Starship pilots: speed kills, especially warp speed
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
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.
"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 :-)
His reply was: "very well, thank you."
"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?
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...
So I would guess, hell, yes!
(I recommend "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman for serious time dilation fun.)
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]
I don't know any of the details though.
isn't this an oft quoted erroneous conclusion?
I thought the correct statement was that matter could not accellerate to the speed of light. Thus something could instantaneously attain FTL/Light Speed velocity or come into existance travelling FTL/Light Speed?
That was Kevin Spacey's claim in the movie K-Pax.
For all I know, we're falling through time at the speed of light.
As for time dilation, it's a very simple formula called Lorentz Contraction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_contraction. At 0.99996c, you can cross the Milky Way (100,000 ly) in one year.
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.
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.
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.
No word on the return trip though...