She can't take much more of it, Cap'n!
Even those of you who aren't Trekkies should recognize that famous (or infamous) saying from Scotty, the engineer on the original Star Trek TV series. He said it whenever the Enterprise was in some kind of trouble, which was pretty much every week. But I learned something recently about the science of the show that practically made my brain say the same thing.
I know! I know! Realizing that science fiction is bogus, is like realizing that pro wrestling is fake. Everyone knows it; they just refuse to acknowledge it. But stick with me for a second here.
In Star Trek they traveled at warp speed; like in the real world we have jets that travel at mach speed. Mach 3 is three times the speed of sound, so warp 3 is supposed to be three times the speed of light. Now the fastest any spaceship in any version Star Trek could go, as far as I remember, was warp 13. So they just jump to warp 13 and cruise over to the next star in 20 minutes. No problem, right? Not quite.
What I just learned yesterday is that the closest star to us is estimated to be 4.24 light years away! It's called Proxima Centauri and it's only 1/10 as big as the Sun. But here's the point: even if you could travel at warp 13 along with the cast of Star Trek, it would still take you 4 months to get to any other star! As far as I can figure, that means two things: Captain Kirk was a crock, and this is an amazingly huge universe.
I think maybe George Lucas had the better sense to leave out a little more science from his science fiction. “Long ago in a galaxy far, far away” folks traveled from planetary system to planetary system at the ambiguously fast rate of hyper-speed. I guess that makes the plot of Star Wars at least imaginable. Although how they all spoke English remains a mystery.
posted by BenandJess @ 13:45
3 comments
3 Comments:
Because I'm nearly an expert on this subject, seeing as how I took basic physics in 9th grade, and have the ability to do 11th grade math (not that I'm bragging), I feel eminently qualified to raise another objection to the Warp Factor 13.
I was under the assumption that although Newtonian mechanics imposes no maximum upper limit to attainable velocities in the universe, Einstein's relativity theory does. And although scientists have accelerated some particles to go faster than the speed of light (heretofore referred to as "c"), the basic problem is that the faster an object goes, the more force is exerted on said object, and the denser the matter becomes. In short, I think I remember that the faster things go, the heavier they become.
So at Warp 13, wouldn't it be like being in a really powerful trash compactor. Like, we'd all end up squashed and looking like Ewoks.
Secondly, I think I remember that it would take infinite energy to move something as massive as a ship at even "c", which would make it tough to have 13 times infinite energy.
Can you have 13 times infinite?
And secondly, how can Wookies be so large and awkward, yet so delicate with the welding torch? And wouldn't hands that large flip every switch on the Millenium Falcon's console accidentally? And why do I still sometimes dream about Princess Leia?
All conundrums of our known universe.
DAT
p.s. And they all didn't speak English, which is why Jabba required subtitles. And I have no idea how in the world Han understood the highly tonal Wookiee dialect. I wonder if, out of respect for Chewbacca, he practiced Wookiee greetings in the shower.
What if Warp Speed is like the Richter Scale. You know like the way they measure earthquakes. Then if I'm right warp speed 13 is like 4096 light years per/hr so then it would be a 9hr trip. At least I think so. Let me know what you think.
Yes! Thank you Russell! Actually, since I posted that last week, it's been popping up in my mind every now and then. I wanted to find some cool way to either prove or further disprove the sci-fi space travel thing. I like the Richter Warp factor scale! And since there was only one episode of Star Trek per week, they could easily get to another planetary system.
There was another kinda cool space travel theory in a movie called Event Horizon. Now I definitely DO NOT recommend that movie. It was one of the freakiest movies I've ever watched. I couldn't finish it, and I felt totally wrong for watching it. What attracted me to the movie in the first place was the space travel (the ads made it look more like a sci-fi than a horror flick). You see, the ship's core could create some kind of artificial black hole. A black hole, as we all know, with it's intense gravity pulls space into a single point. The ship jumped across this point and turned off the black hole so that space went back to normal and viola! it just jumped across the galaxy! Kinda cool, except for the part about traveling beyond the edge of the universe into the anarchal abyss of hell and sending back a space ship possessed by satan.
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