The founder of the Tau Zero Foundation takes a look at the promise of Star Trek, and asks where we stand with regard to the many technologies depicted in the series. My own first memory of Star Trek is seeing a first year episode and realizing only a few days later that it had been one of the few times a TV science fiction show never mentioned the Earth. That was an expansive and refreshing perspective-changer from the normal fare of 1966, though back then I would never have dreamed how much traction the show would gain over time. But with the series now a cultural icon, how about Starfleet’s tech? Will any of it actually be achieved?
by Marc Millis
This week marks the 50th anniversary of Star Trek‘s debut. In just 3 seasons, the series started a cultural ripple effect that’s still going. The starship Enterprise became an icon for a better future – predicting profound technical abilities, matched with a rewardingly responsible society, and countless wonders left to explore. Many engineers and scientists trace their career inspirations to that show. The effect spread worldwide and has been described as a yearning for “a deep and eternal need for something to believe in: something vast and powerful, yet rational and contemporary. Something that makes sense.” [1]
Now, half a century later, how are we doing toward realizing the fantastic futures of Trek? Are we making progress on faster-than-light flight (FTL), control over inertial and gravitational forces, extreme energy prowess, and the societal discipline to harness that much power responsibly?
I directed NASA’s “Breakthrough Propulsion Physics” project – NASA’s first documented inquiry into the prospects of Star-Trek-like breakthroughs – controlling gravity for propulsion and achieving faster-than-light flight. That project was funded from 1995-2002, and continued unfunded through around 2008. With the help of networks beyond NASA via the Tau Zero foundation, the results of the NASA work plus many others were compiled into Frontiers of Propulsion Science, (2009). There has been some more progress from multiple places since then, but by and large that compilation is still a decent starting point into the details.
FTL
Let’s start with the most obvious and glamorous – faster than light flight. The first scientific paper about FTL wormholes appeared in 1988 [2], followed 7 years later with an extensive scholarly book on the topic [3]. Alcubierre’s “warp drive” paper appeared in 1994 [4] and a recent progress report on FTL approaches is available here [5].
In short, FTL is now a theoretical possibility, anchored in Einstein’s general relativity, even though daunting challenges remain. Instead of violating the lightspeed limit through spacetime, these theories are about manipulating spacetime itself – which is an entirely different situation. A significant next-step challenge is to find a way to create bare negative energy – and a lot of it. While negative energy can be created now (such as within Casimir cavities), the catch is that it is still contained inside of a greater amount of normal positive mass-energy. The first experimental demonstration of bare negative energy would be a pivotal moment.
A few other lessons followed: Wormholes are likely to be a more energy-efficient way of achieving FTL than warp drives. The previously touted time-travel paradoxes that seemed to prevent FTL have been found to be non-issues (You cannot use FTL flight to go back in time and kill your grandfather before your father is born). And the last lesson is that better theoretical tools are needed. Many of the FTL investigations have been limited to 1-dimensional analysis rather than full-up 3D spacetime. The theory for FTL flight is there, but still in its infancy.
For fun, I calculated how fast we would need to fly to get as much action as Captain Kirk. In their 5-year mission (of 3 seasons) they seemed to encounter a new civilization almost every episode – 79 episodes. Combining that with a provisional estimate of 1900 light-years between civilizations [6], yields a required speed of 30,000 times lightspeed. That’s about 300 million times faster than today’s spacecraft.
Recall that, on interstellar scales, lightspeed is slow. At lightspeed, our closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, is over 4.2 years away. Our next nearest 10 stars are within about 10 light years away. To reach Proxima Centauri within a person’s career span (say 42 years), we have to get our spacecraft up to 10% lightspeed. That’s over 1000 times faster than we’ve done before.
Transporters
To reduce production budgets, Trek included “transporters” to move people from one point to another with just a scene change – plus noises and lighting effects. The premise is that the people would be dematerialized into some sort of energy beam that could then rematerialize somewhere else. Despite the similar nomenclature with “quantum teleportation” (a real thing) Trek transporters are an entirely different animal. The closest thing in the scientific literature to creating a transporter effect is a wormhole – discussed previously.
Control over Gravitational and Inertial forces
Many of the key features of the starship Enterprise require the ability to manipulate gravitational and inertial forces. The most obvious feature is internal gravitation for its crew – which conveniently matches studio conditions. Think about it – in the middle of space, far from any gravitating body, there is no “down” to fall toward. Things just float.
The ability to induce a gravitational field inside of a spacecraft would be a huge breakthrough with all sorts of spin-offs. If we could induce a gravitational field inside the spacecraft, then why not outside as well – as a form of propulsion? This leads next to concepts like “tractor beams” and “deflectors,” to push objects out of the way of the screaming-through Enterprise. And… if you can push and pull distant objects, it’s likely that you can also sense them in a way that defies contemporary familiarity, such as identifying distant objects by their mass density (convenient for gold prospecting).
While the need for FTL is glaringly obvious, the implications of these mass-based breakthroughs are harder to grasp. Consider this analogy. Long ago, electric charges and magnets were known to exist but not understood. Things got interesting when we learned that electricity can create magnetic fields, and magnetic fields can generate electricity. Thereafter motors, generators, lighting, and… even the computer screen that you are reading this on… were invented.
Similarly, we know that gravitation and electromagnetism exist. Newton got as far as deciphering the behavior of gravity and inertia and then Einstein extended those to include electromagnetism, relativistic speeds, and intense gravitation. But we do not yet understand how that works. If we ever figure out how to use our prowess in electromagnetism to affect changes in gravitation or inertia, then all those Trek-ish visions might be realized, including zero-gravity recreational hotel rooms. The first experimental evidence of such abilities would be a turning point for humanity.
Physics in general has been seeking such knowledge and making progress since its very beginning. Over recent decades other phenomena have been discovered that challenge our existing theoretical models. There is plenty of room for new empirical discoveries and theoretical ‘ah-ha’ moments. When examined in the context of breakthrough propulsion, different lines of inquiry are added. For example, the search for “space drive” effects has revealed the importance of understanding the origins of inertial frames [7].
Extreme Energy Prowess
To achieve interstellar flight, even in the conventional sense, requires incredible amounts of energy. To bump our spacecraft speeds up to 10% lightspeed (1000 times faster than now), we need at least 1-million times more energy. While these sorts of numbers are conceivable within future decades, there are secondary issues which often get overlooked in both the fiction and even in some engineering studies. One example is how to get rid of the waste heat. When converting one form of energy to another, there are inefficiency losses. For something as small as a car engine or air-conditioner, the excess heat is easy to vent to the atmosphere. But when the energy levels get extreme and if they are used in space where it is harder to radiate that energy, then even a 1% inefficiency can lead to enormous challenges. These are not show-stoppers, but details that are a part of the big picture.
When considering the FTL theories, the required energy levels become astronomical. An old example (from Matt Visser) is that to create a 1-meter diameter wormhole, one would need to get as much rest-mass-energy as the whole planet Jupiter, convert it in the form of bare negative energy, and then make it small enough to create that 1-meter opening. Subsequent analyses have brought those estimates much lower, but we are still talking mind-boggling feats of energy prowess. Any new theory or experiment that shows how to warp spacetime with achievable energies would be a pivotal development.
A significant secondary issue is how to use that energy safely. The energy levels of interstellar flight are so great that, if misused, could wipe out all life on Earth. This leads to another key feature of the Star Trek visions – a mature society that wields its power responsibly.
Societal Maturity
Although Star Trek was thought-provoking from the technological point of view, it was also very comforting from a sociological point of view. The crew of the Enterprise behaved in an honorable and respectful manner to each other and to other cultures, despite differences in background, race, sex, or character. They did not abuse their power. Even though they worked toward common goals, each individual had their special niche. Several episodes featured the crew of the Enterprise coming to the rescue of some civilization that gone astray because of their lack of sensible treatment toward each other. Most often those wayward societies would learn their Trek lesson and turn the corner to a better life. If only it were that easy to get people to override their errant beliefs with facts, wisdom, and a good role model.
Of all the challenges, this one is probably the most difficult and the most needed. The survival of humanity. depends on it. To safely wield our growing powers, our society will have to mature to where we work for the common good rather than against each other. A glimmer of hope is that we have refrained from unleashing a nuclear holocaust for over a half century, despite precarious international bickering from time to time. I’ve also read articles that, proportionally, we are killing each other less. Compared to human history, however, a half-century is a tiny moment. As the decades tick by and our energy prowess grows, will all of us wield our powers responsibly? Will we learn to live in a manner where our disagreements do not become life-threatening?
The difficulty of creating these societal improvements is that the tools we have are the same thing that we are trying to fix. To make society healthier, we need a healthy society. When we are part of the problem that we are trying to solve, there is a limit to our perspectives. It’s a bit like asking a vacuum cleaner to suck itself up.
One way to step back and see ourselves more impartially is to contemplate far future societies in the form of “world ships.” Imagine a colony of 50,000 people constrained in a finite ship headed across space for centuries. In addition to sustaining physical life support, their society will have to sustain a peaceful and meaningful culture. Such challenges are explored in the disciplines of Astrosociology and Space Anthropology. Perhaps as more rigorous data about human behavior accumulates, along with methods for complex data analysis, we will eventually figure out how to design a society that accommodates the full realities of human behavior in a manner where individuals can live meaningful lives within a lasting peaceful culture.
Closing Thought – Reflections on Proxima b
It’s been said that having a moon so close to Earth helped create the space program. The science fiction for that step began with Jules Verne in 1865, followed by the mathematical foundations from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, and culminating in the Apollo moon landing in 1969. Roughly a half century from fiction to science, and another half century from science into substance.
Now we have an potentially habitable planet as close as it could possibly be. Our nearest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, has a planet a little bit bigger than Earth which might have liquid water. It’s 4.2 light years away, has a mass 30% more than Earth, and is in the habitable zone of its red dwarf star. Its star is dimmer, cooler, and tiny compared to our Sun (14% the size, 12% the mass), which means that its habitable zone is only 5% the distance between our Sun and Earth. Accordingly, a year on the new-found planet is only 12 Earth days. The science is here.
For those of us who have been contemplating interstellar flight longer than we’ve known better (Tau Zero is a decade old this year), it couldn’t get any better than this – unless we later learn that the planet does indeed have an atmosphere, proof of liquid water, and the right spectral clues for life. This distance makes it within reach of conceivable probes. Just earlier this year, billionaire Yuri Milner committed $100 million for research into one approach to interstellar flight, laser pushed light sails, dubbed Breakthrough Starshot. That particular idea is decades old, with the first detailed analysis done by Robert Forward in the 1980’s. Starshot hopes to nudge the idea from concept to technological proofs of concept.
Centauri b beckons. Will this be the catalyst to nudge interstellar flight toward reality? Consider that the notion of space sails dates back to at least 1929 (and can actually be traced in some form all the way back to the works of Kepler). Those foundations were converted into science by the late 1980’s, and Starshot is trying to mature the science into technology now. If the pattern of the Moon shot repeats, we’ll have probes on their way to Proxima by the 2040s. And consider this. The science fiction for faster than light flight dates back to John W. Campbell in 1931, and the first science articles were in 1988 and 1994. If the pattern repeats there too, we might have warp drives reaching the planet “Proxima b” before Starshot even gets there.
Ad astra incrementis
References
[1] Greenwald, J. (1988). Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth. (Viking).
[2] Morris, M. S., & Thorne, K. S. (1988). “Wormholes in spacetime and their use for interstellar travel: A tool for teaching general relativity.” Am. J. Phys, 56(5), 395-412.
[3] Visser, M. (1996). Lorentzian wormholes. From Einstein to Hawking. (AIP Press), 1.
[4] Alcubierre, M. (1994). “The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity.” Classical and Quantum Gravity, 11(5), L73.
[5] Davis, E. W. (2013). Faster-Than-Light Space Warps, Status and Next Steps. In 48th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference & Exhibit (p. 3860).
[6] Maccone, C. (2011). “SETI and SEH (statistical equation for habitables),” Acta Astronautica, 68(1), 63-75.
[7] Millis, M. G. (2012). “Space Drive Physics: Introduction and Next Steps.” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 65, 264-277.
I went to the 24th World Science Fiction Convention in 1966, Gene Roddenberry showed the pilots for Star Trek there. No one knew who Roddenberry was then. I remember there was a kind of stunned , but enthusiastic reaction after the showing of , “The Cage”. I remember thinking …this is great … no one has done good Space Opera since Forbidden Planet.
Next morning Roddenberry was standing in the hallway of the Sheraton-Cleveland , a small nook with a model of the Enterprise behind him, …people were stopping to look at the model… no body was talking to him!
So I went up and said “That was great! You know why? Because everything in that was so familiar! The technology, the sociology , the story… this is the science fiction prose from the 1930’s,1940’s and 1950’s I read and loved so much.” Roddenberry said “You should be acquainted with it, I borrowed all that from the pages of Astounding and Galaxy.!” He went on to tell me about his time in the ‘Air Force’ in WWII and having read ASF in his spare time … and being an attentive SF reader. We talked for about 20 min. , after that , years later, never could get close enough to him to even say hello.
Alas, I don’t know if Roddenberry ever mention his attention to the source material again, I mean except for those SF writers he hired to write for the show.
It’s a moot point now, but just reading and listening to tributes to the show , last few days, I see and heard things like “Star Trek ‘invented’ the smart phone, faster than light travel, AI, beamed energy weapons, matter transmission … on and on!… well no… that had been around in the prose form for approximately 20,30 years or more by 1966.
Sigh, nobody cares about details like that!
I don’t know how much, or if ever, Roddenberry admitted to being influenced by the great 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet, but I always consider it to be the first true episode (or pilot) of Star Trek, just as I consider the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life to be the first episode of The Twilight Zone series.
And FP is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year!
http://www.dvdjournal.com/reviews/f/forbiddenplanet.shtml
http://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/6030-on-viewing-forbidden-planet-on-its-60th-anniversary
http://mentalfloss.com/article/77073/15-out-world-facts-about-forbidden-planet
Gosh! ljk … had forgotten this was an anniversary year for Forbidden Planet. Even if This Island Earth can claim to be the first film interstellar Space Opera , Forbidden Planet felt like the first Space Opera as a reader of prose SF knew it.
The underlying story is curious, somehow story originators Irving Block and Allen Adler wrote a story that took place on Mercury but framed it using William Shakespeare’s The Tempest! The real hero seems to be the screen writer Cyril Hume who moved the story to an interstellar setting. My impression is that it was Hume who added FTL, a robot, United Planets , a Big Thinks alien civilization and a lot of SF common currency from the 1930’s and 1940’s. Kudos for production design by Cedric Gibbons ,
Arthur Lonergan and the Walt Disney company.
One saw many ideas from the pages of Astounding in Forbidden Planet, mostly from the 1940’s, Asimov’s robot, a ‘warp drive’, ‘blasters’ … and miles of well known SF nomenclature.
I saw Forbidden Planet at one of those movie palaces in Dallas Texas with a contingent of Dallas Futurians. We were really pleased , but then had to wait 10 years for another modern Space Opera based on the prose sources with Star Trek.
I note that even in 1956 prose SF trumped film Space Opera many times over , but we fans were grateful from something!
A favorite quote from Forbidden Planet :
Chief Engineer Quinn: “I’ll bet any quantum mechanic in the service would give the rest of his life to fool around with this gadget.”
They were going to have FP take place on Mercury?
Your comment about being grateful for any cinematic science fiction that wasn’t total junk rings true. I was just telling my kids last night that is how it felt when Star Trek first appeared on television, even though when I was a kid I also cut my teeth on all the Irwin Allen programs.
Apparently so.I would like to know, I don’t think the original script for Forbidden Planet is around.
Injecting something for this thread: I happened to go to the world science fiction convention 1972 in LA. , Roddenberry gave a talk there , I can’t remember what was about. Afterward he was mobbed. I noticed a lady standing outside the crowd and her name badge said D. C. Fontana , which I recognized as the teleplay writer and story editor for the first season of Star Trek. No one was paying any attention to her. We had a chat, she was nice. I was curious about something. A radio play writer by the name of Ernest Kinoy adapted many classic short stories for the radio program Dimension X and X Minus 1. The scripts were great, beautiful adaptations. I knew he had moved on to TV (he won two Emmys). Asked if they had tried to get Kinoy to do some work. Fontana said yes, but they never could coordinate it. She did tell me that Roddenberry had shown Kinoy the first pilot for Star Trek, and he had approved and given his encouragement. (There is a biography of Roddenberry that repeats this story.) I was really pleased that Kinoy had some small part in Star Trek.
Here is an online PDF copy of the Forbidden Planet script from 1954. They were going to Altair 4 even two years before the film’s release, FYI:
http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/Forbidden-Planet.pdf
Interesting that they didn’t think humans would reach Luna until the end of the 21st Century, then almost suddenly they get FTL propulsion and off we go into the galaxy!
Before Star Trek, we Brits had Dr. Who to fulfill our needs for Time and Space SF that was operatic on occasion, depending on te writer. Pity the BBC lost so many episodes by reusing the videotape that recorded many episodes from that time.
There were very few good SF movies during the decade following FP, but Ikarie XB-1 should certainly be included.
After Star Trek, we got a number of great SF movies, most notably “2001: A Space Odyssey” released in 1968.
There was a Golden Age of science fiction cinema before Star Wars came along in 1977 and derailed it. There have been some phoenixes rising from the ashes, such as Blade Runner, Ex Machina and the upcoming Arrival, but SF has been dominated by special effects and simplistic story lines ever since George Lucas went from making THX 1138 to something far more franchisy. Of course now it has gotten even worse with the rise of comic book fantasies – excuse me, I mean graphic novels.
And Star Trek was not immune to the Star Wars effect as evidenced by the first two films made by J. J. Abrams. Will it recover? The latest film, ST Beyond had the feel of the original series, but the story was nothing to write home about. Still, one most always hope for a positive future ala Star Trek.
I’m looking forward to “Star Trek: Discovery” in January 2017.
Before this topic goes away … I am a long time SF fan (reader) and movie buff … I know others like me … the biggest bee in our bonnets is how Hollywood has ignored the prose form of SF as source material. As far as I know only Stanley Kubrick* paid very very serious attention to the ideas in written SF with 2001. Actually it was a bit of a surprise that Big Thinks SF would be successful. Not that it would be again!
There are few SF films that hew to the spirit and intelligence of the prose form as it was developed in the 1940s and 1950s.
Some of the more cinematic stories , Heinlein’s so-called Juvies come to mind, Alfred Bester’s the Stars My Destination … Poul Anderson’s one-step-beyond-Star-Trek Space Opera (a number of novels there!)…. lot of others, ideas still not touched.
Recently I have been watching The Expanse based on the novels by James S. A. Corey. The two guys who wrote the prose ,Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck ,are big fans of 40’s and 50’s ‘Solar System’ SF. Even tho there is a World Ship being build in the story it all takes place mostly in the Asteroid Belt, Mars-to-Jupiter space and back on the Earth. The Moon and Mars have been colonized. The main undercurrent here is the Belter’s rebellion against Colonial Earth , sound familiar? Hints of Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Between Planets … others… It’s not perfect, there are seams, a bit clumsy sub story about some weaponized organism, some sloppy physics , some good zero g physics … nice future-on-a-chipped-plate settings … worth a look.
Don’t let the fact that it’s on the Shark-na-do channel SyFy put you off , tho better to pick off the free of advertising version on Amazon.
*(Always have to mention the radio shows Dimension X and X Minus 1 for their excellent adaptions of prose SF.)
It’s a whole lot easier and cheaper to write SF than to build the sets and do the special effects needed for movie SF.
I’ve been a medical conference today where Star Trek dominated almost all the doctors ( myself and the other lecturers especially ) conversation. Each series speaks to different generations with a blurring thanks to the constant ( and welcome) repeats on TV channels /cable around the world. I watched the original series in its entirety whilst on holiday from Primary School in the 70s and again during my time at Medical School ( one of many great memories of a truly great decade) in the late 80s. It’s engraved in my psyche . It certainly appeals to academics with everyone having their favourite episode from one genre or the other. Most popular seemed to be “City on the Edge of Forever” from TOS . Have to say I’ve recently fallen for the darkest of the series, DS9 , with my own favourite being perhaps the most controversial ( for not following the positive Rodenberry mantre but still often cited as the greatest Star Trek episode ever) of all, “In the pale moonlight” ( from Jack Nicholoson’s infamous line as the Joker in “Batman “) in season 6. Powerful stuff.
The first season of ST:TNG was a nightmare for many involved in that series: Roddenberry didn’t want any conflict between the main characters, which might make for a nice future but dull television drama. It took at least two seasons for that franchise to hit its stride as a result.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/a-new-documentary-shows-how-gene-roddenberry-almost-kil-1721153875
One place that the original Star Trek (1966-1969) was not so progressive in was the treatment of women. In that regard, it was still very much a part of the era it was produced.
Oh, you can tell me that “The Cage” had an actual woman officer on the bridge, yet in the episode Pike commented how he still had trouble getting used to having a person of the female gender there, then gave Number One (that was her name, or at least that is what everyone called her in the pilot) a backhanded compliment by implying he didn’t really think of her as a woman but rather one of the guys.
Then there is the episode “The Enemy Within”, the one where a transporter malfunction splits Kirk into his “good” and “evil” selves (how did that machine determine such an esoteric thing, anyway? Magic!). The evil Kirk lives up to his label, including an assault on Yeoman Rand. The worst part is the end of the episode, where Spock – of all people – makes a crude joke about what Kirk did to Rand, which may have been deemed amusing in 1966 but comes across as amazingly insensitive and damaging in its own right to those of us who live in the real future. Considering the stories I have heard about the behavior towards the women actors on the series by both William Shatner and Gene Roddenberry, I probably should not be surprised.
There are plenty more, but I will add just these: Uhura being called “the lovely little lady” over and over in the episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” (McCoy was never called that “adorable little doctor” even once); the historian McGivers caving into Khan’s charms because she’s a woman, ya know; and the comment by McCoy in “Who Mourns for Adonais” that when Palamas – yet another very attractive woman historian on the Enterprise – got married one day it was assumed she would automatically leave Starfleet.
I saved the “best” for last, namely the very last original series episode titled “Turnabout Intruder”. Airing just over a month before the Apollo 11 manned lunar landing, we learn that Starfleet does not allow women to take command of their starships. Oh, the franchise did fix that decades later (unless you count the animated episode from 1973 where Uhura got command of the bridge in an animated episode, but only because all the senior male officers had been tricked away by some wily alien women), but in TI a woman driven crazy by being unable to do things men can tricks Kirk into transferring her mind into his body via some alien doohicky machine. The rest of the episode was an amazing caricature of how a woman was thought to act in such a situation, especially a command role. Not the best way to end a series that went on to such great heights in many other aspects later on.
I just had to point this out because while older science fiction is often praised at its predictions and paving the ways for a better future, certain social aspects are often still left mired in the past. In the matter of women, Star Trek’s early days were not really that much different. That we can (or should) recognize these flaws and see them largely corrected in later renditions of the franchise is some sign of progress.
As we also progress towards real interstellar missions some day, which we may still presume at least some will have human crews be they multigenerational starships or something else, we must not forget that very vital human element for all genders which will be one of the lynchpins of the success or failure of our attempts to reach the stars.
Sigh. As I was doing a Google search for a relevant article to add here, what pops up in the resulting search list when I type Women of Star Trek: The hottest babes of all time in Star Trek, at least a half-dozen versions of this trope until I get to this article:
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/09/the-forgotten-history-of-the-women-who-shaped-star.html
Alas, the real progress has been slow on this social issue (gender equality) – and sometimes seems retrograde in some places.. You found a lot of fitting examples there – which I suspect many of us would not have even noticed otherwise.
That’s why I brought it up. :^) And I forgot to add about the women’s Starfleet uniforms in the original series: The men got to wear full-length pants, the women had to wear dark nylons with skirts that barely went below their hips. These were their standard DRESS UNIFORMS on the starship Enterprise and everywhere else in the fleet. Starfleet was basically a branch of the military with exploration overtones.
Looking at this from 2016, it is amazing they got away with that.
“…the real progress has been slow on this social issue (gender equality)…”
“Gender equality” is not a desirable objective. “Gender equality of opportunity”, however, is an objective worth pursuing.
Not the greatest episode, but Palamas seems to be stunned.
Maybe because that Adonis had his nipples removed
https://youtu.be/YjAUdOcKYiw
I also forgot to add this, but it was evident from that episode that Apollo basically assaulted Palamas after she spurned him. This behavior was nothing terribly surprising for an ancient Greek deity, but again yet another example of how women were treated on the original series.
A big fan of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the British poet, humanist, and early social reformer, attempts to tie him into Star Trek on this anniversary:
http://www.grahamhenderson.ca/blog/Day/9/Year/what-shelley-star-trek-and-buffy-the-vampire-slayer-have-in-common-humanism
Although the use of science fiction in a visionary sense is, I believe, laudable, I believe that some of the “technologies” from Star Trek are plot devices rather than meaningful predictions of achievable technologies.
I believe that Gene Roddenberry remarked in this vein regarding the transporter device. They needed to transition from the “ship” to “planetside” without ruining their budget.
Yes and they were originally so focused on the transporter (called a “materializer” in the second ST pilot), they forgot to add a shuttlecraft in the first season episode “The Enemy Within”. Poor Sulu and the rest of the landing party were stranded on a hostile planet as a result, waiting for the transporter to be fixed. I guess the shuttles were all up on lifts or something.
I wonder if we will have some version a Prime Directive in place before we launch the first probe to Centauri b.
There is an interesting article in the UK astrophysics magazine “All about Space” this month following on from LIGO’s detection of gravitational waves arising from the collision of two 30 Msun black holes 1.3 billion years ago. A team from Portugal led by Vitor Cardoso are investigating how the collision of two ( presumably naturally occurring ) wormholes might look , believing it would leave a different signature/echo to “conventional” black holes that might be differentiated by a far more sensitive LIGO. The premis of their wormholes depends on the varying equations of Einstein’s relativity work that encompased black holes . Most mathematical solutions to these created deadly singularities , but not all. Some produced wormholes and it’s these Cardoso’s team have been working on . Unrelated to this is the idea that esoteric dark energy and mass might have possess the necessary exotic properties to fulfil the negative mass requirements to hold an erstwhile wormhole exit open long enough to make it traversable . There are even differences in Cardoso’s team as to whether this is possible . But it is now being entertained in mainstream astrophysics which is a paradigm shift in itself .
As Paul also says , the speed of light is a bit rubbish with respect to exploring deep space in a timely fashion so it’s nice to live in hope. I’m sure there are others here with much more insight into this very complex subject than I.
Meanwhile, back to Star Trek , how could you leave out the “holodeck” of Enterprise -C and beyond ? I don’t think anyone would have time to invent anything if they had access to that technology . VR? Pah ! We would probably all live in one permanently . ( strangely echoing the recent suggestion that the entire Universe is just a hologram )
Does the Star Trek transporter involve anything other than killing the “transportees” and creating duplicates somewhere? A great feat, but a little brutal.
There have been numerous stories over the years about the moral and ethical issues involved in such teleportation. I’ll see if I can locate some references.
Here’s some information from Wikipedia:
“In James Patrick Kelly’s 1996 Hugo Award winning story, Think Like a Dinosaur, a woman is teleported to an alien planet, but the original is not disintegrated because reception cannot be confirmed at the time. Reception is later confirmed, and the original, not surprisingly, declines to “balance the equation” by re-entering the scanning and disintegrating device. This creates an ethical quandary which is viewed quite differently by the cold-blooded aliens who provided the teleportation technology, and their warm-blooded human associates. This story was subsequently made into an episode of Showtime’s acclaimed revival of The Outer Limits. Jack Chalker’s Soul Rider series explores similar moral issues.”
This phrase ” The previously touted time-travel paradoxes that seemed to prevent FTL have been found to be non-issues” caught my full attention !
Several times I tried to have explained to me why going FTL was the equivalent of going in the past and that of course was impossible.
I could not understand why and the answer was always “because Relativity says so !”
So , sir , if you have some reference about this point I would very happy to learn about it !
I got that info from Eric Davis, so hopefully I can get him to specify some of the sources.
I would be very interested to see discussion about how to prevent an FTL drive from being a time machine. My understanding, such as it is, was that it was fairly implicit in the way special relativity works. I seem to recall that there is some debate about how physical closed time-like loops are in general relativity. They appear in the solutions to certain problems in general relativity, but I have read suggestions that under more realistic assumptions (properties of exotic matter, taking into account quantum effects), the solutions go away. Does this leave a gap for time travel-less FTL?
If we ever were able to find a way to master control over inertia, wouldn’t that render the question of gravitational wormholes and warp drives sort of moot ?
It seems like the problem of inertia would once and for all take care of the issues of energy as being a limitation factor in getting a craft up to speed. If one could produce and inertia value of zero. Or am I missing something here?
That is one of many ideas. If you do thought experiments with that notion you can run into all sorts of secondary issues. For example, how much energy would it take to “negate” inertial mass? If it’s an E=mc^2 sort of thing, it will be tough. Another example is to consider a rocket with a magical inertia reduction device. If applied to the whole vehicle (rocket and propellant) there is zero improvement. Overall, with as little as is known about controlling such things, there is no leading approach. So, pick your favorite idea and see what happens when you dig down into the details. Hopefully one of such adventures will turn something up.
“Another example is to consider a rocket with a magical inertia reduction device. If applied to the whole vehicle (rocket and propellant) there is zero improvement.”
While propellant on board would also be affected, a solar sail would probably work, because photons and/or charged particles from solar wind would come from outside the vessel.
This touches (perhaps strongly) on aspects of the equivalence principle. In particular whether gravitational mass and inertial mass are identical or not. If they are different beasts (although they appear to be the same thing in our experiments and observations so far) the possibility of controlling one versus the other becomes less farfetched.
Perhaps one way to think about inertia is in terms of constant mass in a gravitational field. A sufficiently accelerating loss or gain of mass will alter the effect of gravity. One way to do this might be by pumping light through matter, e.g., contained hydrogen, to gain or lose mass at a desired rate. This would never achieve FTL, but perhaps allows the possibility of thinking about pumping CMB, e.g., space itself, through a ship at rates approaching the speed of light.
We shouldn’t forget other technologies that have become real or have become SciFi movie tropes. The Medical Tricorder is now the basis of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize competition due to be judged in 2017.
I am fairly certain the Medical Bay beds became the prototype of the more extensive medical bay seen in “Alien” and becoming more apparent in hospitals every year.
While we can see that treatment of women was almost quaint in the 1960s, let’s not forget that feminism had barely started at that point. I think that we should be more concerned that 50 years later, these attitudes are still prevalent. Even “liberal” Hollywood can barely release a movie that passes the Bechdel test.
How many commenters on this site who are married have working wives and share 50% of the cooking and housework?
I think we still have a long way to go.
I just wanted to get across with my comments above that the male side of SF tends to focus on the gadgets and special effects, but we need more attention paid to the human element, or there won’t be a real Star Trek of any kind.
There is a big reason why we haven’t sent a single probe to Alpha Centauri (or Proxima) yet or even put a manned colony on the Moon or Mars, and it isn’t due to the lack of ability or knowledge.
The reason we don’t have a manned Moon base is that we humans like war. It’s hard to put a few billion a year into such a project when we’re salivatating over all the war toys we can buy with it.
I fail to see what feminisim has to do with this. There’ve been plenty of female rulers in plenty of countries throughout history, and they’ve done no better than the males. The US will likely get its first female president soon, but I very much doubt that as she ascends the throne there will be a shift away from war and towards peace.
What is the reason you mention for our not having sent a single probe to Alpha Centauri or Proxima?
Yes, women are just as human and therefore fallible as men, which means they need to be given an equal chance to succeed (and fail) at command, exploration, science, and so forth. I was just using examples from the original series to bring home the point that various aspects of the human element often get left out in science fiction and science fact, a holdover from the old days.
There has been progress and certainly heightened cultural awareness, but as Alex said above, that we still need to work on it shows we are not there yet. If we want to survive living on Earth and move on to colonize other worlds, we need to recognize all aspects of our human selves, not just the technology.
Why haven’t we gone to the Centauri system yet? You mentioned part of the reason in your post, war. The other aspects are ignorance, fear, greed, parochial attitudes, and so forth. Basically all the things that may have worked for a species stuck on one planet that for the longest time was unaware there was anything beyond their savanna or cave, but doesn’t work now that we know we are just a small part of a very, very vast and ancient existence.
I once reviewed here a book that had one possible solution to such problems:
https://centauri-dreams.org/?p=23526
Maybe the economy is just another kind of warfare. Probably the reason Rodenberry wanted to get rid of it. If you want to use gadgets in a right way, you have to change the mind of the users. Psychology became important in the late twentieh century, but I am under the impression that the economy changed the way we use psychology. It should be the other way around.
Yet they use credits in the Federation, so how this is different from our money and economic system? :^)
https://www.quora.com/How-can-the-world-function-without-money-in-Star-Trek
https://www.wired.com/2016/05/geeks-guide-star-trek-economics/
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Money
Money is a BIG part of the reason we haven’t sent any missions to even the nearest stars yet. It is not a trivial matter. ST fans tend to think humanity can just shrug off money as easily as they think we can just whip up a warp drive, assuming they give it much thought at all. However, for those of us who do want to explore the Final Frontier, we need to take these things seriously and work with experts in various fields to resolve these obstacles.
A quote from Quora:
“There is the question of persons of unlimited greed, who wish to collect ‘everything’ just to have more than the next guy. It is not canon, but I suspect these people are seen as either mentally ill or criminal in the Federation and treated/jailed.”
I don’t think Wall Street will produce a lot of scientific experts who will help humanity to the specific Final Frontier we would like to explore ;-)
In ST terms: I wouldn’t give any credit to a Ferengi.
I think Musk, Bezos and Milner are exceptions as far as it comes to daring space exploration. Allen comes to mind as well. And they are from the Bits Bang.
And… Are we not in this golden age of exploration already? Telescopes and astronomers are the Right Stuff now. The moments I wonder about the great discoveries happen in a faster pace year after year. Not related to dark energy, though.
There was the ST:TNG episode “The Most Toys” from 1990 about a character who was a big collector and did so without regard for others. He was portrayed as sociopathic.
Just an example in answer to the comment above about how Star Trek views people who covet material items for the sake of owning them:
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Most_Toys_%28episode%29
And yes, the Ferengi serve as the prime example of what ST thought of beings who are all about greed, profit, and material possessions. Ironically. they were originally supposed to be the worst villains since the Klingons when ST:TNG started, but their introduction was handled poorly and they came across as far more comical than threatening. So they were turned into extreme capitalists and misogynists.
To put this on solid foundation:
– Macroscopic wormholes are problematic. It is easy to see that they would literary implode the universe (gauge theories stop working, for one).
– I have never seen *anyone* address the obvious problem with an Alcubierre drive, putting matter inside a warp bubble moving at speeds over the universal speed limit. That is the problem that those bubbles are supposed to solve in the first place! Since relativity forbid precisely that, nothing is gained, and these curious solutions to GR are not useful.
And I have to think that those who read those papers are not interested in whether or not a solution would work, they just assume it would because the alternative – reality – is too boring for them.
The work of Alcubierre, Thorne and many others in this fashion is interesting and possibly useful. But we should keep in mind what they’re doing. The field equations come about from experimental data and physical principles, unifying all into a physical theory. What these physicists are doing is taking the mathematics and working backwards to explore “what if” scenarios.
You want a wormhole? Invent a metric consistent with GR and then probe the equations for the required energy conditions. Unfortunately the energy conditions appear to be entirely non-physical.
Apart from warp drives and worm holes other examples include tachyons and naked singularities. All very interesting, but for reality.
John Cramer in his Alternate View columns calls these FTL ideas “metric engineering.” Basically you decide on the result you want, like FTL drive, and then you create constants and variables to plug into the relativity equations. The only problem is that the constants and variables you create don’t exist in the real universe.
The warp drive as described above has one really serious flaw: It requires negative matter. Which does not exist. At all. And no, we cannot simply go out and make some.
That the scientist got the amount of negative matter required down in size from Jupiter to a Voyager probe does not mean it will still work if said key piece to the problem does not exist. At all.
But let a real physicist explain this situation:
http://jalopnik.com/the-painful-truth-about-nasas-warp-drive-spaceship-from-1590330763
And dilithium crystals do not exist either. And they were originally called lithium crystals (see the ST:TOS episode “Mudd’s Women”).
Great article from Marc and terrific stories from Al Jackson.
Indeed Star Trek has inspired us all. For me personally it was warp drive that marked my introduction to interstellar studies and I spent two years studying warp drive in the context of GR which lead to me publishing a status paper on it which Eric Davies built on in his 2013 paper referenced in the article. My earlier paper is available here and I listed 19 physics and engineering reasons why warp drive appeared to be problematic.
http://www.jbis.org.uk/paper.php?p=2008.61.347
I even worked with a documentary film maker to try and produce an actual warp field “design” that worked – and it still broke Several laws of physics. It is surrounded by a massive negative energy density generating Casinir ring and these are placed at both ends of the start and end of journey given the warp ship loses all ability to causally effect the surrounding space-time outside of its bubble. In effect it cannot control its own speed.
https://youtu.be/b4oW8xUOi1Y
Sadly, I recently came to the conclusion that both ultra-relativistic and ftl flight may not be practical due to the consequences of special relativity and in Particular time dilation. Knowing that the 50th anniversary of Star Trek was approaching it seemed like a good time to publish a Paper on it which appears in the latest issue of JBIS, titled :
“Unstable Equilibrium Hypothesis: A Consideration of Ultra-Relativistic and Faster than Light Interstellar Spaceflight”
The problems I highlight in the paper only emphasises further the so often referenced Fermi problem and i fear we may be limited to sub-light speeds. I do hope someone shows my arguments are wrong and I support the continued research into warp drive and other exotic propulsion subjects.
http://www.bis-space.com/eshop/products-page-2/magazines/jbis/jbis-2016/jbis-vol-69-no-02-03-february-march-2016/
Good article and congrats to all those that have kept the Star Trek vision alive.
And DS9 is my favourite.
Kelvin F Long
As a good Gen-Xer, I only saw Star Trek in reruns and syndication. Nevertheless, my family (specially my late dad) was very fond of it, and that made it very special for me as well.
I grew watching the movies and the series mostly at whatever chance we had to have it on syndication, in past times before we even had a VCR at home for watching them at our ease.
It didn’t matter, though. It always was an event that we shared, and therefore Star Trek always will recall me those days of childhood, with my dad and my family, dreaming of far away planets and civilizations, and of our idle but entertaining talk about them afterwards.
Of course, I’m still a proud Trekkie, fan of sci/fi in general and interested in the future.
And I assume a significant part of the long lasting appeal of Star Trek in others, comes precisely from these stories of heartfelt familiarity and mundane life, punctuated by stories of hyper-logic aliens, Prime Directives, phasers and transporters.
And while I agree that most of those concepts weren’t Star Trek originals, Star Trek did a superb job sewing them together into the conceptual package that most people nowadays recognizes as the Star Trek vision of the future.
By the way, I quite liked Marc’s description of the pattern of 50 years from fantasy to science possibility, + other 50 from plausibility to scientific/technological fact. I certainly hope it holds true!
Regarding the warp drive that made Star Trek plausible, I was at a SF convention once and Larry Niven was part of a panel discussion. He said that since FTL travel is an impossibility, if you want to put FTL in a SF story you have to write “good mumbo jumbo.” Being young and idealistic I was offended by his sarcasm. I raised my hand and suggested that the Kerr solution to a revolving black hole offered a realistic idea for FTL travel. Niven had a degree in mathematics, and he chuckled and mentioned a lot of problems with the idea. I then said that his objections were just technical problems. He laughed even louder and said in effect that an unsolvable technical problem is the equivalent of a theoretical impossibility. Yep. And as I’ve learned over the years, an unsolvable problem is not really a problem at all, rather it’s a fact of life. And this is probably true of our dreams of FTL travel. But there’s always hope…
Long time reader de-lurking to comment for the first time here. I don’t know about others, but the paragraph in this article that really gives me shivers of awe and excitement isn’t any of the Star Trek stuff (wonderful and influential as that was), rather it is this paragraph rooted firmly in reality:
“Now we have an potentially habitable planet as close as it could possibly be. Our nearest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, has a planet a little bit bigger than Earth which might have liquid water. It’s 4.2 light years away, has a mass 30% more than Earth, and is in the habitable zone of its red dwarf star. Its star is dimmer, cooler, and tiny compared to our Sun (14% the size, 12% the mass), which means that its habitable zone is only 5% the distance between our Sun and Earth. Accordingly, a year on the new-found planet is only 12 Earth days. The science is here. ”
In that simple paragraph are encapsulated a summary of the huge increase in our observational capability over recent decades, and the fact that has greatly increased the odds that one day our starships will fly. I doubt they will resemble anything out of classic science fiction.
One last thing. For some reason when the news of Proxima b broke, the science fiction it brought to mind was Philip K Dick rather than Roddenberry.
Such as: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch? He did like having aliens in the nearby stars.
Kirk a role model? What was the lyrics from the startrekking song? Kirk: “we come in peace! Shoot to kill! shoot to kill! We come in peace! Shoot to kill! Scotty beam me up!” Despite assumptions to the contrary…a one night stand with the alien princess and launching photon torpedoes are not diplomatic acts.
Actually far more often than not Star Trek tried to find diplomatic solutions to problems, only resorting to the use of force when necessary. In the rather hostile universe they existed in, that there were not more wars is rather impressive.
Take this original series episode, for example….
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon_(episode)
Kirk did break the Prime Directive – a lot. Would a PD work in reality? A recent paper by an actual scientist has just come out on that very subject here:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602302/galactic-model-simulates-how-et-civilizations-could-be-deliberately-avoiding-earth/
Thanks for the technology review link, which puts mathematical flesh on the bones of a familiar concept.
I think that this approach to Fermi’s question can be countered with another. I’m sure regular readers of Centaurs Dreams have all seen calculations of how quickly (in terms of the life of the galaxy) a civilization could have self-replicating probes throughout the galaxy. It is sometimes suggested that we should have seen one by now.
If the first civilization decides to embark on a programme of building such probes, it will almost certainly have them everywhere before the next civilization arises. The AIS of these probes could easily be programmed to encourage, or force, all future civilisations to comply with whatever rules the first civilization favours. This could include limiting interstellar communications.
In math one can calculate almost anything to happen. :^) The real question is, WOULD a sufficiently advances species colonize the Milky Way galaxy, or any galaxy for that matter, and WHY?
Would they really colonize every star system, all 400 billion of them, in the galaxy? Would an alien mind even consider space colonization on such a scale, or any scale at all? Only a few human “tribes” have historically bothered to try space exploration, and except for a few brief visits to the Moon almost half a century ago, no humans have directly gone to another world yet, let alone lived there for any extended period of time. This lack of space colonization is not due to a lack of technical knowhow or the knowing the proper science for the task.
Those who say the above about galactic colonization, or that von Neumann machines would have duplicated themselves until they filled up the Milky Way, show us the reasons why, or even IF a species could do such a thing. And once again, we assume those who head out into the galaxy will be organic with organic motives.
As for this old theme of alien conquest, I think it would be rather difficult to maintain a Galactic Empire without FTL or wormholes – both of which have yet to be shown as proven – don’t you? Then we go right back to WHY a species would want the entire galaxy to themselves, etc.
Why would you want a galaxy to yourself? The obvious answer would be security. But I don’t think we need go that far.
Imagine you wish to learn as much as possible about the galaxy and the diversity of stars, planets, life and other exotic phenomena. So you tell your Von Neumann device to replicate itself at every star, or every 10th, or whatever. If you want to see later civilisations develop on their own paths, in other words if you have Prime Directive like ideas, you can use your Von Neumann probes to enforce the PD. It wouldn’t be about conquest, but about ethics.
The Zoo Hypothesis is often criticised for requiring a consensus among civilisations, and the paper you link to is about how unlikely that is.
I suggest that a first mover with Von Neumann devices can generate that consensus.
To elaborate:
Maintaining a traditional Galactic Empire without FTL would certainly be difficult. But that’s not what I have in mind. I envisage a colossal programme of scientific research which, being based on Von Neumann machines, need only (only!) require the investment to build the first machine.
Motivated not by conquest but by the desire to learn, we end up with machines spreading across the galaxy, in each system investigating and cataloging what they find. They would share data with each other, improving their models of their fields of study, astronomical, biological and the rest. All the time, results would be filtering back to their originating civilisation.
But if you launched such a project, you might consider what instructions to give in respect of any life detected. Is it permitted to kill lichens when studying them? Multicellular creatures? Tool-making ones? Space travelling ones?
Among the possible sets of instructions for the AIs would be ones that involve minimising impact on emerging civilisations. This could be extended to ensuring that the impact of emerging interstellar civilisations on other systems and species is also minimised.
Vacuum instability is the #1 natural enemy of every galactic empires. Building a galactic empire is no walk in the park, especially that park hides lots of unknown creatures whose minds might or might not be stable.
Those who weren’t satisfied about the real science from the battle on the surface of the sun (The Killing Star), please look up “Geometry and Dynamics of Magnetic Monopoles” for some basic information.
Many assumptions there. You are assuming an alien mind would think as we might, and humans are certainly anything but founts of logic.
‘The closest thing in the scientific literature to creating a transporter effect is a wormhole – discussed previously.’ I put this in the same box of unsolved problems as hyperspace and time travel: the distance between two points is change in possibility via superposition. That which separates point a from point b is a string. The science is therefor string theory and its eventual applications.
Interesting article, thanks to Marc Millis for writing this up! I’d like to find more information on one thing, though.
I have heard of this time travel argument, but I was unaware that it has been found to be a non-issue. In what papers can I find this particular research?
The time travel paradoxes seemed to be the most damning issue with FTL. Traveling fast is one thing, but doing something like setting up a wormhole on a pool table that sends a billiard ball back in time to knock itself off its own trajectory through the wormhole is quite another. If this is truly a non-issue, that is a pretty hopeful sign for wormhole travel and such.
It’s quite possible that FTL travel will turn out to not be physically meaningful, so it is very exciting that we’ve found such a planet around the star literally closest to us! It seems equally auspicious that its’ discovery coincided with the interest in Breakthrough Starshot.
Of course, the caveats extend from here to Proxima. Being in the habitable zone does not guarantee habitability. There are many other complex factors that may have resulted in a dry, Venus-like world, as recent articles have discussed. But even in this case, finding a rocky planet in the habitable zone around the closest star to Earth indicates that such planets are likely to be very common–and that is excellent news.
Regarding the Casimir force being put forward as a form of negative energy I have to object. It really isn’t, even if in a limited domain it can behave as if it is. I like the following example from mechanics as a good analogy.
Consider a column. Put it under compression through plates at either end. Now reduce the force of the plates by a small amount. Have you reduced compression or have you added tension? Mathematically either works. That is, until the “tension” equals the initial compressive force. Then it stops working. It wasn’t really tension after all.
Similarly we can design electrical circuits by treating current as a flow of electrons or as a flow of charge “holes” moving in the opposite direction. Either works, if you’re careful.
We need to take care not to get caught up in phenomena that are too lightly labeled as negative energy.
I was never a trekkie, but I’ve seen enough Star Trek to understand what it’s about. It’s a sophisticated show that deals with intelligent ideas. It strikes a good balance between entertainment and food for thought. For comparison, the Dune novels are very rich and heavy in ideas, while the Star Wars movies are mostly entertainment and epic storytelling.
This article touches on an important point – mature culture. If we’re going to use advanced technology to create anti-gravity or wormholes, we have to be culturally advanced enough to not use this same technology to destroy ourselves. It’s the cliche of technology as a two-edged sword: nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants. This is especially important for space colonies (cylinder, torus, dome, etc.) which is something I’ll elaborate on in a more relevant discussion. For now, I’ll say that the social/political sphere is just as important for space colonization as hard science and technology.
“It’s the cliche of technology as a two-edged sword: nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants.”
You forgot to mention ICBMs and rockets.
According to the story timeline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Star_Trek) :
2150
Keel laid for Enterprise (NX-01)
That’s 134 years away.
134 years ago was 1882.
I don’t know if there will be an Enterprise as described in the story in 2150, but I am willing to bet that the technological change between now and 2150 will be several orders of magnitude greater than the technological development from 1882 to now.
After all, 90% of all scientists who have ever lived are alive today. We have made great strides since 1882… but we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
In 1882 we were building steel ships and powering them with coal-fired steam engines. Apart from changing the fuel to bunker oil, and adding modern navigation aids, not much has changed with shipping, has it?
We have no idea where science will lead us, but it is a good bet that it will tend to be more productive and “interesting” where there is room for discovery. It is entirely possible that that discovery space may be coming to an end with physics, although I would hate to make the same prognostication mistake as physicists did at the end of the 19th century.
The hot areas right now seem to be biology and materials science (hopefully not my confirmation bias).
Alex, I understand what you are saying but I would like to suggest that the discovery space isn’t ending in physics so much as it is altering from practical to impractical.
The discoveries in the 20th century were mostly practical, leading to computers and hydrogen bombs (random, spectacular examples).
The discoveries in the 21st century may well involve big leaps in understanding of dark matter, dark energy and black holes, all subjects that are intensely interesting but probably not having much in the way of useful applications.
I completely agree with you that the thrust of practical science will be in areas of biology and materials science (including nanotechnology).
NASA’s take on Star Trek technology here:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/star_trek.html
A recent documentary on the subject here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrSCinkFUtA
Warning: Abrams is in the above video.
Lawrence Krauss talks about the physics of Star Trek:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMhrt8ZdkS0
Athena Andreadis used her expertise in biology to discuss the Biology of Star Trek:
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/To_Seek_Out_New_Life:_The_Biology_of_Star_Trek
I reviewed her book back in the day:
http://www.setileague.org/reviews/seekout.htm
Way too many humanoids in the ST universe – yeah, yeah, I saw ST:TNG’s The Chase: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Chase_(episode)
The problem is, the masses think interstellar travel will only be possible with warp drive (why do you think whenever there is an interstellar science conference that the talks on warp drive get most of the media attention) using ships filled with biological humans and meet a lot of aliens who mostly look and act like us. The real exploration and surrounding Cosmos are probably going to be quite different. Will we still explore then? Will we be prepared for the real Universe?
“To bump our spacecraft speeds up to 10% lightspeed (1000 times faster than now), we need at least 1-million times more energy.”
That statement bothers me. From the perspective of the ship, assuming constant acceleration, each delta v requires the same amount of energy release. Therefore, the energy requirement and the cost grow linearly with velocity as velocity grows linearly with time. While it’s true that from the perspective of an earth observer that the final kinetic energy of the ship is a million times higher than current typical speeds, it’s not true that a million times the energy necessarily had to be supplied by the ship in it’s own reference frame. Our problem is we don’t have way of converting raw energy to raw momentum yet but if we could, I’m confident we could test this. Beamed power is an exception. It alway takes more energy to provide the thrust than the ship gains in kinetic energy because beamed power is the least efficient means. Yet, with photon recycling we could also show it. Of course, the EmDrive would directly test this too. Both Shawyer and Fetta designed deep space probes that end up with substantially more kinetic energy as seen in the earth observer frame than raw microwave power integrated over time in the ships frame. But the mechanics of neither violate the Work Energy Theorem whereby it’s the mechanical work (force times distance) that equates to the ships final kinetic energy as seen in the observer frame, not the electrical power times time.
Getting interesting:
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/emdrive-nasa-eagleworks-paper-has-finally-passed-peer-review-says-scientist-know-1578716
http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/46732/20160903/breaking-newton-law-impossible-space-engine-emdrive-passes.htm
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/emdrive-aiaa-confirms-release-date-controversial-nasa-eagleworks-space-propulsion-paper-1579443
Quantum Lithography allows geometric structures of nano-circuit to be at two different positions at once (superposition), adding entanglement with other similar computer chips would create exotic cluster.
Currently we still have problems trying to understand the system d[g(ij)]/dt = Laplace-Beltrami[Ric(ij)] + lambda*R*g(ij) ; since Dr. Perelman refuses to do any more work on Ricci flow, it will take quite long time to figure out the right elasticity of 3+1 spacetime.
Hi Marc,
Well here we are 50 years of StarTrek and we are (hopefully) as a society a little wiser? Here’s my take on the items discussed:
FTL travel: forget about it, ain’t gonna happen. FTL can only happen in the virtual particle domain which isn’t accessible to us. Note that the energy inside Casimir plates isn’t negative energy/mass. No negative energy/mass has been observed in nature so this is a hypothetical concept. Note that antimatter has positive mass. Wormholes aren’t allowed by quantum physics either:
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9510071
Without FTL or wormholes, this has implications on how interstellar travel could happen.
Transporters: forget about it, ain’t gonna happen either, quantum physics doesn’t allow it. Apart from conservation of momentum violations, even if there was a way to dematerialize/materialize an object, it would never be the exact same object before/after. Exact copies are impossible in nature due to the uncertainty principle.
Control over Gravitational and Inertial forces: still open to debate. General Relativity is an incomplete model of gravity, progress in this area is slow because the various quantum gravity approaches being researched make no new predictions that can be verified by experiment today. I suspect if there is any major breakthrough in physics in the next 50 years, this is one area where it could happen. More on this:
http://vixra.org/abs/1506.0194
Extreme Energy Prowess: a compact size fusion reactor is probably within our means in the next 50 years.
Societal Maturity: If people followed reason rather than belief, I think the world would be a better place.
Cheers, Paul.
Paul Titze said on September 10, 2016 at 19:31:
“Extreme Energy Prowess: a compact size fusion reactor is probably within our means in the next 50 years.”
Haven’t they been saying this for the last fifty years? :^) A lot of time, money, and resources have been spent on controlled fusion and so far the best we can do is a few seconds. Of course hydrogen bombs do work, but they tend to be very messy. Although would make a great fuel source for the one method of interstellar travel we can build now, Orion (not the continually behind schedule NASA manned vessel plan, please note).
Then Paul Titze said:
“Societal Maturity: If people followed reason rather than belief, I think the world would be a better place.”
Then they probably would not be human. Neil DeGrasse Tyson recently proposed a government run by scientists and other smart types he called Rationalia. Ironic coming from a man who recently trashed on philosophy and its practitioners. This all makes one realize he should just stick to astrophysics.
http://thefederalist.com/2016/07/01/neil-degrasse-tysons-rationalia-would-be-a-terrible-country/
What we need are people who can do both the social and physical sciences (along with the arts and humanities) and do them well as an integrated whole, but our society is still dominated by the Two Cultures concept outlined by C. P. Snow:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-update-on-cp-snows-two-cultures/
When we can start merging the two sides which were once far more cohesive, especially among those considered to be educated and cultured, we will then start to see the society envisioned in Star Trek and various other utopias.
ljk:
The last 50 years has mainly been slow progress in theoretical and experimental groundwork as far as fusion goes however with ITER coming soon:
https://www.iter.org/mach
this could lead to rapid progress in this field, in the last 50 years the technology available to us just wasn’t there. Maybe the third generation reactor after ITER could be a commercial fusion reactor depending how successful the previous designs are.
If FTL travel were possible, would a ship’s drive be visible as some sort of wake in space/time to an observer on Earth or as in Star Trek: First Contact? If so, a strategy for SETI would be to look for those theoretical signatures.
If FTL travel were possible, and has been invented somewhere in the Galaxy, I would think it to be “common” as a civilization expanded its sphere of exploration. This thought leads directly ties to Fermi’s Paradox: Where are they?
There’s always the chance that FTL is possible but that we are currently the most advanced civilization in this (and nearby) galaxies. Which would explain why we don’t see any signs of FTL even though it’s possible.
I am convinced that the CHON system, with a few other elements to spice up the brew, will cause life to appear wherever the conditions permit, and that growing in complexity is a result of molecular geometry and thermodynamics. That would raise the question, why have we not been visited? Maybe that is because a dominant lifeform destroys itself through overpopulation and warfare: Earth has not yet escaped that trap. But perhaps it is simply not possible for organic life to traverse the space between stars. In all that vast distance maybe there is an almost certainty that radiation and scattered space gravel will destroy a fragile container of life.
Interstellar panspermia may be plausible if it is done deliberately:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/curtissilver/2016/09/12/genesis-project-alien-life/#28a712097662
The transporter technology was redone in the reboot as a wormhole just like Marc said . There seems to be a new rule in Hollowood that allows only one miracle technology at a time. I don’t think we can fully rule in or out FTL until we understand until we get a grip on quantum gravity…and even though there was a new paper out linking it with wormholes…I can’t say I am near term optimistic. I think we get to Proxima before warp……I am optimistic on Breakhrough sstarshot. I think we should tout it’s potential benfits in devloping new technology on the physical sciences. Automation…AI……Materials Sciences and communications technologies.If not..its the biology century.
All this further discussion of wormholes in the Star Trek universe led me to think about a question that I’ve had in my mind for a long long time.
I’m a technical person, so I’ve had a technical education in the hard sciences and I believe that I could understand an explanation if someone could answer that regarding the wormhole phenomenon. I hasten to add that I have not had tensor calculus, nor have I been steeped in general relativity, so a highly mathematical discussion of wormholes would not be of any help.
You’ve often had on this board here in individuals, a professor Davis I believe is his name and he is a specialist in general relativity (I may have the name wrong here). So I would like to direct the question to either him are somebody else like him and asked, could you explain in a technical fashion, in words only (no mathematics, please!) and give a DETAILED technical explanation in words as to HOW a wormhole can connect to distant parts of the universe.
What I’ve never understood about this idea of connection between two different parts of the universe is WHY should there even be anything that would allow someone to suspect that there is a way to bridge the gap between two completely dishonor points ?
I mean, what is it that is happening that allows, or permits if you will, to distant points to have some kind of shortcut even allowed to exist ?
If there was a possibility for such a phenomenon to exist star flight and spaceflight would be a unnecessary and monetarily wasteful way to go to distant places. Why go to the expense and effort of building a ship when you can just open a hole and walk through it
Charlie,
Did you see the movie Interstellar? That was based on relativity physicist Kip Thorne’s work (well the technical parts). Kip wrote a book for the intelligent layman called The Science of Interstellar. Kip explains traversable Wormhole physics in that book. May be possible to find a really cheap used copy by now, the paper back version is not all that expensive:
http://books.wwnorton.com/books/the-science-of-interstellar/
That book was probably one of the few good things which came out of that film, which was otherwise an attempt to recreate the next 2001: A Space Odyssey, yet only showed that Christopher Nolan is no Stanley Kubrick:
https://centauri-dreams.org/?p=32136
The next couple of centuries seems pretty straightforward to predict from a scientific point of view, even absent any major theoretical breakthroughs in physics. Advances in fusion, solid state tech, optics, computing, AI, brain research, robotics, nanotech, genetics, biology etc. will give us the ability to brake to a stop at an interstellar destination and construct a bio-assembler, and thus the ability to reconstruct ourselves at a remote location. No spaceships will therefore be required for the transportation of humans at light speed. That’s the point at which galactic colonisation begins.
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have advocated for decades that complex biology exists in space and likely seeded the earth. In their model of panspermia we ourselves are likely the distant descendants of other worlds filled with DNA based life.
Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, was an advocate of directed panspermia:
http://www.astrobio.net/topic/origins/origin-and-evolution-of-life/francis-crick-remembered/
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-origins-of-directed-panspermia/
https://amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/proceedings/150309.pdf
And an honest-to-goodness theoretical physicist just came out with a white paper on deliberately seeding the galaxy with terrestrial life. See here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/curtissilver/2016/09/12/genesis-project-alien-life/#28a712097662
While Crick and Orgel suggested directed panspermia, their idea was predated by Thomas Gold’s “accidental panspermia” a decade earlier. I see very little difference between the two proposals in terms of the means of infection and the end result.
There is no guarantee that in millions of years you’ll end up with just a lot of microbes. Better to spend resources to test the hypothesis that microbes already exist in space. If they do then no need to seed distant planets for they (and we) were already. If not, then you have millions of years to figure out how to send real people there if you want to.
This has probably been mentioned before in the comments to the recent articles that mention the mass of the Proxima b planet, but the 1.3 Earth mass estimate is the lower limit for the mass – the mass the planet has if it’s gravitational effect on the star is the result of an orbit that is in the same plane as a line from the Earth to Proxima. If the orbit is tilted, a larger mass would be required to produce the same effect. It could be Uranus clone at a much higher inclination for all we know. We won’t know what the true mass is until we are able to successfully deploy some other detection method, like transits (if we are lucky) or direct imaging, or maybe wobble relative to background stars. Maybe a determination of Proxima’s orbital plane relative to A and B might help – a planet would tend to orbit in a plane close to that?
I believe there are a couple of episodes of ST the original series which are never repeated. In the UK at any rate – because of PC considerations.
In fact, reading this (below), I wonder if we have EVER seen the full unedited series in the UK? Even when Sky aired the series, it bought the tapes off the BBC, and they had already been messed with.
http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Four_Banned_Star_Trek_Episodes_in_the_UK
After what the BBC did to all those Doctor Who episodes and countless other British programs, it would not be a surprise.
No sense of the future, clearly.
http://www.warpedfactor.com/2015/05/the-destruction-of-152-episodes-of.html
I take umbrage with those who declare that we will never have FTL. I’m not saying we will develop it or that it is even feasible. I’m saying it’s arrogant to declare it impossible. There is so much about the universe we don’t know. We don’t know the nature of dark energy and dark matter. We have no method at this time to prove or disprove string theory. We don’t have a unified theory that successfully mates quantum theory with relativity. Yes, those who have been working on warp theory have selected convenient metrics that may or may not exist in the real world.
In the 1930s a world renowned astronomer “proved” we would never get to the moon. It was accepted as the definitive analysis by the scientific community. Problem was that his basic assumptions were wrong. He assumed propellant energy to be about the same as nitroglycerine, instead of LOX-hydrogen. He ignored staging. And, of course, he ignored the use of a rendezvous and orbit to orbit energy calculations. While this might not be the same thing as whether negative energy exists or not, it still reflects the problem with declaring something as theoretically impossible.
The problem with this arrogance of declaring something as impossible is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I firmly believe, if you don’t try, you can’t do. If we knew what we were doing it wouldn’t be R&D.
As I wrote above in this thread, one of the key ingredients for warp drive is the need for negative matter (not energy), which does NOT exist and cannot be manufactured. It does not exist because of the physical parameters of our Universe. Flying heavier than air craft or going to the Moon, those are virtual cakewalks in comparison: The key there being that they are physically possible.
It is easy to say some day we will have FTL capabilities. It’s another thing entirely to actually lay out how that will happen. And assuming some ambiguous person from the future will solve this for us is also not helpful.
The future does not always equal automatic progress – just ask most of the societies that came before ours, like the Roman Empire. The film Interstellar fell into that trap, having anonymous future humans solve the current crisis in the plot and send their ancestors help.
We can wait for future humans or more advanced aliens to drop FTL drives on our doorstep (and we should wonder why), or we can work towards that future now and at least start making interstellar travel happen, even if it is – heaven forbid – STL.
Do we even have a concrete definition of what ‘negative matter’ means? If so, what exactly is it? Thanks.
From this paper on negative matter propulsion:
http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/3.23219?journalCode=jpp
“Negative matter is a hypothetical form of matter whose active-gravitational, passive-gravitational, inertial, and rest masses are opposite in sign to normal, positive matter. Negative matter is not antimatter, which as far as is known has normal (positive) mass.”
About as plausible as tachyons – the presumed particles which can only go FTL – which are also very hypothetical despite their numerous appearances and mentions in Star Trek.
Mathematicians and theorists come up with a lot of interesting ideas when playing with numbers and physics, which the layperson often mistakes as being real because they come from such perceived authority figures – combined with the results of our incredibly lax public education system.
Now in 2014 these guys were saying that negative mass can exist in our Universe:
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/cosmologists-prove-negative-mass-can-exist-in-our-universe-250a980320a7#.dd0uz72t9
However, there are of course a lot of theoretical ifs and just like so many similar ideas, whether any of it can be used to power a starship is a whole nuther… matter.
You may be interested to know, and it may be relevant that in R. Mills’ hydrino hypothesis, his membrane model of the electron has different gravitational states depending on the curvature of the membrane. For normal bound electrons, it’s the usual gravity, for free electrons, it’s gravitationally neutral, there is no gravitational force on the free electron but there exists the possibility of forcing electrons into a hyperbolic geometry which supposedly has negative gravitational mass though I believe not negative inertial mass.
If one could change the local geometric structures in a way such that spacetime metric has the form of quartic line element then the requirements for the existence and stability of wormhole would be different.
On the other hand, Nash’s global isometric embeddings is the hidden secret which is seldom mentioned; of course the technique of how to manipulate the curvature of spacetime is another different story.
When science fiction inspires science fact and its practitioners:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/physicists-inspired-by-star-trek-say-thanks
I don’t know about the UK but ME tv in US runs them in oder once a week .BBC America ran a marathon this weekend but not in any order. It did have a pgv rating. In a sense it was the most violent show ever with billlions killed and entire planetary systems destroyed. I looked that up. Some commentators thought it was from the closness of WW2 and the holocaust as well as nuclear weapons. Also despite wars and mass death there is rapid techological development. And that was the case in the 1870 to 1970 era.
The Star Trek universe is a pretty hostile one, even though Earth’s humanity is united – although that is often par for the course with most space operas by their very nature.
Let’s face it, however, not many average viewers would be drawn in to weekly episodes where a Federation starship found lichen on an alien planet, making the staff biologists very happy. Nor would there be much visceral joy in meeting aliens who get along with the ship crew and they all sit down for a nice cup of tea and a chat.
That’s how it should be, but it won’t be. That the series has managed to work in diplomatic solutions and a fairly cooperate interstellar federation of planets as it is I guess is progress. Though I get the feeling that the reality out there is going to be quite different, as will be how we actually venture into the galaxy.
One comment on Star Trek: These are stories about people, human people, regardless of the form, color, shape and state of undress. It is not a story of space travel: that is just the gimmick to tie the stories together. Now, I am old (sort of – 75 this year) and in truth, I am waiting around to die. I see Star Trek as a The Waltons, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Mission:Impossible and Have Gun, Will Travel. The stories all have a genesis in human conflict and drama and are quite similar. I have to admit is somewhat puzzling to read of talented and very intelligent people trying to make this fictional framework on which the stories were hung a reaity. Near earth habitats, L5 and moon colonies that are self- sufficient and spacecoaches are plausible in the next hundred years. There is no reason to believe intergalactic travel will ever be possible.
When Gene Roddenberry was pitching Star Trek to the networks, he dubbed his idea as “Wagon Train… to the stars,” although he was far more heavily influenced by the 1956 SF film classic Forbidden Planet than even he publicly admitted.
Wagon Train was a television series that ran on NBC from 1957 to 1962 and then on ABC from 1962 to 1965. The plot involved a wagon train of pioneers as they settled the American West in the 19th Century. Substitute the Old West for the Milky Way galaxy, Conestoga wagons for starships, and Native Americans for aliens (no offense intended).
Yes, Star Trek was Roddenberry’s way of making current social commentary on public television that wasn’t allowed at the time. The Smothers Brothers tried this outright in 1969 and were canned by CBS for it. It took Norman Lear and his landmark All in the Family series and its various offshoots in the early 1970s to change that medium’s landscape. But ST was the pioneer who snuck those concepts in under the guise of science fiction, which supposedly many network executives and others considered to be just for children, which they thought meant such programming could have nothing of either value or gravity to offer.
However, please note the following: While not perfect, Star Trek did try to be scientifically plausible (they knew the difference between a solar system and a galaxy, a huge step back then and even now). The USS Enterprise certainly felt like something that could be built some day because Roddenberry wanted more than just a V-2 style rocket with interior panels fully of blinking lights. If you take away the fictional and magical dilithium crystals so vital to their starships’ warp capabilities, you still have a vessel that used antimatter for propulsion, which is one method of interstellar travel (albeit STL but still very fast) that could work.
It was this attention to scientific and technological detail that inspired many to want to contribute to real space exploration and even see if warp drive could work. Whether it will is another story, but humanity has often made many important discoveries that were not considered as they searched for other things along the way. That too is important along with the messages from the stories. This makes Star Trek a rich and valuable resource and inspiration to the public on multiple fronts.
Think about this: The original large filming model of the USS Enterprise from the original series has just been restored by the Smithsonian and is now displayed in the main area of the National Air and Space Museum along with some of the most historic real spaceships and aircraft ever flown. That should give you some idea of how far-reaching the series and its iconic space vessel has been as we venture into the Final Frontier (cue bongo drums).
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/enterprise-studio-model-back-display
“However, please note the following: While not perfect, Star Trek did try to be scientifically plausible (they knew the difference between a solar system and a galaxy, a huge step back then and even now). ”
Boy! it that true. Issac Asimov , when writing reviews for TV Guide, noted how mindless was some of the dialog in Lost in Space. I think when the Jupiter 2 left the solar system, not under a warp drive, it immediately came up Alpha Centauri. Asimov said that’s like being on a bus where the driver says “out your right hand window we are arriving in El Paso and out your left hand window is Canton China.”
If only we had listened to Lost in Space, we would have had colonies on Alpha Centauri since 1997! :^)
“That should give you some idea of how far-reaching the series and its iconic space vessel has been as we venture into the Final Frontier (cue bongo drums).”
I wish I had another 20 or so years of clear and rational thought, but unfortunately I picked live fast, die late middle aged ancestors. The quote brings to mind the power of myths to influence humanity. I remember reading about the large effigies in human form that were furnaces to sacrifice one’s children to a god of myth, of human sacrifices all through human history, of the worship of war and death. The year 1000 and to a much lesser degree the year 2000 were expected to bring the end of the world. Such is the power of myth. So we have the effigy of the myth that was Star Trek . . . what do we sacrifice to this effigy of Ba’al? We have concrete possibilities in near earth space and within the solar system.
Will We Ever Find E.T.? NASA Talks First Contact ‘Star Trek’-Style
By Marshall Honorof | September 13, 2016 11:08 am ET
NEW YORK — Is anyone else out there? Humans have asked this question ever since we could look up at the stars, but hundreds of thousands of years later, we still don’t have a satisfactory answer. Logic would seem to dictate that there’s other intelligent life out there, and yet it also suggests that if there is, it may have found us by now. While we may not have an answer for another few decades — if ever — we are slowly but surely getting closer.
A panel called “First Contact: Looking for Life in the Universe” at “Star Trek”: Mission New York Sept. 4 gave the audience a look at the current state of humanity’s search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
The “Star Trek” mythos came up surprisingly few times for a panel calling itself a “Trek Talk,” but the subject matter was still appropriate, given the abundance of alien life on “Star Trek,” both familiar and bizarre. [You don’t supposed they threw in the name to attract attention, do you, and on the fiftieth anniversary of the franchise no less!]
Dan Werthimer, the SETI chief scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Bobak Ferdowski from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory oversaw the discussion, which covered the basics of astrobiology.
Full article here:
http://www.space.com/34047-star-trek-nasa-seti-talk-first-contact-aliens.html
To quote:
In fact, the relative likelihood of finding primitive versus sapient life was one of the recurring themes of the talk. Werthimer believes that humanity may confirm the existence of primitive extraterrestrial life within the next 20 to 30 years, especially if scientists can get missions to Europa, but technological life is harder to pinpoint, as we don’t know how often it occurs. [See you for the next 20 to 30 years when the next prediction cycle will occur. ;^)]
Another potentially limiting factor is that intelligent life does not necessarily equate to technological life. Ferdowski and Werthimer pointed out that intelligent life (with varying degrees of what scientists would call “intelligence”) has evolved many times on Earth. Humans are the most obvious example, but dolphins, octopi and crows are all fairly clever creatures, to say nothing of the other great apes, which share a lineage with humans. [Don’t forget the Jovian floaters and the possibility of plasma beings living on stars. Hey, why not?]
Where is the Universal Translator when you really need it?
http://www.geek.com/science/scientists-discover-dolphins-talk-to-each-other-in-sentences-up-to-five-words-long-1670488/
Star Trek aliens: Mostly humanoid, act and think like humans, and talk with languages very similar to ours – when they aren’t speaking perfect English with a Mid-Atlantic American accent.
Thankfully the ETI in the upcoming film Arrival are none of these things and the film is all about how does one communicate with a truly alien species.
http://www.polygon.com/2016/8/17/12516908/arrival-trailer-the-arrival-charlie-sheen
I look forward to the serious discussion on communicating with alien minds and even the academic papers that will come from this film when it arrives in November – a few days after the U.S. Presidential elections. Take that as you will.
>blockquote> It took Norman Lear and his landmark All in the Family series and its various offshoots in the early 1970s to change that medium’s landscape.
From the country that brought Playboy and feminism to the world, it had to look to Britain for tv inspiration. “All In The Family” was based on the UK’s successful “Til Death Us Do Part”, starring the incomparable Warren Mitchell.
@Robert, Bound electrons are held to the atom and nucleus by the electromagnetic force NOT gravity. The positive charge of the nucleus attracts the negative charge of the electron which remains even in free electrons.
@Ljk Although the layman can be influenced by authority of a theorist it is the scientific principles like general relativity and quantum field theory that they use to support the possibility of FTL such as worm holes and warp drives which is why they have a Ph D in physics, astrophysics etc. The layman is called the layman because he often does not have a knowledge of those principles which is what scientists can corroborate.
The physics to support idea of negative energy density is sound has not been disproved. No one has tried to make it yet but that does not mean it cannot be made. Not much money has been put into experiments in attempting to make it in the laboratory and I would like to see much more money spent in the future. It is such cutting edge, visionary science that it is difficult to get support for it and we have a few ideas how to make it without using a Casimir cavity. These ideas are in the book Frontiers of Propulsion Science and also on the web under how to make negative energy in the laboratory.
But even if negative matter could be manufactured/created, can it be controlled and used in a starship’s propulsion system? We can’t even get controlled fusion to work for more than a few seconds, and this is after decades of work and billions of dollars. And we know fusion exists.
Same goes for mini blacks holes and wormholes, two other cosmic items often touted as our key to the stars. The real key is being able to collect and harness such energies, and I have yet to see anyone come up with anything viable in that department.
Meanwhile we continue to overlook the few real methods we do have for interstellar travel, even if no one will be saying Warp 6 Mr. Sulu in the process.
Geoffrey, I was not suggesting that gravity binds the atom, just that a bound electron has a positive or the usual gravitational mass in Mills’ model whereas a free electron has zero gravitational mass and a hyperbolic electron has negative gravitational mass. There is experimental evidence that free electrons do not seem to fall under gravity but is usually attributed to drift tube effects. Mills disagrees and also believes that the hyperbolic electrons exhibit a new force about twelve orders of magnitude stronger than normal gravity.
What I meant was the electric charge of the electron is always negative. With the electro magnetic force, opposite charges attract and the same charges repel each other like two electrons or two positively charged protons.
Oh, and a thought experiment does not necessarily prove or disprove an idea in physics unless it is supported by invariant, first principles and mathematics.
Perhaps, but if we can’t get it to work, then it will remain just an interesting thought experiment.
And even then one should always be willing to look at data regardless of how fundamental one thinks ones analysis is.
There is some work being done but funding is limited because the mainstream physics community has decided that negative energy and warp drives are impossible. Sonny White et al has received small amounts from NASA, and , as pointed out, his group will be publishing a peer reviewed article in the AIAA journal. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Regarding wormholes. They are usually invoked to allow physical travel across the universe. But what if they can be used simply to allow information to bypass the limits of c? This would allow civilizations to maintain informationally cohesive across a galaxy, even if physical travel is very slow.
If (a big if) information can travel at effectively FTL speeds, then this leads to the idea that physical objects can be recreated (“printed”) at their desired locations, which does effectively allow physical travel. The usual concerns then arise about this form of travel by sentient entities, although it seems conceptually fine for software running on computers, so why not wetware too?
Bottom line is that if FTL can be achieved with information, using manageable amounts of energy, then it should be possible to colonize the universe “quickly” and “relatively easily”.
Alex Tolley Yes it would make colonization easy. The printed thing sounds no different than the disintegration of the transporter beam again. Worm holes might be safer.
Ljk. I assume you mean by thought experiment something like a diametric optical drive might indicate that the physics in idea of negative mass propulsion would work. In other words, making negative energy in the lab won’t give us a warp drive anytime soon but it would prove warp drives are possible.
There is a big difference between a thought experiment and building and testing of an actual design to look for a new force though.
@Ljk. Baby steps are the best. Dont worry about the problems of the warp drive until you can make some negative energy density first. Otherwise that worry can be a barrier to progress.
@Robert. Electrons are Fermions or matter particles. They have positive energy density or mass whether they are free electrons in space or bound electrons. They also have potential and kinetic energy in space which might increase their mass especially if they are cosmic rays coming from the sun as solar wind or relativistic electrons coming from interstellar space which collide with our upper atmosphere with more kinetic energy(energy of motion) that our most power particle colliders and accelerators.
Geoffrey, you’re just stating the mainstream view which would obviously be in conflict with what I said was the Mills model. There is surprisingly little data on gravity and free electrons. The data that exists suggests free electrons do not fall under gravity. Why is uncertain. The mainstream model says nothing regarding hyperbolic electrons because it doesn’t comprehend their existence yet.