No races that can travel intergalactically in star trek

You'd have to imagine Species 8472 have that ability....to leave fluidic space wherever they please.

seamus wrote: »

TOS as usual established a number of really bogey things, one being a galactic barrier.

Star Trek in general tends to be galaxy-centric for the obvious reason that once you go outside of that scope, you find yourself in a whole heap of trouble trying to keep distances and facts half-right. You also introduce a load of questions that have to be answered. Imagine the Enterprise finds itself ten galaxies away, and then Q appears. You'd be thinking, "Hang on, there are trillions of galaxes, each with trillions of stars, countless civilisations, and yet here is an omnipotent being just so happens to be toying with a human".
It's still mad on a galactic scale, but at least slightly believable.

Plus, it adds questions - if there are omnipotent and/or non-coporeal beings, why do they hang around our galaxy? Maybe they're not as omnipotent as they claim to be.

Quick calculations suggest that to reach Andromeda using quantum slipstream drive from Voyager would take about a year running the drive continuously. Experiences of it so far though suggest it has a very limited operational life and can only be run for short periods. That's a lot of time for a ship to be in intergalactic space with absolutely nothing nearby. So on the whole intergalactic travel is maybe just not feasible for typical corporeal life.

I've a feeling the Q are not as powerful as they admit. Even a couple of Voyager episodes alluded to that.

Also, why did the Borg not try traverse the galaxies?
Maybe the Sphere builders could or any extra dimensional beings like 8472 mentioned earlier.

Didn't Voyagers Caretakers come from another Galaxy?

The Traveler in TNG could?

So who here thinks there must be more intelligent life in our Galaxy than just us. I for one think there has to be. Our Galaxy is made up of trillions of stars and worlds so there has to be more intelligent life out there or maybe its only us in this Galaxy and then one set of intelligent being in say the Andromeda Galaxy and the same with all the other Galaxy's.
That would seem like an awful waste of space then do and if that was the case and one of them races had got interstellar travel its no wonder they don't want to visit our planet because they were probably like us once fighting over petty stupid things like Religion, land and oil and are probably about a thousand years ahead of us so we would be like insects to them.

I suppose the Planet killing machine that was in the TOS episode ''The Doomsday Machine'' was from a race from another Galaxy and came from another Galaxy but no one knows what that race was or from what Galaxy it came from.
There was also the race that took over the Enterprise and wanting too use it to get back to their Galaxy but it would take 300 years for them.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. No matter what inventions in the future for space travel it is proven to be impossible to travel faster than the speed of light.

Our Milky Way galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years across. So even light would take 100,000 years to travel from one side to the other.

So, if you had a star ship that could travel as fast as the speed of light, it would take 100,000 years to traverse it from one side to the other. That's a lot of Star Trek episodes.

So it makes sense the keep the Star Trek universe galaxy centric, rather then jumping from galaxy to galaxy. Star Wars was based in a different galaxy to ours.

This is one of sad things about space discovery and the search for life. The physics of the universe are such that it is so big that it is physically impossible to travel between galaxy's at any kind of speed that would be useful.

The Travellers are capable of intergalactic travel as are the Cytherians from Nth Degree and I wouldn't have put i past the Iconians either.

It would take about 2,500 years to get to the Andromeda Galaxy at Voyager's 1,000 lightyear per year estimated pace. Something doesn't exactly add up there since the star maps of the Federation show it to be a few thousand lightyears across and it doesn't take years to get from one side to the other.

pixelburp wrote: »

To paraphrase a famous line whose originator I can't recall: either we're alone in the universe, or we're not. Either outcome is terrifying.

Heck, we may not be the only life in the solar system, if Europa or Enceladus prove theories correct. I await the probes to the former with geeky anticipation.

Statistically there's simply no way planet earth is the only one in the entire universe with life. Just no chance, those are (pardon the pun) astronomical odds. Now, whether that life is capable of interstellar travel? That's where I'm sceptical we might ever make contact, or if there are species with that degree of scientific advancement. Something else to consider is that for many of those stars in the sky, the light took millions of years to reach us. Many of them are already dead, many more newly formed and whose light has yet to reach us.

The universe is tooling away with its plans in its own time, we're so far behind the cosmic news it's humbling.

Well said and I agree with all that. It amazing to think that why you look at the sky and see and star that that star might not be there anymore so in some ways when we look at the sky we are looking back in time.

either we're alone in the universe, or we're not. Either outcome is terrifying.

I am nearly sure that was by the brilliant and legendary Stephen Hawking.

OSI wrote: »

Bit meaningless though given the whole premise of Star Trek is based off humans achieving faster than light space travel via the warp drive.

Okay. Well I wouldn't say 'the whole premise'...but how much faster? I did some Star Trek 'research' and apparent Warp 1 is the speed of light.

Warp 9.9...

However, travelling at a warp factor of 9.9 from one end of the Milky Way galaxy – a body of hundreds of billions of stars that may stretch 150,000 to 200,000 light-years wide, according to a recent study – to the other could take 96 years. That's almost a decade longer than an average human life span today.

Obviously all this can be fixed by speeding up the capability of the 'warp core'.
Traveling from galaxy to galaxy though is whole other problem. Cue worm holes and alien technology.

AllForIt wrote: »

No. Our current understanding if final. It is a definite certainty.

Well, no. Its not. It's bound by our understanding. Another understanding may also exist. To suggest that there is no other possibility from our very, very limited position, is ignorant.

AllForIt wrote: »

No. Our current understanding if final. It is a definite certainty. Einstein proves there is no way to travel faster than the speed of light.

There are many people throughout history who have declared humanity's understanding of physics and other scientific branches to be nearly complete and final.

And then half a century later a whole heap of other crap falls out and it turns out we know nothing.

The speed of light and all of that fun is it not as simplistic as it's made out to be and my brain melts when you start adding in reference frames.

The basis of warp speed in the ST universe for example is that the ships form a field that removes the normal boundaries of space-time, thus allowing one to travel faster than if they were bound by space time. I typically picture it as a vehicle trying to drive through a foot of snow versus the same vehicle with a snow plough attached. For less energy you can move faster.

It's a fudge, of course, a magic plot device. But given that we already know that spacetime can be manipulated with energy fields, warp drive is not outside of the bounds of normal reality like, e.g. magic.

You're both correct; that is to say that Einstein's proof is final, and also that it is restricted to what we currently know about reality.

Newton's laws are final and remain unchanged since they've been formulated. But only within the bounds of the reality that Newton understood at that time. Once you move outside of classical mechanics, Newton's laws break down.

I'll admit that the desire for FTL is as much aspirational as it is theoretical, but it would be wrong to say that we know beyond doubt from now until the end of time that it is not possible to travel faster than light.

AllForIt wrote: »

No. Our current understanding if final. It is a definite certainty. Einstein proves there is no way to travel faster than the speed of light.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2JCoIGyGxc

Well then we'll just resort to this!

Evade wrote: »

The speed of discovery seems to be slowing down which to me indicates one of two possibilities. Either we've already solved most of the secrets of the universe or we've gotten about as far as our capacity to understand will allow. The latter seems far more likely to me.

Oh I strongly disagree. Quite the opposite I'd suggest.


We went thousands of year relatively discovering feic all. In the last few decades we are learning more and more.... ....and leveraging that to learn more again!

Zulu wrote: »

Well considering that we can conceive of slowing time and rationalise the same where gravity is excessive.
And consider that we have successfully transported a particle.
And consider that we are potentially existing within a multiverse.
Perhaps, given the technology, we could remove a body from this verse, and return it again.
Perhaps, we could return that body at another point in this verse.

Should that point be a distance from the origination point greater that the distance light would have traveled in the same time, we'd have achieved FTL.

This would adhere to Einsteins theory (note theory), but achieve a conflicting result.

Imagination is a wonderful thing, and is probably the reason we stopped believing that the earth was flat, and the centre of the universe.

But the World is not flat and nor is it at the centre of the Universe.

We stopped thinking or believing the World was flat because it was proven wrong.

Evade wrote: »

I was thinking in a more recent time frame. There seemed to be big leaps from around the mid 19th to mid 20th century often by small teams or individuals and since then it seems like it's been very incremental needing huge teams of people.

It might not seem that way because manufacturing has caught up and everyone has the internet in their pocket but that's really just applying a refined version of a torpedo guidance system from the 1940s.

Yeah, but it's easy to get a condensed version of history when you're looking at it retrospectively. And when you already know what the "next step" is going to be. You have a list of dates and achievement, and the downtime between them is not visible.

The oft-quoted one is the fact that humans went from learning how to fly, to landing on the moon inside of 60 years. And in the fifty years since we haven't advanced much.
Aeronautical engineers would probably disagree. We haven't gone further, but we have learned how to do it way more efficiently and safely. SpaceX have managed to return rockets from Space and land them nose up on a barge in the middle of the ocean. A feat that would seem almost like magic to the engineers who landed on the moon; something out of sci-fi.

The torpedo guidance system from the 1940s isn't that impressive. It's just a refined version of Babbage's difference engine from 1822.

The singularity is one topic that always interests me. Because it's often touted as a point where we suddenly know everything immediately (or in a really short space of time). In reality it's a logarithmic scale charting the pace of invention/discovery. 10 years ago, Internet in your pocket was only starting to become a big thing. 10 years before that, Internet was only starting to take off, as were mobile phones.
10 years before that there was no Internet or mobile phones (not in widespread use anyway).
Think about how much life has changed every decade for the last fifty years, and how dizzying that would appear to someone from 1800, whose life wasn't very different at all from his parents and grandparents. We're in the singularity right now. The pace of change and innovation is constantly speeding up. But it's very hard to see when you're standing in the middle of it.

I think it was pop scientist Michu Kako who likened development to sand in an hour glass.

The sand slowly piles up in a cone, higher and higher (we learn, develop, implement, learn, develop...) until there is a big shift and a little landslide happens (a significant breakthrough, a monumental development). It then resumes the slow piling up until the next breakthrough.

It's probably over simplistic as there are different breakthroughs happening in different areas all the time, but consider that we are in a "learn, develop, implement" cycle just before a major shift.

Quantum computing?