You don't actually need a "warp drive" to get there in a reasonable amount of time. If you can - somehow - invent a drive that'll accelerate you at 1g without stopping for as long as you want, you can get anywhere in the galaxy within your lifetime due to time dilation. To an earth-bound observer, your trip takes approximately 1 year + the distance in light years.

Admittedly it's a big ask. But not as big as bending space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_ac...

Currently, a warp drive is forbidden by relativity. So I would say, all research trying to find where relativity breaks. So I reckon the gravity wave detectors like LIGO and LISA are more relavant than CERN.

My understanding is that it's not forbidden (wormholes would explicitly allow FTL travel, for example), but that in Einstein's model, FTL travel or communication would break causality, because it would effectively allow one to send messages into one's own past.

That may seem like "equivalent to forbidden", but some of the interesting surprises of quantum physics were originally theorized by Einstein and company as a way to disprove quantum physics because they were clearly too weird to be true. Maybe not as weird as "Oh, you thought an event's cause had to precede its effect? LOL.", but bizarre and non-intuitive nonetheless.

Actually, a warp drive is permitted by general relativity assuming it's possible to create 'negative mass': https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

Of course, that's not a small assumption...

Apparently the designers of Mass Effect did their Sci Fi homework.

In my mind I imagine warp to mean actually warp space not fly through space, the theoretical Alcubierre drive may warp space. Space is shrunk in front of the Alcubierre spacecraft and expanded behind it.

The spacecraft doesn't actually move through space it pulls the space where it needs to go towards the spacecraft and pushes away the space behind it.

I'm no rocket surgeon so don't quote me.

Dr. Cochran here. My 10 year old son Zefram will soon start work on it.

I appreciate the joke, but did you really name your son Zefram? That's fantastic, if true. I'm jealous.

Actually Zephan. Zephan Cochran is close to Zefram Cochrane but at least I can tell my wife I didn't name him after a Star Trek character. Maybe it is close enough get him through admissions at MIT or something... :)

Can you please try to instead tell him to just broadcast in all directions "VULKAN HIGH COMMAND WE HAVE AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR YOU" so they can just visit us and give us the technology to save time?

After all, clearly Star Trek the series has time traveled from the future and is aware of the Vulkans thereby satisfying the prime directive.

Won't that attract attention from other less benign entities?

In any case, it would be interesting if someone is seriously working on anything like this. I don't track current research in any related areas.