You just KNOW they WILL succeed.....mere minutes/hours/days/years.....

....after you're dead.

Clean drinking water for everyone is a matter of culture, not technology.  Throwing money at the problem is something the UN already does, it accomplishes far less than NASA is likely to on this.

I'd defend NASA's budget usage sometime after hell froze over, but pissing away money on social issues without actually understanding the cause is something society already does in far greater volume than their paltry budget.

Agreed.

And this is absolutely awesome research. I actually watched the video, where Sonny White explains their interferometer tests and results, even though i understood shit. Apparently they are trying to generate warp-bubble and detect it, thus prove its existence, therefore confirm the validity of the concept, right? But I still dont understand how exactly are they generating the bubble itself in the first place? Dont they need some kind of negative or exotic energy to do that? And that actually exist? How do you create one? 

yes

not yet, at least in the volumes required.

I feel like if you pulled apart everything the NASA does, most of it wouldn't make sense to me. I do, however, think I'm too clever to fall for the obvious "here's a pretty spaceship, give us money" ploy.

Exactly.

This is just a version of an Alcubierre drive:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

Now, the Gizmodo article was very misleading.  There were A LOT of problems besides just the energy problem being discussed here.  For example, there was also the exotic matter issue that you correctly bring up.

There are fairly strong theorems which indicate that in order to create a warp bubble, you need exotic matter.  As defined here, exotic matter is matter which violates laws of physics (essentially negative mass in this case).  Thats a bit of a problem.

Now you can do some handwaving and hope that quantum mechanics lets you work around this.  After all, you can play some games with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and get local areas with "negative" energy.  But then you are combining quantum mechanics and general relativity, and we don't have a theory of physics which successfully does that.

Thats not to say that any of this is a waste of time, of course.  Just that I wouldn't exactly get my hopes up.  The chance of any kind of payoff is extremely low since you would need some kind of new physics for this to work.

To answer the question of how this experiment is trying to get around the exotic energy requirement:

There are a few approaches you can take.  The most likely thing to do is to create negative pressure.  For example, something like the Casimir effect might do the trick.  I don't think that you could really extract such energy though...

Reading the author's paper, it looks like they are trying to use dark energy.  Dark energy is essentially a negative pressure term in the expansion of the universe.  They are trying to use this to create the warp bubble.  Yeah...thats pretty speculative on their part.

(I don't think that dark energy would ever work for spaceship since its energy density is so low, but there are about a billion hurdles before that would be an issue)

In my opinion, humans will never leave this planet. Not as the beings we are familiar with anyway.  Humanity will spread across the universe but only once we divorce ourselves from our meat.

When ship meat to Mars, for instance, if I can send robotic drones to Mars and have hookups here on Earth that let me experience and manipulate Mars as if I was there? 

Or, in the unlikely event we can't solve the communication lag (17 minutes for a signal to get to Mars) we just digitize our consciousness and move it to different locations.  

It seems more likely we'll do that than come up with a magic FTL system.  Heck, I'd put more stock in quantum entanglement or some other remote matter manipulation technology coming up.

I can't imagine humans in a century running around in the flesh still.

Maybe the people who will solve this problem are alive today.  Let them try.  

I am so sick of war and being told to be afraid.  I am so sick of poverty and the harm we are doing to the most vulnerable among us.  I am so sick of people who underline, bold and put in caps the word "THEORY" when they talk about Global Climate Change.  

The people who don't want to fund this research know we will leave them behind on this planet; a science based Rapture.  

We shall become the Advent.

backs out of the room slowly...  

Well, say Dr. White sat down and showed you the equations, would you understand them and the loopholes (that math is pretty high falootin' )? You have that much math training? Not saying that you don't or wouldn't WITH the right training, though.

A good rule, as far as it goes. Problem is, it doesn't go the whole distance. How much of the mathematics of statistics does one have to understand to buy a winning lottery ticket?

Perhaps at some point in the past, people could claim to understand the theory behind X or Y. Perhaps that's true about some things today though probably far fewer than yesteryear. 

Even using your investment example, economists can explain some market forces and some market behavior, but in fact admit they cannot predict the behavior of the market at any given moment of time. 

I think there are enough folks around who do understand the math and at some point Dr. White et al, will have to 'put up or shut up'...either with experimental results (replicable) and/or communication with higher math mavins (probably sooner than the experimental results) regarding those 'loopholes'.

By the way, he might also be right about the loopholes, just shy of a way to prove they might be usable, at the present. You never know...after all, what was true about many peoples' beliefs 25-50 years before Columbus took his boat ride wasn't 25-50 years afterwards.

I would love to see the math on these equations. It would be a great to see exactly what parts he is looking at for the loophole. I find it completely, neat that we may find a way to create warp drive.

I'm curious, if we create warp drive, would this also imply that we can get to a semblance of teleportation?