The first paper detailing the Alcubierre drive required exotic particles with negative mass to achieve a spacetime bubble (soliton) which is an issue since particles with negative mass have never been observed. The next big paper figured out how to do it with regular matter and it brought the requirements down to the energy equivalent of four solar masses. That would put it squarely into the realm of a type II or III civilization (1 solar mass worth of energy is in the same ballpark as the amount a star puts out over its entire lifetime).
If this paper is correct, it brings the requirements down to a tenth of Jupiter's mass, which is probably somewhat achievable for a type I civilization. The Enterprise would be the size of a small gas giant to hold an equivalent amount of matter and antimatter. It'd be able to enter warp once.
Would be interesting if paired with the harvesting of energy from a black hole. It is theorized that you can do this 'remotely' by slingshotting a laser around a black hole. This functions the same way a normal gravity assist does, except in this case it's photons, and not spacecraft. Shoot a laser around one side of a black hole, it returns to you around the other side, but at a higher energy wavelength. In this way, perhaps you would not need to store the energy needed 'in' your spacecraft, but instead in a black hole that is some safe distance away.
If your laser beam doesn't spread so far that you can't harvest enough energy to be net positive, then the black hole is not going to be a safe distance away.
...why once? Are you assuming all matter+antimatter is destroyed in the single trip? If you have x amount of critical material, could you not warp for half the distance of the "fuel" in your "tank" and then come back?
IANAPhyicist. I'm assuming that if we have the ability to contain and harvest energy from a matter/antimatter reaction then we also have the ability to stop it & start it at will.
The way I said it is misleading for the sake of brevity. That's a small gas giant worth of matter and antimatter to power a warp drive for a ship so small that it's not even worth calculating its mass relative to the fuel. The entire mass of Mount Everest is something like 0.00000000001% of the mass you'd need to create the warp bubble. If the ship was in the center of the fuel, it'd be crushed into something so dense it'd resemble the earth's core.
Best case scenario we're talking a mass effect style planetary megastructure that forms a warp bubble around a ship and shoots it with just enough "momentum" for the warp bubble to fail right at the destination.
IANAPhyicist but if I understand what’s being said correctly the amount of energy necessary to create the warp bubble in the first place, would require converting something roughly the mass of Jupiter. So you’d twice that to “come back”. It sounds much more like surfing a wave that something that get’s turned on or off.
If this paper is correct, it brings the requirements down to a tenth of Jupiter's mass, which is probably somewhat achievable for a type I civilization. The Enterprise would be the size of a small gas giant to hold an equivalent amount of matter and antimatter. It'd be able to enter warp once.