eddie p asked:
To explore my question more I will draw on the hypothetical series of Star Trek (and various other SC-Fi’s) where you can see out of the windows of Enterprise the stars flying past. If we were able to master warp speed, could we theoretically plot a course that could take us thousands of light years without bumping into anything? Although I assume master some sort of shield to block against small debris such as meteors would also be necessary?
To explore my question more I will draw on the hypothetical series of Star Trek (and various other SC-Fi’s) where you can see out of the windows of Enterprise the stars flying past. If we were able to master warp speed, could we theoretically plot a course that could take us thousands of light years without bumping into anything? Although I assume master some sort of shield to block against small debris such as meteors would also be necessary?
Three feet till I hit my cubical wall.
Isn’t there some sort of convention you should be dressing up for?
near heathrow not far in the nevada desert about 98 klometers, just watch Eastenders as jaz shags baz tonight but she is pregnant by Akmed who is coloured and baz is white so it will all get exciting by Christmas
Depends on how well you can steer.
no one knows. o.O
Well I would guess billions and billions of light years, but wouldn’t there have to be something on the other side of the wall.
you could probably find a route which would go a couple thousand light years because of the space in between constellations, however you would need the shield to protect yourself and you would probably die of old age before you reached your destination
I think they are far enough apart at warp speed you would have time to move over and miss anything.
Run a level 3 diagnostic and I’ll see you in my ready room.
If you can steer a star ship at warp speeds, you should be able to not run into anything. Even if you had no steering, space is so vast that even choosing a direction at random may allow weeks of travel before the proximity alarms sound off. If you kept dodging stuff until you reached the ‘end’, well, we’d ALL like to know what’s out there!
If you don’t follow the space signs you could fall into a black hole, or be ejected from the universe by the space police.
only the lord and all his angels know
Serious answer: practically forever. If you look at a random point in the night sky, most of time it will be dark. That’s because the universe is empty, and there is no star/ galaxy / quasar in the direction you are looking.
On average, 999 out of 1000 directions will *not* hit any star or planet or even a large asteroid. (Assuming you start far away from any of these.) You will just go on forever, or at least for many billions times billions of years.
yes that would be correct. my theory is that other human like intelligent beings have already masterd the warp speed and they are probably trying to seek other answers that we have not yes asked such as how many universis are their? and what is beyond them they will be seeking for something that is so far beyond are time. time travel to them is logic but for us would be a magic. that very question you have asked here ”how far can we travel before we hit something” will be one of the main questions the other beings will be asking them selves and seeking to find out. and they will have about 50% of the technology to do it. a little like people saying if we kept sailing we would fall of the edge of the world well theyll be asking the same thing on a much much larger scale. sadly i dont think we will be able to explore the other solar sytems for another 2,000 years.inless someone somewhere on this planet a genius perhaps comes up with the right combination of energy and chemicals and speeds up the technological process.
Hop in your car, start driving in a straight line and imagine that every 100yds is about 500,000 miles.
It isn’t a question of hitting anything so much as the limitations of a human lifetime. Even at the speed of light it will still take you more than 4 years to reach the nearest star to the Sun.
The energy required to reach even a small percentage of light speed, never mind warp speed beyond the speed of light, is so enormous as to be virtually beyond human comprehension. So even getting to the nearest star would take a number of present day human lifetimes.
You don’t have to get far out of the atmosphere before there’s risk of colliding with orbiting debris.
And space is a pretty empty place but the probability of hitting something is still not zero, so yes a ship travelling very fast would have to have some way of deflecting stuff. Even a grain of sand would do great damage if a spacecraft was at near relativistic speeds.
I love Star Trek!!
well I am ignoring all the other stuff you said but the universe is 93 billions lightyears across. So if we were on the exact end of the universe we would travel 93 billion light years across.
What is really interesting to me is the asteroid belt near mars and jupiter. The discovery channel artists picture shows it as a bunch of rocks really close together when, in reality, even these are really really far apart. All of our spacecraft to the outer solar system have sped by these wihout hitting a thing.
We can see objects billions of light years distant.
We can see no ‘walls’ anywhere.
Theoretically, whether space is ‘open’ or ‘closed`,
you can travel indefinately without ever hitting
anything.
Does that answer your question?
Assuming the universe is infinite, everywhere you look, there will be a star to hit. But for practical touring of the Milky Way, you’d have to know the star density for the region you are in. Around the outer arms, it may be one star every cubic parsec. Toward the hub, it shoots up to ten stars every cubic parsec. (These numbers are my estimates, but the logic is there.) So indeed, star travel will involve much more than the propulsion system and basic human needs.
to travel in a warp, we should first have a map of where we are going before warping to them. the distance varies between stars. stars aren’t the only problem, there are more dark matter in space. they can be pretty large and undetectable.
Think of how captains of naval vessels had to chart unknown territory in the oceans before we had any kind of maps. Those charts were made for hundreds if not thousands of years until we had accurate data showing the latitude and longitude of islands, ice, sandbars, and any other objects. Look at our star maps that we have now. It would take us thousands of more years to chart the Milky Way so we could steer a ship right into port without ever looking out the window.
Then go beyond the Galaxy. Until we chart the skies completely, then I would say your chances a hitting a rogue object are extremely great!
Awesome question!
Assuming that you can steer around the occasional star, then you could go on forever.
I wouldn’t know. Cause no one knows. Maybe we should set up wormholes to figure this out.
Not far. There are thousands of little bits of dust in space, and those hit you all the time. In star trek a lot of ships have a deflector that deflects small objects as the ship moves at high speed. It is a lot like a shield. In the main ships in star trek, you can usually see the deflector where the saucer section ends.
In warp, the ships go into this thing called subspace, so that probably doesn’t have any obstacles.
Knowing my luck, pretty quick.
There is junk everywhere in space. Yes, it’s 99 percent empty, but so is an atom and you can’t just fly through atoms now, can you? Like someone else said, before we trying going fast through the galaxy we might want to do it slowly for a while first until we get a decent map.