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Scientist Wil McCarthy shows how Star Trek's planets explode
I'm not in the habit of spoiling movies for people who haven't seen them yet, so I hope it's no surprise to say that in J.J. Abrams new Star Trek movie (aptly titled Star Trek), a planet gets crushed into a black hole. I say "no surprise" because stuff like this happens all the time in Star Trek.
Remember how the random explosion of Ceti Alpha Six doomed Khan Noonien Singh and his followers to a brutal desert subsistence on Ceti Alpha Five? Or how the Doomsday Machine cut a swath through the Alpha Quadrant, gobbling up planets along the way? Or the Crystalline Entity, with its habit of devouring entire biospheres?
And let's not forget the Genesis Planet, whose backbone of unstable protomatter doomed it to short life and a quick, violent death. Or the habitable stars that were so casually destroyed by the criminal Dr. Tolian Soran in his quest to return to the spacetime "nexus" where he'd once spent a brief eternity.
Nor is Star Trek unique in this regard. Stars and planets are regularly destroyed in Star Wars, too, and in lots of other science fiction from the Golden Age right up to the very doorstep of the Singularity.
But here's the thing: destroying a planet takes time. They're big, dense objects, and destroying one is not like popping a balloon or even vaporizing a city with nukes. In fact, a better analogy would be open-pit mining, where solid rock needs to be broken up and carted away, using thousands of tons of dynamite over dozens of years. Even if you drop a bomb or fire a death ray powerful enough to reduce a whole planet to rubble, you still have the problem of gravity; that rubble is going to stay where it is, or at worst, fly apart and then fall back together again. The resulting planet would be loose rather than solid—picture a pile of sand or a dump truck full of gravel—but it would still be round, it would still have gravity, and you could still orbit your spaceship around it. The process would of course kill every living thing on the planet, which is probably good enough for military or political purposes, but the standards of Hollywood are higher; the planet actually has to disappear.
In the case of an explosion, the energies involved are colossal. The Earth (for example) weighs 6 billion quadrillion tons, and even if we ignore the force required to break it into small pieces, we still need to accelerate every scrap of it to escape velocity—over 10,000 meters per second—in every possible direction, to overcome their collective gravity and keep them from falling back together again. That means almost a quadrillion quadrillion gigajoules of kinetic energy. That's the equivalent of every lightning storm on Earth for a million quadrillion years, or the total heat output of the sun for three full decades. Yeah. And of course, to achieve the required visual effect we need to deliver all that energy in a fraction of a second, so even if the Death Star were made entirely out of fully charged Toyota Prius batteries, you'd still need 50 billion billion Death Stars firing simultaneously to make it happen.
Do you get what I'm saying here?
Now, Star Trek gets around this problem by dropping a mysterious substance called "red matter" into the planet's core, touching off some kind of gravitic chain reaction that collapses the whole thing into a black hole. That's a little more reasonable—if a word like "reasonable" can be used to describe the death of 6 billion people and the total erasure of their culture, history and even the biosphere and geology that supported them. But like a lot of Star Trek, what we see on the screen is difficult to reconcile with the known laws of physics.
Let's assume a droplet of red matter weighs 1 billion metric tons. It clearly weighs a lot less than that, or a Volkswagen-sized sphere of the stuff would be impossible to haul around even with the best warp drive in the universe. But we're being generous here, if "generous" is a word I can use to describe, well, you know. In the first place, you wouldn't need a fancy-schmancy mining drill boring a hole to the planet's center, because no material would be strong enough to hold the red matter up. It would drop right through the crust, mantle and core like a cannonball through a pile of feathers. In fact, it would zip right through the planet and out the other side, crisscrossing through it over and over again until friction finally slowed it down and stopped it. That could take days, but let's say (again, generously) that red matter has some special property that allows it to stop dead the moment it reaches the planet's center. All you have to do is drop it from a thousand kilometers up, and the rest is history.
First problem? Planets are big, as I said, and to reach the center of an Earth-like one you need to fall through more than 6,000 kilometers of solid material. This takes even longer than you might guess, because once you're inside the planet you start to experience less of its gravity, until at the center you're completely weightless, because the gravity of all that rock and magma is pulling outward equally in every direction. Once you're in, there's less and less force to accelerate you. Including the 1,000 kilometers of initial altitude, the fall alone would take 2.8 minutes.
Second problem? Even if a black hole forms right away, it's simply not that destructive. Remember: It only weighs a billion tons—one quadrillionth of the mass of the planet around it. It has a fierce gravitational pull, yes, but that drops off rapidly with distance. An object 6 centimeters away would experience almost 2,000 times the pull of Earth's gravity, but just 2.6 meters away the pull is equal to Earth's surface gravity, and a few meters beyond that, it's negligible. So the object will very quickly gobble up everything within a few meters—adding at most a few million tons to its weight—and then very slowly gobble up the stuff farther up. Remember, too, that while the magma at Earth's core is very hot and is under tremendous pressure, it's also weightless, sitting in the one spot where the world's gravity cancels out completely. And it's extremely viscous, acting in many ways more like a solid than liquid. So imagine it dripping and oozing, forming droplets in the superheated cavern that has suddenly opened up in the planet's center. These droplets gradually drift toward the black hole (which is a microscopic pinpoint that still has no more mass than a small asteroid) and are consumed by it. Or maybe the cavern walls squirt like volcanic fountains, or maybe even swell and expand inward to relieve the pressure and fill the void. Either way, the core-stuff—mostly iron, with bits of other heavy metals mixed in—is like taffy; it can only flow so fast.
Rolling the clock forward a few minutes, we find the cavern is now half a kilometer across, and the black hole is eight times as massive as it was at the start. And yet the gravitational pull on the cavern walls is smaller than ever, barely two thousandths of the gravity pressing you into your chair while you read this. It's only the pressure of the rock and magma above, and the lack of any real structural integrity, that keeps the walls collapsing at all. Really, this is not going to be a speedy process! I don't really know exactly how fast it would unfold—we'd need some very sophisticated fluid dynamics simulations to figure that out. And with the black hole sucking in all the light and heat emitted by the cavern walls, they might even start to cool off and solidify, turning into solid iron. And that would end the party right there.
But let's say that doesn't happen. Let's say the red matter is vibrating, wiggling back and forth down there, striking the cavern walls to keep everything stirred up and crumbly. It didn't stop dead at the core at all, just slowed way down, so it's in there tracing Spirograph patterns through the magma while the planet turns around it. Whee! Eventually (and this could still take days), it has eaten away the planet's entire core. By now the planet has a real problem, because the black hole has started to gain a significant amount of mass, and the layer that sits above the core—the mantle—is a lot lighter and runnier than the stuff below it. It collapses inward with much less resistance, and the reverberations are felt throughout the planet, which is now ringing like a bell and cracking under the stress of a billion simultaneous earthquakes. The void around the hypermass is now 2,000 kilometers wide, and the pull of gravity at the margins is 40 gee, so things are starting to happen a lot more quickly. For the people on the surface, this is bad news indeed, and anyone who can get off the planet has probably done so by now.
And yet.
Even when a good percentage of this unfortunate world has been sucked inside the black hole, the mass of the total system cannot exceed the mass of the planet, plus the (comparatively tiny) mass of the droplet of red matter that triggered the cataclysm. If that's not clear, let me state it another way: throughout the ordeal, the gravity on the planet's surface never changes. Never. And when the surface finally begins to collapse—probably several days after the start of the process—its bits and pieces (both living and non) still have more than 6,000 kilometers to fall before they reach the center. The gravity gradients are all different now—the pull grows stronger, not weaker, as you get deeper inside the planet—but even so the fall takes 2.3 minutes, which is much longer than the final collapse we see in the movie.
Actually, it's even more complicated than that, because even after swallowing an entire Earth-sized planet, the black hole is only 9 millimeters across. That's a very small target; much of the falling debris is going to miss it altogether and fall instead into highly elliptical orbits around it. That situation is unstable; objects would be banging and grinding against one another for years. Some would be knocked into the black hole in a shrieking burst of X-rays; others would be ejected from its gravity and escape into space. As for a shock wave, I don't think we'd see one. I'm not saying there wouldn't be energy released—in fact, as more and more matter fell onto the black hole, it would probably look like a continuous H-bomb explosion. But aside from light and charged particles, I don't think anything would escape from the gravity well. The energy required for gas or grit to escape from the region adjacent to black hole's surface is simply too great. Once you get close enough, you're trapped for good. And yet, within a few days friction would slow most of the flailing debris objects down until they were in circular orbits. In a miniature, speeded-up version of the evolution of Saturn, the black hole would acquire a ring of orbiting rubble.
And here's the funny part: some of the debris in that ring might be living people. Close to the event horizon the tidal stresses are enough to tear a person apart into component atoms, but a hundred kilometers farther out, the stresses would be felt but would not be lethal. Such a disaster would be a rough ride indeed, but anyone wearing a spacesuit, or holed up in a submarine, or trapped in a bank vault or an underground military bunker, would have a small but possibly nonzero chance of surviving. In a world of 6 billion, there might just be a few bewildered refugees floating here and there. The odds are even better for plant seeds and bacterial spores, some of which have been shown to survive the vacuum, radiation, heat and cold of outer space. And if we're talking clonable DNA, well, there should be plenty of that, albeit smeared across billions of chunks of jagged rock. There would also be artifacts, including any satellites or space stations in orbit around the planet before the disaster started. Remember, the gravity they experience would not change either; their orbits would hardly quiver. Point is, while the planet would of course be a total loss, a determined salvage operation could probably find enough bits and pieces of its history and biology to cobble together, on some other similar planet, a rough approximation of the way things used to be.
So. The planet's destruction would be nowhere near as quick or as total as Star Trek's otherwise capable writers and director would have us believe. Then again, given that the whole sequence occupies only a few minutes of the storyline's 2.1-hour runtime, you should probably go see it anyway, as millions of people have already done. True to the Star Trek franchise, it's a tense, fun and ultimately hopeful story that will likely kick off a whole new sequence of rebooted cinematic glory.
Sources:
McCarthy, Wil: The Collapsium, Appendix C, Technical Notes, Del Rey Books, 2000
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org): "lightning", "Prius", "iron", "Earth"
The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com): Star Trek
www.rottentomatoes.com: Star Trek
C. Balto and S.M. Cali: PaperTech Astronomical Data I, Papertech Marketing Group, 1985
Wil McCarthy is a rocket guidance engineer, robot designer, nanotechnologist, science-fiction author and occasional aquanaut. He has contributed to three interplanetary spacecraft, five communication and weather satellites, a line of landmine-clearing robots and some other "really cool stuff" he can't tell us about. His short writings have graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Wired, Nature and other major publications, and his book-length works include the New York Times notable Bloom, Amazon "Best of Y2K" The Collapsium and most recently, To Crush the Moon. His acclaimed nonfiction book Hacking Matter is now available as a free download.
By Spork at 12:49 PM ON 05/26/09
Excellent article. I'd love to see more goodies like this on scifiwire.com. :)
By datarat at 1:00 PM ON 05/26/09
Terrific article, and I loved the science. However, in defense of the film makers I'd like to say that an accurate representation would have been less dramatic than "Desperate Housewives", so I'll suspend my disbelief.
By MikeMarano at 1:02 PM ON 05/26/09
Ah, Wil! Great article! Your non-fiction writing (to say nothing of your fiction!) pushes the same "Gosh! Wow!" buttons that the best Hard SF of the Clement and Clarke school does,
By ObeyMyBrain at 2:03 PM ON 05/26/09
Yeah, red matter was the basically the only thing that made me go "Wait a minute" in the movie. Well, that and shouldn't Vulcan have had colonies? I know there was the temple/listening post shown in Enterprise but there should have been a lot more than a few tens of thousands of Vulcans off planet.
By Al at 2:06 PM ON 05/26/09
Very interesting article on the theories and limitations of our current technology. It has little to do with science fiction along the ranks of star trek or star wars, but interesting nonetheless.
By BuckBlack at 2:21 PM ON 05/26/09
As much as I enjoyed the film, I have to say that the 'red matter' thing made me groan.
Surely, the makers could have come up with a more plausible macguffin; something based on 'real science'. Maybe they should consult Wil when they next need a cataclysmic event to shake the audience out of their seats.
By labrat at 2:25 PM ON 05/26/09
Nice article but unfortunately it omits the fact that Red Matter is simply a highly refined form of Handwavium (this is not the scientific explanation you're looking for).
The easiest way to see this is that when the planet collapses someone on the Enterprise mentions an increase in the gravitational pull. The fact is that if you are in orbit around a spherical body that collapses into a black hole you simply remain in orbit. The mass of the object never increases and so the gravity never increases. What does happen is that it becomes possibly to get much much closer to the center of mass which would increase gravity, but unless the Enterprise actually turned towards the planet that would never have happened.
Additionally, as pointed out, if you were to somehow crush a planet down small enough to make a black hole the event horizon would be extremely small (not to mention how tiny a black hole would be made by a space ship). In the movie the black holes are far too large to have been created simply from the ordinary matter present.
This means that either the Red Matter is so mindbogglingly massive that it is what is actually creating the big black holes we see (with the mass of the planet just a small addition) or that the Red Matter somehow creates the black hole through means other than its basic mass (maybe it magically gains mass or somehow transports mass from somewhere else). Given that people are able to handle the Red Matter (albeit with equipment) and the strange actions they seem to have to take with it (having to drop it into the core of the planet) I would not think it operates simply through an intrinsically high mass.
I was initially annoyed by the Red Matter and the lack of any kind of explanation of it but I latter realized that by leaving it so completely vague (even to the point of having a very non-definitive name) the script writers left themselves an awful lot of wiggle room when people tried to point out the scientific problems with its behavior.
By Randall at 2:40 PM ON 05/26/09
By YakNose at 2:43 PM ON 05/26/09
Wonderful article, and very fun to read.
It doesn't bother me to have the occasional thing like red matter and a great collapse visual for a movie, but it's a lot of fun sometimes to remember just how silly it is.
I'd love to see more articles like this.
By treqqer1 at 2:56 PM ON 05/26/09
Oh Come on!!!! Don't contaminate our favorite Science Fiction with SCIENCE!!!!!!
Where's the sport in that?? Of course, the science presented is sound and the writing is witty and lucid. Which makes the affront WORSE!!!!
Anyway, my question is - WHERE THE HELL WAS THE VULCAN DEFENSE FLEET??!!
The Vulcans were supposed to be MORE ADVANCED than Earth in the movie's time frame, so why did they just sit there and let Nero blackhole-isize their planet without lifting a finger to defend themselves? Makes no sense to me.
Vulcan gone? Sorry - can't accept it.
(It's worse than the kissy-face stuff between Spock & Uhura!!)
Loved the film, though.
By Zorro6 at 3:01 PM ON 05/26/09
I hypothesize that the actual element name of red matter is "coincidentium." Not only does it distort mass and gravity, it also influences bizarre and random coincidence in the nearby space-time continuum.
I still enjoyed the movie, though. :)
By PonderousMan at 3:31 PM ON 05/26/09
There is one fairly clear way out of this - just as handwavey, but from what I can see, at least it provides a consistent set of results.
The movie repeatedly references "setting off" the red matter, at which point it does way funky things. While it's never clear just what does set it off, it sure looked to me like when it gets set off, red matter *gains a whole lot of mass*... like enough to become a really big mucking black hole, in nearly no time flat.
If you add this to the picture, then at least the "increase in gravity" is accounted for - and I'd like to see what happens to Wil's analysis if in fact the black hole created when the red matter "goes off" is more like a solar mass, or even many solar masses. Or maybe another way to ask it would be, how big would the hole have to be for the tidal forces to muck with the full structure of an Earth/Vulcan sized planet? That would allow us to guesstimate how much mass "jumps" when red matter "goes off"...
By Dr. Malcolm Long at 3:40 PM ON 05/26/09
Wheee, that was great! I especially loved that some folks "would have a small but possibly nonzero chance of surviving." I think I'll start describing my romantic chances as nonzero!
By Al at 3:52 PM ON 05/26/09
Alright, I admit, the last time I was light years from home and watched a glob of red matter make a meal of a planet, it took a few moments longer than in the Trek movie, but if I remember correctly, the reaction it created had nothing to do with its own mass as the substance reacted in a similar way to a virus which infected the center of the planet and transformed the matter into the black hole it eventually became.
The gragvometric changes did not need to take place on the surface of the planet in order to cause it to crumble as each infected portion of matter collapsed into itself.
Oh, wait. Maybe that hasn't happened yet.
Computer, what year is this?
By Earl, the All-Knowing at 4:21 PM ON 05/26/09
Oh, just FABulous. When I created the universe, my buddy Baltazer thought that red would just be a DYNAMITE color for the window treatments for the Delta Vega system.
Who knew???
By Screamingecko at 4:29 PM ON 05/26/09
So what about the Pon Farr? I can see it now, the few remaining male Vulcans all fling themselves into the black hole, snuffed out in a salmon/lemming orgy. We'll call it A Pon Too Farr?
By gorehound696 at 4:42 PM ON 05/26/09
the destruction of vulcan did more to piss me off than any other thing in this film.what a cheap shot to take just to make a film on star trek.go ahead and throw out the creation of someone a lot smarter than you filmmakers are it is a real shame to have vulcan destroyed.
and as others have said it is a dumb thing to have done to us long time star trek fans.
10,000 vulcans left !!!!
what no colonies ???
no advanced weaponry ???
By Myrddin at 4:45 PM ON 05/26/09
Great article. Please do more like this in the future. People interested in learning more about "fantastic" science should check out Michio Kaku. Physics of the Impossible and Hyperspace are well worth a read.
By IsoTek at 5:08 PM ON 05/26/09
You know, I just went to see the movie for it's entertainment value. Personally I don't turn to Star Trek for my scientific pursuits but you all go right ahead and pick it apart for it's scientific ambiguity.
By Blue Sky Singularity at 5:40 PM ON 05/26/09
Along with the final orbiting debris of the planet, would there be a tube of possibly breathable air circling the black hole for a short amount of time?
By Thogar at 5:40 PM ON 05/26/09
Wouldn't it make more scientific sense, at least as it pertains to quickly destroying a planet, to have some technology that opens a wormhole to a huge, honkin' black hole instead? If they drilled a hole into the planet, then dropped in a "wormhole bomb" that would open up between the heart of a planet and somewhere inside the event horizon of a massive black hole, it would seem that THAT would be a slightly quicker way to make a planet go "squish."
I might be way off in my thinking scientifically, but it still has to be miles closer to real science than a 2 meter diameter blob of shiny "Ketchup O' Doom."
By Son of a Maui Portagee at 5:59 PM ON 05/26/09
Generally speaking, if I can categorize something introduced in the plot as "Treknological" such as Soran's missile or "red matter", I'll give it a pass as this is a civilization that can bend space/time to their will to travel to the stars and now trans warp transport as well. Beyond looking for self-consistency in how it is described to work (If it is mentioned at all.) there's not much our level of civilization can determine about it employing technology that can do that.
What gets my science dander up is when they take a well-observed and studied phenomenon, a supernova, in not only our galaxy but others even in our own time, and have the most scientific character in the movie espouse twaddle about one being an eminent threat to the galaxy as a whole, and that it caught one Treknological civilization by "surprise".
By Son of a Maui Portagee at 6:45 PM ON 05/26/09
IsoTek,
Whether you care or not, ToS was built on stories contributed by science-fiction writers of the era and the original fan base that saved it was drawn from science-fiction fans which organized at science-fiction conventions.
What you describe is a love of science-fantasy which is a perfectly valid form of fiction that encompasses many other works such as STAR WARS. To deny Trek and it's fans the right to discuss how well the science and the scientific-method is written in its supposed science-fiction is to deny Trek itself. It is to betray the you really do not like STAR TREK at all for you despise how it came to be. You despise its roots.
By kelsouth at 6:48 PM ON 05/26/09
That was really interesting. I always enjoy learning about the science behind sci-fi.
By jdmimic at 6:51 PM ON 05/26/09
Interesting article and I would second the request for more like it.
But, seriously, with as many scientific and logical fallacies as were in that movie, I doubt the addition of a ludicrous bit of red matter really matters that much. Anyone hoping to see logic in these movies will be greatly disappointed.
I liked the movie, but had to completely shut down my logic centers to do so. As another example using the red matter: a single drop makes a black hole out of a planet, but a car-sized blob doesn't have any more effect than the single drop?
and captcha still sucks
By Lexomatic at 10:25 PM ON 05/26/09
IMHO, the problem wasn't with astrophysical phenomena behaving unlike anything we know. The problem was the simplistic names they were given -- "black hole" and "supernova" -- when just a few extra words would've satisfied the tech-nitpickers. "It resembles a wormhole," "black hole catalyst," "an exceptionally powerful supernova with faster-than-light aspects." Or the Starfleet characters could lampshade the unusual behavior of Red Matter: "No normal black hole could do that!" (The scientists of "Stargate Atlantis" would probably do exactly that. Not that *it* didn't play fast and loose with gravity too.)
Even a Niven-style supernova chain reaction can't threaten a galactic civilization with FTL travel, but if you (a) use the terms "subspace propagation" (per the Praxis explosion in ST6) you confuse the non-Trekkers, and (b) with "faster than light" you confuse the people who don't realize just how isolated stars really are. So the exact phrasing is a balancing act.
Now, scientific terminology does change over time, but that's hardly an excuse in a genre where 23rd century humans and aliens alike speak colloquial 20cen English. The magical translation has to apply equally to everything.
By B at 11:24 PM ON 05/26/09
Tuvok managed to have Pon Farr without being on Vulcan.
By Screamingecko at 11:11 AM ON 05/27/09
Thanks B! I'm afraid I'm old school and bailed on Voyager, thinking Trek had jumped the shark. I didn't know Tuvok managed the Pon Farr without returning to Vulcan, although I should have considered it considering they were lost in space. Did you know that Tuvok was in Of Gods and Men, and witnessed someone opening a can of galactic whup ass on Vulcan? Best I stop connecting Trek dots for now, but I’m glad to hear those pointy-eared hobgoblins don't need Vulcan to procreate.
p.s. Thanks Wil, sorry to comment tangentially. I enjoy your articles. Although I read it ages ago I still recall how cool I thought Pohl's Gateway story was. Have you ever parsed his treatment of black holes?
By QuantumSam at 12:42 PM ON 05/27/09
I have almost the same comment that I gave when the Commandant of the Marine Corps (in a speech touting the Navy and Marine Corps relevance to US space forces equal or superior to the Air Force) stated "Remember the USS Enterprise was a naval vessel.": At that time I said "It's a goddam TV show." Now: "It's a goddam movie!!!"
Gee, so planet's don't implode that way. Well, people don't transport across space that way. People don't time travel that way. People don't go to warp that way. Where do we stop with the critique of FICTIONAL SCIENCE? I want something plausible and entertaining. STAR TREK was plausible and entertaining.
How come the party pooper doesn't ask why if Spock's ship and the Mining Vessel (why does it have so much armaments? and what did it do for 25 years?) could travel through the wormhole the first time to get to the past, did the second wormhole destroy the Romulan ship instead of putting it somewhere else in the timestream where it could wreck even more havok? And where were the time police enforcing the Time Prime Directive?
To quote William Shatner: "GET A LIFE!!!"
By Captain Zacary R Wildstar Captain SSD Dexterous at 6:36 PM ON 05/27/09
you al know what i'm going to say. This time I'll say it with nickelback lyrics Refering to Star Track: This time, this place, Misused, Mistake, too long, too late.
By Son of a Maui Portagee at 2:12 AM ON 05/28/09
The discussion at hand is: how well science and the scientific-method is incorporated into a work of science-fiction. There's nothing silly or ignoble about it. It simply is the nature of the beast.
Now, there are others who have axes to grind about fans taking pages from the definition of their root, fanatical, and discussing a genre as if it literally happened, or is the actual future. Well, it is true in all genres that some go too far, but that really has nothing to contribute to the discussion at hand and most definitely is not a good excuse to promote its cessation.
Then there's a group that seems to be desperately threatened by the phenomenon that STAR TREK clearly is. It seems to assault their psyches that STAR TREK is this big and unique thing. They desperately need to trivialize or minimize it at every opportunity by trying to encapsulate it as "Just a TV show." or "Just a movie." when numerous college dissertations exist giving proof to the lie of that. If STAR TREK is "just" anything it is a phenomenon unique into and of itself. Its like has never been duplicated to date. The closest is the STARGATE franchise but that began with a movie and not a TV show.
The SCI FI blurb makes it very clear what this article is about. So clear that one can easily infer that the bulk of comments in response will be about the science in a work of science-fiction. Thus, if one reads this article, and each of the aforementioned comments (including this one) so that these bromides can be contributed, well, you risk appearing every bit as small and fanatical as that which you feel compelled to disparage as being so.
By Son of a Maui Portagee at 8:32 PM ON 05/28/09
The movie's first faulty science:
http://www.origin.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4316608.html
is the Kirk-child being able to extricate himself from the vehicle instead going over the cliff as the laws of physics mandate.
By James M. Essig at 12:25 AM ON 05/30/09
It is interesting to consider the possibility that the Earth's oceans might be locally heated to the extent that they would undergo nuclear fusion in a fusion wave front chain reaction that could spread throughout the entire oceans in a second or less.
The fact that traditional nuclear weapons detonated under ocean water have not is most likely the result of their more limited mass specific yield and more importantly, their more limited peak exploding temperatures and pressures in comparison to pure fusion devices and/or shaped charge nuclear devices which may be able, according to some sources, concentrate the nuclear bomb explosion energy flux densities by several orders of magnitude beyond that which is possible with curent spherically detonating nuclear weapon designs.
Assumming a self propagating fusion chain reaction could be started within the ocean water, the amount of pure fusion fuel in the form of hydrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, and oxygen would be about 10 EXP 18 metric tons which would equal 10 EXP 26 metric tons of TNT in yield which is within the mass range of an entire Red Dwarf Star. This is about 50,000 times the energy required to vaporize the matter in an Earth massed planet that is frozen through its core. Put is another way, this amount of energy is the equivalent of the kinetic energy of an Earth massed planet traveling at about 700 kilometers per second.
If such a reaction could be started, I think the Earth would be complete history in a matter of seconds.
Now the Earth has a crust, mantel, and core that contains heavy metals along with mid density metals such as iron, nickel, aluminum and silicon and the like. It might be the case that if the planet was detonated by the above process, the explosve heat flux, and the transmuting effects of the ocean water fusion products might be locally amplified in terms of eddy currents, density fluctuations and the like to the point where such energy concentrations might react or interact with the heavier material composition of the sub-oceanic components of the Earth to produce strange matter or matter that is composed at least in part of strange quarks.
Some theories suggest that certain forms of strange matter might be stable and worse yet might be capable of transforming normal baryonic matter it comes into contact with into strange matter.
The result might not only be the complete destruction of Earth, but also the outward spread of strange matter particles and bulk pieces of material that could spread gradually throughout the Milky Way Galaxy and perhaps ultimately throughout the universe to endanger any extraterrestrial civilizations if not all of them.
The fact that supernova appear not to produce such strange matter might be due to the low mass consituency, isotopic make up and percentage-wise isotopic mass composition of the pre-supernova stars.
One can also speculate as to whether bottomomium matter or matter made at least in part of bottom quarks might have a simmilar drastic effect as any forms of reactive strange matter.
The fact that we have not observed stable strange matter based or bottom matter based baryons within our particle accelerators might simply be due to the fact that not enough collisions have occured, only collisions of non-optimal energies for the formation of such stable forms have occurred, and/or the colliding particles where not of the right species.
I wonder if someone could write a movie script about the devestating effects or threats of such reactions regarding the notion of dangerous strange matter or bottom matter particles being dispered throughout the universe and converting every planet and star they come in contact with into strange matter or bottom matter.
As a son of a retired career navy man who worked under the leadership of the late Admiral Rickover for the U.S. Navy's Naval Reactors division and then under his sucessor as a D.O.D./D.O.E. civilian employee, I by association of being one of his sons, although I have never served in the military, have been indoctrinated in the usefullness and effectivenes of our nuclear deterence capability.
Although, I believe in a strong defense and believe that in today's world of terrorism, unilateral U.S. nuclear dissarmament would be foolish and unwise not only for our national security, but also for that of the Global community as a whole, perhaps we need to take a second look at what we cook up or might inadvertantly cook up in our nuclear weapons research and development facilities.
As someone who has always liked to play with fire crackers as a young typical grade school boy, I now say that; yes, fire crackers are fun, but lets be careful of how big we make them and only make the types that are needed for our national defense.
By Son of a Maui Portagee at 10:26 AM ON 05/30/09
James M. Essig,
I think the key problem for your script is "spread gradually". That speed of light propagation limitation makes for a very bad "eminent" immediate threat for all galactic civilizations.
And a Treknological civilization is going to have plenty of time to study the strange stuff and devise a solution.
Not to mention that at that time in Spock Prime's universe the Federation is well aware of other civilizations far more advanced than they (The most advanced of which are probably the Q.). Why would the fate of the entire galaxy rest on this one Vulcan's untested hypothesis?
And Spock's solution in the movie is inelegant and unnecessarily risks prematurely setting the supernova off by introducing more mass to the star before a significant amount of the available fuel can be consumed as observed in the film.
The proper way to use a singularity to safely reduce the chance of a star going supernova, is to set it in orbit as close to the star as possible so that it can siphon enough matter off to preclude that possibility. Just dim it down to a nice safe nova or more if it is the parent star of the Romulan Empire. No need to consume the whole thing.
By James M. Essig at 10:49 AM ON 05/30/09
Hi Son of a Maui Portagee;
The only problem I can see with being able to defend against such a spread of strange matter is that the particles or stable stranglets could be so numerous that even the most advanced civilization might not catch them all. Plus, the strangelets may convert whole entire planets and stars to strange matter thus promoting the existence of additional strangelets.
Perhaps the plot can be modified such that the strangelets can fall into an orbiting black hole and travel through a wormhole in a manner proposed by some general relativists to distant reaches of our universe or into other universes either into the past, present, or future.
By Dr. Dan Guitar at 7:01 PM ON 05/30/09
I have some issues with Dr. Wil on the timescale. I think that he doesn't pay enough attention to what happens to stuff just BEFORE the event horizon. It's not the gobbling up, it's the energy release. By the time things disappear behind the event horizon, they frequently radiate away 10% or more of their mass-energy as x-rays, visible light, or gravity waves, So in the first fraction of a second, several grams of stuff near the black hole release, say, 10% of its m*c^2 into the nearby environment, which is several Hiroshima's worth. That vaporizes several cubic meters of nearby stuff, which fills up any empty spaces in the volume (including the empty space around the black hole) with a time constant roughly equal to the volume divided by (the speed of sound in the plasma times the area of the event horizon.) The stuff keeps getting hotter and hotter, increasing the speed of sound and the area of the event horizon. Nasty positive feedback. Starts fast, keeps getting faster.
Now if a planet’s mass suddenly acquires enough kinetic energy to speed it up to, say 3,000 km/sec or 1% of c, escape velocity is no longer an issue. The planet turns into a ball of plasma, and expands by a planetary radius in about 2 seconds, and over the next few seconds eventually becomes a more and more tenuous ball of plasma and fades away. That just requires the planet’s mass to turn 1.0e-4 times its mass into energy, or 0.1% of its mass to release 10% of its mass-energy. I haven’t cranked through all the rest of the math, but on the back of an envelope I think you could get rid of a planet VERY quickly with a little blob of Campbell’s Condensed Black Hole.
Now... does that matter? Not necessarily. Every SF story is entitled to at least one, and sometimes several, BIG FAT LIES. Science Fiction is about "What If?" And while there are probably millions of definitions of what makes a work of SF "good," I will argue that one essential element is that it makes the reader/viewer/listener appreciate how exciting and mysterious and wonderful it is to explore science. Star Trek, in all its incarnations, does a fabulous job of that, which is why I’ve been a fan from the beginning (I marched in the “Save Star Trek” march in the ‘60s, which got us one more season of the original show.
Live long and prosper, y'all.
By Son of a Maui Portagee at 3:58 PM ON 05/31/09
James M. Essig,
Once you introduce this mechanism to spread the ill effects of your supernova around, the problem becomes that this one supernova becomes pretty much insignificant. If it has the potential to spread multiversally and across time then you have to factor in that the odds are excellent that it has already happened somewhere and somewhence else that there's an even bigger threat that strange matter may come spewing out a random portal near us even as we type.
Since the threat could be originating from outside our known universe and very likely would be threatening other universes as well, we probably need to form a federation of universes to work on stemming the tide of this apocalypse?
By Son of a Maui Portagee at 4:12 AM ON 06/01/09
QuantumSam said ''To quote William Shatner: "GET A LIFE!!!"''
I think you weakened your "we don't live in the fictional world" point by misattributing the quote to a character in comedy sketch. Shatner was merely performing a caricature of himself as written by SNL writer Rober Sigel who should properly get the attribution as the "real" Shatner did not improvise or otherwise contribute to the creation of the line.
By Son of a Maui Portagee at 4:19 AM ON 06/01/09
Errata:
Sorry for the typo. that's SMIGEL as in Robert Smigel.
By James M Essig at 9:37 AM ON 06/01/09
Hi Son of a Maui Portagee;
Interesting ideas!
A Federation of universes would be an excellent theme for a SCI FI space Movie. I can see some educational aspects to including the concept of multiple universes in such a SCI FI plot.
It is interesting to consider such a theme based on the concept of the multiverse as envisioned by the theory of chaotic inflation.
Another way to spin the concept of multiple universe is to some how start with the assumption the many universes form that are initially completely causally, thermodynamically, and topologically decoupled from ours but which for some reason become coupled to each other and our universe or vis versa.
By Peter V at 4:48 PM ON 06/01/09
Great stuff Wil, but as others have said, I don't think you are quite into the Treknology headspace. Clearly the red matter doesn't weight billions of tons, so it would have to create the black hole by some other means. Note the usage of the terms "ignite" associated with it, and the fact that it seems to need other matter to work with; perhaps when "ignited", it causes some sort of radical change in the matter it comes in contact with, a chain reaction that increases the mass of the affected matter. Not real science? No, of course not - but as you say, this is Star Trek. Whacky science is their stock and trade.
By Clinton at 5:17 PM ON 06/01/09
Not to side-track the main conversation -- which is awesome -- but the screenwriters have added a bit of info on the 10,000 Vulcans thing. They said to consider that the number of Vulcans that escaped from the planet itself and does not include those already off world.
By Visionary at 4:06 PM ON 07/04/09
Let's not forget all the parralels that Next Gen gave us existence of or some of the places the next gen series went. The possibilities are rather extensive. The real question is do producers and directors feel that blowing up planets a must have or just want big bangs for audiences?
By Son of a Maui Portagee at 7:50 PM ON 07/05/09
@Visionary,
But in the PARALLELS episode of TNG Data gave us the "quantum signature" which uniquely identifies the proper universe that an alternate-universe jumper belongs.
As long as Spock Prime is alive in the current narrative we are left with the question of "Why doesn't he go back to home prime and assist with the Romulan recovery there?"
For example, in DS9 they already worked out how to do the Mirror universe jump via the transporter. So he knows how to do that.
My point is he knows the way to the Mirror universe and that they have technology even in the current time frame that he can use to time travel to the appropriate future moment from which to transport back to his prime universe.
Could even have him use the excuse to recover the Defiant.
Actually the journey home for Spock prime has many possible routes beyond just this one.
XII has to come up with some reason why he remains in the alternate universe for it is difficult to see how they can make the implausible claim that he's just stuck there as he's been introduced to far too many technological ways out of this dilemma.
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Son of a Maui Portagee:
@Visionary, But in the PARALLELS episode of TNG Data gave us the "quantum signature" which uniquely identifies the...More »