I think the main problem with the Star Trek scenario is "faster than light travel". Of course, traveling faster than light really isn't possible however most of the alternate mechanisms proposed, e.g. worm holes, etc. don't seem that feasible either.
I think more realistic is that man gets a toehold on space by being able to harness resources from other planets / asteroids. If people can become self-sufficient in space, perhaps generation after generation, we can creep out further into space.
But it takes a big initial commitment and it's unlikely we'll ever resolve all the problems on earth so I'm not sure how much of a priority it will be.
You're not trying to travel faster than light, you're tying to bend space.
To understand, take a piece of paper and imagine you're on one end of it trying to get across. Instead of traveling the length of the paper just fold it in half and jump to the other side.
I hated this example of folding space. This example just shows us how confused we are about "folding".
When you folding a paper. Your reference frame is outside that piece of paper. You also possess energy supply outside the paper to exert the deformation of the material on the paper. But you did not posses the energy to fold the "space" around that paper.
In fact, even you fold it, you and that piece of paper are still in the same 4-d space time. Unless you are the lucky intelligent beings that are living on that piece of paper such as a colony of bacteria. Now it is the time to jump to the other side the paper!
So I guess the first step to construct a warp drive is to figure out questions:
1. "Can we as bacteria living on that piece of paper evoke help from extra dimensional source and energy from it?"
2. "Can we as bacteria living on that piece of paper control this mechanism?"
3. "Can the above mechanism to be achieved without ruining basic physics laws such as law of matter energy conservation, laws of thermodynamics in marcophysics scale".
As long as we figure the possibility for those questions in physics, then we will know can we travel like Star Trek.
Don't get me wrong. I love Star Trek. And my undergraduate major was physics. But I know very few general relativity theory and problems. What I just said is just consider what is necessary if we want to fold the space time.
I'm happy you edited your reply to try and clarify your point but you're still over complicating an attempt at a simple explanation.
My original point was that going faster than light in a straight line isn't the goal. The goal is to bend/fold/warp space around you and get to another physical point is space before light does.
Edit: I'm saying bending space, which happens all around us, is more likely a scenario than traveling faster than light. Is this statement wrong?
Yes, but eugenejen's point is that you're vastly oversimplifying a complicated concept. It's easy to use paper as a metaphor for our universe, but unless you've got any practical ideas for how we, as members of it, can use technology to accomplish this bending, it's not really very useful.
In fact, we are never able to bend the space and time to perceivale level so far. To bend the space and time we need to create a large gravitational field.
We bend the material, but we did not bend the space.
The problem with this approach is that it looks like anytime you bend space like that, you create a vacuum-energy resonance that destroys the space-time structure you just created. I'm not a physicist and I've never seen anyone state this as a universal rule, but it has come up in the recent analysis of the warp drive (won't try to spell that A-guy's name), in Hawking's analysis of what would happen if we tried to drap a wormhole around such that we can use it to travel FTL, and a couple of other things I've seen too.
I always find it amusing when people look at these hypothetical designs and say "Hey, it must be possible!" Because what I see is a universe that absolutely hates FTL and will destroy anything that looks like it might achieve it with extreme prejudice, yanking the space-time rug out from underneath your atomic feet.
I think more realistic is that man gets a toehold on space by being able to harness resources from other planets / asteroids. If people can become self-sufficient in space, perhaps generation after generation, we can creep out further into space.
But it takes a big initial commitment and it's unlikely we'll ever resolve all the problems on earth so I'm not sure how much of a priority it will be.