This article smells off. Unless I missed a breakthrough paper in the last few years, the mass/energy required to move an actual warp vehicle is measured in Jupiters. Given that we're talking about messing with spacetime, there's no reason to assume we can knock many orders of magnitude off that number any time soon. At any rate, it will probably be centuries before humans have the ability to start engineering something like that.
> The laws of physics definitely allow for functional subluminal warp drives
“Definitely”? That feels like an exceedingly bold claim, given the nature of the thing we’re talking about. I don’t believe we know enough about “functional” machines comprised of multiple Jupiter-masses of exotic-if-not-quite-fictional matter to start using words like “definitely”.
It's also a very bold claim because a warp drive will violate Newton's Laws. ("Technically we're moving space, not the ship itself," you might say, but Nature usually ignores semantic arguments.)
