quantum teleportation over hundreds of miles. I suppose instead of people we could warp-drive self-assembling nanomachines there and back, but that's about the extent of my realism.
Anyway, if we did discover how to create negative mass-energy on a macroscale, building a warp drive would be the least of our priorities...we'd be talking about literally limitless, totally clean energy and ways of manipulating the fundamental structures of spacetime in even bigger ways (eg create wormholes and jump 100s of light years instantly, eff this 4x the speed of light). Wake me when we have a working Theory of Everything, that's the bare minimum to even begin to conceptualize how to "industrialize the process".
= new reply since forum marked as read
