Rant Alert – William Edelstein (And NewScientist Editors) Apparently Never Actually Watched Star Trek
NewScientist has put out an article debunking the possibility of space travel using warp technology based on a scientific analysis made by Dr. William Edelstein (of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore) … and apparently neither the NewScientist editor, nor Dr. Edelstein, have ever watched Star Trek.
Now, I grant you, the science itself has some merit, for some situations. Dr. Edelstein notes that hydrogen atoms, though sparse in space at a an average of two atoms per cubic centimeter in the big black yonder, would become a rather deadly phenomenon when traversing between the stars at near the speed of light. He calculates that the path of travel of a starship even approaching lightspeed (99.999998 percent) would be hit by a “death ray” of radiation from the hydrogen atoms equal to 7 teraelectron volts, on par with the energy of the Large Hadron Collider beam.
Which is probably true.
That part I don’t think any scientist would really dispute. When you travel at (or in the case of Star Trek, greater) than the speed of light, every particle in space becomes deadly. And not just the hydrogen. Even if it didn’t hit you like a Large Hadron Collider beam and irradiate you to death in a fraction of a second, it would certainly punch holes in the hull and the crew.
If you were traveling at near the speed of light, relatively speaking.
Here’s where the first observation of the technology of Star Trek itself seems to have failed. Warp speed is accomplished by literally warping local space/time. You in effect create ripples around the spacecraft and ride through the waves of warped space instead of traveling in a straight line from Point A to Point B. You effectively skip over the majority of the space that you sort-of travel through. It’s a way to cheat Einstein and his relativity, because you do not travel at the speed of light (or even anywhere near it), you travel at a safe speed, but continually bend space around you to shorten your relative trip. And with the skipping of traversing of all of that space, you skip running into all of the things occupying that missed space, like those pesky hydrogen atoms Dr. Edelstein counted up. Because Dr. Edelstein is counting up the whole space, not the relative space.
It’s the whole point of warp speed. That’s why it’s called warp. It’s not because it just sounds cool.
Now how exactly a warp field is generated, I’m sadly not geek enough to say. I’d suspect a gravity-based system is in play since, well, that’s how our universe naturally warps space and time. Whatever the means however, it takes a lot of energy. Which is why Star Trek fuels its ships with mind-boggling energy reactors such as matter/antimatter powerplants!
So right there is already great concern over just how NewScientist and Dr. Edelstein see the hydrogen in the universe affecting Star Trek specifically. I’m sure the calculations made apply quite aptly to, say, trying to send a rocket to the speed of light. But not to the science employed in Star Trek.
But that’s really only just the beginning. Because we also know that in the Star Trek canon even the first warp-capable ships from Starfleet used polarized hull plating to deflect nastiness away from the hull and protect the ship and its inhabitants. It’s funny, but I don’t see any mention of how this technology affects things in Dr. Edelstein’s scientific study. Nor is there any mention of one of the most obvious technologies to come from Star Trek canon to protect a ship: energy shields. (Which, again, I don’t know how exactly they operate, but I would wager is based somehow on containing plasma within an electromagnetic field.)
And that doesn’t even begin to dive into the possible alloys of which the exterior armor on the hull, nor interior shielding to protect the crew, could be made of. And why do I mention that? Because Dr. Edelstein specifically calculates, “that a 10-centimetre-thick layer of aluminium would absorb less than 1 per cent of the energy.” Well great. Who is using pure aluminum as shielding for anything in space? Certainly not anyone in Star Trek. According to canon even their glass is some doped-up transparent aluminum. However that is made, I’m sure it isn’t just raw aluminum.
So then, what is my point? Well two-fold. First, if you’re going to do calculations on near-lightspeed to make some commentary about space travel, maybe you should take the time to research the technology that would be used to achieve that speed before you open your big mouth. (Note that Dr. Edelstein presented his study to the American Physical Society meeting in Washington DC.) This applies to the editors at NewScientist as well, who really ought to screen these things, since that is their job and all.
And second, if you’re going to specifically target a canon like Star Trek to throw your half-baked study at, maybe you should first respect that canon enough to do due diligence in studying it. Because you’d probably be amazed at all of the hard science and theoretical physics that went in to creating it in the first place. Unlike Star Wars for example that is nothing more than a space-pimped melodrama with fantasy in mind and a lot of fill in the blanks, Star Trek is a heavily scientific canon where a lot of intelligent people have taken the time to actually work these things out. And anyone with any modicum of respect for what they’ve chosen to target should have taken the incredibly small amount of time and effort it would have needed to find that.
So Dr. William Edelstein, and the folks at NewScientist, maybe the next time you want to be scientific you should stop trying to sensationalize your findings by comparing them to something that you couldn’t have been bothered to research and just stick to the science.
And don’t knock The Enterprise.

The Enterprise, NCC-1701

