

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

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RiderOfGiraffes
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_.

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

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

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

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abalashov
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?

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ugh
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Time_dilation_and...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Time_dilation_and_space_flight)

~~~
abalashov
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...

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palish
Consider this. It is impossible for matter to travel at the speed of light,
yes? However, imagine a cannon on a train travelling (speed_of_light - 10
MPH). The cannon shoots a cannonball at 210 MPH. So when the cannon fires,
you'd expect the cannonball to go (speed_of_light + 200 MPH), right? Well,
no... matter cannot exceed the speed of light. What actually happens (afaik)
is time itself is altered as one approaches the speed of light. So the closer
you are to the speed of light, the more time is altered.

I don't know any of the details though.

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theblackbox
"It is impossible for matter to travel at the speed of light, yes?"

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?

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palish
Sorry, no idea. I don't know any details.

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noonespecial
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.

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mortenjorck
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.

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

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synnik
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.

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DougWebb
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.

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amix
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] ).

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windsurfer
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...

