Is interstellar travel possible?

[samson212]

7. Alcubierre drive bypasses classical mechanics concerns...

The whole point of the Alcubierre drive is that there's no thrust involved. Rather than using a conventional engine (with which you're right, it would be impossible to approach relativistic speeds much less accomplish interstellar travel) this kind of engine actually compresses / expands space-time in front of and behind the vehicle. The ship would be in a locally flat region of space-time, i.e. a non-accelerated frame, so the rocket equation is completely irrelevant. You can call them kooks if you want, but it won't stop scientists from investigating the actual science that is involved here.

There are a lot of real issues with the science. An initial problem was that, should the mathematical issues be worked out, the amounts of energy that would theoretically be required to operate such a drive are astronomical. Literally. Like, more than the energy of the entire universe. Recently, theoretical physicists have been able to reduce the requirements to more 'manageable' numbers, to something more like the energy contained in the Voyager 1 probe. Still, you'd have to convert the whole thing to energy, which we don't have a way to do. It's a lot of energy.

Another problem I've heard is that there may not be a way to safely collapse the bubble once you've built it, so you could travel across the universe in the blink of an eye, but you'd just keep right on going out into the void, never being able to return to normal space. I've also heard it said that if you could collapse such a bubble, all of the energy you used to erect it would be catastrophically released, completely annihilating anything nearby...

But this is a real scientific theory. It may be shown to be incorrect when we figure out quantum gravity, but there's definitely real mathematics behind it.