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I'd say that about 20% of the trekkies I meet are cool. They know that the show is unrealistic, and can still hold reasonable discussions about space travel and colonization.
The other 80% think that Star Trek is in any way representative of how **** actually works. I argue with them for hours about the sheer impossibility of things they believe are just a few decades or centuries off; Faster-than-light travel, teleporters, cloaking devices, aliens anybody would really want to meet, etc.
Even that would be fine if they would just leave it there. But they don't. Instead, they foam at the mouth over NASA and support wasting resources on stupid ideas like moon colonies. Or worse, Mars colonies. I know, space travel is exciting (except for that it takes forever and is really boring) but be smart about it. What would one of those colonies ever get us?
They have no resources of worth, not considering how much fuel we'd have to burn to ship them. Nor will they ever be permanently habitable save in the stupidest sense. The Moon has a third of Earth's gravity, Mars a scant 40-something percent. Anyone who lives there too long or is born there will thus actually be worse at space than the people who just stayed on Earth. They couldn't handle a paltry 1-G burn if we ever intvent fusion or fission rockets, to say nothing of current chemical rockets. Maybe invent the inertial dampers first, huh?
Worse than that, we have to truck parts of Earth up there to sustain these people. Food will not grow in martian or lunar soil, no matter how much fertilizer you add to it. Lunar soil is nutrients-bare and has no microbes to regulate the ecosystem or assist in biological processes. Mars is the same but also full of rust. Both are quite irradiated.
To the bad kind of trekkies, this is okay. They think of such endeavors as baby steps to interstellar travel. They are in the same way that jumping is good practice for interplanetary travel. A completely different set of science is needed to consider interstellar travel, none of which is usually being done by NASA.
To NASA's credit, and those of other space agencies, they are beginning to change their thinking. You don't hear about the guys doing this often, they aren't sexy enough for newspapers, but they're trying to focus more on near-Earth and orbital development. They know what I know, the classic vision of space travel is never going to happen. Not 200 years from now, not 2000 years from now, not 20,000 years from now. Physics simply do not permit it.
I explain all this and more, but it just bounces off their shielded skulls. I wish I had shields, because the incoming phaser volley is always this : "You don't know what's possible."
That's true, I don't. Until we figure out how gravity works (there's an excellent chance we will never be able to control it the way they want to) nobody does. But when we do figure it out, universal physics will be complete, and thus far, universal physics says Kirk and his ship would never make it past the Oort cloud. Dilitihium crystals or no, that's a fusion torch they're riding on, with the engines arranged in a way that would most likely sheer them off. Suitable for interplanetary travel, not interstellar. If they kept accelerating at a very uncomfortable 1G (everything would be sideways) by the time they hit the Oort cloud a grain of sand would impact their hull with the force of half a stick of dynamite. And there is a lot of dust in the oort cloud.
Assuming they somehow survive that, it's 10.4 years to Alpha Centauri with a flip and burn. That's a lot of food storage, and fuel, which we haven't taken into account yet. If we strapped a fusion rocket to the actual USS Enterprise's butt and sent that into space the journey would take more like 18 years. The original starship is 60% more massive than that, so it's going to be about 23 years, very conservative estimate, with most of that time being spent accelerating to optimum velocity in both directions. Physics nerds know my calculations are way too generous because I didn't adjust curve for that, just used a straight-up 1 for 1 conversion.
Suffice it to say, by the time we get to Alpha Centauri (where there is nothing) only the Red Shirts and dumb ensigns will be fit to fly a starship. Hopefully they didn't all die in dramatic accidents when we hit the Oort cloud.
They still won't agree with me most of the time, and I know why. They value the imagination more than the knowledge, which is fine. We're going to need some imagination if we're ever going to leave this solar system. I just think mine is actually more fun, a universe where you have to plan everything decades or centuries in advance. Interstellar wars, trade, and exploration should make for some interesting developments. Like an invasion fleet detected 15 light years out arriving to discover that their weapons are obsolete. Or a trade ship and its wares. Yes, we can detect fusion burns at those ranges. Right now we can detect the Voyager (well beyond Pluto) and it's about as powerful as your refrigerator light bulb. Unlike Enterprise, it will probably survive any collisions with partciles.
In the meantime, it might be best to look before wasting billions of dollars on **** that isn't going anywhere, but the bad kind of trekkies don't care about that, either. They think the Federation's economy could actually exist, somehow having evolved beyond currency. Like that has ever worked before, but hey, imagination! I'm going to stop myself before I go on forever.
The moon is literally covered in fuel which a couple shiploads of could power all of Earth for a year or something.
And the sense behind colonies is that dropping off a few people and letting them breed is cheaper and easier than transporting everyone individually, and they can continue operating indefinitely providing they have shelter and food. On Mars there could also be a long term terraforming program whereby plant life returns and makes the outdoors more habitable.
But here's a question for you: If you're against exploration and colonization, what do you think a space prgram should focus on?
And technically satellites are in low earth orbit, not space. I'd classify a space program as anything that deals with alien planets or stars.
Humans are cheaper, and self replicating. It will also be a long time before robots can maintain themselves. Some humans will be needed to do that even if it's robots doing most of the labor.
Hydrogen-3 does not count as fuel right now. If we had the fusion to use it, why would we go after something as barren as the moon? Just send a ship to Jupiter. We can get way more, and a bunch of other gases, too. Saves you the expense of refining it from dust.
I'm not against exploration and colonization. Just against exploration and colonization of worthless things. Or by dumb methods. We should be focusing on making ourselves and our machines space-portable. Not sending guys to dead rocks with chemical rockets.
Step 1, already underway, is getting into orbit cheaply. Even outlandish ideas like an orbital elevator, which would could theoretically make with enough graphene, are better than wasting rocket fuel.
Step 2 is better power sources and engineering. Both mechanical and biological. We could build a nuclear (fission) rocket today if we wanted to, but nobody wants to build it on Earth because of the radiation. Building it in orbit is the obvious choice, but reactors are really heavy. Not even NASA would want to make 4000 trips into orbit to build the thing.
Genetic engineering is already well underway, but most space agencies don't look at it much. They should, because it's quite possible that our genes and machines are the only things that will ever make it to other stars. Even if we could build a fusion torch, and we're getting there, the largest theoretical range for any manned vessel is only about 10 light years. Far as we can tell, there are no habitable planets within ten light years.
It is very likely that any humans we send out there will have to be able to live their entire lives and moreaboard a ship. That's okay. So long as we have fusion we can make pretty much anything out of pretty much anything on the elemental level.
But whoever those humans are, they will not be like you and I. They could be spindly, lethargic things with reinforced bone structures, reduced need for nutrients, posiibly even reduced brain capacity. If the ship can more or less fly itself, you just need the humans to do mundane tasks. Robots would be better, but we don't know if it's possible to create intelligent ones.
Alternatively, they might just be brains in tanks, living in a virtual world. These things are a ways off yet, but they are much more likely and attainable than FTL or stasis.
I agree with all of this. I just don't like imagination turning into votes and dollars for programs that will disapoint these people. Sure, communicators were once science fiction. So was nuclear energy. But these things do not outright violate the laws of physics.
Imagination is fine, I said that, but when it comes to Star Trek imagination is much more limited than you apparently see. If we had an inertialess drive, why build a phaser? Your engine alone could destroy entire star systems. Or build them. You could literally build stars, planets, and so much more.
We may be able to do such things one day even within the limits of physics. But not their way.
Energy shields, (in star trek form) teleporters, inertial dampers, inertialess drives, artificial gravity (as opposed to simulated gravity, which is what rotating space stations have) cloaking, and a distinct lack of heat dissipation for all this high-power crap. There's a reason we don't put Scotty down with the dilithium engines. Even on Earth. We're in space, the heat has nowhere to go. The entire engineering crew is dead from being boiled alive before they ever get to die from radiation.
I used the term myself in my first post, dude. And how would that work? Inertia goes where? Conveniently sucked out of a tube that goes to the hypothetical 6th dimension? Because gravity isn't having any of that ****. It violates the laws of conservation of energy.And somehow, they don't work when the ship is being shot at. You know, because a phaser striking your energy shields would naturally make everything rock about.
My pleasure. An intertialess drive, if you could create one, moves objects without imparting any inertia. This is a huge problem in physics because the faster an object travels, the more its effective mass increases relative to everything around it. For instance, a pebble striking you at 1 meter per second will not do much. But if it's going 30% of the speed of light it will blow you apart. Or just rip a clean hole through you. Nobody is really sure.
At the same time, the more velocity you impart to an object, the more energy you need to accelerate it. It's a matter of diminishing returns. The harder you push, the more the universe pushes back. Insofar as physics are concerned, only massless things like energy can go that fast.
It's important to note that the actual mass of an object never changes. To the pebble, it masses the same as it always did. But due to the energy imparted, it effectively masses more to everything else.
Inetialess drives are based around the idea that relativity can be overridden. You impart energy to an object, but that object does not feel it. The energy is redirected somehow. Warp drives are a clever sort of inertialess drive, and Star Trek manages to **** even that up.
There's no need to move the mass very far if you can warp spacetime, so that's great, but the amount of energy it would take to effectively warp spacetime is greater than the energy contained in a black hole. In a universe where Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, that is a ****-ton of energy. More energy than entire glaxies contain.
Somehow, Star Trek fits all this energy into a single ship. In fact, it's common. Aside from the obvious question of where in the hell all this energy came from, there's also the matter of containment (which would require even more energy or mass) and why they have levels of warp. It's not like Warp 9 is equivalent to mach 9, you either warp spacetime or you don't with an inertialess drive.
Some trekkies have suggested that the engines only warp small pockets of spacetime, and the more or faster you can warp them, the more quickly you are travelling. That would be fine, if not for the fact that inertia compounds exponentially by this method. Each time you warp space, like a rubber band, it is going to snap back. Spacetime is not inertialess. This is where you get theories that with enough energy or mass, you could rip a hole in the universe.
Anyway, rather than destroying all of creation, let's just look at how you could destroy a star system or build one with an inertialess drive. Objects have no effective mass no matter how fast they are travelling, or how slow. Well gee, it's not a problem to construct a planet then, is it? Just transport enough mass to one location, in the right amounts, and you have a plaent. Or a star, or a black hole, which you could totally do because you have no mass and are not governed by the speed of light.
By the same token, you could pull or blow entire star systems apart. You've still got the problem of how you direct all this heat energy, but in a universe with inertial dampers, we can just assume it's shunted into another universe. Tough luck for those guys, and so much for the Prime Directive.
That's the magic of phlebotinum, my friend. You fake-science away everything that couldn't happen. Almost every piece of common Star Trek lore violates the laws of physics, starting with the drive systems. From there its just a cascading comedy of errors, at least to me.
Yet you think this is a viable way to discuss social issues? Based on what? Stuff that is never explained? Seems like watching a dumb show and basing your worldview on it to me. Since when has theater ever led human development? I mean, aside from the obviously bad ways where people love celebrities and trust them for life advice.
Lots of trekkies seem that way to me, at least at first. No offense, I think you're on of the potentially good ones. At least you ask questions. And by no means am I the authority on this stuff. Just a guy who really likes reading and debate.
If we want to go up from here, we'll need Commander Makara or someone like him. People that understand Quantum Physics more than I do. Fair warning, I don't think their science is as advanced as they make it out to be. After all, it still plays by Relativity rules on anything but a microcosmic scale, but let's not dismiss the possibilities, yeah?
I am pretty sure if nations start colonizing space, it is going to be less like Star Trek, and more like Europa Universalis in space.
And there it goes. The phaser volley I talked about earlier. After a complete, if abridged, explanation of the intertialess drive, all the physics. I get this. Not a defense of Star Trek physics, just this.
I have a better idea. You tell me how anything on that show acutally works. Starting with the drive systems.
And for the record, I do have a bit of a crazy button today. I'm royally pi$$ed off at something that has nothing to do with you.
Damn liberals probably did......whatever it is that pi$$ed you off.