Season 2 of the critically acclaimed Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiered June 15 (streaming on Paramount+). So today, Short Wave Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber chats with two Trekkie physicists about the science powering the show and why they love the franchise. Astrophysicist Erin Macdonald is the science consultant for Star Trek, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a theoretical physicist and author of the book The Disordered Cosmos. This episode, the trio discusses not only the feasibility of warp drive, global cooperation and representation and how the transporters that beam crew members from the surface of a planet to the ship might be breaking fundamental laws of physics.Questions about the "scientific" underpinnings of other pop culture? Email us at shortwave@npr.org. We'd love to hear from you!
The thing about the galactic barrier is that it’s pointless. The average distances between galaxies is so vast that a ship moving at Warp 9.8 would take about a millennium to cross.
One of the theories i’ve heard about it is that one of the races with much higher power levels, or a higher powered being, may have constructed the barrier to protect our galaxy from something outside. I imagine that we’ll probably never know what the person who originally suggested this idea might’ve thought for an origin for it, or if it was just a plot device they came up with to turn that one guy into a super being… but… you’re right, given that as far as we know, even the spore drive turns to useless when nearing the galactic barrier.
However… one might find that the mycelial network picks up again somewhere on the other side of the barrier, and might allow for rapid intergalactic travel.
But, it’s not really necessary – the Milky Way is still even in Discovery’s current time, quite unexplored by the Federation. We could make hundreds of years of Star Trek stories without ever needing to leave the galaxy.
The thing about the galactic barrier is that it’s pointless. The average distances between galaxies is so vast that a ship moving at Warp 9.8 would take about a millennium to cross.
One of the theories i’ve heard about it is that one of the races with much higher power levels, or a higher powered being, may have constructed the barrier to protect our galaxy from something outside. I imagine that we’ll probably never know what the person who originally suggested this idea might’ve thought for an origin for it, or if it was just a plot device they came up with to turn that one guy into a super being… but… you’re right, given that as far as we know, even the spore drive turns to useless when nearing the galactic barrier.
However… one might find that the mycelial network picks up again somewhere on the other side of the barrier, and might allow for rapid intergalactic travel.
But, it’s not really necessary – the Milky Way is still even in Discovery’s current time, quite unexplored by the Federation. We could make hundreds of years of Star Trek stories without ever needing to leave the galaxy.