STAR TREK Primarily one should discuss the issues surrounding inter-stellar travel to address why warp drives are important in science fiction. The first challenge relating to space travel is propellant mass. Standard spacecraft use rockets and rockets use large quantities of propellant. As propellant blasts out of the rocket in one direction, it pushes the spacecraft in the other -- Newton's third law. The farther or faster we wish to travel, the more propellant we'll need. For long journeys to neighboring stars, the amount of propellant we would need would be enormous and prohibiting expensive. Inter-stellar space travel requires some fundamentally different mode of travel that requires little or no propellant. This would imply the need to find some way to modify gravitational or inertial forces or to find some means to push against the very structure of space-time.
The next challenge to inter-stellar travel is speed. Even though the breakthrough of eliminating propellant would greatly boost how quickly oen could travel in space, to reach interstellar destinations in comfortable time frames, would require another breakthrough in technology. The fastest thing we know of is light. Yet even at light speed it would take almost 9 years for a round trip journey to our nearest star system. For objects like people and spacecraft that are built of matter rather than photons, however, the journey would have to take significantly longer. To travel to our neighboring stars in comfortable time frames, it is necessary to have the physics breakthrough that allows us to travel faster than the speed of light.
This is where warp drives enter the fray. A warp drive allows objects to travel faster than the speed of light without out the use of propellants. Although Einstein has predicted that no objects can move faster than the speed of light within space-time, it is unknown how fast space-time itself can move. If one could fold space as one does a piece of paper, one can bring two points in time very close and then 'jump' to the destination, unfolding space after the completion of the trip. One could expand space-time behind a spaceship and contract space-time in front of the ship, thereby creating faster than light travel. The theory behind the warp drive is based on the Big Bang Theory that postulates during the creation of the universe space-time expanded faster than the speed of light. Warp drive theory postulates that this can be achieved by creating a ring of 'negative energy' around the ship. Negative energy is the counterpart to energy as we currently know it to exist, and although theoretical, quantum theory leans toward its possible existence. Concentrated in the back of the ship this negative energy, when it comes in contact with regular space, will push against space-time in the thereby semi-stretchable fabric, this will force the space-time in front of the ship to contract in a fixed proportion to the expansion behind the ship. The end result is faster than light travel with very little propellant necessary.

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