If you know about warp drive, it’s probably from Star Trek. Warp is the technology that’s supposed to make the USS Enterprise move really fast. But did you know that some physicists at NASA and major universities are trying to turn this imaginary technology into reality? Spacecraft propelled by rockets move too slowly to reach distant planets in a reasonable amount of time. If we want to make our civilization’s storyline more exciting, we’ll need to speed things up.
HELLO FROM THE CHILDREN OF PLANET EARTH
Light travels at 299,792 kilometers per second, or about 671 million miles per hour. No physical object with mass can reach that speed, according to one of Albert Einstein’s theories, called special relativity. But obeying this cosmic speed limit would have caused headaches for the writers of the original Star Trek series, which first aired in 1965.
“Limiting the Enterprise to [less than light] speed is a problem when protagonists need to get to a new adventure each week,” explains Nick Sagan. He’s a science fiction writer who worked on two Star Trek series, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. “Just imagine the helmsman saying, ‘Yes, Captain, course laid in for the Klingon homeworld . . . We’ll get there in about 900 years; you might want to make yourself comfortable.’”
If anyone knows personally about slow and, carry gold-plated copper records with selections of Earth music and greetings in many languages. Nick’s father, the late astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan, helped NASA select these messages—just in case extraterrestrials ever find the probes. One of those greetings is Nick at age six saying, “Hello from the children of planet Earth.”
