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Post by rmarks1 on Jul 22, 2013 17:57:43 GMT -5
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Post by faskew on Jul 23, 2013 7:27:38 GMT -5
Even if a FTL craft could someday be built, it would have limited uses. You'd probably have to get far away from the gravity wells of planets to use it, for one limitation. And things are SO far away. Let's say you wanted to get over to the other side of the Milky Way galaxy from earth. It's about 100,000 light years across, say 75,000 light year from where we are to the other side. Even at double the speed of light, it would require thousands of years to get there.
If I remember correctly, in the Star Trek series "warp" was used like "mach" (speed of sound). So Warp 3 was x3 the speed of light, etc. Ships topped out at something like Warp 11. So, yeah, maybe x10 the speed of light could get us somewhere. But merely exceeding the speed of light by a little would only open up a tiny portion of our galaxy. 8->
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Post by raybar on Jul 23, 2013 12:18:32 GMT -5
We will just have to wait and see where the research goes.
Some years ago I read an article proposing the stretch/shrink space idea, but the punch line was something like, "but no one has any idea how to do that."
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Warp Speed in Star Trek was loosely defined, and the definition seemed to change with the needs of particular episodes.
Just off the top of my head ---
(Warp 1 = c) was implied somewhere. (Warp 10 = ∞) was specified when Ryker (or Worf?) achieved Warp 10 and could view all of time and space simultaneously. But Captain Kirk's Enterprise was attacked by vessels going Warp 13. And Captain Archer, while going Warp 4, said how many miles and hour they were going and how long it would take to get to the Klingon home world, which placed that planet only about two light years from Earth (that particular writer evidently had no science education whatever).
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Post by faskew on Jul 23, 2013 12:49:18 GMT -5
I'm not a hard-core trekkie, but I vaguely remember one ep in which they lost control of the engine and were doing Warp 11, which was going to destroy the ship if they couldn't get it under control. Might be poor memory on my part. Might also be different flavors of the series, different writers, no script bible, who knows?
My SF writer friends and I discuss this often; my view is that there has been virtually no real SF on TV. Ever. It's all space fantasy that involves faster than light magic boxes, telepathy, aliens who can interbreed with humans, and so on.
Of course, one definition of SF is "competent people solving problems with technology." By that definition, even fantasy-filled Star Trek is true SF. Ah, well.
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Post by rmarks1 on Jul 23, 2013 13:26:31 GMT -5
Even if a FTL craft could someday be built, it would have limited uses. You'd probably have to get far away from the gravity wells of planets to use it, for one limitation. And things are SO far away. Let's say you wanted to get over to the other side of the Milky Way galaxy from earth. It's about 100,000 light years across, say 75,000 light year from where we are to the other side. Even at double the speed of light, it would require thousands of years to get there. If I remember correctly, in the Star Trek series "warp" was used like "mach" (speed of sound). So Warp 3 was x3 the speed of light, etc. Ships topped out at something like Warp 11. So, yeah, maybe x10 the speed of light could get us somewhere. But merely exceeding the speed of light by a little would only open up a tiny portion of our galaxy. 8-> A tiny bit is still a lot more than we have now. Let's say we could go even twice the speed of light. That means two years to get to Alpha Centauri instead of four. 300 years ago, sailing to China from Europe took that long, and they didn't even have video for recreation! Bob Marks |
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Post by faskew on Jul 23, 2013 14:46:06 GMT -5
Yep, it would be quite an accomplishment to do it at all. It's just bad by comparison to movies and TV, where they flit all over the universe in what seems like a day or two, at most. And, of course, because almost everything we see in the sky is actually not really there - we're just seeing old light - we might pop off to some far planet only to discover that it blew up years ago. LOL.
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Post by raybar on Jul 25, 2013 23:06:03 GMT -5
A tiny bit is still a lot more than we have now. Let's say we could go even twice the speed of light. That means two years to get to Alpha Centauri instead of four. Alpha Centauri is our closest neighbor, but that in itself is no reason to go there. Attractive destinations might a lot further away. An interstellar civilization anything like Star Trek or Star Wars or Star Troopers or Dune or ... well, like just about any space travel story ... would require speeds many times higher than c. Inhabitable worlds might be separated by hundreds or thousands of light years, and traveling between them at only several times c would require far too much time. |
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