I'm Working on That: A Trek From Science Fiction to Science Fact (Star Trek) - Softcover

Shatner, William

 
9780671047382: I'm Working on That: A Trek From Science Fiction to Science Fact (Star Trek)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0671047388 ISBN 13: 9780671047382
Verlag: Gallery Books, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

"BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY."™
During the 1960s, in an age when the height of technology was a crackly AM transistor radio, Star Trek® envisioned a time when communication devices worked without wires.
"WORKING"
Computers of the decade took up entire climate-controlled rooms and belonged only to the government and a few very large corporations. Yet Captain Kirk had one small enough to sit on the top of his desk -- and it talked back to him.
"AHEAD, WARP FACTOR 2"
While man still hadn't walked on the moon, the crew of the Starship Enterprise™ traveled between star systems faster than the speed of light. Its crew was able to walk on other worlds.

Over the past three decades, Star Trek has become a global phenomenon. Its celebration of mankind's technical achievements and positive view of the future have earned it an enduring place in the world's psyche. It has inspired countless viewers to become scientists, inventors, and astronauts. And they, in turn, have wondered if they could make even a little piece of Star Trek real in their own lifetime. As one noted scientist said when he saw a plywood, plaster and plastic set that represented the ship's warp engines, "I'm working on that."

As in his missions aboard the fictional Starship Enterprise, William Shatner, the actor who is Captain James T. Kirk, and his co-author, Chip Walter, take us on an adventure to discover the people who are working on the future we will all share. From traveling through space at warp speeds to beaming across the continent, noted scientists from Caltech to MIT explore the realms of what was once considered improbable and show how it just might be possible.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William Shatner is the author of nine Star Trek novels, including the New York Times bestsellers The Ashes of Eden and The Return. He is also the author of several nonfiction books, including Get a Life! and I’m Working on That. In addition to his role as Captain James T. Kirk, he starred as Denny Crane in the hit television series from David E. Kelley, Boston Legal—a role for which he won two Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe. Find more information at WilliamShatner.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Gallery Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0671047388
ISBN 13 
9780671047382
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780671047375: I'm Working on That: A Trek From Science Fiction to Science Fact (Star Trek)

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  067104737X ISBN 13:  9780671047375
Verlag: Star Trek, 2002
Hardcover