Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:The first warp drive design from the early 90s required massive amounts of negative energy, but three decades of honing the math later, scientists have lowered that threshold considerably. Now, a new study shows that Star Trek-inspired geometries can funnel those exotic energy requirements to end-caps of Gaussian cylinders (or nacelles), showing that warp metrics can fit starship designs. However, these designs still require negative energy—an exotic matter that appears impossible in classical physics. While living in his dorm at the University of Cardiff, Wales, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre—then pursuing a Ph.D. in numerical relativity—wrote a short paper detailing the physical reality of the warp drive. But regardless of design philosophy, the warp drive remains a thing for fiction—at least, for now.