Personally, I think it's far more interesting to look at sci fi and ask, "How could it be?" rather than "How it can't be." As such.... FTL bypasses the energy limit by being an equivalence....by way of Warp drive, worm hole, God-power (Q), etc. i.e. They don't actually move faster than light, they just shorten the distance thus is only "FTL" since light isn't taking any short cuts. There's a book I read and loved that was a history/science of space travel from the Star Trek universe perspective which included Sputnik, NASA projects, etc......to The Enterprise and a bit beyond. Also covered the 'science' of propulsion systems in a consistent (granted fantastical...probably) way: chemical, ion, nuclear, antimatter, etc. Fiction? Sure....but fun as hell and very thought provoking!
So quantum pieces are connected through worm holes.... And the gravity doesn't have to be offset it just has to be stronger how do you make gravity stronger unless you can pack more matter into the gravity in the wormhole itself... @Sableagle anyway so God can use the spirit of lying who's to say God didn't use the spirit of lying against Jesus that way only God can know the time the hour and the day like Jesus said in the first place...😮💨👽⚛️🤣 I mean butterfly effect So anyway.... Wormholes connecting loop quantum pieces ... Could not be unless some gravity is different amounts of compact matter... Unless you say you have something off setting their gravitational pull... Like different compacts amounts of matter like energy that would be made up of the gravitational field😂👽🤣🤣⚛️ So anyway wormholes could connect loop quantum gravity but how the wormholes would work is they would increase gravity at the points that the wormholes were created.... And that would crunch a little bit of space up pulling on the rest of the universe remember this is all happening on the quantum scale So different compact amounts of matter would have different properties who's to say some would act like it ghost I mean the less compact it is the more likely it is to pass through something just like sound can pass through walls 😁⚛️👽😮💨... Plus if the matter that makes up gravity is so uncompacted... It can act like the heat off of flame going into another heat a ghost get it So anyway wormholes could connect loop quantum gravity but how the wormholes would work is they would increase gravity and the points that the wormholes were created.... And that would crunch a little bit of space up pulling on the rest of the universe remember this is all happening on the quantum scale
This is the series that plays in our Milky Way. Star Wars is the far far away one. This is the episode with the Traveler. An entity that could traverse space completely different from what the Enterprise can. So yes this is pure fiction as this was done by a transient being who pretended to enhance the engines, but actually just used his own abilities to fling them across space. So to be honest it's a bit unfair for them to ask you to react to one of the few episodes that is actually pure fiction/fantasy. It is interesting to see how fast they were going, but it will not give you any idea on how fast warp-speed actually is as even the first time with M 33 was pure fiction.
This is why Star Trek physics is so cool! Star Trek vessels aren’t traveling faster the light. They are bending or “warping” space around their ships. This is they get around time dilation.
its also why they have to use special communication things to talk while at warp, and also why in the original series you never see anyone fighting at warp.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the whole point of ships in ST being able to travel at superluminal speeds and not break causality is that the ship itself does not move, it folds space around it (rather, compresses space in front and extends it behind) so that instead of moving through space, it wraps itself in a bubble of moving space. Thus, the ship itself wouldn't experience time dilation. Yeah, the energy required to do this would be absurd, but then again, there is nothing like dilithium in real life, a fictional mineral which allows for a controlled matter-antimatter reaction... :)
All forms of FTL travel are time travel unless there is a preferred frame of reference. Yes, even warped or folded space is time travel. What ST (and other sci fi shows) assume is that the galaxy (or a cluster of galaxies) are the preferred frame of reference. But relativity tells us there is not preferred frame of reference. It's all handwavium.
But that still breaks causality. The method doesn’t matter, FTL travel/communication is effectively time-travel, and that breaks effect following cause.
I think Star Trek often leans on something Arthur C Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". The idea is we meet other alien species and they know way more about physics than we do, and have such advanced technology that to us, it seems impossible, and like "magic"
This was especially prevalent in TOS. They were constantly running into magic aliens, God aliens, and so on. It got less common in later shows, but we still got the Q in TNG, the wormhole aliens in DS9, and the Caretaker's species in Voyager.
@@billybrain6217 more like an imagination of technology, mind and evolution working together in unimaginable ways.
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To be fair, Star Trek has never pretended to be a particularly "hard" sci-fi show. They have, however, often been pretty socially and politically progressive. For example, Star Trek: The Original Series was one of the first instances ever of a black person being portrayed having a job other than menial labor. It also had a Russian officer and an Asian one. Both The Original Series and The Next Generation promoted the idea of Earth being a post-war, post-scarcity society with world peace and universal social security. Start Trek: Voyager had a female Captain and a Native American First Officer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine a black Commander.
Exactly. The progressive values; the optimistic view of the future is what I watched Star Trek for - otherwise it is just a space opera with ray guns 'N' rocket ships like dozens of others.
A lot of fans haven't gotten the memo that Star Trek has never been hard sci-fi though. The line "Star Trek is science fiction, Star Wars is science fantasy" gets thrown around from time to time and a surprising number of fans (and unfortunately some of the writers) are under the impression that the technobabble in Star Trek is based on real science. It namedrops real scientific terms from time to time and occasionally even portrays it correctly but that's the exception rather than the rule.
I find it hilarious whenever anyone complains that Star Trek has “gone woke”, because it’s been woke since the 60s. In 1992 Riker fell in love with a trans woman.
There are many websites that calculate speeds of various 'Warp drives', 'Jump drives', 'Ludircrous Speed' and such from various films/franchises, and with Star Trek they go from Zefram Cochranes' Warp 1, through to Johnathan Archers ship (NX-01) Warp 5 through to the fastest Enterprise/other ship speeds... 😎🇬🇧
First season of TNG, even Patrick Stewart expected that the whole thing would be cancelled. If you want a good Start Trek: TNG episode, try "Yesterday's Enterprise." It's got time dilation, alternate realities, plot, and a beloved actor reprising her role. "Or, The Inner Light." It's got climate catastrophe, a stellar nova, a rocket-launched probe, and a flute that was about the only thing we cared had survived the crash of the Enterprise D in the post-series movie.
Also here for the 17.01 reference and the warp bubble thing. The Enterprise registry number is NCC-1701-D (in TNG), for those who need that explaining. The warp bubble thing (essentially described by Alcubierre) is that the ship doesn't actually travel faster than the speed of light. Warp drive curves spacetime in such a way that space itself warps around the ship, but everything inside the warp bubble is relativistically stationary; only the space is moving. This is how they get around the obscene acceleration forces and time dilation effects.
"The Enterprise registry number is NCC-1701-D (in TNG), for those who need that explaining. " Is that in decimal, octal (= 961 decimal) or hexadecimal (= 94237 decimal)?
@@a.karley4672 kirk's ship from the 1960s tv show had no letter designation, the A and B are in the feature films after various plot events. the C is skipped in the time skip between the tv shows, although we see it in an alternate timeline episode. picard's enterprise is the 5th federation ship named enterprise. the federation appears to use decimal by default
Alas, S1 is oft ham-fistedly preachy and Atacama desert dry. The awkward development of some characters (e.g. Data) and species (e.g. the Ferengi) is kinda painful to behold.
In TNG it's suggested that Fermat's Last Theorem is still unsolved, "in our arrogance, we feel we are so advanced and yet we cannot unravel a simple knot tied by a part-time French mathematician working alone without a computer". They drop a little correction into Deep Space 9, many years later, where a character mentions that a previous host of her body (cos aliens) developed "the most original approach to the proof since Wiles over 300 years ago", putting it more on a par with modern day amateur mathematicians finding new proofs of Pythagoras' Theorem. They did pay attention! They just also had stories to write without getting bogged down too much ;)
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I forget who it was... Asimov? Heinlen? Whatever... He observed that once FTL travel had been sorted out, there may be long distances in space, but because there was nothing there, space itself isn't so big. Planets are big. Stars can be VERY big indeed. Space is just somewhere for them to be big in. (I think the bad grammar was part of the observation)
Then you realize that you're thinking in two dimensions (as illustrated by the "road to the chemist's)...Go on basically forever in that direction, and when you get there, turn "up" and go on another forever, turn left (remember, you're still oriented on a vertical plane) and keep turning up, down, left, right (and possibly "strange" and "charm", once we understand multidimensional navigation) and going infinite distances. Or in time....
@@farmj002which is even funnier considering that the alternative Carter in Mobius part 1 (or 2?) says it AGAIN in a made-up confrontation with her boss xD
It's about your "computers", calculating, doing everything for you. A.I. that is. They can predict and even shape the future of technology and civilization. They Roddenberry group probably made breakthroughs upon breakthroughs. At least for their time. How you program your "computer" is up to you, or design your own "even faster" computers.
Star Trek works based on a layman's misunderstanding of GR. But have you read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which the Heart-of-Gold (Hereinafter "HOG") works based on a layman's misunderstanding of quantum mechanics? The infinite improbability drive works similar to Quantum Tunneling: For any place at which there is a non-zero chance of the HoG being, the HoG manipulates probability such that it is less improbable for the HoG to be there than to be anywhere else. And thus, it is there. If it's good enough for an electron...
(Why do I think, she likes science fiction? See the end of this video). (And why do I think, she nevertheless keeps science strictly separated from fiction? Her videos are very exact. When it matters, she keeps science separated from fun or fiction of course. And when there is time for fun, then there is a bit fun in a video, but clearly separated from science. She is very strict in that, that's good!)
J. Michael Straczynski, who wrote and produced another Science Fiction TV show "Babylon 5", said that the ships in his show travelled at the speed of plot. I thought that was a great way to describe how fast fictional spaceships get from one place to another. In other words, he was basically saying forget the physics and enjoy the story 😉
There's an episode in a later season where it is discovered that the use of warp drive has an impact on a region's "local" spacetime, distorting it subtly - but over time, excessive warp travel through a region can render the region impossible to travel via warp speed. The Federation even institutes a speed limit for non-emergency travel. It was, at the time, an allegory about climate change being driven by the industries that also led to global travel and connectivity, and the moral and ethical issues that arise from that tension.
@NomenLuni1975 such was the way of episodic television. I mean, there was also that Empire of Bugs that nearly took over the federation in one episode, and then never got mentioned or again 🤔 😊 It wouldn't be until DS9 that we got more long form story arcs, and Voyager was the first show to actually have time meaningfully pass for the characters.
For context, even Star Trek TNG fans are not thrilled about early season 1 Star Trek TNG. It took a while to mature, and when it hit its stride it was amazing to watch.
Fun Fact: Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, was aware back in the 1960's that Faster than light travel was not possible and used the idea of Warp Drive to get around the Milky Way Galaxy. He also came up with a Maximum Warp [Factor] of 9.9 (9,999 times the speed of light) as a speed limit in order to "humanize" the distance the ship could travel: It kept the show "local" for the era the show is set in.
Although that wasn't added until TNG. In the original series there were episodes where the Enterprise hit warp 11 or 12. I think from memory that they said something about the actual speeds still being similar but that the warp factor numbers were re-allocated to fit with the idea of 10 being so fast that travel was effectively instantaneous
@@russbaxter1806Yeah, TOS didn't have a limit. They just did whatever. When making TNG they redid the warp scale where 10 is infinite speed and every increment in 9 is exponentially faster than the last. It's ridiculously overcomplicated, but it was done to stop warp factors from getting out of hand. Plus, with all the time that passed between TOS and TNG, modern ships should have had significantly high warp speeds than the TOS ships. They'd have had to *start* at something like warp 15 as basic cruising speed. The number would have quickly gotten out of hand if left alone.
TOS didn’t have a limit in some episodes they traveled 8000x light and others 50,000 , between then and the movies they had it at ^3 (wf 1, 1C wf2 8C wf 3 27xC etc ) TNG - Roddenberry changed it to warp 10 was the maximum and you’d occupy ever point in the universe, the maximum was warp 9.9999 199,512x C for subspace communication and in the TNG series warp 9.6 1909x C was the enterprise D maximum, then you had voyager 9.975 (3500-4300x C then Slipstream which is 2.6 million x C but it only lasts for 30 minutes at 150 LY ( 300 per hour)
Oh please. Writers were creating great Science Fiction since HG Wells Jules Verne. Asimov, Heinlein, Campbell were writing classics while Roddenberry was still in grade school. FTL travel was very common in those stories. Read a book or two...
I'd never actually looked up what Warp factors were meant to represent in actual speed. Nice if its basically factors of a thousand times the speed of light, as that means they did the (fictional) math right on this episode - Max warp is just over Warp 9, and as per the calculations, you'd need to go at just over 9000 x the speed of light to do Milky-Way to Triangulum in 300 years.
Warp speed accounts for time dilation, inertial dampening accounts for speed and acceleration and why they don't turn to soup, structural integrity field and deflector array accounts for stresses on the ship and space debris respectively.
I think that in Trek, while at warp speed the ship is not actually moving, just the space in front of and behind the ship. It’s like when my daughter pulls the rug around the house with my lazy cat laying on it. The cat isn’t moving but he still travels across the house. The rug is the”bubble”. My daughter is the “drive”. There’s no time dilation because they’re not technically moving (at least in universe)
Yes I was just going to say the same thing. The Star Trek writers don't get nearly enough credit by real scientists. Warp drive compressed spacetime in front of the ship and decompressed spacetime behind, therefore displacing the ship within the warp created. There is no time dilation because the ship has not moved but effectively the ship has been displaced at a speed much faster than light. Of course this requires a lot of energy as she says, but they use matter-antimatter reactors, so they thought of that too. Dr Becky should read the Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss :)
I think the infinite energy barrier of light speed is overcome because the warp bubble containing the ship accelerates past the speed of light in less than a Plank unit of time (a fictional unit of time which I think was extremely small and was actually indivisible).
ACTUALLY .. :D ... Dr. Alcubiere's theory shows that by warping space around the ship, the ship is encapsulated in a bubble of standard time, and regardless of how fast the bubble is moving, the ship itself NEVER experiences any time dilation.
I seem to remember something in canon where it's discussed scooting around on high impulse everywhere ends up with bad time dilation problems, thus why warp is used pretty much everywhere outside of solar systems.
Watching you get excited about some random lines in Star Trek brings me back to a quote from Wil Wheaton at the TNG 25th anniversary reunion. "The difference between good science fiction and great science fiction is that good science fiction is really enjoyable to watch. Great science fiction works on multiple levels for different people. It can be an exciting action adventure for some part of the audience and it can be an incredibly meaningful message about equality or technology or death or love..."
Also, inertial dampeners are what stop them being stains on the back wall when the ship jumps to warp, and the structural integrity grid runs a forcefield through the superstructure of the ship to keep it in one piece when doing loop de loops and warp jumps.
I’m not sure what amuses me more. Coming across an astrophysicist who didn’t watch Star Trek growing up or that astrophysicists are also shocked by this 😂
What I loved about this episode back when it aired was that it was the first time (for TNG at least) that this crew in their super advanced ship were put in a situation where the sheer vastness of the universe became the obstacle, and that gave me a lot to think about as a 10yr old. 😊
If you want weird space phenomenona try the British Sci fi sitcom Red Dwarf Season 1 episode 2: Future echoes (what they think happens when you break the light barrier) Season 2 episode 6: parallel universe Season 3 episode 1: Backwards (what happens when the universe starts shrinking instead of expanding) Season 4 episode 4: White hole (they run into the opposite of a black hole) Season 4 episode 5: dimension jump Season 6 episode 6: Out of time (reality warping bubbles and a time machine) There's lots of fun episodes that are less astrophysics related inbetween involving a time travelling inquisitor demanding people justify their existence, cloning, wax droids, despair squids, holoships, polymorphs that drain emotions, and a toaster that demands you eat 600 rounds of toast a day or it throws a major wobbler.
Thing is, many of the issues you bring up, Star Trek has already thought of. Inertial dampeners stop of from going squish when we jump to Lightspeed, for example
@@djashley2002, do you mean Parallax? That was the first one I thought of too. It definitely fits under the category of "separating science from fiction!"
Well, Star Trek is by no means constant in how they use Warp Drive. For example in Star Trek: Voyager the ship is displaced 70.000 light year and the crew projectes a 75-year journey home... A crawl compared with the discussed TNG episode above
The difference being that Voyager would be limited to normal warp drive, while in this episode the Enterprise was subject to a warp drive that was deranged by The Traveler (the "Thought" guy) a member of a race that can manipulate warp fields (how the warp drive works - the bendy space bit) using thought.
In ST:TNG they used this weird formula (Mentioned in the TNG technical manual) for calculating the Warp Factor, in the original ST TV-series the warp factor was the cube-root of the velocity in multiples of c. Warp factor 1 is 1c, warp factor 2 is 8c, warp factor 3 is 27c and so on.
@@nicholasmaude6906 Yes, you're right, I should have double-checked the way you were going. In my defence, the examples you gave were converting from warp factor to velocity, hence my confusion.
For some context in this episode the Enterprise didn't travel naturally but was thrown about by an individual part of the Travelers who possess the ability to influence space and time with their mind that influenced the Enterprise systems during an experiment. Bit of a spoiler Wesley Crusher is later revealed to also have such ability which is featured more prominently in Star Trek Prodigy
The series usually is in the Milky Way and within a few hundred light years of Earth. The episode you watched is unusual because the ship left the Milky Way.
> "I really think the writers just threw science out of the window for plot" Go with that. I'm reminded of a quote from Austin Powers when they were dealing with time travel: "I suggest you don't worry about this sort of thing and just enjoy yourself, [to the camera] That goes for you all too."
@4:51 - That is precisely how warp drive in Star Trek works, pushing plasma (heated through direct matter/antimatter [deuterium/antideuterium] reactions, regulated by the fictitious dilithium crystals, which in universe are "transparent" to these reactions at certain lattice angles, and can help direct the output energy of the reactions) into an energetic state high enough to make the warp coils in the engine nacelles selectively compress and expand the space around it in rapid succession, thereby avoiding relativistic effects. The official Next Generation Technical Manual is incredibly detailed on this process and while it is all complete fantasy, it is shockingly consistent within itself. Highly recommend the read.
I agree with all the fellow star trek fans here on all the data that the star trek universe has out there - warp factors, best/worst seasons etc. Becky, just look up the Astrophysicist consultants for each show/season. There always are accredited consultants that you may know more about than any star trek fan 🖖
@@DrDeuteronIf Picard travels in the Enterprise at near c & we earthlings, on Earth, looked through a big telescope we'd see him running around in slow motion. He would perceive himself as running at normal speed because like you say he's not moving. If he observed us he'd see us running around in slow motion. We would see ourselves running at normal speed because like you say we're not moving. But if he's in a warp bubble I guess we'd see him running at normal speed since, like marsovac says, he's effectively not moving?
If memory serves, I believe they use some form of "sub space" while travelling in warp to negate the effects of time dealation. Also; these Starships have "inertial dampeners" to protect the crew from the effects of acceleration.
The 1996 Novel Federation by Judith and Garfield Reeves -Stevens Has the original crew and TNG crew involved in a story where they cross paths inside a black hole. The story starts with Zefram Cochrane and his fleeing the 3rd world war and the British leader of Col Green's forces ,Adrik Thorsen. We involve his story from the early warp experiments to exactly why he vanished into space never to be seen again. It explains how the Companion found him. and what happened after. Short back story. An experiment on the lunar base caused the warp impellor to create a static warp shell where the drive and the base were wiped out in the blast but the effects were shunted into subspace. Thorsen thought it could be made into a warp bomb. Zephram gives his lecture that if you push the object in the bubble into other space(sub space where C is much much higher) that you could avoid the infinities of energy to velocity and then pop back into normal space time. But much further than light speed could have taken you. It's all in the Enterprise warp delta insignia. that is the power curve lower line while the upper one is the velocity. the star is the point of infinite energy. So you don't need infinite energy to get past light speed. Simple really.
Shout out to The Orville (in many ways a spiritual successor to Star Trek) for actually addressing time dilation in an episode. Basically they were stuck in the past after their temporary time travel device got burnt out beyond repair. Their chief engineer goes, "wait, we've got a time machine right here!" pointing at the FTL engine. They then disable their "time dilation compensator" on the engine and travel at something like 99.99999999% light speed making use of time dilation so that while the trip is only a minute for them, for the outside universe it was enough time passing for them to catch up to their "present".
Apparently there is a maximum warp factor: 10, were you would occupy every point in the universe at the same time. At least, if I remember that episode from Star Trek Voyager correctly.
You are correct, Monsieur. A Trek Universe spacecraft traveling at Warp 10 basically turns into The Heart of Gold from The Hitchhiker's Guide book (increasingly inaccurately named) trilogy. Qapla'!
You are correct but about that episode, but they did change the definitions at some point. In TOS they frequently go to Warp 12 or whatever. Later (I think in Voyager, but I'm not sure) they made Warp 10 the theoretical maximum. Maybe just for the plot of that one episode.
So in a way, kind-of, warp 10 is like a weird version of our speed of light where time becomes 0 but you can experience any and all points along a space-time stream/cone simultaneously.
A character in one of Larry Nivens novels once pointed out that “other races may have developed different theories” which is certainly something to think about.
It's a similar reason to why teleporters/transporters were invented... They didn't want the constant to and fro of shuttles and being able to have the emergency escape plot twists and all that fun stuff.
Actually, transporters were invented for budget reasons. They didn't have the money to land ships on planets all the time. But a quick fade and some lighting effects? That was fine.
That specific episode involved a character called "The Traveler." He, or his species rather, were very old and evolved enough to physically manipulate space-time in such a way that causality and relativity just didn't matter. The Enterprise is built with a deflector array and shielding. That's how it could survive the wear and tear. Alcubierre's warp equations were inspired by Star Trek. Star Trek warp factors are exponential concerning FTL travel. Regardless, there's plenty of technology that's been inspired by Star Trek. Touch screens, flip phones. Tablets. Those sliding doors at the grocery store...
The length of the video being 17:01 I see what you did there. It was nice when they used some real science in the script, but Ronald D. Moore once said that the later scripts would be (dialogue) (technobabble) ( more dialogue) Most SciFi authors will say that the stardrive speed is at the speed of plot. It's nice when they include some physics, however twisted, in the story, but some magic must occur to allow an interesting plot.
If I remember this episode correctly, they were not traveling via their regular "warp drive". In this episode they were traveling with the help of a being known as the "Traveler". In this episode the method of travel was more comparable to Douglas Adams fictional "infinity improbability drive" as described in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of books
I’m pretty sure TNG talked about “warp bubbles” before the Alcubiere theory. In Trek they are supposed to negate time dilation. You’re right that Trek’s physics are flexible for the sake of the plot, but they do try to put a bit of thought into the ramifications of that. If you’re interested, the TNG Technical Manual explains a lot of the behind the scenes thinking and theorising by the writers. Great video ❤
There's a great episode of The Orville (a Star Trek-like show) where they wind up a few hundred years in their past (circa present-day Earth) and work out that turning off their warp bubble will expose them to time dilation, allowing them to return to their time when they accelerate up to near light speed. I really enjoy when they use real science in Sci-Fi. It not only lends credibility to the rest of the show, but makes it more enjoyable, too. The episode is "Twice in a lifetime" for those interested.
A little quote I always keep in mind while watching/reading SciFi: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” ~ Arthur C. Clarke. 😁
You summed it up pretty well in your concluding comments. Arthur C. Clarke once said something to the effect of: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Our present-day technology with smartphones, TVs, nuclear power plants, etc. would seem magical to someone from medieval times, much of the technology of Star Trek is largely magical to us, and the "Traveler" is magical to the crew of the Enterprise (although they are sophisticated enough to recognize that it is not magic, just far beyond their understanding). In Star Trek, warp drive is supposed to get you from A to B many times faster than the speed of light e,g, from Earth to a world hundreds of light-years away in a narratively short period of time, and do so without incurring the effects of time dilation (to avoid narrative complications). FWIW, the "original" Star Trek (which you have to watch) was produced/initially broadcast 1966-1969, and introduced essentially all the elements of Star Trek seen since, including warp drive. The Next Generation (1987-1994, containing this episode) pick up on the original series narrative universe, but moved the setting some 80 years later. Alcubierre is said to have been inspired by Star Trek (possibly the original series) to investigate Einstein's equations for a solution which allows for the existence of warp drive, and that's what led him to the results we now know him for.
They reference time dilation in Star Trek, something about the Warp Field protects them from that. There are episodes where they approach light speed without Warp Drive and time dilation becomes a problem.
If you go WAY back to the TOS show, much was written about the technology. The writers knew that even the most non-geeky watcher would know that it would take 4.3 years to get to our nearest stellar neighbor in space and if warp factor was linear, and at maximum warp (we'll use 8), it would take almost 200 days to reach the alpha centauri system. So, to allow the ships to get around faster and to keep the story lines more plausible (haha), they made the WFx value be the cube of the speed of light. So, at warp 8, (512x speed of light), it would only take 3 days. Of course in the series, they would do these long distances in hours, so it still wasn't even remotely accurate.
Great points, all! I will offer one possible additional factor: since everything in the galaxy is in motion, the distances between, say, Earth and the Vulcan home world would constantly be changing; thus, the total distance traversed to get from point E to point V might be different every time, and also depending on which direction you're going?
And later they redefined Warp Speed making Warp 10 a theoretical maximum. It's internally inconsistent. This whole exercise is very silly. I'd much rather hear about whether or not she like the plot.
I’d like to see you do the recent “Wild Blue Yonder” on “Doctor Who.” That’s the one where the “mavity” running gag started, and then the Doctor and Donna also went to the edge of the universe.
not so fast, he said at maximum warp speed, so you need to know what kind of starship they are on and what its max warp speed is to do any calculation.
The Galaxy class starship can theoretically go warp 9.8 but with extreme risk, warp 9.6 can be maintained for several hours with warp 6 being cruising speed.
They have a theoretical maximum speed, but that’s unstable. And a maximum sustainable warp level which indeed can usually only be maintained at a predictably stable rate for a few hours. But you’d generally not attempt that outside of emergencies and testing.
As a lifelong fan of Star Trek of all the series , I love that you did a bit on Star Trek Dr Becky. Speciallyl that you took the extra time to see back in 1987 what the farthest known object was at that time. To think that in as little as 37 years, that furthest object would grow from 1.3b to 13.5b light years away. A little tibit of trivia for my fellow Star Trek fans here, in this episode, the alien character known as "The Traveller", played by Eric Menyuk was nearly cast in the permanent role of "Data", the android played by Brent Spiner.
Warp 9 is 1516c, while maximum warp of Ent D is 9.6 which is 1909c. Those are the official warp chart measurements. Although they rarely follow those exact numbers in the show
hmmm, I thought that warp was logarithmic, i.e. 10,000c would be warp 5, but apparently it's more like warp 20. Looking online the only consistent thing seems to be that there's no consistent conversion between light speed and warp 😂
Finally! 😃 There are fan pages that have already calculated the warp factors. I believe warp 1 is like 200ish times the speed of light. One hand for Live long and prosper. Two for a Jewish ritual. Would love to see one on the original series from the 60s. Thanks for doing this!
Star Trek was not consistent over the years about how fast any warp factor would be. In TOS they're often going Warp 12 or 14. Later they made Warp 10 a theoretical maximum, kind of like the speed of light, at least in concept.
I thouroughly ENJOY when scientists such as Dr. Becky include in their explainations of science vs. science fiction the phrases "as we currently understand the laws of physics" and "as we understand Einstein's theory of general and special relativity" and "breaking the laws of physics as we understand them"! These simple acknowledgements give creedance to the fact that science is fluid in the sense that of while science facts are static, it is our understanding of science that continues to update our progress towards understanding the universe, how we came to be, and our place in it.Thank you Dr.Becky for these acknowledgements. 🖖
Dear Dr. Becky. Apologies for the elongated comment in advance. Regarding controlling machines (here especially drives): Back in the days where this episode was shoot (towards the end of the 1980’s) controlling machines via thoughts was more a part of fiction, nowadays it’s more a part of science. There is research in progress to control machines via brain waves (whereas “machines” here is a widely meant term). Brain waves (and so does nerve impulses) are electric current pulses and as electricity physics apply, electric currents build also an magnetic field around them (the so called “electromagnetic field”), and both are going every time together: none of them exist without the other. That’s how brain wave sensors (and therefore EKG sensors) are working: they detect the electromagnetic field created by the electric current pulses which is processed further to have a depiction on a screen. There’s research in progress to control machines with thoughts (brain waves more specific), whereas at moment a cursor on a computer screen is being moved vertically and horizontally. Practical research to control protheses (artificial limbs) with thoughts for limb amputated people is ongoing too. This makes control of machines with thoughts more a science part, however we’re still at least decades away for practical application in the wide field, which turns the scale a little bit more to the fiction side thus this all is happening more in laboratories than in the field. In anyway controlling FTL drives with thoughts will remain fiction for centuries or even millenia and beyond. Controlling complex machines (even space ships, included those we have at moment and in the near future available) via a neural interface can be considered more science than fiction. Best regards, and carry on making those incredible videos.
Whilst it's great watching you react to stuff Becky. Regrettably, I think you're missing the point of Star Trek. This episode in particular is where you're meant to suspend your feelings of disbelief and go with the flow. The main character is from a species called, "Travellers." Time means nothing to them. They can exist in all places simultaneously, freeing themselves from the constraints of our spacetime. Similar to the character *Q* in the series. They only appeared in this episode to help the crew develop a more efficient warp drive, and something went wrong. The traveller eventually sacrificed himself to safely return the crew to there own spacetime. *_"Sometimes Imagination is more important than knowledge"_* ~ Albert Einstein. Boldly go Becky, where no Cat has gone before. 🖖
The Orville had a clever way of fixing a time travel jump to the past (300 years if memory serves): they did a near-light speed lap to Alpha Centauri and back under non-warp propulsion so when they returned, they arrived at the proper century. Andromeda handled this similarly. Their main protagonist (Captain Dylan Hunt) was stuck near the event horizon of a black hole and found himself in a further future when his ship was rescued.
From what I can tell, Warp speed is logarithmic, reaching an estimated maximum of Warp 10 (although a later episode implies a view into the future when speeds exceeding Warp 10 are reached). Warp 9.975 (the maximum sustainable speed of the USS Voyager) is approximately 3,056 times the speed of light. So 9,000 times the speed of light would probably be something like Warp 9.9999.
This episode's story was based on an early-1980s Star Trek novel (The Wounded Sky) written by Diane Duane. In the book, the Enterprise is testing an exotic new drive system that would allow it to instantly "hop" to other galaxies, but the use of the system actually causes a "rip" in spacetime and allows another universe with reverse entropy to being intruding on our entropic universe. The ship has to travel into the aentropic universe to "fix" the spacetime rip, and it's there where the crew experiences all their thoughts coming to life. The book was actually very well-researched and was based on ideas that were very cutting-edge in the early 80s. For my money it's the best Star Trek story ever told in any medium.
The amount of people who don’t know the Trek warp speeds or just throw out random numbers are surprising, here - (edit the writers completely ignore these numbers for - speed of the plot ) TOS/Enterprise is based on ^3 scale ~ ( warp factor) Wf1 -1xC wf2 -8xC wf3 27xC wf4 64xC (wf4.5 NX enterprise 91.125xC ) wf5 -125xC (NX maximum 5.2 140.608xC) wf6 216xC wf7 343xC wf8 512xC )) TNG/DS9/ Voyager all use the new warp factor scale ( warp 10 is the maximum and you’d occupy all point in the universe) Wf1 1xC wf2 10xC wf3 39xC wf4 102xC wf5 214xC wf6 392xC wf7 656xC wf8 1024xC wf9 1516xC wf 9.2 1649xC (wf9.6 1909xC Enterprise D maximum for 12 hours ) 9.9 3053xC ( Voyager 9.975 3500-4300xC ) 9.99 7912xC 9.999 ? Borg Transwarp 39,000x ( 9.9999 199,515xC limit of subspace communications Slipstream burst drive (Voyager) 240,000 - 2.6 million xC ) but only attainable for 30 minutes 150LY ( 300 LY an hour ) Prodigy- Protowarp 5000 LY in a few seconds .
In "Where No One has Gone Before" is a little different because it's the Traveller and "normal" speeds don't apply. His abilities aren't limited by the usual constraints of 4-D spacetime. (In the Star Trek prime universe thought and space/time are basically the same thing if you know how to utilize that symmetry).
Unlike Star Wars, Star Trek is set in our future. "The Next Generation" is set in the late 2360's and early 2370's (the season 1 finale gives the exact date of the episode according to the 20th century calendar). Many episodes even refer to real people, past and present, as people that they read about in their history books. But there will be plenty of time between now and then, for mathematical formulae on a page today (or later) to become working machines by that time (or sooner). The whole point of Star Trek is traveling to strange new worlds and discovering new life and new civilizations. It follows that some of these new alien societies that they will meet will have more advanced technology than them. Consider that in light of Arthur C. Clarke's first law, and of course they will appear to be magic. So it would be unrealistic if Star Trek never did a story like this.
The lols when Dr. Becky explains how we can "go" faster than light by explaining how a warp drive works the literal mechanism that ST uses for FTL travel. On a side not the 9000x the speed of light somehow coincides with warp 9 the fastest travel in ST prior to transwarp
@gary.h.turner no it depends on the series but TOS it was an exponential increase between warps and TNG made it more logarithmic then in VOY they established warp 10 as the maximum warp which equated infinite speed and being at every point in the universe at once. Then of course there is transwarp tech acquired from the borg which fundamentaly works different by tunneling through subspace.
Most of Alistair Reynolds' "Known Space" books obey the laws of physics. They require suspended animation and mile long space ships whose noses are covered in thousands of tons of ice to travel between planets around the galaxy. Great stuff!
Star Trek has huge inconsistemcies from episode to episode and between series. Maximum warp (usually warp 9) in TNG in this episode applied to th3 ST:Voyager universe would have completely broken the plot for Voyager, which held that it would take that ship 70+ years to travel back home from just the other side of our own galaxy
Time dilation was actually referenced in the original pilot episode The Cage. This episode was shot in 1964 and appears as clips in the later 2 part episode The Menagerie. One character talks about how "the time barrier" had been broken. Focusing on wrap factors as a measure of speed and warp didn't start until later. In The Cage warp is called "time warp" not "warp speed".
In this episode it is not the warp drive that sends them 300 or 1 billion light years. Therefore, your calculation is not for the maximum warp drive speed but an anomaly not related to the warp drive.
In the Star Trek universe Warp speed is a cubic function. Basically you cube the warp factor and multiply by the speed of light to determine your speed. In The Next Generation they upgraded to a fourth power. So you raise the Warp factor to the 4th power and multiply by the speed of light.
If I'm not mistaken, in this episode the Enterprise was transported by a supernatural being so you have to add on another layer of disbelief suspension to the disbelief of warp drive. The crew was discussing the distance to home but the ship never actually traveled that distance under its own power. It was returned to home space by the supernatural being. In another series, the starship Voyager, after incredible relocation within the Milky Way, by another super being with super tech faced the time vs distance problem. The crew and ship found itself facing a journey of decades to get home to their galactic neighborhood
There’s a lot of plot armor in this episode. For one, the Traveler works some hocus pocus that propels the Enterprise far beyond the physics of warp drive while simultaneously protecting the ship’s structural integrity, so the means of traveling those vast differences is less important than in other episodes.
This is the episode that got me into Star Trek. I loved the idea of traveling so far into the universe that nothing makes sense. There's a Lawyer that reacts to an episode of this series where they decide if Data is an individual or Federation property.
Just after I posted my earlier comment I recalled another Star Trek episode which blatantly ignored science. It was in the Star Trek spinoff Deep Space 9. The Dominion (an empire on the other side of the galaxy ruled by changelings) wanted to destroy the space station Deep Space 9 orbiting the planet Bajor. (It had something to do with a wormhole near Bajor that allowed very fast travel from Bajor to the Dominion on the other side of the galaxy. Apparently the Dominion wanted control of the wormhole.) To do so the Dominion would destroy the Bajoran system by making its sun go supernova. They planned to do so by exploding a bomb inside the sun. Of course as an astrophysicist you know there is no way this would work. First the bomb would vaporize before it entered the sun. Second a supernova is caused by the collapse of the star's core, and there is no way a bomb could cause that even if they could somehow get it to the core. I should mention another highly implausible aspect of Star Trek (in addition to faster than light travel) that you didn't discuss is their ability to "beam" themselves all over the place. I remember reading years ago that to store the amount of information needed to reconstruct a person after beaming them would require a stack of hard drives one third the size of the Milky Way. Moreover I can't imagine a person could survive such a process.
Good evening, Dr. Becky. The Star Trek canon has partially solved the speed questions with their own “physics”. For the original series (1966-1969), the formula was speed = warp factor to the cube times the speed of light (s=(wf)^3 x c); and the maximum warp factor for the Enterprise was 9.75. That rule was violated only once for the second pilot episode “Where No One Has Gone Before”. For The Next Generation and the other series they needed more “speed”, so they changed the formula to s=15^(wf-1)x(wf^3) x c. And the maximum warp factor was 9.975. In over 800 episodes along 60 years, warp factor 10 has been reached or exceeded only 3 times.
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Personally, I think it's far more interesting to look at sci fi and ask, "How could it be?" rather than "How it can't be."
As such....
FTL bypasses the energy limit by being an equivalence....by way of Warp drive, worm hole, God-power (Q), etc.
i.e. They don't actually move faster than light, they just shorten the distance thus is only "FTL" since light isn't taking any short cuts.
There's a book I read and loved that was a history/science of space travel from the Star Trek universe perspective which included Sputnik, NASA projects, etc......to The Enterprise and a bit beyond. Also covered the 'science' of propulsion systems in a consistent (granted fantastical...probably) way: chemical, ion, nuclear, antimatter, etc.
Fiction? Sure....but fun as hell and very thought provoking!
So quantum pieces are connected through worm holes.... And the gravity doesn't have to be offset it just has to be stronger how do you make gravity stronger unless you can pack more matter into the gravity in the wormhole itself...
@Sableagle anyway so God can use the spirit of lying who's to say God didn't use the spirit of lying against Jesus that way only God can know the time the hour and the day like Jesus said in the first place...😮💨👽⚛️🤣 I mean butterfly effect
So anyway....
Wormholes connecting loop quantum pieces ... Could not be unless some gravity is different amounts of compact matter... Unless you say you have something off setting their gravitational pull... Like different compacts amounts of matter like energy that would be made up of the gravitational field😂👽🤣🤣⚛️
So anyway wormholes could connect loop quantum gravity but how the wormholes would work is they would increase gravity at the points that the wormholes were created....
And that would crunch a little bit of space up pulling on the rest of the universe remember this is all happening on the quantum scale
So different compact amounts of matter would have different properties who's to say some would act like it ghost I mean the less compact it is the more likely it is to pass through something just like sound can pass through walls 😁⚛️👽😮💨... Plus if the matter that makes up gravity is so uncompacted... It can act like the heat off of flame going into another heat a ghost get it
So anyway wormholes could connect loop quantum gravity but how the wormholes would work is they would increase gravity and the points that the wormholes were created....
And that would crunch a little bit of space up pulling on the rest of the universe remember this is all happening on the quantum scale
This is the series that plays in our Milky Way. Star Wars is the far far away one.
This is the episode with the Traveler. An entity that could traverse space completely different from what the Enterprise can. So yes this is pure fiction as this was done by a transient being who pretended to enhance the engines, but actually just used his own abilities to fling them across space.
So to be honest it's a bit unfair for them to ask you to react to one of the few episodes that is actually pure fiction/fantasy. It is interesting to see how fast they were going, but it will not give you any idea on how fast warp-speed actually is as even the first time with M 33 was pure fiction.
@@Excanda how do you know that that is fantasy 😇😈
@@Excanda are you saying you know everything are you claiming to know what absolute nothing can make?
I find it to be an interesting coincidence that the video is exactly 17:01 in length.
Fascinating.
Remarkable!
This is why Star Trek physics is so cool! Star Trek vessels aren’t traveling faster the light. They are bending or “warping” space around their ships. This is they get around time dilation.
its also why they have to use special communication things to talk while at warp, and also why in the original series you never see anyone fighting at warp.
The enterprise is like a surfboard. Haven't they found a couple of things, like tachyons, that can go faster than the speed of light?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the whole point of ships in ST being able to travel at superluminal speeds and not break causality is that the ship itself does not move, it folds space around it (rather, compresses space in front and extends it behind) so that instead of moving through space, it wraps itself in a bubble of moving space. Thus, the ship itself wouldn't experience time dilation. Yeah, the energy required to do this would be absurd, but then again, there is nothing like dilithium in real life, a fictional mineral which allows for a controlled matter-antimatter reaction... :)
Spot-on, Italian staple!
Qapla'!
naw its just 4D lithium.
All forms of FTL travel are time travel unless there is a preferred frame of reference. Yes, even warped or folded space is time travel. What ST (and other sci fi shows) assume is that the galaxy (or a cluster of galaxies) are the preferred frame of reference. But relativity tells us there is not preferred frame of reference. It's all handwavium.
But that still breaks causality. The method doesn’t matter, FTL travel/communication is effectively time-travel, and that breaks effect following cause.
@@ShawnHCorey Albert would be proud.
Qapla'!
0:20 Not normal warp speed. MAXIMUM warp speed. Going faster than the speed of light is what makes the show fun. It's also science fiction, not fact.
There’s also the casual overlooking of the preface “over…”
“Over 300 years”
“Over 1B light years”
Well…how much over?
And it's not possible to run at maximum for ... really any amount of significant time.
@@obiwanpez Anything over Warp 9 is exponential.. then you get Trans warp/trans warp tunnels and quantum slipstream drive😂
@@obiwanpez Yeah, like 12 hours.
The length of this video is 17:01. CLEVER GIRL!
Eh… I only grade this a -D.
She’s not the only person who is clever.
But is she as clever as the velociraptor😊 from JP
Arroway reference!?
Was it on purpose...or SERENDIPITY???🤣
I think Star Trek often leans on something Arthur C Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". The idea is we meet other alien species and they know way more about physics than we do, and have such advanced technology that to us, it seems impossible, and like "magic"
This was especially prevalent in TOS. They were constantly running into magic aliens, God aliens, and so on. It got less common in later shows, but we still got the Q in TNG, the wormhole aliens in DS9, and the Caretaker's species in Voyager.
It's all just spooky action at a distance if you ask me ...
Also the “it works that way because we wouldn’t have a story otherwise” principle.
Q is just using technology?
@@billybrain6217 more like an imagination of technology, mind and evolution working together in unimaginable ways.
To be fair, Star Trek has never pretended to be a particularly "hard" sci-fi show. They have, however, often been pretty socially and politically progressive. For example, Star Trek: The Original Series was one of the first instances ever of a black person being portrayed having a job other than menial labor. It also had a Russian officer and an Asian one. Both The Original Series and The Next Generation promoted the idea of Earth being a post-war, post-scarcity society with world peace and universal social security.
Start Trek: Voyager had a female Captain and a Native American First Officer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine a black Commander.
Exactly. The progressive values; the optimistic view of the future is what I watched Star Trek for - otherwise it is just a space opera with ray guns 'N' rocket ships like dozens of others.
A lot of fans haven't gotten the memo that Star Trek has never been hard sci-fi though. The line "Star Trek is science fiction, Star Wars is science fantasy" gets thrown around from time to time and a surprising number of fans (and unfortunately some of the writers) are under the impression that the technobabble in Star Trek is based on real science. It namedrops real scientific terms from time to time and occasionally even portrays it correctly but that's the exception rather than the rule.
I find it hilarious whenever anyone complains that Star Trek has “gone woke”, because it’s been woke since the 60s. In 1992 Riker fell in love with a trans woman.
@@DissociatedWomenIncorporated The kiss between Uhura and Kirk in the original series was the first interracial kiss on TV.
and Obamacare!😷🤒🤕🖖😁😍
There are many websites that calculate speeds of various 'Warp drives', 'Jump drives', 'Ludircrous Speed' and such from various films/franchises, and with Star Trek they go from Zefram Cochranes' Warp 1, through to Johnathan Archers ship (NX-01) Warp 5 through to the fastest Enterprise/other ship speeds... 😎🇬🇧
First season of TNG, even Patrick Stewart expected that the whole thing would be cancelled. If you want a good Start Trek: TNG episode, try "Yesterday's Enterprise." It's got time dilation, alternate realities, plot, and a beloved actor reprising her role. "Or, The Inner Light." It's got climate catastrophe, a stellar nova, a rocket-launched probe, and a flute that was about the only thing we cared had survived the crash of the Enterprise D in the post-series movie.
The inner light is peak TNG.
I don’t care what you say. The Enterprise is out there somewhere, man…
Superb suggestions, fellow TNG connoisseur. "The Inner Light" is especially moving.
Qapla'!
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. 'nuff said
@@pbm___000 Shaka, When the Walls Fell!
Also here for the 17.01 reference and the warp bubble thing. The Enterprise registry number is NCC-1701-D (in TNG), for those who need that explaining.
The warp bubble thing (essentially described by Alcubierre) is that the ship doesn't actually travel faster than the speed of light. Warp drive curves spacetime in such a way that space itself warps around the ship, but everything inside the warp bubble is relativistically stationary; only the space is moving. This is how they get around the obscene acceleration forces and time dilation effects.
"The Enterprise registry number is NCC-1701-D (in TNG), for those who need that explaining. " Is that in decimal, octal (= 961 decimal) or hexadecimal (= 94237 decimal)?
@@a.karley4672 kirk's ship from the 1960s tv show had no letter designation, the A and B are in the feature films after various plot events. the C is skipped in the time skip between the tv shows, although we see it in an alternate timeline episode. picard's enterprise is the 5th federation ship named enterprise.
the federation appears to use decimal by default
Me finding out Dr. Becky is watching TNG... "YES!"
Me finding out it's season 1... '"NOOOOOO!"
On someone's recommendation...someone who I assume has seen past season 1? Madness.
That season is brutal!
The beginning is a very good place to start...I heard that in a song once. 😊
Alas, S1 is oft ham-fistedly preachy and Atacama desert dry. The awkward development of some characters (e.g. Data) and species (e.g. the Ferengi) is kinda painful to behold.
Dr. Becky already grew a beard in the Nerd dome, but doesn't yet know about it ;)
In TNG it's suggested that Fermat's Last Theorem is still unsolved, "in our arrogance, we feel we are so advanced and yet we cannot unravel a simple knot tied by a part-time French mathematician working alone without a computer".
They drop a little correction into Deep Space 9, many years later, where a character mentions that a previous host of her body (cos aliens) developed "the most original approach to the proof since Wiles over 300 years ago", putting it more on a par with modern day amateur mathematicians finding new proofs of Pythagoras' Theorem.
They did pay attention! They just also had stories to write without getting bogged down too much ;)
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I forget who it was... Asimov? Heinlen? Whatever...
He observed that once FTL travel had been sorted out, there may be long distances in space, but because there was nothing there, space itself isn't so big. Planets are big. Stars can be VERY big indeed. Space is just somewhere for them to be big in. (I think the bad grammar was part of the observation)
Space is big.
Space is dark.
It's hard to find
A place to park.
Burma Shave.
Best comment ever
Then you realize that you're thinking in two dimensions (as illustrated by the "road to the chemist's)...Go on basically forever in that direction, and when you get there, turn "up" and go on another forever, turn left (remember, you're still oriented on a vertical plane) and keep turning up, down, left, right (and possibly "strange" and "charm", once we understand multidimensional navigation) and going infinite distances.
Or in time....
@@Name-ps9fx "Upward! Not Northward" haunts me like a soul devouring Sphinx!
"Warp bubble". You hit the Star Trek nail on the head. That IS the basic premise of space travel in Star Trek.
From Stargate SG-1: “I don’t know how you can call yourself a scientist and not worship at the altar that is Roddenberry.”
That line is almost as bad as Carter's genitalia comment in the pilot of SG-1.😂
@@paulonius42 She actually hated that line. lol
@@farmj002which is even funnier considering that the alternative Carter in Mobius part 1 (or 2?) says it AGAIN in a made-up confrontation with her boss xD
No need to sharpen your pencil Becky, Google is your friend, you can find the speed ratios of the Star Trek universe' warp factors easily.... 😉
It's about your "computers", calculating, doing everything for you. A.I. that is. They can predict and even shape the future of technology and civilization. They Roddenberry group probably made breakthroughs upon breakthroughs. At least for their time. How you program your "computer" is up to you, or design your own "even faster" computers.
Star Trek works based on a layman's misunderstanding of GR.
But have you read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which the Heart-of-Gold (Hereinafter "HOG") works based on a layman's misunderstanding of quantum mechanics?
The infinite improbability drive works similar to Quantum Tunneling: For any place at which there is a non-zero chance of the HoG being, the HoG manipulates probability such that it is less improbable for the HoG to be there than to be anywhere else. And thus, it is there.
If it's good enough for an electron...
"Normality in 3..2..1.." as the ship goes through infinite changes...😂
OK, before even watching, the length of 17-01 is just.. chef's kiss!
Was that D for Days .
(Why do I think, she likes science fiction? See the end of this video).
(And why do I think, she nevertheless keeps science strictly separated from fiction? Her videos are very exact. When it matters, she keeps science separated from fun or fiction of course. And when there is time for fun, then there is a bit fun in a video, but clearly separated from science. She is very strict in that, that's good!)
J. Michael Straczynski, who wrote and produced another Science Fiction TV show "Babylon 5", said that the ships in his show travelled at the speed of plot. I thought that was a great way to describe how fast fictional spaceships get from one place to another. In other words, he was basically saying forget the physics and enjoy the story 😉
There's an episode in a later season where it is discovered that the use of warp drive has an impact on a region's "local" spacetime, distorting it subtly - but over time, excessive warp travel through a region can render the region impossible to travel via warp speed. The Federation even institutes a speed limit for non-emergency travel. It was, at the time, an allegory about climate change being driven by the industries that also led to global travel and connectivity, and the moral and ethical issues that arise from that tension.
Hear Hear! You know your TNG!
QAPLA'!
Screw that. “We brake for no one.” 😉 Max warp is unenforceable in the neutral zone.
@@brothermaynardsbrother I grew up on TNG, DS9, and Voyager
Force Of Nature. Of course, apart from one reference an episode or two later, that speed limit was completely forgotten about.
@NomenLuni1975 such was the way of episodic television. I mean, there was also that Empire of Bugs that nearly took over the federation in one episode, and then never got mentioned or again 🤔 😊 It wouldn't be until DS9 that we got more long form story arcs, and Voyager was the first show to actually have time meaningfully pass for the characters.
For context, even Star Trek TNG fans are not thrilled about early season 1 Star Trek TNG. It took a while to mature, and when it hit its stride it was amazing to watch.
Fun Fact: Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, was aware back in the 1960's that Faster than light travel was not possible and used the idea of Warp Drive to get around the Milky Way Galaxy. He also came up with a Maximum Warp [Factor] of 9.9 (9,999 times the speed of light) as a speed limit in order to "humanize" the distance the ship could travel: It kept the show "local" for the era the show is set in.
Although that wasn't added until TNG. In the original series there were episodes where the Enterprise hit warp 11 or 12. I think from memory that they said something about the actual speeds still being similar but that the warp factor numbers were re-allocated to fit with the idea of 10 being so fast that travel was effectively instantaneous
@@russbaxter1806Yeah, TOS didn't have a limit. They just did whatever. When making TNG they redid the warp scale where 10 is infinite speed and every increment in 9 is exponentially faster than the last. It's ridiculously overcomplicated, but it was done to stop warp factors from getting out of hand. Plus, with all the time that passed between TOS and TNG, modern ships should have had significantly high warp speeds than the TOS ships. They'd have had to *start* at something like warp 15 as basic cruising speed. The number would have quickly gotten out of hand if left alone.
TOS didn’t have a limit in some episodes they traveled 8000x light and others 50,000 , between then and the movies they had it at ^3 (wf 1, 1C wf2 8C wf 3 27xC etc ) TNG - Roddenberry changed it to warp 10 was the maximum and you’d occupy ever point in the universe,
the maximum was warp 9.9999 199,512x C for subspace communication and in the TNG series warp 9.6 1909x C was the enterprise D maximum, then you had voyager 9.975 (3500-4300x C then Slipstream which is 2.6 million x C but it only lasts for 30 minutes at 150 LY ( 300 per hour)
Oh please. Writers were creating great Science Fiction since HG Wells Jules Verne. Asimov, Heinlein, Campbell were writing classics while Roddenberry was still in grade school. FTL travel was very common in those stories. Read a book or two...
I'd never actually looked up what Warp factors were meant to represent in actual speed. Nice if its basically factors of a thousand times the speed of light, as that means they did the (fictional) math right on this episode - Max warp is just over Warp 9, and as per the calculations, you'd need to go at just over 9000 x the speed of light to do Milky-Way to Triangulum in 300 years.
Warp speed accounts for time dilation, inertial dampening accounts for speed and acceleration and why they don't turn to soup, structural integrity field and deflector array accounts for stresses on the ship and space debris respectively.
I think that in Trek, while at warp speed the ship is not actually moving, just the space in front of and behind the ship. It’s like when my daughter pulls the rug around the house with my lazy cat laying on it. The cat isn’t moving but he still travels across the house. The rug is the”bubble”. My daughter is the “drive”. There’s no time dilation because they’re not technically moving (at least in universe)
Yes I was just going to say the same thing. The Star Trek writers don't get nearly enough credit by real scientists. Warp drive compressed spacetime in front of the ship and decompressed spacetime behind, therefore displacing the ship within the warp created. There is no time dilation because the ship has not moved but effectively the ship has been displaced at a speed much faster than light. Of course this requires a lot of energy as she says, but they use matter-antimatter reactors, so they thought of that too. Dr Becky should read the Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss :)
She very much in this very video points out the theories of warp travel. Watch before you comment.
That's a great explanation!
@@brianstraight9308I did, and she mentioned time dilation. Hence my comment.
I think the infinite energy barrier of light speed is overcome because the warp bubble containing the ship accelerates past the speed of light in less than a Plank unit of time (a fictional unit of time which I think was extremely small and was actually indivisible).
ACTUALLY .. :D ... Dr. Alcubiere's theory shows that by warping space around the ship, the ship is encapsulated in a bubble of standard time, and regardless of how fast the bubble is moving, the ship itself NEVER experiences any time dilation.
I seem to remember something in canon where it's discussed scooting around on high impulse everywhere ends up with bad time dilation problems, thus why warp is used pretty much everywhere outside of solar systems.
Watching you get excited about some random lines in Star Trek brings me back to a quote from Wil Wheaton at the TNG 25th anniversary reunion. "The difference between good science fiction and great science fiction is that good science fiction is really enjoyable to watch. Great science fiction works on multiple levels for different people. It can be an exciting action adventure for some part of the audience and it can be an incredibly meaningful message about equality or technology or death or love..."
I am blown away that the writers were actually trying to get the numbers right! Love it.
Also, inertial dampeners are what stop them being stains on the back wall when the ship jumps to warp, and the structural integrity grid runs a forcefield through the superstructure of the ship to keep it in one piece when doing loop de loops and warp jumps.
I’m not sure what amuses me more. Coming across an astrophysicist who didn’t watch Star Trek growing up or that astrophysicists are also shocked by this 😂
What I loved about this episode back when it aired was that it was the first time (for TNG at least) that this crew in their super advanced ship were put in a situation where the sheer vastness of the universe became the obstacle, and that gave me a lot to think about as a 10yr old. 😊
Star Trek is available in the Uk, Now Tv, Netflix UK and paramount plus.
If you want weird space phenomenona try the British Sci fi sitcom Red Dwarf
Season 1 episode 2: Future echoes (what they think happens when you break the light barrier)
Season 2 episode 6: parallel universe
Season 3 episode 1: Backwards (what happens when the universe starts shrinking instead of expanding)
Season 4 episode 4: White hole (they run into the opposite of a black hole)
Season 4 episode 5: dimension jump
Season 6 episode 6: Out of time (reality warping bubbles and a time machine)
There's lots of fun episodes that are less astrophysics related inbetween involving a time travelling inquisitor demanding people justify their existence, cloning, wax droids, despair squids, holoships, polymorphs that drain emotions, and a toaster that demands you eat 600 rounds of toast a day or it throws a major wobbler.
Red dwarf is the best!
Red dwarf is the best!
I mean, thats all well and good, but would you like some toast?
@@malphadour ah, so you’re a waffle guy!
@@isaiahd781 What about a crumpet?
Thing is, many of the issues you bring up, Star Trek has already thought of. Inertial dampeners stop of from going squish when we jump to Lightspeed, for example
Just wait 'til you get to Star Trek Voyager. You're gonna love Captain Kathryn Janeway!
"Do It" !
I've just recommended ST:V S01E03 as being more up Becky's street.
@@djashley2002, do you mean Parallax? That was the first one I thought of too. It definitely fits under the category of "separating science from fiction!"
Well, Star Trek is by no means constant in how they use Warp Drive. For example in Star Trek: Voyager the ship is displaced 70.000 light year and the crew projectes a 75-year journey home... A crawl compared with the discussed TNG episode above
The difference being that Voyager would be limited to normal warp drive, while in this episode the Enterprise was subject to a warp drive that was deranged by The Traveler (the "Thought" guy) a member of a race that can manipulate warp fields (how the warp drive works - the bendy space bit) using thought.
17:01 long - I like what you did there :D
Dr. Becky probably doesn’t get it lol
@@slandgsmith Yeah, she wasn't even sure about the name of the ship, so I highly doubt she knows it's registry number. XD
@@WimpomanHer editor might.
01:58 - HAHAHA you did your own 'Leo Getz' ('Lethal Weapon' film series) rapid "Okeh okeh okeh" 🤣🤣🤣 😎🇬🇧
In ST:TNG they used this weird formula (Mentioned in the TNG technical manual) for calculating the Warp Factor, in the original ST TV-series the warp factor was the cube-root of the velocity in multiples of c. Warp factor 1 is 1c, warp factor 2 is 8c, warp factor 3 is 27c and so on.
That's the cube not the cube-root.
@@MentalLentil-ev9jr No, cube-root, cubing is used to convert a warp-factor into multiples of light speed.
@@nicholasmaude6906 Yes, you're right, I should have double-checked the way you were going.
In my defence, the examples you gave were converting from warp factor to velocity, hence my confusion.
For some context in this episode the Enterprise didn't travel naturally but was thrown about by an individual part of the Travelers who possess the ability to influence space and time with their mind that influenced the Enterprise systems during an experiment.
Bit of a spoiler Wesley Crusher is later revealed to also have such ability which is featured more prominently in Star Trek Prodigy
The series usually is in the Milky Way and within a few hundred light years of Earth. The episode you watched is unusual because the ship left the Milky Way.
Now do a collab with Angela Collier and she can make another 4 hour Star Trek video explaining why you should watch all of Next Gen :)
Thiiiiiiiiiiis
AC can’t hang with DB.
> "I really think the writers just threw science out of the window for plot"
Go with that. I'm reminded of a quote from Austin Powers when they were dealing with time travel: "I suggest you don't worry about this sort of thing and just enjoy yourself, [to the camera] That goes for you all too."
If you prefer to watch Star Trek instead of the Super Bowl like this comment.
Could like both. Besides, I've already seen all the Star Trek episodes... 🤔
I've never watched an entire football game in my life. I do watch some form of Star Trek just about every day. Live long and prosper!
The super what now?
#foundtheincels
Is “Superbowl” another name for the holodeck when Cisco is using it to recreate Baseball?
@4:51 - That is precisely how warp drive in Star Trek works, pushing plasma (heated through direct matter/antimatter [deuterium/antideuterium] reactions, regulated by the fictitious dilithium crystals, which in universe are "transparent" to these reactions at certain lattice angles, and can help direct the output energy of the reactions) into an energetic state high enough to make the warp coils in the engine nacelles selectively compress and expand the space around it in rapid succession, thereby avoiding relativistic effects. The official Next Generation Technical Manual is incredibly detailed on this process and while it is all complete fantasy, it is shockingly consistent within itself. Highly recommend the read.
I agree with all the fellow star trek fans here on all the data that the star trek universe has out there - warp factors, best/worst seasons etc. Becky, just look up the Astrophysicist consultants for each show/season. There always are accredited consultants that you may know more about than any star trek fan 🖖
There is no time dilation inside a warp bubble since you are effectively not moving.
But you are always not moving in special relativity.
@@DrDeuteronIf Picard travels in the Enterprise at near c & we earthlings, on Earth, looked through a big telescope we'd see him running around in slow motion. He would perceive himself as running at normal speed because like you say he's not moving. If he observed us he'd see us running around in slow motion. We would see ourselves running at normal speed because like you say we're not moving. But if he's in a warp bubble I guess we'd see him running at normal speed since, like marsovac says, he's effectively not moving?
If memory serves, I believe they use some form of "sub space" while travelling in warp to negate the effects of time dealation. Also; these Starships have "inertial dampeners" to protect the crew from the effects of acceleration.
The 1996 Novel Federation by Judith and Garfield Reeves -Stevens Has the original crew and TNG crew involved in a story where they cross paths inside a black hole. The story starts with Zefram Cochrane and his fleeing the 3rd world war and the British leader of Col Green's forces ,Adrik Thorsen. We involve his story from the early warp experiments to exactly why he vanished into space never to be seen again. It explains how the Companion found him. and what happened after.
Short back story. An experiment on the lunar base caused the warp impellor to create a static warp shell where the drive and the base were wiped out in the blast but the effects were shunted into subspace.
Thorsen thought it could be made into a warp bomb.
Zephram gives his lecture that if you push the object in the bubble into other space(sub space where C is much much higher) that you could avoid the infinities of energy to velocity and then pop back into normal space time. But much further than light speed could have taken you.
It's all in the Enterprise warp delta insignia. that is the power curve lower line while the upper one is the velocity. the star is the point of infinite energy.
So you don't need infinite energy to get past light speed. Simple really.
Has anyone noticed that the total running time of this video is 17:01? lol
I absolutely love that I can see you start doing the math in your head after they say it would take 300 years at maximum warp. Deeply relatable.
She says she's not a Star Trek fan, but with a run time of 17:01, somebody obviously is.
little Easter Egg there with the 17:01 runtime, very nice
Shout out to The Orville (in many ways a spiritual successor to Star Trek) for actually addressing time dilation in an episode. Basically they were stuck in the past after their temporary time travel device got burnt out beyond repair. Their chief engineer goes, "wait, we've got a time machine right here!" pointing at the FTL engine. They then disable their "time dilation compensator" on the engine and travel at something like 99.99999999% light speed making use of time dilation so that while the trip is only a minute for them, for the outside universe it was enough time passing for them to catch up to their "present".
Apparently there is a maximum warp factor: 10, were you would occupy every point in the universe at the same time. At least, if I remember that episode from Star Trek Voyager correctly.
Which did not stop them from conceiving Trans-Warp, a form of travel through some sort of sub-space tunnels.
You are correct, Monsieur. A Trek Universe spacecraft traveling at Warp 10 basically turns into The Heart of Gold from The Hitchhiker's Guide book (increasingly inaccurately named) trilogy. Qapla'!
Never speak of that episode again. We don’t speak of that episode.
You are correct but about that episode, but they did change the definitions at some point. In TOS they frequently go to Warp 12 or whatever.
Later (I think in Voyager, but I'm not sure) they made Warp 10 the theoretical maximum. Maybe just for the plot of that one episode.
So in a way, kind-of, warp 10 is like a weird version of our speed of light where time becomes 0 but you can experience any and all points along a space-time stream/cone simultaneously.
A character in one of Larry Nivens novels once pointed out that “other races may have developed different theories” which is certainly something to think about.
It's a similar reason to why teleporters/transporters were invented... They didn't want the constant to and fro of shuttles and being able to have the emergency escape plot twists and all that fun stuff.
Actually, transporters were invented for budget reasons. They didn't have the money to land ships on planets all the time. But a quick fade and some lighting effects? That was fine.
That specific episode involved a character called "The Traveler." He, or his species rather, were very old and evolved enough to physically manipulate space-time in such a way that causality and relativity just didn't matter.
The Enterprise is built with a deflector array and shielding. That's how it could survive the wear and tear.
Alcubierre's warp equations were inspired by Star Trek.
Star Trek warp factors are exponential concerning FTL travel.
Regardless, there's plenty of technology that's been inspired by Star Trek. Touch screens, flip phones. Tablets. Those sliding doors at the grocery store...
The length of the video being 17:01
I see what you did there.
It was nice when they used some real science in the script, but Ronald D. Moore once said that the later scripts would be (dialogue) (technobabble) ( more dialogue)
Most SciFi authors will say that the stardrive speed is at the speed of plot.
It's nice when they include some physics, however twisted, in the story, but some magic must occur to allow an interesting plot.
If I remember this episode correctly, they were not traveling via their regular "warp drive". In this episode they were traveling with the help of a being known as the "Traveler". In this episode the method of travel was more comparable to Douglas Adams fictional "infinity improbability drive" as described in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of books
I’m pretty sure TNG talked about “warp bubbles” before the Alcubiere theory. In Trek they are supposed to negate time dilation. You’re right that Trek’s physics are flexible for the sake of the plot, but they do try to put a bit of thought into the ramifications of that. If you’re interested, the TNG Technical Manual explains a lot of the behind the scenes thinking and theorising by the writers. Great video ❤
There's a great episode of The Orville (a Star Trek-like show) where they wind up a few hundred years in their past (circa present-day Earth) and work out that turning off their warp bubble will expose them to time dilation, allowing them to return to their time when they accelerate up to near light speed. I really enjoy when they use real science in Sci-Fi. It not only lends credibility to the rest of the show, but makes it more enjoyable, too.
The episode is "Twice in a lifetime" for those interested.
A little quote I always keep in mind while watching/reading SciFi:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” ~ Arthur C. Clarke.
😁
The inverse also holds true in Fantasy; any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
A fair point! 😂
3:38 “you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space”!
You summed it up pretty well in your concluding comments. Arthur C. Clarke once said something to the effect of: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Our present-day technology with smartphones, TVs, nuclear power plants, etc. would seem magical to someone from medieval times, much of the technology of Star Trek is largely magical to us, and the "Traveler" is magical to the crew of the Enterprise (although they are sophisticated enough to recognize that it is not magic, just far beyond their understanding). In Star Trek, warp drive is supposed to get you from A to B many times faster than the speed of light e,g, from Earth to a world hundreds of light-years away in a narratively short period of time, and do so without incurring the effects of time dilation (to avoid narrative complications).
FWIW, the "original" Star Trek (which you have to watch) was produced/initially broadcast 1966-1969, and introduced essentially all the elements of Star Trek seen since, including warp drive. The Next Generation (1987-1994, containing this episode) pick up on the original series narrative universe, but moved the setting some 80 years later. Alcubierre is said to have been inspired by Star Trek (possibly the original series) to investigate Einstein's equations for a solution which allows for the existence of warp drive, and that's what led him to the results we now know him for.
They reference time dilation in Star Trek, something about the Warp Field protects them from that. There are episodes where they approach light speed without Warp Drive and time dilation becomes a problem.
If you go WAY back to the TOS show, much was written about the technology. The writers knew that even the most non-geeky watcher would know that it would take 4.3 years to get to our nearest stellar neighbor in space and if warp factor was linear, and at maximum warp (we'll use 8), it would take almost 200 days to reach the alpha centauri system. So, to allow the ships to get around faster and to keep the story lines more plausible (haha), they made the WFx value be the cube of the speed of light. So, at warp 8, (512x speed of light), it would only take 3 days. Of course in the series, they would do these long distances in hours, so it still wasn't even remotely accurate.
Great points, all! I will offer one possible additional factor: since everything in the galaxy is in motion, the distances between, say, Earth and the Vulcan home world would constantly be changing; thus, the total distance traversed to get from point E to point V might be different every time, and also depending on which direction you're going?
Depends on what warp scale you use. The TOS scale or the TNG scale. TNG’s scale was logarithmic.
And later they redefined Warp Speed making Warp 10 a theoretical maximum. It's internally inconsistent. This whole exercise is very silly.
I'd much rather hear about whether or not she like the plot.
Alternate explanation: The Traveler dosed their water supply.
I’d like to see you do the recent “Wild Blue Yonder” on “Doctor Who.” That’s the one where the “mavity” running gag started, and then the Doctor and Donna also went to the edge of the universe.
Like most science fiction, or most fiction in general for that matter, you just ignore the fact that it doesn`t make sense and enjoy the story.
not so fast, he said at maximum warp speed, so you need to know what kind of starship they are on and what its max warp speed is to do any calculation.
The Galaxy class starship can theoretically go warp 9.8 but with extreme risk, warp 9.6 can be maintained for several hours with warp 6 being cruising speed.
They have a theoretical maximum speed, but that’s unstable. And a maximum sustainable warp level which indeed can usually only be maintained at a predictably stable rate for a few hours. But you’d generally not attempt that outside of emergencies and testing.
As a lifelong fan of Star Trek of all the series , I love that you did a bit on Star Trek Dr Becky. Speciallyl that you took the extra time to see back in 1987 what the farthest known object was at that time. To think that in as little as 37 years, that furthest object would grow from 1.3b to 13.5b light years away. A little tibit of trivia for my fellow Star Trek fans here, in this episode, the alien character known as "The Traveller", played by Eric Menyuk was nearly cast in the permanent role of "Data", the android played by Brent Spiner.
3:06 Ok, that's pretty damn good, The Enterprise D is a warp 9 capable ship, so warp 9 is 9,000c
they went faster than that in emergencies.. 9.6 or so I think
Warp 9 is 1516c, while maximum warp of Ent D is 9.6 which is 1909c. Those are the official warp chart measurements. Although they rarely follow those exact numbers in the show
hmmm, I thought that warp was logarithmic, i.e. 10,000c would be warp 5, but apparently it's more like warp 20. Looking online the only consistent thing seems to be that there's no consistent conversion between light speed and warp 😂
@@nurmrTOS and Enterprise follows the ^3 scale ( wf1 1x wf2 8x wf3 27x etc , TNG change it to warp 10 is everywhere in the universe ,
Wf1 1x wf 2 10x wf3 39x wf 4 102x wf5 214x wf6 392x wf7 656x wf 8 1024x wf 9 1516x 9.2 1649x 9.6 1909x 9.975 (3500-4300x ) Borg Transwarp 39,000x slipstream 240,000 - 2.6 million.
I doubt you have the time to read through all of the comments your audience leaves you, but I genuinely appreciate your videos. Thanks, doc
Finally! 😃
There are fan pages that have already calculated the warp factors. I believe warp 1 is like 200ish times the speed of light.
One hand for Live long and prosper. Two for a Jewish ritual.
Would love to see one on the original series from the 60s.
Thanks for doing this!
The way I understood it, in TOS the speed was the warp factor squared times the speed of light
@@karma432 Nerd time... 😂 WF^3 * c=V
Star Trek was not consistent over the years about how fast any warp factor would be. In TOS they're often going Warp 12 or 14. Later they made Warp 10 a theoretical maximum, kind of like the speed of light, at least in concept.
@@JustOneAsbestodifferent warp scales.
@@karma432I recall it being the *cube* of the warp factor in TOS, so warp 4 was 64c and warp 7 was 343c.
I thouroughly ENJOY when scientists such as Dr. Becky include in their explainations of science vs. science fiction the phrases "as we currently understand the laws of physics" and "as we understand Einstein's theory of general and special relativity" and "breaking the laws of physics as we understand them"! These simple acknowledgements give creedance to the fact that science is fluid in the sense that of while science facts are static, it is our understanding of science that continues to update our progress towards understanding the universe, how we came to be, and our place in it.Thank you Dr.Becky for these acknowledgements. 🖖
Warp would counter time dilation . And inenursia
Anuria ?
Dear Dr. Becky.
Apologies for the elongated comment in advance.
Regarding controlling machines (here especially drives):
Back in the days where this episode was shoot (towards the end of the 1980’s) controlling machines via thoughts was more a part of fiction, nowadays it’s more a part of science.
There is research in progress to control machines via brain waves (whereas “machines” here is a widely meant term). Brain waves (and so does nerve impulses) are electric current pulses and as electricity physics apply, electric currents build also an magnetic field around them (the so called “electromagnetic field”), and both are going every time together: none of them exist without the other. That’s how brain wave sensors (and therefore EKG sensors) are working: they detect the electromagnetic field created by the electric current pulses which is processed further to have a depiction on a screen.
There’s research in progress to control machines with thoughts (brain waves more specific), whereas at moment a cursor on a computer screen is being moved vertically and horizontally. Practical research to control protheses (artificial limbs) with thoughts for limb amputated people is ongoing too. This makes control of machines with thoughts more a science part, however we’re still at least decades away for practical application in the wide field, which turns the scale a little bit more to the fiction side thus this all is happening more in laboratories than in the field.
In anyway controlling FTL drives with thoughts will remain fiction for centuries or even millenia and beyond.
Controlling complex machines (even space ships, included those we have at moment and in the near future available) via a neural interface can be considered more science than fiction.
Best regards, and carry on making those incredible videos.
Whilst it's great watching you react to stuff Becky. Regrettably, I think you're missing the point of Star Trek. This episode in particular is where you're meant to suspend your feelings of disbelief and go with the flow.
The main character is from a species called, "Travellers." Time means nothing to them. They can exist in all places simultaneously, freeing themselves from the constraints of our spacetime. Similar to the character *Q* in the series.
They only appeared in this episode to help the crew develop a more efficient warp drive, and something went wrong. The traveller eventually sacrificed himself to safely return the crew to there own spacetime.
*_"Sometimes Imagination is more important than knowledge"_* ~ Albert Einstein.
Boldly go Becky, where no Cat has gone before. 🖖
Like it. 😂
The Orville had a clever way of fixing a time travel jump to the past (300 years if memory serves): they did a near-light speed lap to Alpha Centauri and back under non-warp propulsion so when they returned, they arrived at the proper century.
Andromeda handled this similarly. Their main protagonist (Captain Dylan Hunt) was stuck near the event horizon of a black hole and found himself in a further future when his ship was rescued.
It's always a great day when Dr. Becky shows up on my feed.
From what I can tell, Warp speed is logarithmic, reaching an estimated maximum of Warp 10 (although a later episode implies a view into the future when speeds exceeding Warp 10 are reached). Warp 9.975 (the maximum sustainable speed of the USS Voyager) is approximately 3,056 times the speed of light. So 9,000 times the speed of light would probably be something like Warp 9.9999.
at least ways after TOS when they reset the warp scale.
Maybe quantum entanglement with parwell versions of themselves. Galaxies away
This episode's story was based on an early-1980s Star Trek novel (The Wounded Sky) written by Diane Duane. In the book, the Enterprise is testing an exotic new drive system that would allow it to instantly "hop" to other galaxies, but the use of the system actually causes a "rip" in spacetime and allows another universe with reverse entropy to being intruding on our entropic universe. The ship has to travel into the aentropic universe to "fix" the spacetime rip, and it's there where the crew experiences all their thoughts coming to life. The book was actually very well-researched and was based on ideas that were very cutting-edge in the early 80s. For my money it's the best Star Trek story ever told in any medium.
I have always been an avid fan of TNG but the science in the sci-fi is absurd at times. Do you remember anti-time in the finale? 😆
why not physics works regardless of the thermodynamic arrow of time.
That was also Q messing around, so anything could happen, really.
@@Boa_Omega I did not realize until now a paper on negative time was just produced a few days ago.
The amount of people who don’t know the Trek warp speeds or just throw out random numbers are surprising, here - (edit the writers completely ignore these numbers for - speed of the plot )
TOS/Enterprise is based on ^3 scale ~ ( warp factor)
Wf1 -1xC wf2 -8xC wf3 27xC wf4 64xC (wf4.5 NX enterprise 91.125xC ) wf5 -125xC (NX maximum 5.2 140.608xC) wf6 216xC wf7 343xC wf8 512xC ))
TNG/DS9/ Voyager all use the new warp factor scale ( warp 10 is the maximum and you’d occupy all point in the universe)
Wf1 1xC wf2 10xC wf3 39xC wf4 102xC wf5 214xC wf6 392xC wf7 656xC wf8 1024xC wf9 1516xC wf 9.2 1649xC (wf9.6 1909xC Enterprise D maximum for 12 hours ) 9.9 3053xC ( Voyager 9.975 3500-4300xC ) 9.99 7912xC 9.999 ? Borg Transwarp 39,000x ( 9.9999 199,515xC limit of subspace communications
Slipstream burst drive (Voyager) 240,000 - 2.6 million xC ) but only attainable for 30 minutes 150LY ( 300 LY an hour )
Prodigy- Protowarp 5000 LY in a few seconds .
In "Where No One has Gone Before" is a little different because it's the Traveller and "normal" speeds don't apply. His abilities aren't limited by the usual constraints of 4-D spacetime. (In the Star Trek prime universe thought and space/time are basically the same thing if you know how to utilize that symmetry).
Why aren‘t you wearing a Treckie Costume? 😂
Yeah, good idea! I'm sure a decent Seven of Nine cosplay would throw the door wide open for a couple of new subscribers. 🤭
@@Max..Q 😂👌
Unlike Star Wars, Star Trek is set in our future. "The Next Generation" is set in the late 2360's and early 2370's (the season 1 finale gives the exact date of the episode according to the 20th century calendar). Many episodes even refer to real people, past and present, as people that they read about in their history books. But there will be plenty of time between now and then, for mathematical formulae on a page today (or later) to become working machines by that time (or sooner).
The whole point of Star Trek is traveling to strange new worlds and discovering new life and new civilizations. It follows that some of these new alien societies that they will meet will have more advanced technology than them. Consider that in light of Arthur C. Clarke's first law, and of course they will appear to be magic. So it would be unrealistic if Star Trek never did a story like this.
The lols when Dr. Becky explains how we can "go" faster than light by explaining how a warp drive works the literal mechanism that ST uses for FTL travel. On a side not the 9000x the speed of light somehow coincides with warp 9 the fastest travel in ST prior to transwarp
I thought Warp 9 meant nine times the speed of light in Star Trek? 🚀
@gary.h.turner no it depends on the series but TOS it was an exponential increase between warps and TNG made it more logarithmic then in VOY they established warp 10 as the maximum warp which equated infinite speed and being at every point in the universe at once. Then of course there is transwarp tech acquired from the borg which fundamentaly works different by tunneling through subspace.
Well, isn't speeds that exceed the speed of light seen more as breaking a barrier than exceeding an absolute constant?
Most of Alistair Reynolds' "Known Space" books obey the laws of physics. They require suspended animation and mile long space ships whose noses are covered in thousands of tons of ice to travel between planets around the galaxy. Great stuff!
Star Trek has huge inconsistemcies from episode to episode and between series. Maximum warp (usually warp 9) in TNG in this episode applied to th3 ST:Voyager universe would have completely broken the plot for Voyager, which held that it would take that ship 70+ years to travel back home from just the other side of our own galaxy
Time dilation was actually referenced in the original pilot episode The Cage. This episode was shot in 1964 and appears as clips in the later 2 part episode The Menagerie. One character talks about how "the time barrier" had been broken. Focusing on wrap factors as a measure of speed and warp didn't start until later. In The Cage warp is called "time warp" not "warp speed".
Thanks Becky from Punta Rubia, Rocha, Uruguay. Enjoy!
In this episode it is not the warp drive that sends them 300 or 1 billion light years. Therefore, your calculation is not for the maximum warp drive speed but an anomaly not related to the warp drive.
In the Star Trek universe Warp speed is a cubic function. Basically you cube the warp factor and multiply by the speed of light to determine your speed. In The Next Generation they upgraded to a fourth power. So you raise the Warp factor to the 4th power and multiply by the speed of light.
If I'm not mistaken, in this episode the Enterprise was transported by a supernatural being so you have to add on another layer of disbelief suspension to the disbelief of warp drive. The crew was discussing the distance to home but the ship never actually traveled that distance under its own power. It was returned to home space by the supernatural being. In another series, the starship Voyager, after incredible relocation within the Milky Way, by another super being with super tech faced the time vs distance problem. The crew and ship found itself facing a journey of decades to get home to their galactic neighborhood
There’s a lot of plot armor in this episode. For one, the Traveler works some hocus pocus that propels the Enterprise far beyond the physics of warp drive while simultaneously protecting the ship’s structural integrity, so the means of traveling those vast differences is less important than in other episodes.
Dr. Becky's exasperation with the distances and the energy needed etc. are the best parts of this video 😄
This is the episode that got me into Star Trek. I loved the idea of traveling so far into the universe that nothing makes sense. There's a Lawyer that reacts to an episode of this series where they decide if Data is an individual or Federation property.
Just after I posted my earlier comment I recalled another Star Trek episode which blatantly ignored science. It was in the Star Trek spinoff Deep Space 9. The Dominion (an empire on the other side of the galaxy ruled by changelings) wanted to destroy the space station Deep Space 9 orbiting the planet Bajor. (It had something to do with a wormhole near Bajor that allowed very fast travel from Bajor to the Dominion on the other side of the galaxy. Apparently the Dominion wanted control of the wormhole.) To do so the Dominion would destroy the Bajoran system by making its sun go supernova. They planned to do so by exploding a bomb inside the sun. Of course as an astrophysicist you know there is no way this would work. First the bomb would vaporize before it entered the sun. Second a supernova is caused by the collapse of the star's core, and there is no way a bomb could cause that even if they could somehow get it to the core.
I should mention another highly implausible aspect of Star Trek (in addition to faster than light travel) that you didn't discuss is their ability to "beam" themselves all over the place. I remember reading years ago that to store the amount of information needed to reconstruct a person after beaming them would require a stack of hard drives one third the size of the Milky Way. Moreover I can't imagine a person could survive such a process.
Good evening, Dr. Becky. The Star Trek canon has partially solved the speed questions with their own “physics”. For the original series (1966-1969), the formula was speed = warp factor to the cube times the speed of light (s=(wf)^3 x c); and the maximum warp factor for the Enterprise was 9.75. That rule was violated only once for the second pilot episode “Where No One Has Gone Before”. For The Next Generation and the other series they needed more “speed”, so they changed the formula to s=15^(wf-1)x(wf^3) x c. And the maximum warp factor was 9.975. In over 800 episodes along 60 years, warp factor 10 has been reached or exceeded only 3 times.