"Wait a second" you think "This is where I work". You realized that you had been sleepwalking, and somehow you ended up getting a shower, getting dressed, eating breakfast and walking to work. You work at masa ( like NASA but they work on more experimental things like teleportation or lightspeed travel or terraformation) and you are working on a warp drive for faster than light travel / communication. You go to your office and try to crack the last piece of the equation, negative energy. The problem isn't that it doesn't exist, but that it exists in small quantities, the largest being made yet an amazing 2 µm long. You have been working on this part for 15 years, yesterday you got very close to solving it. You found that if you ( insert science here ) then ( insert science here ) happens, letting you reduce it to a millimeter, you just need to do a few more calculations and, wait a second. You realised that you made a tiny mistake that deleted a few zeros here and there, and you find that you only need a uranium atom's size of negative energy! You then send it out, and it gets published (not publicly as that could let someone else build it first) and construction begins right away. It gets finished and you are the first one to be able to try it out.