Starship pilots: speed kills, especially warp speed

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18532-starship-pilots-speed-kills-especially-warp-speed.html

by georgecmu • 16 years ago

15 25 16 years ago

newscientist.com

RiderOfGiraffes2• 16 years ago

No 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.

ugh3• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

I believe the inertial dampeners also prevent the crew from being squashed against the bulkheads.

RiderOfGiraffes2• 16 years ago

I've heard it reported that someone asked James Doohan (Scottie) "How do the inertial dampers work?"

His reply was: "very well, thank you."

DougWebb• 16 years ago

Exactly. 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.

abalashov3• 16 years ago

Wait, 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?

ugh3• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Time_dilation_and...

abalashov3• 16 years ago

Ah, 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...

yurifury• 16 years ago

It depends on which frame of reference you're measuring from.

abalashov3• 16 years ago

I assumed the claim was being made from one external to the spacecraft.

noonespecial• 16 years ago

Did 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• 16 years ago

The Wikipedia page on warp drive seems pretty well-curated: 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.

windsurfer2• 16 years ago

The only thing you need to know about the Star Trek is this: anything unexplained is being done by the deflector dish.

rubinelli• 16 years ago

If they did, they would know the Borg don't bother cloaking.

amix• 16 years ago

A 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 - The Physics of Building a Black Hole Powered Starship [pdf] ).

windsurfer2• 16 years ago

To 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• 16 years ago

Whether 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.

Starship pilots: speed kills, especially warp speed

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