I love Trek.
But over the last year or so the entire idea, not just Trek it's self, has started to seem incorrect. That of humans and interstella travel onboard space ships.
Moving humans round takes a lot of effort. Human bodies need constant environmental control to keep them alive, food, water and so on. Then you need the craft it's self, some way of directing it, slowing it down, protecting it from radiation, protecting it from impact damage cause by atomically sized particles, negating friction (which goes with the last one)... In order to support all these requirements, you need mass. Lots of it.
And the number one problem when accelerating things to gigantic speeds... mass.
We've been through a stage of constant discoveries near and at the quantum level. Nuclear fission giving us electricity. Nuclear fusion will be along soon enough. And, more recently, we've had the possibility of antimatter power sources discussed.
Forgetting developments in energy densities of these sources, as these are merely ways of making the engine it's self more realistically sized, one thing still sticks out. The very quantities of energy required in the first place to move a human around at such speeds over these distances are hurrendous. Once you begin taking account of the requirements to keep a human body alive, and preferably happy, over these journeys, you're talking about quantities of energy that would be difficult for us to actually find anywhere on Earth once more than one or two people want to do more than just test the theory of the idea.
Science has provided a way of compressing the energy down into a smaller space. It hasn't really provided any such jumps in methods of extracting such quantities of energy from the universe to start with. Perhaps the last big step was fusion, with antimatter reactions placing the fundamental limit on the quantity of energy you can extract from a specific mass.
We don't have any antimatter lying around, so we need to make it. Making and storing it costs energy. I suppose that opens up the next big step in energy production to finding some means of mining, or harvesting, already present antimatter from a naturally occuring resource; saving energy by not having to generate it from normal matter. We then enter the domain of antimatter being thought of as a fossil fuel. I've left this idea open as possible, but as I understand it, antimatter doesn't like existing in our part of space anyway. It's this very fact that would make it useful, since we have so much none antimatter stuff spare to react with it. So the chances of finding a big seam of it through our part of space would appear to be low. I'm only leaving it open as it's the only major advance I can forsee in the availability of energy. And even then, it may prove to be a limited availability.
This makes me question the Trek idea. Indeed, the entire idea of humans travelling around the universe in ships. With new discussions of such dense energy sources, it's obviously an appealing idea. But you're still left with the problem, where do you get that energy from to begin with?
This is also forgotting the technical developments required to even build such a craft. Which I strongly suspect the supporters of vastly underestimate.
Looking at my own nervous system, it seems like an easier idea to just take myself apart and get rid of the requirements to start with.
I feel that Arthur C Clarke was perhaps more correct than the producers of Trek when he suggested that humans would eventually find a way to condense their intelligence into crystals of light that would then be able to travel through the stars without the need for crafts.
If you're hot up to date on your data storage and neural interfacing, that is a supremely viable idea. Light can be crystallised. And by doing so, you can store quantities of data within a 3D crystal lattice that make anything we have now look pathetic. A handful of crystallised light could wipe out the entirity of the data you've ever written to tape, CD, DVD, HD or whatever else you've ever recorded something on. With neural interfaces progressing towards total interconnectivity with a human brain, could it be that Arthur has beaten Trek to the reality of what space travel will be?
I am, of coarse, ruling out the idea of travelling at conventional speeds given that it's totally unrealistic given the size of the universe.
