There's a group called 'Icarus Interstellar' that is advocating for discussion and engineering proposals that would pave the way for interstellar flight by the end of the century. This group is hosting an upcoming conference called, "Starship Congress", might be worth looking into?

Curious if anyone in the SETI@home community is involved? I've always been fascinated with the thought of interstellar travel, since I first saw the diagrams of the Bussard Ramjet (which has since been theoretically disproven as a viable propulsion system..).

Icarus Interstellar is currently running a Kickstarter to fund a 'hackathon' to bring together engineers, academics, students and interested people in a venue to come up with new ideas, designs or solutions to the INCREDIBLY difficult problems inherent to interstellar flight. Check it out:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1468630926/starship-congress-2015-interstellar-hackathon?ref=hero_thanks

And a list of the presenters and topics being discussed during the conference as well:

http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/sc2015-papers/

It appears possible, within current theory, to warp space, and so achieve effective or global speeds exceeding those of light, while not violating the light speed limit locally, which is what relativity theory specifies.

interstellar flight by the end of the century

Looks interesting but that is 85 years away yet. Who knows what new scientific discoveries mankind will make in the interim.

Bear in mind of course that interstellar travel will not be viable until and unless, we can exceed the speed of light. So far our physics says it can't be done, whatever the propulsion system.

Plenty of more plausible STL interstellar travel prospects which are scientifically plausible (maybe not
practical, but plausible):
Relativistic travel
Sleeper ships
Generation ships

I often wonder and hope that the work being done at CERN will produce a breakthrough in our understanding of particle physics that will someday enable the development a propulsion system that is capable crossing an interstellar distance.

In addition to SETI@home, I also commit a bit of CPU time to running LHC@home and ATLAS@home in hopes that it might make an ever so slight difference toward this end.

Probably not in my lifetime though..

It appears possible, within current theory, to warp space, and so achieve effective or global speeds exceeding those of light, while not violating the light speed limit locally, which is what relativity theory specifies.

Possible, but at energy levels that we have no known way of reaching on a sustainable level. Many things are possible when you can harness the energy output of a star and focus it at a single point. Right now we can't even build a fusion reactor that can sustain a reaction for more than a second.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

Dr. Harold White, at NASA has been working on reducing the energy needed to warp space. He has so far worked out that modifying the shape of the warp field generator proposed by Dr. Miguel Alcubierre, and using a pulsating, rather than a steady field may cut the energy requirement greatly. Further efficiencies are conceivable.
Dr. White is currently attempting to produce small space warps in an electrical field, held as a charge in a ring of capacitors. Even very high power electrical fields would no doubt be much easier to create than exotic matter charged with negative energy.
His results, so far, hint that he may be on the right track. These results appear to have been duplicated by another lab, using a significantly different set up. Both results may be due to a small warp field. More definitive results await more refined experiments, which Dr. White proposed to do in the near future.

It appears possible, within current theory, to warp space, and so achieve effective or global speeds exceeding those of light, while not violating the light speed limit locally, which is what relativity theory specifies.

it's possible...but also 2 much power is needed 4 powering such a machine...
;)

@ least now, until we get some "dilithium crystals"!
:D

I often wonder and hope that the work being done at CERN will produce a breakthrough in our understanding of particle physics that will someday enable the development a propulsion system that is capable crossing an interstellar distance.

In addition to SETI@home, I also commit a bit of CPU time to running LHC@home and ATLAS@home in hopes that it might make an ever so slight difference toward this end.

Probably not in my lifetime though..

there's a topic about GPU vs. CPU crunching on SETi@home...but it didn't come 2 much understanding by d "CPU crunchers":
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=77363&sort_style=6&start=0
;)

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non-profit org. Play4Life in Zagreb, Croatia, EU

I see the Starship Congress 2015 kickstarter was recently funded. Cool.
I believe they post videos of the presentations online. They have for prior years.