I and the physicists I know will go to the mat on the principal that the Alcubierre Drive is the first real life physics closed form proof of a warp drive.

For the purposes of this discussion though, the more fundamental point is that Alcubierre’s theoretical proof of concept for warp drives was created in the mid 1990s nearly 30 years after TOS first broadcast and TNG had completed its run.

As I have said here before, following the norm in mathematics-based theory development, Alcubierre started with a tractable corner case. This means he set a number of obviously necessary parameters to zero to make it possible to get to a closed-form solution that didn’t rely on crunching numbers.

His objective in his PhD thesis was prove there was an exception General Relativity that makes warp drives possible theoretically.

He did that, and as is usual with corner solutions, came up with something fairly absurd that would involve massive amounts of exotic matter and couldn’t steer a course due — simply because he intentionally set those parameters to zero for the purposes of the proof.

It’s a misunderstanding of the way theoretical reasoning and research gets done to say that Alcubierre’s warp drive isn’t the one in Star Trek, simply because he chose the simplest case for his proof. The Star Trek warp drive would involve setting these parameters to positive values - but that doesn’t mean it’s a different theory at the fundamental level.

As usual, more realistic applications of the theory, with nonzero values for those parameters that would:

• actually allow a ship to enter warp from a sublight velocity
• permit the ship to control its direction while at warp, and
• would not require massive amounts of exotic matter,

are very likely to involve massive amounts of numerical approximations calculated by a computer and advances in materials science.

Unless someone finds a mathematical trick to get around the numerical approximations with a better closed form solution — and comes up with a materially different basic warp drive equation — whatever we get eventually from this line of research will still be viewed as Alcubierre’s drive. Or, also likely an Alcubierre-OtherPerson drive.

1. My apologies, I didn't look at the usernames and made a bad assumption.

2. You are correct, my point was that the warp drive did fit within our understanding of theoretical physics at the time. So much so that it eventually inspired the Alcubierre drive. I couldnt find a way that the spore drive fits within our understanding of physics.