I read an article today about some celestial objects that astronomers were watching 24,000 light years away yet still inside the Milky Way galaxy. Then I started thinking (ouch!!)

On Star Trek, ships just set up their warp drive and warp over to planets far away. If I am doing my math right, a ship traveling at light speed would take a year to reach a planet 1 light year away. So if they are warping all over the galaxy fighting bad guys, even in some of those episodes where it takes days to reach at warp 10 (10x the speed of light) it would still take over a month to reach an object 1 light year away.

Plus they really wouldn't even know if that object still existed because by the time the light reached them the star could be long burned out.In reality the stars we see in the sky could have been burned out and dead for tens of thousands years. We are just seeing the light today that eminated a long time ago.

Crap Alan, do you have to think so much on a monday morning.

I am about halfway through Stephan Hawking's "The Universe in a Nutshell." You want to talk about some physics that is really hard to get your around. Based on the fact that nothing can go faster than the speed of light I am opting for wormholes...

Shaun :-) :-)

Well it's either thinking or getting to work.

Easy answer, its sci/fi, it doesn't have to make sense (much). Or be consistent, or conform to the laws of physics. :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)

Not a big fan of Hawkins. I read his "A Brief History of TIme." He explained a lot of things quite thouroughly but left out string theory all together. He argues there is no God. His entire argument towards aetheism: "I can't fathom His nature so He can't exist."

Yeah I am dodging work myself, Alan.

I didn't read Hawking's first book. The second one confused me enough. There was a show on Nova some time ago about string theory. If you haven't seen it it was really worthwhile.

Link below.

Shaun

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/

Not into SiFI but a lad said in one of the star trek series some of the tec stuff was in theory possiable then again he might have had Verbal Diarrhea

Some explanations:

warping... consider a sheet of paper... plot 2 points on it... now... fold the paper.. and the distance of the points will have change.. this is basically what warping is: you aren't going faster than lightspeed.. you change the distance between points!!!!!

Then, according to the star trek encyclopedia: light speed, or the ability to cover the distance of a lightyear in one earth year, is warp 1. and from then on, it's exponential, so warp 2 is 10 times lightspeed, warp 3 is 100 times lightspeed and so on.

And finally: i don't believe that lightspeed is a limit. Never had, never will.. Remember, people used to say that the earth is flat, and that the speed of sound would be a barrier we wouldn't be able to overcome.

I see a lot of us are avoiding work today!!

Thats what mondays are for, isn't it :-) :-) :-) :-)

I'll raise a pint of root beer to that. or two.

Ahh...but you are forgetting...it's Warp "Factor". Meaning Warp 4 is not 4 times the speed of light but a factored amount. Now I am not math wiz either but basically once you get up to speed of Warp 9 a small variance (9.1 for example) is a GIGANTIC difference in actual speed.

Here is a site that explains it better:

http://www.star-fleet.com/ed/warp-chart.html

Cheers,
Jim

C'mon guys...I have a hard enough time figuring out rush hour in Dallas let alone warp speed/factor and string theory.

Nope.. just another monday evening here in Holland :-) :-) :-) :-)

man, thats pretty sick... its like traveling back in time kinda...

Frank

299,792,458 meters per second, It's not just a good idea, it's the law...

Shaun :-) :-) :-)

This thread has got me thinking (yes it does hurt), if a star was 1 light year away and you travelled at twice the speed of light and came back to earth would you see yourself at the star through a telescope , and if you travelled fast enough could you get back before you leave
P.S i am sober :-) :-) :-) :-)

I was also thinking of the same thing :-) If you travel around the globe via a Concorde non stop flight backwards, would you go back in time? :-) :-)