Captain Kirk might want to avoid taking the starship Enterprise to warp speed, unless he's ready to shrug off interstellar hydrogen atoms that
would deliver a lethal radiation blast to both ship and crew.
There are just two hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter on
average in space, which poses no threat to spaceships traveling at low speeds.
But those same lone atoms would transform into deadly galactic space mines for
a spaceship that runs into them at near-light
speed, according to calculations based on Einstein's special theory of
relativity.
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 personal interest in this thought experiment
began 20 years ago, when his son Arthur asked him if there was friction in
space. The father responded that yes, there would be hydrogen bumping off a
spaceship. But he soon realized that the stray atoms of hydrogen gas would
actually go right through the ship traveling close to light speed, and
irradiate both crew and electronics in the process.
More recently, the physicist and his now-grown son
calculated the scenario of a spaceship trying to travel halfway across our
Milky Way galaxy in just 10 years. That's doable in theory, because special
relativity states that time slows down and distances shrink for travelers
approaching light speed.
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
At the higher speed, the human crew of a starship would
experience something like getting struck by the high-energy proton beam from
the Large
Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. On top
of killing the crew, such powerful levels of energy would also likely destroy the
starship electronics.
"I'm not claiming this is a brilliant new discovery
or anything," Edelstein told SPACE.com. "I'm just saying that it's
interesting."
Some audience members at the American Physical Society event
protested that Kirk, Spock and the "Star
Trek" crew would all still live because of the starship Enterprise having shields. But Edelstein noted some of the existing difficulties with
creating an electromagnetic shield with any resemblance to "Star
Trek" technology.
Solid shields seem even more hopeless. A starship might
need anywhere from a 4.4 -meter to 4,400-meter thickness of lead shielding to
deflect the hydrogen radiation — added mass that would make travel at
near-light speed even more impractical.
The physicist concluded by suggesting that
extraterrestrials might not have visited Earth because of all the problems in
traveling at near-light speeds, including how to deal with deadly hydrogen
space mines. But for the record, he does believe that alien life exists.
"Getting between stars is a huge problem unless we
think of something really, really different," Edelstein said. "I'm
not saying that we know everything and that it's impossible. I'm saying it's
kind of impossible based on what we know right now."
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