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PatrickStar wrote:

Also: Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a theoretical physicist!
In all seriousness, warp technology won't be practical until we can develop a material that can survive upwards of 1 light-second/second-squared acceleration (that's almost 300000 km/s^2). The forces involved in accelerating the engines to warp speeds wouldn't transfer into the rest of the ship fast enough, causing the engines to tear through the rest of the ship. If you were to counter this problem by accelerating slowly, you'd reach your destination at about the same time as you'd reach Warp 0.5 (which isn't anywhere close to half of Warp 1, and are generally inconsistent with the previous), and take you thousands of years. One proposed solution is the Alcubierre drive, whereby a spaceship would contract the spacetime in front of it and expand the spacetime behind it, allowing an object to arrive at it's destination faster than light would in normal space. It does, however, require creating a negative mass field around the object to be accelerated. A curious effect of the drive is that the object itself would not experience any additional g-forces even when accelerating. To any inside observers, their "bubble" of spacetime would be stationary, and the rest of the universe would be accelerating at blinding speeds around them.