;)

First, on the Hawking radiation issue, there were several seemingly plausible solutions proposed to either avoid or shield against this.

Regarding what happens when the bubble “pops” – there is no “momentum” to be preserved, as the ship is sitting stationary in space-time inside the bubble (this is why you would not feel any crushing G-forces when using a warp drive). This also allows a warp-drive ship to avoid the nasty time-related problems that normally result from near lightspeed travel through normal space.

Of the other two possibilities you suggest, I guess that would depend on how the bubble came apart. According to the traditional “Star Trek” approach, a warp field collapse would typically simply drop the ship into normal space-time at that location (if you were a warp drive design engineer, I suppose that one of your first tasks would be to design the warp field so that it would lean towards collapsing in a non-destructive manner!)

On the possible warp bubble instability issue, it has been suggested that the solution may simply be to devise a control mechanism to adjust the bubble to dynamically compensate for any instabilities, sufficiently fast enough to prevent a complete collapse (or just tell Scotty to “Stabilize the warp field, dammit!”)

But even if you were dropped into normal space, as long as your warp drive was not destroyed in the process, you would not be “stranded” in the vastness of space as described, as you could simply re-create the field and continue on your journey!

If the designers of early generations of “warp drives” found long-term stability of the warp bubble unobtainable with their current level of technology, what you would end up with something that has also already been contemplated in the sci-fi realm – an FTL drive that simply requires interstellar travel to be divided into discrete “hops”.

Of course, this is all based on our present understanding of physics – to a starfaring civilization with the technological capabilities to warp space, even our present theoretical understanding of this topic would appear like savage apes trying to understand quantum gravity, barely beyond walking upright, stone tools and the invention of fire!

Some physicist noted that warp drives actually doesn’t solve how to get around special relativity. All ftl solutions are based on having the warp bubble (and all its content) traveling ftl in the first place. So they aren’t physically realizable anyway.

“exploring even 1% of the galaxy would take eons”

Not really, I believe reproductive probes using known (but not demonstrated) feasible drives have been shown to cover the galaxy in 500 000 years. That is way longer than the typical species lifetime of course, but that isn’t a problem if the populations which benefit travel with, or in close association to, the probes.

Bummer, man. Maybe you’re right though in the last paragraph and we’ll find some other phenomenon to break the speed-of-light limit. Thanks for the excellent article.

The mislabeling has now been fixed.

General relativity is the fancier one.

I think you misused “special”.