Most of us alive today have never known a world where human spaceflight didn’t exist. Yet before we walked on the Moon, had an International Space Station, sent spacecraft to all the planets and even out of the Solar System, we had Star Trek, which brought even bigger dreams into the public consciousness. Instead of rocket fuel, our ships were powered by antimatter technology. Instead of reaching for the nearest worlds in our own Solar System, we arrived at new planets around distant stars. And instead of breaking the sound barrier, we traveled distances of light years in mere days. While Star Trek brought us a great many technological advances — and possibilities for what humanity can be as a civilization — perhaps it was the invention of warp drive, which itself enabled us to trek to the stars, that was the most groundbreaking of all.
Since even before the inception of Star Trek, the need to defeat the speed of light seems to be a necessity for human space exploration. Given that even the nearest star to our own Sun — and the next nearest potentially inhabitable world — is more than four light years away, a journey to any other star system would mean that multiple years would pass back on Earth, even if the ship itself took advantage of special relativity to shorten the journey for the crew. According to Einstein’s theory, when you travel close to the speed of light, the distances in your direction-of-motion appear shorter (length contraction) and the rate at which time passes appears to lengthen (time dilation), two of the most counterintuitive and yet well-studied and confirmed consequences of special relativity. If this were all there was to traveling through the Universe, then only the crewmembers traveling at near-light speeds would remain relatively young, while years would pass both at the origin and destination star systems. Interstellar travel would be a generational venture for all but the absolute nearest stars.
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http://www.isn-news.net/2016/09/star-treks-warp-drive-might-become.html
