I'm Working on That : A Trek From Science Fiction to Science Fact - Hardcover

Chapter One: From Here to Neverwhere

The universe is big, really big!

But don't take my word for it. Consider a few of these numbers. I warn you, if you actually try to get your mind around them, they'll turn your brain to tapioca.

There are 250 billion stars in the Milky Way. The Milky Way, for you nonastronomers (like me), is the galaxy we live in. Experts who know about these things have told me that if I were to ship off from one edge of it traveling 700 million miles an hour (the speed of light), it would take me 144,000 years to get to the other side! That's a lot of years. But even more astounding than the enormity of the Milky Way itself is the fact that it represents only a tiny fraction of the universe -- a droplet in an ocean of Milky Ways. There are an estimated 100 billion galaxies out there beyond our tiny planet. If you were to count the number of stars in the cosmos -- first you would be long dead before you could count even a fraction of them -- but if you could, you would come up with a number that has twenty zeros behind it.

And there's more...

Even if every one of the stars above us were crammed together cheek by jowl; if there wasn't room to slip even a teensy silicon chip between all of the heavenly bodies in all of the galaxies, the immensity of space would still be staggering. However...they are not crammed together. They are spread far, far apart. The emptiness between these bodies would shame even the emptiest heads of some studio executives I know. It is so empty in fact that if I were to place you in the transporter room of the Enterprise and set the controls to beam you to some random location in the galaxy, the chances of you arriving anywhere at all close to a planet or a star or any kind of solid body, would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion.

Space is spacious.

More proof. The swiftest object we humans have created is a spacecraft called Pioneer 10, launched from earth way back in 1972. About twelve years ago it departed the solar system, zipping along at twenty-five miles a second, a pretty stout speed. (I'm lucky if I can go twenty-five miles an hour on the freeways of Los Angeles). Having left our relatively crowded solar system behind, Pioneer 10 now finds itself sailing through a vast vacancy, as solitary as a clam. Even traveling at 90,000 miles an hour, it is moving 7,500 times slower than the speed of light!

The nearest star to Earth, other than our own sun, is Proxima Centauri, combusting 4.3 light-years away. It will take Pioneer 10 32,000 years to get there. And this is the closest star! It will take 15 billion years for it to reach the next galaxy. That's a billion with a "B." To place that number in perspective, keep this in mind: 15 billion years is the current estimated age of the universe. Everything that has ever happened, from the big bang to your last meal, from the extinction of the dinosaurs to the rise of alien civilizations in star systems we don't even know about -- everything has happened in those 15 billion years. And remember there are a hundred billion galaxies roughly the size of our own out there, circling, colliding, transmogrifying.

Okay. Fine, you say. I get the picture. The universe is big and things in space are far apart. This is probably why we call it "space," Bill. But we can close those distances, right, by increasing the speed?

That's what I thought, but no. Ninety thousand miles an hour might be okay if you're going from planet to planet, but when dealing in a Star Trek universe we're talking interstellar not interplanetary travel. To handle traveling between stars, we have to kick things up into a much higher gear, say the speed of light.

Okay, so let's go the speed of light. I mean let's build a big, turbocharged mother of a starship, load it with antimatter, rev it up to light speed, and plot a course for the center of the Milky Way. Be there in no time, right?

Wrong.

Be there in 30,000 years! This is traveling at186,300 miles a second. Of course it won't feel that way to those of us onboard the ship because of something called time dilation (more on this later). We, on the starship, would only be twenty-one years older at the end of the trip, but back on Earth, assuming there is an Earth, things will have changed thirty millennia worth -- that's enough time for all of recorded human history to have come and gone five times. Considering that almost everything I buy these days (except sweatpants) is outdated the moment I open it, I'm betting Earth will be just a smidgen different than it is now.

What does all of this tell us? For one thing, if you want to trek among the stars, chugging around the galaxy at the dismal speed of light is not going to cut it. Even when moving at 186,300 miles per second (at that speed you would encircle the Earth seven and a half times in a second!), we would hardly even have gotten out of the gate before Star Trek's five-year mission would have been called on account of boredom. We certainly wouldn't have been encountering an alien a week.

Nope, for star trekking, we need something even faster than light speed. We need something that is, shall we say, warped.

Warped Factors

Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek's creator, was a smart guy. So when he looked at the starscape in which he had chosen to set the series, he quickly understood the inherent "spacey-ness" of space. Having been a World War II pilot himself, he certainly had some sense of speed and distance. And having devoured volumes of science fiction, he knew he wasn't the first writer to confront the problem of a huge galaxy. He also knew that being constrained to the piddling speed of light simply wouldn't do given the territory his spacefarers had to cover each week.

But there is a problem with traveling faster than light, and his name is Albert Einstein. Early in the century, after much ruminating, Einstein wrote this simple, elegant equation:

E=mc2

In addition to reflecting cosmic realities that have made everything from lasers to computers to the atomic bomb possible, this formula set the universal speed limit at 186,300 miles per second, the speed of a beam of light. Nothing, Einstein said, could travel faster, no way, no how. More precisely, he wrote in 1905, "Velocities greater than that of light...have no possibility of existence."

You can't go up against the leading genius of the age and expect to win, so Gene did what every other self-respecting science fiction writer this century had done before him. He made something up.

He called it warp drive.

Warp drive made it possible for Star Trek to skirt Einstein's universal speed limit and zip around the galaxy fast enough to knock off a thoughtful (usually) and entertaining adventure a week. Imagine the problems we would have had holding to our timetable without warp drive.

Kirk: "What's our estimated time of arrival at Tycho IV, Mr. Spock?"

Spock: "Exactly twenty thousand three hundred years, six months, three weeks, four days and seven hours, Captain."

Kirk: "Very well, break out Star Trek XLIII: Spock Jr. Meets the Son of the Nephew of Khan and have everyone injected with enough sodium pentothal to put them out cold for a couple millennia."

So warp drive, or something like it, was an absolute necessity. At top speed, the Starship Enterprise could travel exactly 199,516 times 186,300 miles per second. Damned fast. But again, just to refresh your memory about the incomprehensible dimensions of the universe, even at this speedy speed (1,380,000,000,000,000 miles per hour), it would take us eighteen days to cross the celestial territory of the United Federation of Planets (10,000 light-years across), and it would still require ten years to reach the next galaxy. It says so right in the Star Trek Encyclopedia. This is traveling at maximum warp to the next nearest galaxy, never mind the remaining 99,999,999,999 other ones. (I told you this was big.) Of course it would take no time at all to get to Proxima Centauri. In fact if you left right now, you'd arrive just inside of thirteen minutes, shorter than the average urban commute.

Gene was not the first science fiction writer to conjure up faster-than-light travel. Even by the early 1960s there had been plenty of references to it in science fiction literature going all the way back to John Campbell and his 1930s pulp magazine Astounding Stories. In fact it's Campbell who is credited with coining the term "warp drive."

Then there was Isaac Asimov's famous Foundation series where he had his characters jaunt around the universe at faster-than-light speeds using something called "hyper drive." In fact it was the discovery of hyperspace travel that had led to the rise of Asimov's fictional Galactic Empire in the first place. Not that he went into a whole lot of detail explaining how hyper drive worked. Here's how Asimov described the experience in the opening pages of Foundation:

He [Gaal] had steeled himself just a little for the Jump through hyper-space, a phenomenon one did not experience in simple interplanetary trips. The Jump remained, and would probably remain forever, the only practical method of travelling between the stars. Travel through ordinary space could proceed at no rate more rapid than that of ordinary light (a bit of scientific knowledge that belonged among the few items known since the forgotten dawn of human history), and that would have meant years of travel between even the nearest uninhabited systems. Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time...it ended in nothing more than a trifling jar, a little internal kick which ceased an instant before he could be sure he had felt it. That was all.

Nice passage, but not exactly advanced physics.

In the 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet, a movie that had enormous influence on Roddenberry, the terms hyper drive and hyperspeed were used again to describe the faster-than-light travel that got the movie's impetuous crew to the "Altair system" where they then proceeded to get into all sorts of hair-raising trouble.

In the opening credits the narrator intones (over some of the weirdest music to ever accompany a movie):

In the final decade of the twenty-first century, men and women in rocket ships landed on the moon. By 2200 a.d. they had reached the other planets of our solar system. Almost at once there followed the discovery of hyper drive through which the speed of light was first attained and later greatly surpassed. And so at last mankind began the conquest and colonization of deep space.

United Planets Cruiser C-57D now more than a year out from Earth base on a special mission to the planetary system of the great main sequence star Altair.

(Note to Cyril Hume who wrote the script: You were only 140 years off on the moon-landing prediction. We'll wait and see how accurate you are on everything else.) Once again, you can't really call this, well, rocket science.

The point is that Gene, as inspired as he was by these works, knew that this sort of vague sci-fi mumbo jumbo wouldn't do for Star Trek. Yes, in the earliest days of the show, Roddenberry played pretty fast and loose with the whole warp drive concept, and some unabashedly sloppy terminology was tossed around. At first it was considered nothing more than this "capability" that solved some obvious dramatic problems while it moved the Enterprise at high speed from one place to the other throughout the galaxy. I know that in the first pilot there was talk about hyper drive and warp factors, but no technical explanations were offered. That was fine for a pilot, but once the series was given the green light, Roddenberry and his writers were forced to become a little more specific.

Why? Well, a movie or pilot is a one-shot deal. You can slip a vague generalization or two by the audience and they might be willing to buy into it, but that's not going to fly for a weekly television series. In an ongoing story you can't escape explaining how various exotic technologies work because they keep coming up. Warp drive was certainly no exception. In fact, come to think of it, it probably came up more than any other did. Pretty regularly it seemed the warp drive engines seized up or were wrecked in battle or needed "routine maintenance," and Scotty would start yapping about how if we didn't get them fixed we were going to blow a twenty-third century gasket. More than one plot was driven by a need to get a fresh supply of dilithium crystals.

Naturally, being the captain of the ship, if something was wrong with the engines, I would have to ask Scotty for an explanation. That's what captains do, right? And, since the series was determined to feel real, the answer had to be plausible. I mean somehow it just wouldn't have worked if Lieutenant Commander Scott would have answered, "Well, Cap'n, the engines just keep goin' ka-chunka, ka-chunka, and if we don't fix 'em we're all going to die faster than Spock in The Wrath of Khan."

No, he would say something like, "Captain, you can't mix matter and antimatter cold. We'd go up in the biggest explosion..." That's what he told me in "The Naked Time," an episode where delusional crewman Lieutenant Kevin Riley had shut down the Enterprise's engines and we suddenly found the ship overheating and spiraling in the atmosphere of the planet we were orbiting (Psi 2000).

The whole scene went something like this:

Scotty: He's turned the engines off. They're completely cold. It'll take 30 minutes to regenerate them.

Uhura: (on the intercom) The ship's outer skin is beginning to heat, Captain. Orbit plot shows we have about 8 minutes left....

Kirk:...Captain's Log Supplemental: The Enterprise, spiraling down out of control. Ship's outer skin heating rapidly due to friction with planet atmosphere.

Scotty:...[I need] maybe 22, 23 minutes --

Kirk: Scotty, we've got six.

Scotty: Captain, you can't mix matter and antimatter cold...

Kirk: We can balance our engines into a controlled implosion.

Scotty: That's only a theory -- it's never been done!

Kirk: Bridge. Have you found Mr. Spock yet?

Scotty: If you wanted to chance odds of 10,000 to 1, maybe assuming we had a row of computers working weeks on the right formula...

Uhura: Mr. Spock is not on the bridge, Captain.

Where was that slippery Vulcan when I needed him?

Anyhow, if you notice, this dialogue doesn't have an iota of truly technical information in it, but the overall effect of the whole conversation was that real technical issues had to be dealt with and you couldn't just snap your fingers and make them all magically disappear.

It was very effective.

Warped Thinking

But how ...