Star trek space phenomena12/14/2023 In general, Star Trek portrays a future you hope will come true, albeit after humanity endured terrible troubles like the Eugenics Wars led by the genetically enhanced conqueror Khan Noonien Singh, and a third world war, and rose above them. That said, there are still shades of a more cynical future. While the ships and officers of Starfleet use Frickin' Laser Beams, Deflector Shields, Photoprotoneutron Torpedoes and essentially invented Technobabble, the main way they solve problems is by talking, and by finding out the Commonality Connection between us humans and the Monster of the Week. Cynicism, at least partially because of its solid allegiance to the Enlightened side of Romanticism Versus Enlightenment. It is, for the most part, way on the idealistic side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Every series dealt with a particular crew, mostly of various ships named Enterprise. The setting in every series is sometime in the distant future featuring a collection of broadly similar rubber-foreheaded polities spanning (fairly small) segments of the so-called 'quadrants' of the Milky Way galaxy, with the stories centered around an Earth-based interstellar government called the United Federation of Planets and the exploits of its fleet of starships, Starfleet. The trope Wagon Train to the Stars was taken from Roddenberry's own statements on how he pitched the concept. Starting with Star Trek: The Original Series in 1966, it was inspired by such works as Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still in being introspective sci-fi, but pulled from any number of genres to tell a story. As such, it was not above being Anvilicious or engaging in thinly-veiled social satire, but considering its origin during The '60s, sometimes they couldn't afford to be subtle. As originally envisioned by its creator, Gene Roddenberry, the science fiction nature of the series was just a method to address many social issues of the time that could not have been done in a normal drama. And he'll be able to tell he's doing it not by looking at the outside universe but by making observations while inside his rocket - for example, the vibrations of the engines and the push of his body against the floor during deceleration.Star Trek is a long-running science-fiction franchise. He will be doing something that shifts him away from his special frame of reference. This act of turning around has a major impact on Bob's reckoning of time. In other words, he needs to slow down, stop, turn his ship around, reaccelerate and come back home. But for them to compare notes, Bob has to return to Earth. It's true that as long as Bob is flying along at a constant speed, he and Alice will fundamentally disagree about the flow of time, and both perspectives will be valid. We can solve the twin paradox by looking at the whole picture. Who's correct, Alice or Bob? This is the real paradox. So, when they meet again, she should be younger than him, because not as much time has passed for her.īut Alice says the exact same thing about Bob, because according to her, she's the one staying still and he's the one moving. In Bob's calculations, his clock is running normally, and it's Alice's that should be running slowly. Yes, it sounds improbable, but from the point of view of physics, Bob can't tell the difference. So, from Bob's perspective, he's staying perfectly still, and it's Alice (and the whole Earth) that's racing away from him. Have you ever been in a car and you see the car next to you reverse, and for a moment, you think you're moving forward? Your mind is relying on outside cues to help tell you if you're in motion. If you're moving at the exact same speed (no accelerations or decelerations), it's impossible to tell if you're the one who's moving, or if you're staying still and the rest of the universe is moving. This is the crucial thought experiment that helped Einstein develop special relativity. Everything just feels totally normal - so normal, in fact, that as long as he's not accelerating, he can't even tell he's moving at all. It's not like he moves in slow motion or anything. Nothing feels different for Bob when he's traveling. This is exactly what the physics of special relativity demands: Different observers in the universe will have different calculations of the flow of time depending on their velocity. The actual paradoxĪs head-scratching as this tale is, it's not a paradox. But depending on how fast he went, it could have been decades, or even centuries, for Alice. But if Bob were to get in a rocket ship and cruise around the galaxy at near light speed, things would be a bit different.įor Bob, maybe only a few months or a couple of years passed on his journey. As long as they remain near each other, their clocks will stay synchronized and they will age at the same rate. To explore the full implications of this idea, let's start with some hypothetical twins, Alice and Bob.
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