Key Points
A team of physicists has discovered that its possible to build a real, actual, physical warp drive and not break any known rules of physics..
These arent baked into relativity itself, but add-ons needed because general relativity allows things like negative mass that dont appear to exist in our universethese energy conditions keep them out of relativitys equations..
And until recently, physicists have viewed those energy conditions as making it absolutely 100 percent clear that you cant build a warp drive, even if you really wanted to...
We already have plenty of methods for traveling slower than light (rockets, walking, etc.), so adding one more to the list isnt all that exciting. Plus, even if we wanted to build this warp drive, the gulf between this hyper-theoretical work and an actual, physical propulsion mechanism is the same as the difference between writing down Newtons laws and building a Falcon 9...
One of the signposts that we have to a future understanding of gravity is the fact that general relativity allows for interesting, exotic solutionslike warp drivesthat appear to violate other domains of physical understanding...
