Could be that I just don’t have enough science mojo to grok the obvious answer, however, I seem to almost recall something about people travelling at light speed or faster should age slower than people that aren’t moving that quickly. If this is true, then while Kirk (who would so kick Picard’s ass, because Picard was a wimp) was warping around the galaxy, he and his crew should stay young, while the folks back on Earth should age quickly…from Kirk’s perspective.
I don’t recall this ever coming up in an actual episode of ST, TNG, DS9, Voyager, or That Show with the Puppy. Is there some techno-bable loophole invented for the show, a real explanation, or did they just ignore the problem?
Well, one important aspect that you overlooked is that relativity tells us that faster-than-light travel is completely impossible for anything with a nonzero mass (like a spaceship.) Whenever the Enterprise is at warp, they are going faster than light. So this kinda throws everything we know about relativity out the airlock. So there’s no reason to assume that relativistic time dilation would happen.
“Impulse power” is sub-light speed…though time dilation never was discussed to my recollection. But “warp speed” involves putting a bubble of magic around the ship which means that the ship is no longer in normal space, ergo, Einstein’s rules no long apply. Easy-peasy!
It’s not at all uncommon for sci-fi movies or TV shows to use some plot device, like warp drive / hyperspace / what have you to get around the problems that relativity (and the impossibility of FTL travel) place on most sci-fi stories that deal with interstellar travel.
Many “hard” sci-fi authors deal with interstellar travel in a more realistic manner, but it’s the rare TV series or movie that does so.
They rarely traveled very far, or for very long, at sublight speeds, so even if the issues were possible, I don’t know how big they’d be.
But, ultimately, unless the relativisitic effects were integral to the plot, I imagine they would have just been ignored. Trek has never been hard sci-fi, by any stretch of the imagination.
Well They did sort of approach the issue. Roddenberry added the ‘Stardate’ time system as a way of keeping absolute time. Since any local planetary time would have been meaningless
"As we were going .998 Warp I went to bed at 10:59:12.001 GMT and got up at 10:59.12.002 GMT fully rested.
Not many. There are a few, but even Hal Clement used warp drives. Otherwise, the distances of space make stories set outside the solar system impossible. Warp drives are considered a perfectly legitimate hard science way to use interstellar travel, since they are not forbidden by science.
Nowadays, “hard” sf writer still use warp drives, or have super advanced aliens come to us.
But they would be very minor, and plot-insignificant. Time would pass at 0.968 of the rate of a stationary observer - something you’d have to correct for but not enough to make a big fuss about on-screen.
Granted that it is a “doubletalk drive” – something with a glib pseudo-scientific explanationm to enable plot developments – the warp drive transforms a starship into a self-propelled, self-enclosed space warp, à la wormhole, in which the distance between two points separated by light years on a Newtonian metric is shrunk to a much smaller distance, one which may be crossed in days or weeks, without Einsteinian time contraction. Dr. Zephrem Cochrane was a genius whose analysis of the metric of space-time and practical application of theoretical constructs resulted in something that would make the stars accessible.
The actual physics of this, of course, leaves something to be desired. But if we demanded scientific precision of SF presumptions of future technology, we would not have a TV show and movies franchise produced by Paramount, but rather NASA channelling funds into the improbable.
I can remember, as a kid, reading stories where people carried micro-radiotelephones in their pockets, and could access the total of human knowledge from virtually any site by a computer terminal, Humans had gone to the Moon and landed devices to study the surface of Mars. Commercials shockingly promoted contraceptives along with detergents. Devices using concentrated beams of light for weaponry or to read nuiicrostorage records were in common use – you might even print out data from storage using such devices. Atomic power was a major component of household energy sources. All completely bizarre, and not to be taken seriously, as though we might have such devices today.
So too with “warp drive” – it’s impossible with today’s knowledge. But do not discount what may be possible with innovations working around present limitations.
…For some value of “forbidden”. Any means of producing a warp drive or anything resembling it seems to require the usage of materials with negative energy density, and there’s no indication that such materials exist-- If they don’t, then warp drives would indeed seem to be forbidden. And regardless of how one makes an FTL device, even if it’s a magic carpet or something, if special relativity is correct, then such a device could also be used as a time machine. So if you think that time travel is logically impossible due to the potential paradoces, then you have to also conclude that FTL of any sort is impossible. You could just throw out special relativity entirely, but that’s not really any different, in principle, from throwing out the law of conservation of energy or the like, in which case you’d be forced to say that nothing whatsoever is forbidden by science.
FTL drives are tolerated in hard science fiction stories because of the “fiction stories” part, not because of the “hard science” part. We tolerate them because we have to, because there’s no story without them.
I can swallow warp drive, but that whole “let’s whip around the sun to go back in time” stuff was silly. We go around the sun every year. True, we don’t go as fast, but seriously–traveling around the sun turns back the clock? Or do you have to travel counter-clockwise to do that? :rolleyes:
Why can’t they just go AT the speed of light, instead of slower or faster than it?
This thread was semi-inspired by a Heinlein story about telepathic twins. One twin went on a space ship, other twin stayed home. Multiple pairs of twins were split this way, as the ship was an exploratory voyage. The ship-bound twins stayed young, while the home bound twins aged normally. Think at least one guy was able to link to following generations.
There’s also a short series…maybe three books…that uses relativity in economics. Can’t remember the titles, think the author was F.M. Busby…something like that. The protagonists made much ballyhoo about taking “the long view” of things, considering space travel. Also think a guy known as Tregare the Pirate was a major player…
I think going to high warp in the close vicinity of a large gravity well was what caused the going backward in time.
Kirk most certainly did order Warp 1 on several occasions-in one case IIRC to make a trip last longer for that prima donna Princess who made Kirk fall in love with her because of her tears.
Due to the distances involved, warp 1’s not going to be very useful except when travelling interplanetary distances, and most episodes involve interstellar travel.
Warp 0.5 would be twice the speed of full impulse, by the way. To the best of my knowledge, no sublight vessel can travel that fast.
