Sonny White is running on alternate Woodward conjecture. Paul March is reportedly working with him, but till I'd heard this, most everyone was really skeptical, on (ironically enough) math basis, of White's projections. In any case it's just a matter of time since March (way more approachable) is under NDA since he started serious lab work at Eagleworks.
White & co still need to actually produce negative mass. The experimental data so far is all literally minuscule in amplitude. Just above measurement error. But sure is compelling for more investigation, no argument.
Warp travel issue is really not such a calamity. Overnight we'd go from earthbound to possibly star bound, with solar system colonization easily feasible.
In practice you could just run pusher ships shielded by comets. Lotta solutions worked out in SF literature. If you absolutely had to "icebreak" with ship hull, you could have precursor drones clearing the way to FTL-safe paths. Basically analogous to how soldiers today deal with pathfinding thru mine fields.
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Heim is broken, forget about that one. Excluded by data a couple years ago.
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More interesting than most of these is basic "cheap" propellantless propulsion like Woodward's Mach Effect Thrusters, allowing mundane solar system colonization which would literally change the world. And computational progress which would enable something like Kurzweil's Singularity - all sci/tech progress multiplied by AI smarts, etc within something like next 50-100 yrs. And most of all, curing aging (e.g. SENS, Calico...), which again changes the paradigm: the future need not happen so soon if you will live to see it anyway (e.g. Generation ships are different ball game).
Then there's the parallel but no less important developments, e.g. genetics. Sooner than later there'll be DIY there as for human livelihood there was Renaissance/IndustrialRev/Modern culture divergence and fractalism: people will be modifying themselves and make today's body-modification subculture look microbial in scale and implications for what it is and means to be Human (e.g. behavior mods. Intelligence mods (speed? multitasking? memory? etc, lotta dimensions). Extremophile mods (human photosynthesis? gills? radiation repair? strength?). Biointerface with synthetic prostheses?).
Then extreme basics - extra performance allowed by new materials - carbon compounds (graphene, CNTs, etc), stanene and others, metamaterials (invisibility cloaks etc), room and high temp superconductors, etc.
All of these make for more plausible "interesting times" than White and even Woodward's almost obsession with wormhole implications of their so-far borderline credible theorizing instead of more immediate and mundane tech that'd make the whole solar system as accessible as Antarctica today. I.E. no need for freakin wormholes if we've got longevity, true AI, and at least the entire asteroid belt to build with.
Sonny White so far isn't anywhere near most of these, yet these on their own could put us out there. White is thus mostly hype.
