WHY

Special relativeity dictates that gravity appears to move instantly for objects at a distance. It is why, as the sun hurtles through the galaxy, the planets maintain a flat disc around the sun, as opposed to lagging behind it in a cone shape.

Can you source that? It's just preservation of momentum mate.

You're an imbecile. Spacetime is a meduim. Nothing moves faster than light through a patch of spacetime, but patches of space time can move as fast as thy like, relative to each other. A warp drive is essentially a ship farting out space behind itself to make it go forwards.

I'll need some source on that. Nothing says that's viable

Does the Earth orbit the Sun's current location, or its location from 8 minutes ago?

Let us examine the terms in this statement and take the simple case where only the sun and the earth exists "rotating" around it:

Orbit is a path defined in newtonian gravitation where the gravitational potential goes like 1/r and the classical mechanics solutions are conic sections, and closed orbits can be circles or elipses. Light travels instantaneously. The system of reference is well defined, for the sun and earth, as the much greater mass of the sun makes it also practicallythe center of mass of the system.

8 minutes ago introduces special relativity and current location forces general relativity GR) into the problem, if one considers that gravity's effect comes through velocity of light limited gravitational forces.

To get a correct estimate one has to start with general relativity, which does not have orbits, but 4D space contours.Your concerns appear in the discussion of the two body problem in general relativity and are part of the need that made the developement of GR inevitable:

If gravitational influence propagates at a finite speed, then at all points in time a planet is attracted to a point where the Sun was some time before, and not towards the instantaneous position of the Sun. On the assumption of the classical fundamentals, Laplace had shown that if gravity would propagate at a velocity on the order of the speed of light then the solar system would be unstable, and would not exist for a long time.

The simplistic answer , if one looks at the GR equations , is that the intuitive 'orbit' of a Newtonian world is corrected by the space time geometry of general relativity, and if one could get an instantaneous measure ( not possible in reality) the Newtonian orbit prediction would be the one that led to the conundrum of unstable orbits. They are stable because of General Relativity.

Is this realistically testable? General relativity is never wrong.

Any warp drive page says how it's viable. Hell, universal expansion shows it's viable.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

Knock yourself out, kiddo.

>Does the Earth orbit the Sun's current location, or its location from 8 minutes ago?

It's location from 8 minutes ago mate

Don't you think I've read that "kiddo"? Please explain how it's viable? We've done nothing that comes even CLOSE to making that happen and even on paper it's dodgy as fuck

Dead wrong. Gravity propagates at cee. Someone referenced the stupid "cone" video about a week ago.

Incidentally, Special Relativity says NOTHING whatsoever about gravity. The "Special" means it only covers the restricted cases wherein gravity can be ignored. General Relativity included gravity and explicitly gave it the velocity of light.
If you're going to make up stuff, at least do us the courtesy of sounding plausible and using the right words.

8 minutes ago... lmao

No, it orbits the sun's exact position and you can prove that by observing all the planets orbits, which are on the same plane. Neptune certainly doesn't lag below mercury. All planets orbit the same point.

I did explain it.

The principle is just fine. Finding ways to bend space without mass is the conundrum. If it could be done, all science says that you would have a bubble which moves faster than light on a parallel path, but not faster than light within its own path. It violates no laws.

Good explanation. I usually tell brainlets that the lightspeed lag is exactly countered by aberration. Energy is conserved (except for the tiny amount radiated away as gravitational radiation.)
I hope you convince more people than I usually manage.

Alcubierre found a valid solution to the Einstein equations. It would work -- IF you could produce that space-time geometry.
However, there are a number of engineering "difficulties" which need to be addressed before it becomes practical. Number one would be finding some negative mass. (Which is not antimatter and not what the University of Rochester announced last month.)

You did not explain it. And all planets do not orbit in the same plane -- merely close to it because they inherited the angular momentum for the pre-stellar nebula.

Literally this, it's impossible on fucking paper let alone in engineering, it's nothing more that pop-sci believing losers with IQ's too low to actually study STEM that think this fucking shit is possible. It's really annoying.

>are we wasting time with this form of "faster than light" travel
implying this is something that a lot of time and resources are dedicated to

I think journalists spend more time writing about than physicists spend working on it

We just hang your mama on a stick in front of spaceship and gravity will move the ship and your moma forward.

>citing wiki
Search culture Marxism

Remember the image of the sun that we see propagated to us at c as well.

The speed of light c is a restriction only for things moving though space, but not for moving space itself. Hence, the universe itself is expanding faster than light as well.

Think about it this way: the speed of sound in water is 1500 m/s, but the waves can actually travel faster than that, by putting a glass of water on a rocket for example. We are moving the medium and so we are not bound the speeds in the medium itself.

Yeah this does make sense and I've read a lot on it, but there's nothing significant to back it up. And I don't see it happening anytime soon, or ever.

General relativity tells us that space is curved. Earth follows the curve that the sun creates.

GR doesn't tell us anything but math.
kevinaylward.co.uk/qm/ModelsOfPhysics-Mermin.pdf

You seem lost, fucking retarded piece of shit

business idea: use a solar system as a space ship

Did you read the PDF?
Mathematics is only a model of the real world. That is correct.
If the math doesn't agree with the real world, it's wrong. At least, some assumption is wrong.
So you test it against reality by running experiments. Every time the real world matches the theory, you gain more confidence.
That doesn't guarantee the theory is right.
People had a great deal of confidence in Newton.
Eventually, there were observations which didn't agree with Newton. Newton is fine -- under certain circumstances -- but he's only an approximation to a better theory. Which theory has not been contradicted by any experiment or observation to date.

GR tells you what will happen under such-and-such circumstances. It could be wrong. We know there are conditions under which it breaks down.
But unless you have a better idea it's stupid to dismiss it as "just math".

lmao dipshit
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele–Keating_experiment