Faster Than Light Travel

Not a day after my widely-acclaimed open letter to President Obama, William Edelstein, a physicist at Johns Hopkins, tries to disagree with me:

The original crew of "Star Trek" featured as unfortunate examples at a presentation by William Edelstein, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University, at the American Physical Society conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 13. The physicist showed a video clip of Kirk telling engineer "Scotty" to go to warp speed.

"Well, they're all dead," Edelstein recalled saying. His words caused a stir among the audience.

Edelstein's work showed that a starship traveling at just 99 percent of the speed of light would get a radiation dose from hydrogen of 61 sieverts per second, when just one tenth of that number of sieverts would deliver a fatal dose for humans. And that's not even the 99.999998 percent of light-speed necessary to make the journey to the center of the Milky Way in 10 years.

Hilariously, Edelstein is using a Star Trek clip to prove his point, but what he is proving is that he doesn't understand Star Trek.
What Edelstein is arguing is fundamentally true, and has basically been known for century; any object moving very fast can hit a stationary object and sustain a large amount of damage. This is what Edelstein is arguing. He's saying that the tiny amount of hydrogen freely floating in space, though sparse, would constitute a lethal threat to a spacecraft traveling near the speed of light. Much like bugs on a windshield, except in this case it would come right through the ship, destroying all the electronics and killing the crew.
But what Edelstein isn't acknowledging is that Roddenberry and Co. thought of this. High-speed impacts were not unknown to the science fiction writers of the 60's and 70's. Roddenberry's solution was elegant.
Imagine you are driving your car in a snow shower. Have you ever noticed that once you reach a certain speed (typically around 30 mph), the snow seems to stop hitting the windshield, even though it is falling heavily all around your vehicle? The reason for this is that a laminar airflow pattern that mixes into turbulent has formed a "shell" on the surface of your vehicle. As snow hits this shell, it is carried back and over the car, not landing on the surface. Slow down, and the air-shield breaks down. Essentially, this is because you are carrying some air mass with you. Roddenberry's solution was the same. The "warp field" generated by the warp nacelles on a spacecraft was used to accelerate the mass within the warp field to light speed and above. TAE believes that the free hydrogen in space would be carried around the subspace field the warp drive creates, keeping the crew within it safe. This also explains why the acceleration to warp speed does not fatally slam the crew against the rear walls of the interior of their ship; the mass around the ship is moving too, and so the crew does not feel the effects of the acceleration.

TAE wants to point out that this isn't just science fiction. If the sun is hurling its orbiting planets through space along with it, one has to imagine that Earth's combined speed of its own orbit, plus the orbit of the sun in the Milky Way Galaxy, plus the hurling of the Milky Way Galaxy away from the center of the universe makes for a combined speed that isn't trivial. And yet, I type this, not being bombarded with lethal hydrogen. Nor is the atmosphere of Earth constantly bombarded with lethal hydrogen. Why not?
The answer, though complicated, can be found here.

So while I agree with Edelstein; simply attaching a big rocket to the back of a spacecraft and accelerating it to near light speed would be ill advised, I also disagree. The crew of the Enterprise would not necessarily be dead. And if a fiction writer in 1970 could devise a practical go-around to light speed limitations...what could real scientists create?!


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