In the wake of the recent news of the confirmation of the existence on gravitational waves, I was discussing gravitational waves with a friend, and he asked whether this could potentially lead to some kind of warp drive, and I pretty much immediately dismissed it. However, it got me thinking.
The gravitational waves detected by LIGO were from 2 black holes that merged and released of the order of 3 solar masses of gravitational energy (I apologise if I'm slightly butchering the science here, I'm no physicist), and it caused a "deflection" (again, please excuse, and feel free to correct, any technical ignorance on my part) of a fraction of the width of a proton.
The point of my question is this: if such an unimaginably large output of energy could cause such a tiny "deflection" at a distance of ~1.3 billion light years, what would something like LIGO (or perhaps something more like ESA's eLISA) observe at a distance of only 1 light year?
