3 ms·
Starship pilots: speed kills, especially warp speed
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y agoNo doubt all true, but the points are: 1. The Enterprise et al don't approach the speed of light, they travel in sub-space (whatever that is) 2. They have a deflector dish that deals with "stuff that's in the way" I'm pretty sure the writers in later series more-or-less knew these points, and they're pretty obvious. After all, ride your bicycle really, really fast in the rain and the drops hitting your face hurt.
- ugh 17y ago"Isn't that a serious plot hole?" "Oh, no problem, one line of dialoge will solve that problem: 'It works because of our so-we-don't-die-a-horrbile-death-thingie!'" (A necessary plot device in every science-fiction story, but please don't overuse it :-)
- msluyter 17y agoI believe the inertial dampeners also prevent the crew from being squashed against the bulkheads.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y agoI've heard it reported that someone asked James Doohan (Scottie) "How do the inertial dampers work?" His reply was: "very well, thank you."
- DougWebb 17y agoExactly. And, most people who seriously think about extraterrestrial interstellar travel think in terms of folding space by manipulating the fabric of spacetime rather than brute-forcing your way through at relativistic speeds. The latter seems clearly unattainable, while the former is simply unknown.
- abalashov 17y agoWait, I'm confused ... "For a crew to make the 50,000-light-year journey to the centre of the Milky Way within 10 years, they would have to travel at 99.999998 per cent the speed of light." If a light-year is the distance light travels in a year, and the center of the galaxy is 50,000 of them away, then how are you supposed to get there in 10 years by traveling "at 99.999998 per cent the speed of light?" 10 years at the speed of light will take you 10 light-years, not 50,000. Am I missing something?
- ugh 17y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Time_dilation_and_space_flight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Time_dilation_and...
- abalashov 17y agoAh, I see, and suspected something like this implicit in the claim. Duh. I haven't done the math, but is it really possible for time dilation at or around the speed of light to have the effect of compressing 50,000 years into 10? That's a difference of 5,000 times. By "possible" I mean "as the theory would prescribe," of course...
- ugh 17y agoI don't know, but the Wikipedia article claims that "a constant 1 g acceleration would permit humans to travel as far as light has been able to travel since the big bang (some 13.7 billion light years)". So I would guess, hell, yes! (I recommend "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman for serious time dilation fun.)
- diiq 17y agoYes, it is. At light speed, time dilation brings the high-speed observer to see the trip as instantaneous : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Time_dilation.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Time_dilation.svg You can choose ANY time dilation factor and determine a velocity accordingly, because the graph is asymptotic and continuous. [EDIT: I mean, obviously, the whole thing breaks down with an observer actually AT light speed; assume above that I'm talking about taking limits of the Lorentz factor as velocity approaches 1]
- noonespecial 17y agoDid these guys ever even watch an episode of Star Trek!? If you're going to nit-pick the physics of a fictional tv show, at least watch a little of it and try to grok a bit of the fictional technology they claim to employ.
- mortenjorck 17y agoThe Wikipedia page on warp drive seems pretty well-curated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive Trek-universe ships don't travel through space; they travel in "bubbles" of local space so that relativity is preserved. These bubbles then move at hundreds or thousands of times the speed of light... somehow.
- windsurfer 17y agoThe only thing you need to know about the Star Trek is this: anything unexplained is being done by the deflector dish.
- rubinelli 17y agoIf they did, they would know the Borg don't bother cloaking.
- amix 17y agoA solution could be to use a black hole powered starship that uses a parabolic reflector to protect against radiation ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=969794 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=969794 - The Physics of Building a Black Hole Powered Starship [pdf] ).
- windsurfer 17y agoTo keep things in reference, if we were allowed to use hydrogen bombs in space, we could build a starship with present day technology that would get us to alpha centauri in 20 years. No word on the return trip though...
- synnik 17y agoWhether Star Trek or sci-fi in general, we're talking about fiction here. Any problem that true science can through at a plot, the writer can work around. I just finished re-reading 'The Forever War', and in that novel, the issue was resolved by two energy fields, at 5K and 10K in front of ships... and that was for sub-light travel. The time dilation was actually a major plot point, too... Or look at the Ringworld series. The original novel had so many scientific holes in it that he HAD to write a sequel to resolve all of them. It is the same here -- poke holes at the stories all you want. It will just inspire the writers to become more clever.