April 10, 2013 • 51 mins
Why does Han Solo's line about parsecs not make any sense? In the Star Wars universe, what exactly is hyperdrive? Why would hyperspace cause huge causality problems if it were real? Learn more about hyperspace with Lauren and Jonathan.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tex stuff from dot com.
He there text stuff fans. This is Jonathan Strickland and
I'm Lauren Wold OBAM and today we want to present
you a little drama. So I will be taking on
(00:24):
a roll and Lauren will be taking on a roll
and this plays into what we'll be talking about today.
So here we go, man, red leather, yellow leather, red leave,
yellow leather. All right, here we go, Han Solo, I'm
captain of the Millennium Falcon. Chewy here tells me you're
looking for passage to the Alboron system. Yes, indeed, if
it's a fast ship fast ship, You've never heard of
(00:45):
the Millennium Falcon, should I have? It's the ship that
made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs. I've
outrun Imperial starships, not the local bulk cruisers mind you.
I'm talking about the big Karelian ships. Now, she's fast
enough for you, old man? What's the cargo? Usually I
am the one calling you old man. Yeah, that's true.
I just wanted to turn that around a little bit.
I also didn't go full Christopher walk In, despite the
(01:05):
fact that I love that Saturday Night Live skit. So
we are talking about the Kessel Run and hyper drives
in the Star Wars universe and uh, and then kind
of comparing it to what we would like to call
real life. Right. We're doing this, by the way, because
this is our five first episode and we are we
we are big fans of the five of first legion.
That's right, That's right, that's the Uh. This is props
(01:28):
going out to our Star Wars buddies. So you five
hundred and first members out there, this one's for you.
So now, in the original context, we need to talk
about what the Kessel Run is within the mythology of
Star Wars, all right, and it's not really mentioned in
um in any of the three original films, right, or
even the fictional prequels that supposedly exist. No, we should
(01:50):
also point out, according to everything I've ever read, Lucas
considered anything that was in the movies cannon correct. Anything
outside the movies was just extra stuff that may or
may not line up with what is canon. So there's
no um. You know, the stuff that we'll be talking
about a lot of this is things that other writers
have kind of expounded upon in in the novels. Are
(02:12):
the comics and of the video games, yeah, some of
the cartoons, etcetera. And so the stuff that we're talking
about this is this is mostly people trying to explain
away what Lucas created in a in a manner that
makes kind of sense, because a lot of the stuff
that you watch in Star Wars, if you really think about,
you're like, wait a minute, it's not science. So the
Kessel Run in particular is a route in Star Wars,
(02:37):
at least this is the way it's explained. In the
Expanded Universe. It's it's a smuggling run, right, which is
exactly what you know. Han Solo is a smuggler, and
so this is a particular route through space that smugglers
would take. And uh. And one of the big complaints
or criticisms of this particular section of dialogue is that
Han Solo talks about doing a Kessel Run in less
(02:58):
than twelve parts x, which seems to suggest that he
thinks par sex is a measure of time, right, And
it's not, and it's it's certainly not, you know, you know,
I think that my my strongest um explanation of this
is just that Han Solo was just saying words he
was just talking and trying to sound impressive. My my
explanation is Lucas thought that parsex sounded futuristic and that
(03:21):
it sounds like a measurement of time. That was mine,
which puts the onus on the writer, not the character.
But hey, you know, I'm a writer. That's kind of
how I think. Like sometimes I make mistakes too. I'm
just saying that if you're going to excuse the character saying,
and I think that that is not a poor right
if you want to be an apologist. Sure, So, so
what a what a par sec actually is? It is
(03:41):
a unit of distance. It technically based upon uh the
uh the Sun and Earth and and and a second
of arc uh. It involves some pretty complex uh concepts
that are not that complex, but they're difficult to explain
an audio format. But ultimately it translates to about three
(04:02):
point to six light years, right, And and it's specifically,
by the way, tied to to the distance of the
Sun from the Earth and another object and another object
that makes up one sec. And so you know, forgiving
the fact that we're talking about a galaxy far far away,
and that perhaps as a phil plate of that astronomer
pointed out that might not be the most valid measurements.
(04:25):
Why would think why would another why would people in
another galaxy use a unit of measurement that's dependent upon
the Earth's position relative to another object and the sun.
That makes no sense at all. But anyway, so it's
it's equivalent to about three point to six light years,
And of course that just makes things even more confusing
for people who don't know what a light year is
and they think light year is also a measurement of time.
(04:45):
It's not. But at any rate, the description Han Solo
makes is very confusing if you think about parsecs being
a distance, like, how can you take a route and
say that your ship made it in less than twelve
units of distance for that route and make that the
a measurement of its speed. So here's how we're gonna
(05:08):
try and explain this well. And also I should mention
uh in the novelization of a New Hope, Han Solo
does not say par sex recond that real quick. He
said standard time units twelve less than twelve standard time units.
I have no idea how long the standard time unit is,
but that doesn't really matter, I guess. But anyway, so
(05:31):
kessel run. You've got this route. It's usually if you
are taking the quote unquote safe approach, eighteen par sex long,
which is about years. Yeah. So the reason why it's
that long is because the route takes you through an
area of space that has black holes in it. It's
called the mall and the maw in aw would destroy
(05:54):
a ship if you got too close to it. It's
you know, it's a black hole. There bad times for ships, right,
you know, you know you do? You have you heard
what the term is for something that gets pulled through
a black hole, the term of what is happening to
it spaganification. It's my favorite thing in the world, yes,
because it gets pulled into these long, thin strands as
it's being uh infinitely thin strands hypothetically being pulled towards
(06:18):
this center of intense density or intensity as I like
to call it. Anyway. So usually this route would be
eighteen parsex long, but if one were to be a
little daring or perhaps insane, completely crazy, one might be
able to plot a route that goes closer to the
(06:40):
black holes. He kind of scarred around it, and you know,
Han Solo, being the guy that he is, he's he says,
you know, time is money or distance his money, or
money is money or something I don't know. Anyway, he
wanted to be able to take a more direct route,
which would shave off about six or so parsex for
this eighteen parsic long route, and that means that you know,
(07:03):
he's he's essentially instead of going like a curved line,
he's making a straight line. Not quite like that dramatic,
but close to it. So in other words, he's taking
a route and making it more efficient, but it is
much more dangerous. There's no direct relationship between the Millennium
Falcon's speed and this route immediately, but one could argue,
(07:27):
and one has. In fact, Kyle Hill of Wired wrote
a great article how the Star Wars Kessel run turns
Hans Solo into a time traveler. Fantastic articles. Yeah, it's
entertaining and uh and also and it starts to build
in some chronological problems in the Star Wars universe, but
we'll get into those. But anyway, he points out that
(07:50):
that you could end up thinking, oh, well, the Millennium
Falcon has to be a fast ship because it has
to be able to escape that pull of the black hole.
So Therefore, that's what tells you that it's fast. It's
not only that heat and only is the pilot capable
of making a more efficient route to go through the
Kessel run, but there's also in a ship fast enough
(08:11):
to a state black roles, right right? Yeah, Well, according
to a Wikipedia, which is one of the best wikis ever,
I just said that on the air, it was wonderful. Um.
In the commentary for Star Wars episode for a New
Hope DVD, George Lucas said that the Millennium Falcons navigational
computers were highly advanced and that that was why the
parsic thing works out the way that it does. Yeah,
(08:33):
that's yeah. So essentially then you just make Han Solo
a Guo flips switches a really good flip switcher. There's
also a great thing that was at the Smithsonian for
the Star Wars exhibit where uh, Harrison Ford was actually
talking about the first time they shot uh seen in
the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, and George Lucas gave
him the direction of your flying the ship and he says, Okay,
(08:56):
how do I do that? Because there are just all
these dials and switch is that they didn't. There was
no rhyme or reason to it. And Chus was like,
I don't know. So there was buttons pull that lever
pushed the button Frank. So anyway you might wonder, well,
why what's the big deal of the Kestle run? Anyway,
was what was the significance? Like it's a smuggling route,
(09:16):
but it's a smuggling route for what? And within the
lore again this again not film expanded universe, so not
Cannon Kessel was a planet that had these minds on
it for something called glitter stem spice, which was a
substance created by spice spiders, and it's a photoactive substance,
(09:40):
so it activates when light hits it, so it had
to be mined in complete darkness. It could not be
exposed to light in anyway or else it would lose
its potency. And the spice was essentially a drug. Uh.
As cheery as that is, I do want to point
out that I'm pretty sure the word castle comes from
during World War Two. You know that you Rman's got
(10:00):
themselves really good and surrounded by a group of Russians,
and UH and some of their compatriots were trying to
get supplies and aid to uh their their surrounding colleagues leagues.
Yeah sure, and this failed completely. But but the word
kessel means that like pocket in German cat or cattle. Yeah,
dossi rishtish uh So the glistone spice stuff. What it
(10:22):
was supposed to do within the realm of Star Wars
is boost your mental capacity and even give you perhaps
telepathic powers for a short amount of time. It was
also incredibly addictive. This is this makes Han Solo an
even darker character in a way because he's smuggling. Yeah,
he runs drugs, um so, yeah, that's kind of grim.
But in the during the Galactic Republic, which is the
(10:44):
period that proceeds A New Hope, that's back when there
was a the Old Republic was around. It was being
used medically, but then the Republic fails and then the
black market takes over. Smugglers start selling this I guess
more like recreational drug as opposed to medical things, and
the Empire outlaws it. And so that's why it's important
(11:05):
to be able to avoid imperial entanglements, as Obi Wan
says in a New Hope. So that's why it's important
that there's the explanation of shaving off some of the
distance that it would normally take you to to travel
in order to get there, and also the fact that
the Falcon would have to be a little faster than
(11:27):
most ships. Now, all of that is kind of cool.
I can. I can kind of handle most of that,
even though I think that the PARSEC thing is really
an apologist. It's a red coon or retroactive continuity, where you,
after you've made a mistake, you go back and try
to justify the fact that a mistake is there. Uh,
this is, by the way, in no way it's extraordinarily common. Um, yes, everywhere, Yeah,
(11:53):
it's Yeah. So the other thing that Hans Solo says
is that can go at point five beyond light speed.
So I interpret that to mean half again faster than
the speed of light. I I interpreted it as as
a as point five percent of light speed above light speed.
But but but your sounds much more impressive. But that
(12:13):
would be much mind would be much more impressive. Either way,
you're violating the laws of physics as we understand them.
Because as we as we understand the speed of light
through a vacuum is the universal speed limit. Nothing can
go faster than light through a vacuum physically impossible. Now
we should also mention light itself does not necessarily travel
(12:34):
at the same speed through all media. You know, through
a vacuum, it travels at an incredible clip. It's about
two hundred million, seven four hundred fifty eight meters per
second or around one six thousand, two d eighty two
miles per second. That's through the vacuum of space and
solos ship. If you assume it could go half again
(12:57):
faster than the speed of light would have its tough
speed at somewhere around four hundred forty nine million million
Si eight thousand, six eighty seven per second or two
four hundred twenty four miles per second. That's really fast.
And of course it is faster than anything we can
we we know of besides some theoretical particles that we'll
(13:18):
talk about in a little bit. It's faster than anything
we know of can go. That makes it really problematic
because if we just talk about parsecs and shaving off distance,
you know, okay, I can see that we still have
the problem of a parsec is a really long distance, right, Yeah,
So how you know if Han Solo made the Kessel run.
(13:40):
How long would it take him to do it, assuming
that he's traveling at around the speed of light? And yeah, yeah,
I mean if you go, if you nudge right up
to the speed of light, they would take about thirty
nine years travel twelve that that would be. That would
be due to an independent observer though correct because special relativity.
But we'll talk about that. Yeah, I don't want to
(14:01):
get into that right now, but special relativity will play
a part in our second part of our conversation because
also we should go ahead and say it. According to
Star Wars, and again this is a retcon type thing.
All ships have a stasis field stabilizer thing that keeps time.
It's the universal constant of time amongst the Empire, which
is really convenient because otherwise Han Solo would be older
than Yoda after he had taken what I don't know,
(14:24):
like like two or three trips yet four or five
trips on the Kestle run. But it does sound like
he's done it multiple times, which means that if he's
done the Kestle run multiple times, that special relativity problem,
which again we'll talk about in a minute just to right.
So So here's here's the thing the stasis is supposed
to keep everything constant. Uh. Time is a tricky thing
(14:46):
because it doesn't matter that it's not just if you're
traveling nearer or at or above the speed of light,
where you have to take it into account. Every single
planet that's in the entire galaxy of Star Wars has
time pass at a different rate according to any according
to physics. And again it's relative. So if Lauren's on
(15:08):
one planet and I'm on another planet, each of us
are going to feel as if time is passing at
the same speed individually, like a second will feel like
a second to me, a second will feel like a
second to Lauren. However, depending upon the planet's mass and
the speed at which it travels through space, the actual
passage of time is going to be different relative to
(15:28):
each other. So if we match our our watches up,
we'll see that they're not keeping exact synchronized time. And
again more on that and just a bit. I have
to I have to preface it because it's it makes
my head swim, all right. So the other element in
this Star Wars universe is this idea of hyperspace and
(15:49):
hyper drive, and so this is when and if you've
watched the Star Wars movies, you know, they engage the
hyperdrive and then suddenly all the stars start streaking towards
them in this beautiful display, and from from the outside
it looks like the ship just suddenly gets an enormous
speed boost, and yet no one is is slammed back
against the back of the the Millennium falcon like and
(16:11):
ejected into space because of the massive acceleration. That would
be a pretty pretty lame trip. It would be really
would be funny to see, like the the activation of
the first hyper drive and then you just see a
bunch of a lads just floating free in space, like well,
that was a bad idea. Um that kind of this
kind of happens in far Escape. But that's for for
you kids out there. We need to make Jonathan watch that. Anyway.
(16:31):
I've never watched it. So so it's it's not very
well defined hyperspace and in the Star Wars universe, even
in the expanded universe, all right, right, it's hyperspace is
kind of placed in contrast to real space. Yeah, you know,
real space being of course what we're kind of moving
around and the chips under under normal speed constraints are
moving around it and then and then yeah, apparently these
these hypermatter reactor drives with hypermatter implosion cores. I mean
(16:55):
it sounds a little bit like a like a wormhole
or a test react something like. Yeah. Like again, it's
not very well explained. So some of there's like it
could be a parallel universe where you open up a
gate and you travel into a new universe, and then
you open up a second gate and you re emerge
into quote unquote our universe, the star or at least
the Star Wars universe, real space, but you are, you know,
(17:17):
in a different point of real space than you were
when you started. Um Or. It could be an extra
dimension in space, which is kind of like warp drive,
where you're warping space around you. It could be an
alternate mode of physical existence, which I said is kind
of like an astral plane for those of you who
play fantasy games where you can travel to that. Um
(17:38):
Or it could just be traveling faster than the speed
of light, and all of that is difficult to to
get your head around. Again, none of that was was
definitively set down in the movies as this is how
hyper drive works or hyperspace, so we have a lot
of different things to choose from and uh. And it
seems to me that a lot of the people who
(17:59):
write the Star Wars universe or who have tried to
explain the Star Wars universe have kind of fudged around
with this a lot. No one has really come out
with what is the definitive answer as to what this is? Right? Sure,
and and this I used this example about about once
a week with Jonathan, but it always reminds me of
this one terrific interview that Rick Berman did about Star Trek,
(18:22):
specifically the uh Eisenberg uncertainty compensators and the transporters, and
someone was like, well, how did those work? And he
was like, very well, thank you, next question. Yeah. Whereas
you know, the holidack works very poorly, or at least
it breaks down once a year. But again, within the
lore of Star Wars, hyperspace itself is first discovered by
a race called the Ricotta, and they create ricotta like
(18:44):
the cheese. No, it's our A K A T A Okay,
just checking. You gotta remember that Star Wars often the
pronunciations are exactly the same as very silly stuff here
on Earth. Funny about that, um, But anyway, they they
create force powered drives, so they were tapping into the
power of the force to travel through space at incredible speeds.
(19:08):
And then there I have no problem because the force
is magic, and and magic means you do not have
to explain how something works technologically. Physics is right out
the windows, right. Yeah, you know, it's a fairy tale.
You don't question the physics of a fairy tale, you know.
I mean if you sit there and say, well, wouldn't
prints climbing Rapunzel's hair, scalp her and leave her screaming
(19:31):
in pain, that doesn't make the fairy tale very much fun.
Uh would have been a very short movie. Tangled would
have been very grim and not in a fairy tale
kind of Okay, anyway, I'm getting off track. But they
used the force, and I thought, oh, well, if it's
something that's force space, then that's except that then within
(19:51):
again the expanded lore. The Karelians Karelias, one of the
planets in the Star Wars universe, and the Euros both
found these starship drives and using reverse engineering, determined how
they worked and created technological versions of these force driven drives.
So they use technology to replicate what the force did.
(20:15):
And uh what now, now we have a technological explanation
for how hyperspace works, except there's no actual explanation there.
It's just that it is technological. Now this is what
drives me crazy because then I'm like, okay, wait now,
so if there is a technical way to make it happen,
how does it work? Um? And and really we have
more about the process than anything else. So uh. In
(20:37):
the movies, when they were going to make a jump
to hyperspace, they would activate the ship's navigational computer, which
would calculate whatever the route needed to be. And this
was important because, as Han Solo explains to Luke, who
is an impatient little brat in a New Hope, he
explains like, he can't hurry this stuff because if you do,
(20:58):
you pass too close to a star or a planet,
it pulls you out of hyperspace and you could die. Yeah. Yeah. Now, now,
this to me creates another problem, because if hyperspace is
in fact a parallel universe, why do things that exist
in our meat space affect you when you're in the
parallel universe, unless, of course, they also have a presence
in that parallel universe. I I do. I don't know,
(21:20):
And it sounds much more like a like a like
a wormhole, like like you're somehow jumping from from point
to point along kind of a like like an conveyor
belt sort of thing, which is another concept that we
can talk about in a minute. So so you're you're
thinking more along the lines of this parallel universe has
has certain anchor points to real space that it does
(21:44):
pass through, even if it's not a one to one ratio.
Is that kind of what you're talking about, or yeah,
or kind of like I don't know, like like there's
just certain sections of space that you can go much
faster through and and unfortunately, you know, sometimes as sun
gets in the way, so you're about like the auto
bawn of space. Yeah, and and that's another thing that
I was reading on Wikipedia. I was was saying, I
(22:07):
was saying that there maybe about eight of these, according
to the Star Wars universe, kicking around and that that
are super safe roots and then there's some that are
pretty shady and wind up getting me stuck in an asteroid. Wow. Okay, Well,
at any rate, it does make me sit there and
think this parallel universe explanation is is harder to get
my mind wrapped around if things in real space can
(22:28):
affect you're traveling through the parallel universe, unless, of course, uh,
it's just talking about how where your output is going
to be, like where your stopping point is going to be,
then obviously would be important if if it um maybe
it has to calculate, all right, well during the process,
like right now, if we were to leave, if we
were to instantaneously jump to this end point right now,
(22:48):
we'd be fine. But by the time we actually get there,
there's gonna be a planet in the way because of
the rotation of the planets. Then I'm like, okay, all right,
I got it. Now that makes sense. It was to me.
It was the stuff that was on the pathway that
made no sense. But anyway, how the hyperdrive would create
ripples in the time space matrix using a fusion reaction
and gamma radiation, and then the ripples would propel the
(23:11):
ship into hyperspace and none of that makes any sense.
But then again, it sounds really impressive if you're just
not thinking at all, If if you're just if Han
Solo were reading that, I would be like, yeah, totally, yeah, well,
let mean, come on, he was kind of dreamy, you know,
we just we just bought anything, he said, uh yeah.
And and this also reminds me of warp drive as well,
(23:31):
where you're you're warping the time space. In this case
it's the time space matrix, and in star check could
be the space time continuum. But either way, it's the
idea of warping the dimensions themselves in order to propel
you across vast distances at incredible speeds. And uh and
so that's kind of the breakdown of how it worked
(23:52):
within the lore of Star Wars. But we should really
kind of talk about again. We'll we'll get into special
relativity in general relativity and also some other discussions about
the whole hyperspace idea and just a little bit. But
first before we do that, let's take a quick moment
to thank our sponsored Alright, so let's get back to hyperspace.
(24:13):
So we mentioned in the first half nothing can go
faster than the speed of light, this universal speed look correct, Yeah,
it's it's smart. People such as Einstein have talked a
lot about that, right, and that that speed and time
themselves actually have a relationship. And so this gets us
into special relativity. There are a lot of different aspects
(24:33):
of special relativity, but the one that interests me the
most in this discussion is the fact that as objects
move faster, time dilates on that object relative to a
stationary observer. So again, in other words, like if I
if I'm standing perfectly still in space, so I'm not,
I'm not on a planet, I'm not moving at all,
hopefully in space? Yes, sure, why not? I'll give it
(24:57):
to you at this time, all right, And Lauren, you
are in a a zippy little ship that's going at
near the speed of light. Again, to you, time seems
to be passing at the normal rate. Like if you
were to have a watch watch, it would be taking
along at one second pertick according to my eyeballs right,
and it would feel exactly like it was as long
as a second should be. My watch would also to
(25:20):
me be it would appear to be moving at exactly
the correct speed. Now, if I were to to be
able to see what's happening in your little world, it
would look to me like a time had slowed way
down for you, and that more time was passing for
me than it was for you. So you could do
like a quick joy ride around the Solar system. And
(25:43):
let's say we're just going to make an argument that
that you take an hour long trip around the Solar system.
And now we're according to me to to your to
your watch, so your watch, you start the timer as
soon as you engage the drive, and an hour has
gone by, and you you come back and pick you
come back to see me, and uh, and we're gonna
say that you're going at a speed so that we
(26:05):
won't make it ridiculous. Well, you're going at a speed
where a year of time has gone by for me.
I'm going to Chris speed. So so an hour of
times gone by for Lauren, a year has gone by
for me. Um And and that's the special relativity. It's
that idea that again relative to me, less time has
passed for Lauren. Relative to Lauren, more time has passed
(26:27):
for me. And and that's because that's because speed and
mass both have speed and gravity both have an effect
on time, as though time is a substance itself. So
now the the gravity mass thing, that's really more general relativity.
But that's that's also playing a part in all of
our calculations when it comes to space. Faring. By the way,
if you were to do something like Carrie an atomic clock,
(26:51):
uh and have it synchronized with another atomic clock. So
to atomic clocks are side by side on a table
here on Earth, and you take one of those and
you get on an air elevator line is not not
even a space elver. You just get an airplane. And
as an airplane is going at top speed and it's
flying as far as it possibly can and then it lands.
By the time it lands, those two clocks that were
(27:12):
in perfect sink before will no longer be in perfect sink.
And the reason is is that you were traveling a
little faster. There's also some uh, the element of general relativity,
which means that when you're further away from the center
of the Earth, and therefore the closer you are to
a large mass object, the slower time passes for you
(27:33):
relative to something that's further out from that massive object. Again,
it's all relative because from your individual experience, it seems
like time is passing at the same rate unless you're,
you know, waiting on an important phone call, right, in
which case, yeah, like you know that that dreamy that
dreamy person you met at that party is supposed to
call and you're just staring at the phone. Tie. Every
second is an eternity, no matter whether you're traveling at
(27:54):
the speed of light or not. But anyway, yeah, we
can observe asn't it in satellites that we've launched into orbit.
They have to they have to mathematically correct. Yeah. So,
in fact, both special and general relativity play a part
in this. So the Global Positioning System GPS, the GPS
device you have picks up signals that are beamed down
(28:14):
from satellites, and the satellites part of the signal is
a time stamp, And the way your GPS figures out
where you are is by saying, all right, well, it
took x amount of time for for this one signal
to come from this satellite to hit me. It took
x amount why amount of time from the signal from
this other satellite to hit me, and took the amount
of time for the signal from this third satellite to
(28:37):
hit me. Based upon all of that and the position
of those satellites, I know that I must be on
this point on the Earth. Well, obviously the time stamp
is really important for the information to work needs to
be pretty precise. Yeah, otherwise it's going to give you
the wrong location on the Earth. The thing about the
satellites is that they are traveling faster than a point
(28:57):
relative on the surface of the Earth. So that means
that time is passing again at a different rate relative
to us here on Earth on the on the surface.
But they are also further out from the mass of
the Earth, which means they're going faster. So that means
times passing more slowly relative to us. But they are
further out, so time is passing faster than relative to us.
(29:19):
This gets really complicated, but if you were talking about
just special relativity, because the satellites are moving so fast,
they have about a lag of about seven micro seconds
per day on the satellites clock. So remember they're they're
traveling faster than the relative point on the surface of
the Earth, so that means that less time is passing
on the satellite seven microseconds per day as a as
(29:41):
a result. But because they're further out from the mass
of the Earth, then a clock would be here, you know,
close to the surface, their clocks are actually running faster
by about forty five micro seconds per day because of
general relativity. So if you take those two numbers the
the lag of second seven microsecon and the surplus of
(30:01):
forty five microseconds, and then you know, combine the two
to cancel them out. You are still left with a
thirty eight microseconds surplus per day on the satellites clock
compared to one on Earth. So that means that you
actually have to correct for that. All right, that's one
satellite that's orbiting Earth. Now imagine that on all the
spaceships traveling everywhere all the time. And that's why you
(30:24):
get to the point where keeping track of time is
an impossible act level. Yeah. So in the case of
Han Solo, again going back to that that Wired article
that Kyle Hill wrote, he started pointing out that assuming
that you're going at near the speed of light. He
went ahead and said, okay, you can't go faster than
speed of light. Yeah, let's let's that's right out. And
going at the speed of light is also impossible because
(30:46):
you would at that point have infinite density, density and mass.
So so that would be bad your mass. Your mass
increases as you get closer to the speed of light.
But if we say at infinitum, yeah, so it's going
a ballast pass. As as as that was close to
his speed of light as you possibly can imagine, this
(31:06):
is probably not ever it's probably not ever going to
be possible physically, but if you can imagine it um that,
then the castle run would take about half a day,
about so sixteen hours on the on the Millennium Falcon.
But then galactic time, assuming the galactic time is passing
at a standstone, forty years, so forty years would pass
(31:29):
in galactic time while on board the falcon, sixteen hours passes.
So they started to figure out, like, how much time
has passed in the gal in the galaxy since Han
Solo made his Kessel run, And then he started saying, well,
yeahs probably made a castle run more than once, so
if you start adding up the number of Kessel runs,
(31:50):
how much time has passed. And that's when he said, like,
you know, you do two castle runs. And then he
had to have been born before characters who like you know,
So then you've got Han Solo predating all the characters
who were in the prequels. Uh, And it's because of
this special relativity problem. So, by the way, if he
(32:12):
were in fact able to travel faster than the speed
of light, it would mean that he would arrive at
his destination before he left math is fun. Yeah, so
so he would actually he would be on Kessel before
he had decided to make the Kessel run due to
the way this works. Not granted, nothing can go faster
(32:33):
than the speed of light. But you know, assuming they
have they have those those drives, those the hyper drives,
ret red con drives, the red con drives. Yes, those
work really well. Um where you just say, hey, look impossible,
let's change it. Let's look at the Wookie. Yeah, and
and so the stasis field was sort of the answer
to that, saying that the time does not pass differently
(32:56):
aboard the ship as it does in the outside galaxy,
which is fine except for the fact that again, remember,
every single planet has its own passage of time. Like
you know, a second feels like a second no matter
where you are, but it lasts shorter or longer depending
upon the planet's mass and its speed that it moves
through space. And also technically, I think that it would
(33:17):
be a little bit confusing to try to, you know,
call days out on a whole system of planets that
have different sons and different orbits and yeah, and and tattooing,
you've got two sons. One of them might always be up.
You never know. I mean, it's it gets complex and
uh yeah. And then you have all these other people
who are traveling around at nearer or faster than the
(33:37):
speed of lights, so time gets messed up for them too,
So time would be meaningless in this universe, which you know,
one could argue it's kind of meaningless now, but I
don't get that cynical except on Fridays, and it's a Thursday,
so I'm all right. Then again, there are also some
criticisms to things like the visual representation of what it
looks like to go into hyper space, which I thought
(33:59):
was so yeah, yeah, there there was a study that
was done by we did that study, I don't have
it in front of some students that Riley Connor's, Katy Dexter,
Joshua Argyle and Cameron's school are, and they said that
if you were to travel at the speed of light,
and not only would you not see those stars become streets,
they would become a cone of light. So the center
(34:19):
would be the brightest, and the further out from the cone,
the darker it would get. And uh and part of
that is because of the Doppler effect essentially, right, right,
that's that's that's blue shift and redshift. And yes, when
you're when you're when you're moving near the speed of
light or at the speed of light towards something, Um,
everything is going to shift towards the blue. Yeah. The
waves compressed because you're you're traveling toward the emanation of
(34:43):
those waves, so they are being compressed further and further.
In fact, they would be compressed so much as to
move outside the visible spectrum and then you would start
getting hit by lots of X rays, which would tell
you that your spaceship needs to have some real protection
built into it or else people are not going to
feel so great when they get to where they're going. U.
And that's an interesting point too. Yeah, And I didn't
even think about that until I read this little study
(35:05):
and I thought, well, that's pretty clever. Yeah, I guess.
So the doubler effect would would be something you'd have
to take into account, so it wouldn't look like those
stars flying by the way they do in the movies. UM.
So we wanted to talk a little bit conclude with
a discussion about some actual real propulsion systems besides chemical rockets.
(35:26):
Now we don't have a hyperdrive, which is unfortunate. We
would love to have one obviously, would be really handy,
you guys, get on that. Yeah, but right now we
don't have one. So some of the propulsion systems have
been proposed for for for space travel beyond. We're getting
outside the whole thing about launching off the Earth. I
(35:46):
mean that that part. You still pretty much need chemical rockets,
solid fuel rockets, uh to to provide the propulsion you
need to get off the planet, right, because the amount
of power involved what we can do with chemical right
now is a lot more. Um well, it gives a
lot more. A lot more, that's the that's the astronomical term,
and there's a plenty in a chemical rocket. These other
(36:09):
drives would be very useful once you do get up
into space where you don't have to have the considerations
of escaping a planet's gravity or battling its atmosphere in
order to maneuver right, because the thing about about these
chemical drives is that they are extremely wasteful in a
grand universal kind of scheme. You have to carry a
lot of fuel. They pack a lot of power, but
(36:29):
you have to carry an awful lot of It's not
terribly efficient. Uh, so they wouldn't last very long in
the grand scheme of things. If you're talking about trying
to travel vast different distances, not differences, but distances, then
the chemical uh rockets end up being really heavy and
that limits how much you can carry, which in turn
(36:51):
limits how far you can go. So without just coasting
like for example, the voice your satellites right right, which, hey,
just left the Solar system. Actually they didn't. They come back. Yeah, yeah,
they puto um no they that was that was a
little bit of a mismisquote in the press. Oh nice. Yeah,
Well I'm glad you. I'm glad you caught up on that,
(37:12):
because obviously I did not. I failed to tweet about it.
So well, I'm that's bad. Hey, no, it's okay. You
caught it on the podcast. So now our listeners can
say that vogo bomb she gives Strickland on task. So
one of the ones we want to talk about where
ion engines. Now ion engines they're using ions and so
(37:33):
that's charged particles. Um. You know, think of an atom
that's either either has an excess of electrons or a
deficit in electrons. So either way to got a negative
or positive charge. Plasma is an ionic gas, so it's
a gas that has these free ions moving through. It
means that you can actually pass electric current through the
(37:55):
gas itself. That's what a plasma is. A plasma, of course,
is the most plentiful of the states of matter in
the universe as far as we are aware. And UM
and so the ion engines use electric fields rather than
chemical reactions to create propulsion. And they're not as powerful
as chemical engines, so they don't give you that the
(38:15):
chemical engines do, but they are way more efficient, and
so they can last ages. And they use that they
have solar energy to provide that. Yeah, they get the
solar energy to provide electricity to help create these reactions
that will create the ions that that propel it. So
they have these big solar panels that will unfold from
(38:36):
the spacecraft. We've already launched some spacecraft using ion engines.
The Dawn spacecraft, which launched on September twenty seven, two
thousand seven, has ion engines and uses the solar panels
to get the electricity UM it's destination had to actually,
but the second destination, the ultimate destination, is a dwarf
planet series and it's scheduled to arrive there in February.
(38:59):
Uh So, visiting the NASA pages about this spacecraft, I
saw some interesting figures. One was that it is a
six point three billion kilometer journey, and just so that
you get an idea of how far that is compared
to a light year. A light year is nine point
four trillion kilometers, so six point three billion kilometers still
nowhere near a light year. So it assuming that it
(39:22):
arrives on the first of February, in which you know,
that's I just took as an arbitrary it will have
flown for seven years, five months, and two days to
go those six point three billion kilometers. So I did
some I did some silly little math which was that
six million, six point three billion kilometers ends up being
(39:44):
six point three trillion meters. And then you have to
figure out how many seconds are in seven years, five months,
and two days. So I did two hundred three six
million hundred seconds. So if you do the math, then
that means that the average speed, and this is you know,
just an average because it does change, is twenty six
five nine seven meters per second. Based on the information
(40:06):
that I was able to find, so uhby I mean
not shabby, but still nowhere near the schools of the falcon. Uh.
But it also used about uses. The Dawn's engine used
fos of xenon fuel, being a neutral ly charged yeah,
and it used that the solar array to to ionize
(40:27):
everything's uh. And the solar array at one astronomical unit
provided about ten point three kilowatts of power. Uh. An
astronomical unit, by the way, is one million, seven thousand
and seventy one KOs. And you might say, well, what
the heck kind of measurement is that, Well, that's the
mean distance between the Earth and the Sun. Because the
(40:49):
distance actually changes throughout the Earth's rotation around the Sun,
it's not always exactly that far away. That's the mean.
So that's what we decided to define as an astronomical unit.
And I'm sure any aliens will be happy to take
us up on a discussion of why that's very human centric. Yeah, yes,
an astronomical unit is exactly the distance between your star
(41:11):
and your planet. Really enlightened guys, I mean I think
that they'll really take onto it like parsex. Yeah, they'll
be right up there. They're like I was having this
discussion with my Buddy eight parsex Ago like, oh, come on, like, hey,
I know how this goes, because I watched your Star
Wars documentary. So at the maximum thrust, Don's ion engine
(41:32):
expands about point to five ms of xenon per day,
and that produces a thrust of ninety two million Newton's,
which NASA explains is about the amount of force you
feel when you put a piece of paper on your
open hand. That's the amount of force which sounds so
incredibly unimpressive when you write, but in the in the
(41:52):
in the environment of space is plenty enough. And uh
so it says that the thrust changes the space crest
velocity about oh ten to the negative five meters per
second every second, and after about a thousand days, it
would achieve a velocity of a thousand meters per second.
So because there's no dragon space exactly. Yeah, so anyway, yeah,
(42:16):
about a thousand meters a second after a thousand days.
So that that that speed I gave you the twenty
six thousand seven per second. Obviously, again that's a that's
just averaging it out over the full distance. In fact,
it's just constantly accelerating, uh, not always at that particular speed.
But it will be or at that particular rate. I
shouldn't say it's accelerating at that speed. That's totally not misleading,
(42:38):
but at that rate. So yeah, that's that's one of
the ones that we're looking at. Now. There's also other
forms of propulsion that have been proposed, like solar sales. Again,
not something that's going to get you from Earth's solar
system to a distant solar system anytime quickly. Um, it's
more of a very efficient means of travel by harnessing photons.
(43:02):
The photons hit the solar sale and that's what provides
the propulsion to move the craft forward, which sounds kind
of incredible you think about that. You know, how much
kinetic energy can a photon have? Uh And and it
may surprise some of you to know that photons have
kinetic energy, but but that's true. I mean the Earth actually,
when the sun is hitting you, you weigh a little
(43:24):
more because the light is actually hitting again. Yeah, yeah,
that's why I never go outside. I don't like getting
pushed around by the sun or by nobody. And so, uh,
then I wanted to mention there's a theoretical engine. There's
there's a few theoretical engines. Yeah, the one that I
came across was an electromagnetic gravity drive by Yachoum Howser.
(43:48):
That's just a guess because I don't know how to
pronounce that name. I do not either. That sounds great
to me. Well, he's a physicist and a professor of
computer science at the University Applied Sciences in a solve
skitter and uh. And then he worked with Volter Drusher,
who was an Austrian patent officer, and they came up
(44:09):
with an idea that would use an electro magnet, essentially
a rotating ring above a super conducting coil, and then
they would pump a lot of electricity through the coil,
which would then create a magnetic field. Because we know
about the relationship between coils, electricity and then magnets magnets,
you know you can you can either if you run
(44:30):
electricity through a coil, you'll create a magnetic field. If
you run a coil through a magnetic field that's alternating
or that's that's uh, that's changing over time, a dynamic
magnetic field, you will induce current to flow through the coil.
That's this relationship between electricity and magnets. Thus the electro
magnetism that magnetic field will quote reduce the gravitational pull
(44:51):
on the ring to the point where it floats free
end quote. Uh. And that theoretically you could go from
Earth to Mars and about three hours using this in
a way that makes no sense to me. I mean,
it's it's talking about a The math requires that you
actually have extra dimensions to make it all makes sense.
(45:12):
And you know, in the in the standard model, we
essentially think of four dimensions, three in space and one
in time. But this would require two more dimensions, would
also end up in requiring extra fundamental forces besides the
strong and weak nuclear force, electromagnetic and gravity that we
are familiar with, there be two more and uh. And
it's possible that these things exist, but it's so far
(45:33):
exists as far as math goes, and not observation right right,
even even lower down or even though it drowning down
on the scale. There's a few other things that people
have kind of theorized about. One one is called um
this is probably not how you say it. Qber's warp
drive is the thing that NASA has talked about a
little bit, which which kind of kind of is similar
to the Doppler effect. It says that if you can
(45:54):
get space time to expand behind you in contract in
front of you, you can just kind of warp straight
through it. So, in other words, think of it this way.
You've gotta like imagine you have a map in front
of you, all right, a paper map, and you have
put a figuring on the leftmost edge of the paper map,
and your job is to get the figuring to the
right most edge and the least number of die rolls,
(46:17):
and there their spaces there that that represent how far
you can go. So uh, normally there would be a
hundred spaces between you and the and the right side,
and you're only able to roll the die x number
of times. Right, but you can just pick up right
if you were able to fold the edge of the
map so that it's right next to you, and you
(46:40):
roll a one and you move one space, and then
you unfold the map, you have just moved one space,
but you've traveled all that distance. That's the magic of
warp drive. People. We're talking about folding all of the
galaxy around us to accommodate our travel needs. And people say,
I'm a demanding traveler, but so so that's that's one.
(47:02):
You know, it sounds super easy on paper. Um, I
just explained that. Um. And the other being a being
creating wormholes. Um. You know, you know, a wormhole being
kind of a pokey thing through its shortcut on a
paper map. If you, if you, if you took instead
of a little figuring, you had a pointy figuring or
(47:24):
a pencil or something, and you and you stuck that
pencil straight through the two points in the map that
you wanted to travel between, and then sort of hit
hopped through the holes. So there's still some travel time,
but it's much more reduced. It's this is where we
get wibbly wobbly timmy whimy right right. But but hypothetically,
all we would have to do is build two super
dense rings giant super dense rings, charge them somehow, and
(47:46):
spin them near the speed of light. Oh that's easy, Yeah,
no problem. So the interesting thing here, by the way,
is that when we're talking about warping space, when we're
talking about actually moving or manipulating the space time continuum
or however you want to fabric break of space itself,
we actually get around the special relativity problem because your
actual speed doesn't need to be light speed. You are
(48:08):
just changing the distance and not changing You're not going
at this incredible speed. So time is still gonna travel
or stimes. Time is still going to pass differently relative
to someone on a different ship or a different planet,
but not at the amazing differences. You wouldn't need an
infinite amount of energy to move yourself, and you wouldn't
have an infinite amount of masks. And you also wouldn't
(48:28):
find out when you call back home that everyone you
know is forty years older. Uh, they might be, you know,
a few micro seconds older than you, but it would be,
you know, so small as to not as to be negligible,
except for things like communication and stuff where you have
to have exact timing. Obviously you have to have computers
to correct those calculations. But when it comes to, you know,
(48:49):
missing someone's birthday, you don't have to worry so much.
Daylight saving time would probably interesting. So anyway, Yeah, I mean,
there are people who are working on these theoretical drives.
It may turn out that the theories are just they're
they're not truly like theories in the sense of this
is really established stuff. We're just working more hYP they're
(49:10):
more like hypotheses that we have yet to prove um.
So it'll be interesting to see if we ever do
develop anything beyond the propulsion systems that we're currently looking into. Uh.
I mean, it would obviously be very helpful for anything
involving colonization or exploration, because otherwise it's going to take
us a really long time to get Yeah, you you
(49:34):
would have to build spacecraft capable of supporting multiple generations
of people aboard that with a very limited number of supplies,
because you know, you pretty much you have what you
take with you. You know, you know, most we don't
know of any shopping malls out there beyond Earth. You
have to have to grow it yourself up. So anyway,
(49:54):
that that kind of wraps up this discussion about uh,
Star Wars and hyperspace, the Kessel Run, what we're actually
looking into as means of propulsion in space. It's a
really interesting topic. I'm glad that we we grabbed this
one as our first episode, and hey, to all my
Star Wars fans out there, I just have to say,
live long and prosper. So yeah, if you guys want
(50:18):
to send in any emails, I'm sure lots of you
are thinking that you want to right now, I recommend you,
uh you use our mudd ass that's tech stuff at
Discovery dot com. Or let us know on Facebook or
Twitter that I was making a Babylon five reference. Just
now are handled there and say that I think pretty
(50:39):
sure it was the master. Um. Just drop me a
little note my handle at both Twitter and Facebook text
stuff hs W Lauren and I will talk to you
again really soon for more on this and bouthands of
other topics. Does it has to works dot com? This
(51:02):
is Tis
Get in touch with technology with tex stuff from dot com.
He there text stuff fans. This is Jonathan Strickland and
I'm Lauren Wold OBAM and today we want to present
you a little drama. So I will be taking on
(00:24):
a roll and Lauren will be taking on a roll
and this plays into what we'll be talking about today.
So here we go, man, red leather, yellow leather, red leave,
yellow leather. All right, here we go, Han Solo, I'm
captain of the Millennium Falcon. Chewy here tells me you're
looking for passage to the Alboron system. Yes, indeed, if
it's a fast ship fast ship, You've never heard of
(00:45):
the Millennium Falcon, should I have? It's the ship that
made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs. I've
outrun Imperial starships, not the local bulk cruisers mind you.
I'm talking about the big Karelian ships. Now, she's fast
enough for you, old man? What's the cargo? Usually I
am the one calling you old man. Yeah, that's true.
I just wanted to turn that around a little bit.
I also didn't go full Christopher walk In, despite the
(01:05):
fact that I love that Saturday Night Live skit. So
we are talking about the Kessel Run and hyper drives
in the Star Wars universe and uh, and then kind
of comparing it to what we would like to call
real life. Right. We're doing this, by the way, because
this is our five first episode and we are we
we are big fans of the five of first legion.
That's right, That's right, that's the Uh. This is props
(01:28):
going out to our Star Wars buddies. So you five
hundred and first members out there, this one's for you.
So now, in the original context, we need to talk
about what the Kessel Run is within the mythology of
Star Wars, all right, and it's not really mentioned in
um in any of the three original films, right, or
even the fictional prequels that supposedly exist. No, we should
(01:50):
also point out, according to everything I've ever read, Lucas
considered anything that was in the movies cannon correct. Anything
outside the movies was just extra stuff that may or
may not line up with what is canon. So there's
no um. You know, the stuff that we'll be talking
about a lot of this is things that other writers
have kind of expounded upon in in the novels. Are
(02:12):
the comics and of the video games, yeah, some of
the cartoons, etcetera. And so the stuff that we're talking
about this is this is mostly people trying to explain
away what Lucas created in a in a manner that
makes kind of sense, because a lot of the stuff
that you watch in Star Wars, if you really think about,
you're like, wait a minute, it's not science. So the
Kessel Run in particular is a route in Star Wars,
(02:37):
at least this is the way it's explained. In the
Expanded Universe. It's it's a smuggling run, right, which is
exactly what you know. Han Solo is a smuggler, and
so this is a particular route through space that smugglers
would take. And uh. And one of the big complaints
or criticisms of this particular section of dialogue is that
Han Solo talks about doing a Kessel Run in less
(02:58):
than twelve parts x, which seems to suggest that he
thinks par sex is a measure of time, right, And
it's not, and it's it's certainly not, you know, you know,
I think that my my strongest um explanation of this
is just that Han Solo was just saying words he
was just talking and trying to sound impressive. My my
explanation is Lucas thought that parsex sounded futuristic and that
(03:21):
it sounds like a measurement of time. That was mine,
which puts the onus on the writer, not the character.
But hey, you know, I'm a writer. That's kind of
how I think. Like sometimes I make mistakes too. I'm
just saying that if you're going to excuse the character saying,
and I think that that is not a poor right
if you want to be an apologist. Sure, So, so
what a what a par sec actually is? It is
(03:41):
a unit of distance. It technically based upon uh the
uh the Sun and Earth and and and a second
of arc uh. It involves some pretty complex uh concepts
that are not that complex, but they're difficult to explain
an audio format. But ultimately it translates to about three
(04:02):
point to six light years, right, And and it's specifically,
by the way, tied to to the distance of the
Sun from the Earth and another object and another object
that makes up one sec. And so you know, forgiving
the fact that we're talking about a galaxy far far away,
and that perhaps as a phil plate of that astronomer
pointed out that might not be the most valid measurements.
(04:25):
Why would think why would another why would people in
another galaxy use a unit of measurement that's dependent upon
the Earth's position relative to another object and the sun.
That makes no sense at all. But anyway, so it's
it's equivalent to about three point to six light years,
And of course that just makes things even more confusing
for people who don't know what a light year is
and they think light year is also a measurement of time.
(04:45):
It's not. But at any rate, the description Han Solo
makes is very confusing if you think about parsecs being
a distance, like, how can you take a route and
say that your ship made it in less than twelve
units of distance for that route and make that the
a measurement of its speed. So here's how we're gonna
(05:08):
try and explain this well. And also I should mention
uh in the novelization of a New Hope, Han Solo
does not say par sex recond that real quick. He
said standard time units twelve less than twelve standard time units.
I have no idea how long the standard time unit is,
but that doesn't really matter, I guess. But anyway, so
(05:31):
kessel run. You've got this route. It's usually if you
are taking the quote unquote safe approach, eighteen par sex long,
which is about years. Yeah. So the reason why it's
that long is because the route takes you through an
area of space that has black holes in it. It's
called the mall and the maw in aw would destroy
(05:54):
a ship if you got too close to it. It's
you know, it's a black hole. There bad times for ships, right,
you know, you know you do? You have you heard
what the term is for something that gets pulled through
a black hole, the term of what is happening to
it spaganification. It's my favorite thing in the world, yes,
because it gets pulled into these long, thin strands as
it's being uh infinitely thin strands hypothetically being pulled towards
(06:18):
this center of intense density or intensity as I like
to call it. Anyway. So usually this route would be
eighteen parsex long, but if one were to be a
little daring or perhaps insane, completely crazy, one might be
able to plot a route that goes closer to the
(06:40):
black holes. He kind of scarred around it, and you know,
Han Solo, being the guy that he is, he's he says,
you know, time is money or distance his money, or
money is money or something I don't know. Anyway, he
wanted to be able to take a more direct route,
which would shave off about six or so parsex for
this eighteen parsic long route, and that means that you know,
(07:03):
he's he's essentially instead of going like a curved line,
he's making a straight line. Not quite like that dramatic,
but close to it. So in other words, he's taking
a route and making it more efficient, but it is
much more dangerous. There's no direct relationship between the Millennium
Falcon's speed and this route immediately, but one could argue,
(07:27):
and one has. In fact, Kyle Hill of Wired wrote
a great article how the Star Wars Kessel run turns
Hans Solo into a time traveler. Fantastic articles. Yeah, it's
entertaining and uh and also and it starts to build
in some chronological problems in the Star Wars universe, but
we'll get into those. But anyway, he points out that
(07:50):
that you could end up thinking, oh, well, the Millennium
Falcon has to be a fast ship because it has
to be able to escape that pull of the black hole.
So Therefore, that's what tells you that it's fast. It's
not only that heat and only is the pilot capable
of making a more efficient route to go through the
Kessel run, but there's also in a ship fast enough
(08:11):
to a state black roles, right right? Yeah, Well, according
to a Wikipedia, which is one of the best wikis ever,
I just said that on the air, it was wonderful. Um.
In the commentary for Star Wars episode for a New
Hope DVD, George Lucas said that the Millennium Falcons navigational
computers were highly advanced and that that was why the
parsic thing works out the way that it does. Yeah,
(08:33):
that's yeah. So essentially then you just make Han Solo
a Guo flips switches a really good flip switcher. There's
also a great thing that was at the Smithsonian for
the Star Wars exhibit where uh, Harrison Ford was actually
talking about the first time they shot uh seen in
the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, and George Lucas gave
him the direction of your flying the ship and he says, Okay,
(08:56):
how do I do that? Because there are just all
these dials and switch is that they didn't. There was
no rhyme or reason to it. And Chus was like,
I don't know. So there was buttons pull that lever
pushed the button Frank. So anyway you might wonder, well,
why what's the big deal of the Kestle run? Anyway,
was what was the significance? Like it's a smuggling route,
(09:16):
but it's a smuggling route for what? And within the
lore again this again not film expanded universe, so not
Cannon Kessel was a planet that had these minds on
it for something called glitter stem spice, which was a
substance created by spice spiders, and it's a photoactive substance,
(09:40):
so it activates when light hits it, so it had
to be mined in complete darkness. It could not be
exposed to light in anyway or else it would lose
its potency. And the spice was essentially a drug. Uh.
As cheery as that is, I do want to point
out that I'm pretty sure the word castle comes from
during World War Two. You know that you Rman's got
(10:00):
themselves really good and surrounded by a group of Russians,
and UH and some of their compatriots were trying to
get supplies and aid to uh their their surrounding colleagues leagues.
Yeah sure, and this failed completely. But but the word
kessel means that like pocket in German cat or cattle. Yeah,
dossi rishtish uh So the glistone spice stuff. What it
(10:22):
was supposed to do within the realm of Star Wars
is boost your mental capacity and even give you perhaps
telepathic powers for a short amount of time. It was
also incredibly addictive. This is this makes Han Solo an
even darker character in a way because he's smuggling. Yeah,
he runs drugs, um so, yeah, that's kind of grim.
But in the during the Galactic Republic, which is the
(10:44):
period that proceeds A New Hope, that's back when there
was a the Old Republic was around. It was being
used medically, but then the Republic fails and then the
black market takes over. Smugglers start selling this I guess
more like recreational drug as opposed to medical things, and
the Empire outlaws it. And so that's why it's important
(11:05):
to be able to avoid imperial entanglements, as Obi Wan
says in a New Hope. So that's why it's important
that there's the explanation of shaving off some of the
distance that it would normally take you to to travel
in order to get there, and also the fact that
the Falcon would have to be a little faster than
(11:27):
most ships. Now, all of that is kind of cool.
I can. I can kind of handle most of that,
even though I think that the PARSEC thing is really
an apologist. It's a red coon or retroactive continuity, where you,
after you've made a mistake, you go back and try
to justify the fact that a mistake is there. Uh,
this is, by the way, in no way it's extraordinarily common. Um, yes, everywhere, Yeah,
(11:53):
it's Yeah. So the other thing that Hans Solo says
is that can go at point five beyond light speed.
So I interpret that to mean half again faster than
the speed of light. I I interpreted it as as
a as point five percent of light speed above light speed.
But but but your sounds much more impressive. But that
(12:13):
would be much mind would be much more impressive. Either way,
you're violating the laws of physics as we understand them.
Because as we as we understand the speed of light
through a vacuum is the universal speed limit. Nothing can
go faster than light through a vacuum physically impossible. Now
we should also mention light itself does not necessarily travel
(12:34):
at the same speed through all media. You know, through
a vacuum, it travels at an incredible clip. It's about
two hundred million, seven four hundred fifty eight meters per
second or around one six thousand, two d eighty two
miles per second. That's through the vacuum of space and
solos ship. If you assume it could go half again
(12:57):
faster than the speed of light would have its tough
speed at somewhere around four hundred forty nine million million
Si eight thousand, six eighty seven per second or two
four hundred twenty four miles per second. That's really fast.
And of course it is faster than anything we can
we we know of besides some theoretical particles that we'll
(13:18):
talk about in a little bit. It's faster than anything
we know of can go. That makes it really problematic
because if we just talk about parsecs and shaving off distance,
you know, okay, I can see that we still have
the problem of a parsec is a really long distance, right, Yeah,
So how you know if Han Solo made the Kessel run.
(13:40):
How long would it take him to do it, assuming
that he's traveling at around the speed of light? And yeah, yeah,
I mean if you go, if you nudge right up
to the speed of light, they would take about thirty
nine years travel twelve that that would be. That would
be due to an independent observer though correct because special relativity.
But we'll talk about that. Yeah, I don't want to
(14:01):
get into that right now, but special relativity will play
a part in our second part of our conversation because
also we should go ahead and say it. According to
Star Wars, and again this is a retcon type thing.
All ships have a stasis field stabilizer thing that keeps time.
It's the universal constant of time amongst the Empire, which
is really convenient because otherwise Han Solo would be older
than Yoda after he had taken what I don't know,
(14:24):
like like two or three trips yet four or five
trips on the Kestle run. But it does sound like
he's done it multiple times, which means that if he's
done the Kestle run multiple times, that special relativity problem,
which again we'll talk about in a minute just to right.
So So here's here's the thing the stasis is supposed
to keep everything constant. Uh. Time is a tricky thing
(14:46):
because it doesn't matter that it's not just if you're
traveling nearer or at or above the speed of light,
where you have to take it into account. Every single
planet that's in the entire galaxy of Star Wars has
time pass at a different rate according to any according
to physics. And again it's relative. So if Lauren's on
(15:08):
one planet and I'm on another planet, each of us
are going to feel as if time is passing at
the same speed individually, like a second will feel like
a second to me, a second will feel like a
second to Lauren. However, depending upon the planet's mass and
the speed at which it travels through space, the actual
passage of time is going to be different relative to
(15:28):
each other. So if we match our our watches up,
we'll see that they're not keeping exact synchronized time. And
again more on that and just a bit. I have
to I have to preface it because it's it makes
my head swim, all right. So the other element in
this Star Wars universe is this idea of hyperspace and
(15:49):
hyper drive, and so this is when and if you've
watched the Star Wars movies, you know, they engage the
hyperdrive and then suddenly all the stars start streaking towards
them in this beautiful display, and from from the outside
it looks like the ship just suddenly gets an enormous
speed boost, and yet no one is is slammed back
against the back of the the Millennium falcon like and
(16:11):
ejected into space because of the massive acceleration. That would
be a pretty pretty lame trip. It would be really
would be funny to see, like the the activation of
the first hyper drive and then you just see a
bunch of a lads just floating free in space, like well,
that was a bad idea. Um that kind of this
kind of happens in far Escape. But that's for for
you kids out there. We need to make Jonathan watch that. Anyway.
(16:31):
I've never watched it. So so it's it's not very
well defined hyperspace and in the Star Wars universe, even
in the expanded universe, all right, right, it's hyperspace is
kind of placed in contrast to real space. Yeah, you know,
real space being of course what we're kind of moving
around and the chips under under normal speed constraints are
moving around it and then and then yeah, apparently these
these hypermatter reactor drives with hypermatter implosion cores. I mean
(16:55):
it sounds a little bit like a like a wormhole
or a test react something like. Yeah. Like again, it's
not very well explained. So some of there's like it
could be a parallel universe where you open up a
gate and you travel into a new universe, and then
you open up a second gate and you re emerge
into quote unquote our universe, the star or at least
the Star Wars universe, real space, but you are, you know,
(17:17):
in a different point of real space than you were
when you started. Um Or. It could be an extra
dimension in space, which is kind of like warp drive,
where you're warping space around you. It could be an
alternate mode of physical existence, which I said is kind
of like an astral plane for those of you who
play fantasy games where you can travel to that. Um
(17:38):
Or it could just be traveling faster than the speed
of light, and all of that is difficult to to
get your head around. Again, none of that was was
definitively set down in the movies as this is how
hyper drive works or hyperspace, so we have a lot
of different things to choose from and uh. And it
seems to me that a lot of the people who
(17:59):
write the Star Wars universe or who have tried to
explain the Star Wars universe have kind of fudged around
with this a lot. No one has really come out
with what is the definitive answer as to what this is? Right? Sure,
and and this I used this example about about once
a week with Jonathan, but it always reminds me of
this one terrific interview that Rick Berman did about Star Trek,
(18:22):
specifically the uh Eisenberg uncertainty compensators and the transporters, and
someone was like, well, how did those work? And he
was like, very well, thank you, next question. Yeah. Whereas
you know, the holidack works very poorly, or at least
it breaks down once a year. But again, within the
lore of Star Wars, hyperspace itself is first discovered by
a race called the Ricotta, and they create ricotta like
(18:44):
the cheese. No, it's our A K A T A Okay,
just checking. You gotta remember that Star Wars often the
pronunciations are exactly the same as very silly stuff here
on Earth. Funny about that, um, But anyway, they they
create force powered drives, so they were tapping into the
power of the force to travel through space at incredible speeds.
(19:08):
And then there I have no problem because the force
is magic, and and magic means you do not have
to explain how something works technologically. Physics is right out
the windows, right. Yeah, you know, it's a fairy tale.
You don't question the physics of a fairy tale, you know.
I mean if you sit there and say, well, wouldn't
prints climbing Rapunzel's hair, scalp her and leave her screaming
(19:31):
in pain, that doesn't make the fairy tale very much fun.
Uh would have been a very short movie. Tangled would
have been very grim and not in a fairy tale
kind of Okay, anyway, I'm getting off track. But they
used the force, and I thought, oh, well, if it's
something that's force space, then that's except that then within
(19:51):
again the expanded lore. The Karelians Karelias, one of the
planets in the Star Wars universe, and the Euros both
found these starship drives and using reverse engineering, determined how
they worked and created technological versions of these force driven drives.
So they use technology to replicate what the force did.
(20:15):
And uh what now, now we have a technological explanation
for how hyperspace works, except there's no actual explanation there.
It's just that it is technological. Now this is what
drives me crazy because then I'm like, okay, wait now,
so if there is a technical way to make it happen,
how does it work? Um? And and really we have
more about the process than anything else. So uh. In
(20:37):
the movies, when they were going to make a jump
to hyperspace, they would activate the ship's navigational computer, which
would calculate whatever the route needed to be. And this
was important because, as Han Solo explains to Luke, who
is an impatient little brat in a New Hope, he
explains like, he can't hurry this stuff because if you do,
(20:58):
you pass too close to a star or a planet,
it pulls you out of hyperspace and you could die. Yeah. Yeah. Now, now,
this to me creates another problem, because if hyperspace is
in fact a parallel universe, why do things that exist
in our meat space affect you when you're in the
parallel universe, unless, of course, they also have a presence
in that parallel universe. I I do. I don't know,
(21:20):
And it sounds much more like a like a like
a wormhole, like like you're somehow jumping from from point
to point along kind of a like like an conveyor
belt sort of thing, which is another concept that we
can talk about in a minute. So so you're you're
thinking more along the lines of this parallel universe has
has certain anchor points to real space that it does
(21:44):
pass through, even if it's not a one to one ratio.
Is that kind of what you're talking about, or yeah,
or kind of like I don't know, like like there's
just certain sections of space that you can go much
faster through and and unfortunately, you know, sometimes as sun
gets in the way, so you're about like the auto
bawn of space. Yeah, and and that's another thing that
I was reading on Wikipedia. I was was saying, I
(22:07):
was saying that there maybe about eight of these, according
to the Star Wars universe, kicking around and that that
are super safe roots and then there's some that are
pretty shady and wind up getting me stuck in an asteroid. Wow. Okay, Well,
at any rate, it does make me sit there and
think this parallel universe explanation is is harder to get
my mind wrapped around if things in real space can
(22:28):
affect you're traveling through the parallel universe, unless, of course, uh,
it's just talking about how where your output is going
to be, like where your stopping point is going to be,
then obviously would be important if if it um maybe
it has to calculate, all right, well during the process,
like right now, if we were to leave, if we
were to instantaneously jump to this end point right now,
(22:48):
we'd be fine. But by the time we actually get there,
there's gonna be a planet in the way because of
the rotation of the planets. Then I'm like, okay, all right,
I got it. Now that makes sense. It was to me.
It was the stuff that was on the pathway that
made no sense. But anyway, how the hyperdrive would create
ripples in the time space matrix using a fusion reaction
and gamma radiation, and then the ripples would propel the
(23:11):
ship into hyperspace and none of that makes any sense.
But then again, it sounds really impressive if you're just
not thinking at all, If if you're just if Han
Solo were reading that, I would be like, yeah, totally, yeah, well,
let mean, come on, he was kind of dreamy, you know,
we just we just bought anything, he said, uh yeah.
And and this also reminds me of warp drive as well,
(23:31):
where you're you're warping the time space. In this case
it's the time space matrix, and in star check could
be the space time continuum. But either way, it's the
idea of warping the dimensions themselves in order to propel
you across vast distances at incredible speeds. And uh and
so that's kind of the breakdown of how it worked
(23:52):
within the lore of Star Wars. But we should really
kind of talk about again. We'll we'll get into special
relativity in general relativity and also some other discussions about
the whole hyperspace idea and just a little bit. But
first before we do that, let's take a quick moment
to thank our sponsored Alright, so let's get back to hyperspace.
(24:13):
So we mentioned in the first half nothing can go
faster than the speed of light, this universal speed look correct, Yeah,
it's it's smart. People such as Einstein have talked a
lot about that, right, and that that speed and time
themselves actually have a relationship. And so this gets us
into special relativity. There are a lot of different aspects
(24:33):
of special relativity, but the one that interests me the
most in this discussion is the fact that as objects
move faster, time dilates on that object relative to a
stationary observer. So again, in other words, like if I
if I'm standing perfectly still in space, so I'm not,
I'm not on a planet, I'm not moving at all,
hopefully in space? Yes, sure, why not? I'll give it
(24:57):
to you at this time, all right, And Lauren, you
are in a a zippy little ship that's going at
near the speed of light. Again, to you, time seems
to be passing at the normal rate. Like if you
were to have a watch watch, it would be taking
along at one second pertick according to my eyeballs right,
and it would feel exactly like it was as long
as a second should be. My watch would also to
(25:20):
me be it would appear to be moving at exactly
the correct speed. Now, if I were to to be
able to see what's happening in your little world, it
would look to me like a time had slowed way
down for you, and that more time was passing for
me than it was for you. So you could do
like a quick joy ride around the Solar system. And
(25:43):
let's say we're just going to make an argument that
that you take an hour long trip around the Solar system.
And now we're according to me to to your to
your watch, so your watch, you start the timer as
soon as you engage the drive, and an hour has
gone by, and you you come back and pick you
come back to see me, and uh, and we're gonna
say that you're going at a speed so that we
(26:05):
won't make it ridiculous. Well, you're going at a speed
where a year of time has gone by for me.
I'm going to Chris speed. So so an hour of
times gone by for Lauren, a year has gone by
for me. Um And and that's the special relativity. It's
that idea that again relative to me, less time has
passed for Lauren. Relative to Lauren, more time has passed
(26:27):
for me. And and that's because that's because speed and
mass both have speed and gravity both have an effect
on time, as though time is a substance itself. So
now the the gravity mass thing, that's really more general relativity.
But that's that's also playing a part in all of
our calculations when it comes to space. Faring. By the way,
if you were to do something like Carrie an atomic clock,
(26:51):
uh and have it synchronized with another atomic clock. So
to atomic clocks are side by side on a table
here on Earth, and you take one of those and
you get on an air elevator line is not not
even a space elver. You just get an airplane. And
as an airplane is going at top speed and it's
flying as far as it possibly can and then it lands.
By the time it lands, those two clocks that were
(27:12):
in perfect sink before will no longer be in perfect sink.
And the reason is is that you were traveling a
little faster. There's also some uh, the element of general relativity,
which means that when you're further away from the center
of the Earth, and therefore the closer you are to
a large mass object, the slower time passes for you
(27:33):
relative to something that's further out from that massive object. Again,
it's all relative because from your individual experience, it seems
like time is passing at the same rate unless you're,
you know, waiting on an important phone call, right, in
which case, yeah, like you know that that dreamy that
dreamy person you met at that party is supposed to
call and you're just staring at the phone. Tie. Every
second is an eternity, no matter whether you're traveling at
(27:54):
the speed of light or not. But anyway, yeah, we
can observe asn't it in satellites that we've launched into orbit.
They have to they have to mathematically correct. Yeah. So,
in fact, both special and general relativity play a part
in this. So the Global Positioning System GPS, the GPS
device you have picks up signals that are beamed down
(28:14):
from satellites, and the satellites part of the signal is
a time stamp, And the way your GPS figures out
where you are is by saying, all right, well, it
took x amount of time for for this one signal
to come from this satellite to hit me. It took
x amount why amount of time from the signal from
this other satellite to hit me, and took the amount
of time for the signal from this third satellite to
(28:37):
hit me. Based upon all of that and the position
of those satellites, I know that I must be on
this point on the Earth. Well, obviously the time stamp
is really important for the information to work needs to
be pretty precise. Yeah, otherwise it's going to give you
the wrong location on the Earth. The thing about the
satellites is that they are traveling faster than a point
(28:57):
relative on the surface of the Earth. So that means
that time is passing again at a different rate relative
to us here on Earth on the on the surface.
But they are also further out from the mass of
the Earth, which means they're going faster. So that means
times passing more slowly relative to us. But they are
further out, so time is passing faster than relative to us.
(29:19):
This gets really complicated, but if you were talking about
just special relativity, because the satellites are moving so fast,
they have about a lag of about seven micro seconds
per day on the satellites clock. So remember they're they're
traveling faster than the relative point on the surface of
the Earth, so that means that less time is passing
on the satellite seven microseconds per day as a as
(29:41):
a result. But because they're further out from the mass
of the Earth, then a clock would be here, you know,
close to the surface, their clocks are actually running faster
by about forty five micro seconds per day because of
general relativity. So if you take those two numbers the
the lag of second seven microsecon and the surplus of
(30:01):
forty five microseconds, and then you know, combine the two
to cancel them out. You are still left with a
thirty eight microseconds surplus per day on the satellites clock
compared to one on Earth. So that means that you
actually have to correct for that. All right, that's one
satellite that's orbiting Earth. Now imagine that on all the
spaceships traveling everywhere all the time. And that's why you
(30:24):
get to the point where keeping track of time is
an impossible act level. Yeah. So in the case of
Han Solo, again going back to that that Wired article
that Kyle Hill wrote, he started pointing out that assuming
that you're going at near the speed of light. He
went ahead and said, okay, you can't go faster than
speed of light. Yeah, let's let's that's right out. And
going at the speed of light is also impossible because
(30:46):
you would at that point have infinite density, density and mass.
So so that would be bad your mass. Your mass
increases as you get closer to the speed of light.
But if we say at infinitum, yeah, so it's going
a ballast pass. As as as that was close to
his speed of light as you possibly can imagine, this
(31:06):
is probably not ever it's probably not ever going to
be possible physically, but if you can imagine it um that,
then the castle run would take about half a day,
about so sixteen hours on the on the Millennium Falcon.
But then galactic time, assuming the galactic time is passing
at a standstone, forty years, so forty years would pass
(31:29):
in galactic time while on board the falcon, sixteen hours passes.
So they started to figure out, like, how much time
has passed in the gal in the galaxy since Han
Solo made his Kessel run, And then he started saying, well,
yeahs probably made a castle run more than once, so
if you start adding up the number of Kessel runs,
(31:50):
how much time has passed. And that's when he said, like,
you know, you do two castle runs. And then he
had to have been born before characters who like you know,
So then you've got Han Solo predating all the characters
who were in the prequels. Uh, And it's because of
this special relativity problem. So, by the way, if he
(32:12):
were in fact able to travel faster than the speed
of light, it would mean that he would arrive at
his destination before he left math is fun. Yeah, so
so he would actually he would be on Kessel before
he had decided to make the Kessel run due to
the way this works. Not granted, nothing can go faster
(32:33):
than the speed of light. But you know, assuming they
have they have those those drives, those the hyper drives,
ret red con drives, the red con drives. Yes, those
work really well. Um where you just say, hey, look impossible,
let's change it. Let's look at the Wookie. Yeah, and
and so the stasis field was sort of the answer
to that, saying that the time does not pass differently
(32:56):
aboard the ship as it does in the outside galaxy,
which is fine except for the fact that again, remember,
every single planet has its own passage of time. Like
you know, a second feels like a second no matter
where you are, but it lasts shorter or longer depending
upon the planet's mass and its speed that it moves
through space. And also technically, I think that it would
(33:17):
be a little bit confusing to try to, you know,
call days out on a whole system of planets that
have different sons and different orbits and yeah, and and tattooing,
you've got two sons. One of them might always be up.
You never know. I mean, it's it gets complex and
uh yeah. And then you have all these other people
who are traveling around at nearer or faster than the
(33:37):
speed of lights, so time gets messed up for them too,
So time would be meaningless in this universe, which you know,
one could argue it's kind of meaningless now, but I
don't get that cynical except on Fridays, and it's a Thursday,
so I'm all right. Then again, there are also some
criticisms to things like the visual representation of what it
looks like to go into hyper space, which I thought
(33:59):
was so yeah, yeah, there there was a study that
was done by we did that study, I don't have
it in front of some students that Riley Connor's, Katy Dexter,
Joshua Argyle and Cameron's school are, and they said that
if you were to travel at the speed of light,
and not only would you not see those stars become streets,
they would become a cone of light. So the center
(34:19):
would be the brightest, and the further out from the cone,
the darker it would get. And uh and part of
that is because of the Doppler effect essentially, right, right,
that's that's that's blue shift and redshift. And yes, when
you're when you're when you're moving near the speed of
light or at the speed of light towards something, Um,
everything is going to shift towards the blue. Yeah. The
waves compressed because you're you're traveling toward the emanation of
(34:43):
those waves, so they are being compressed further and further.
In fact, they would be compressed so much as to
move outside the visible spectrum and then you would start
getting hit by lots of X rays, which would tell
you that your spaceship needs to have some real protection
built into it or else people are not going to
feel so great when they get to where they're going. U.
And that's an interesting point too. Yeah, And I didn't
even think about that until I read this little study
(35:05):
and I thought, well, that's pretty clever. Yeah, I guess.
So the doubler effect would would be something you'd have
to take into account, so it wouldn't look like those
stars flying by the way they do in the movies. UM.
So we wanted to talk a little bit conclude with
a discussion about some actual real propulsion systems besides chemical rockets.
(35:26):
Now we don't have a hyperdrive, which is unfortunate. We
would love to have one obviously, would be really handy,
you guys, get on that. Yeah, but right now we
don't have one. So some of the propulsion systems have
been proposed for for for space travel beyond. We're getting
outside the whole thing about launching off the Earth. I
(35:46):
mean that that part. You still pretty much need chemical rockets,
solid fuel rockets, uh to to provide the propulsion you
need to get off the planet, right, because the amount
of power involved what we can do with chemical right
now is a lot more. Um well, it gives a
lot more. A lot more, that's the that's the astronomical term,
and there's a plenty in a chemical rocket. These other
(36:09):
drives would be very useful once you do get up
into space where you don't have to have the considerations
of escaping a planet's gravity or battling its atmosphere in
order to maneuver right, because the thing about about these
chemical drives is that they are extremely wasteful in a
grand universal kind of scheme. You have to carry a
lot of fuel. They pack a lot of power, but
(36:29):
you have to carry an awful lot of It's not
terribly efficient. Uh, so they wouldn't last very long in
the grand scheme of things. If you're talking about trying
to travel vast different distances, not differences, but distances, then
the chemical uh rockets end up being really heavy and
that limits how much you can carry, which in turn
(36:51):
limits how far you can go. So without just coasting
like for example, the voice your satellites right right, which, hey,
just left the Solar system. Actually they didn't. They come back. Yeah, yeah,
they puto um no they that was that was a
little bit of a mismisquote in the press. Oh nice. Yeah,
Well I'm glad you. I'm glad you caught up on that,
(37:12):
because obviously I did not. I failed to tweet about it.
So well, I'm that's bad. Hey, no, it's okay. You
caught it on the podcast. So now our listeners can
say that vogo bomb she gives Strickland on task. So
one of the ones we want to talk about where
ion engines. Now ion engines they're using ions and so
(37:33):
that's charged particles. Um. You know, think of an atom
that's either either has an excess of electrons or a
deficit in electrons. So either way to got a negative
or positive charge. Plasma is an ionic gas, so it's
a gas that has these free ions moving through. It
means that you can actually pass electric current through the
(37:55):
gas itself. That's what a plasma is. A plasma, of course,
is the most plentiful of the states of matter in
the universe as far as we are aware. And UM
and so the ion engines use electric fields rather than
chemical reactions to create propulsion. And they're not as powerful
as chemical engines, so they don't give you that the
(38:15):
chemical engines do, but they are way more efficient, and
so they can last ages. And they use that they
have solar energy to provide that. Yeah, they get the
solar energy to provide electricity to help create these reactions
that will create the ions that that propel it. So
they have these big solar panels that will unfold from
(38:36):
the spacecraft. We've already launched some spacecraft using ion engines.
The Dawn spacecraft, which launched on September twenty seven, two
thousand seven, has ion engines and uses the solar panels
to get the electricity UM it's destination had to actually,
but the second destination, the ultimate destination, is a dwarf
planet series and it's scheduled to arrive there in February.
(38:59):
Uh So, visiting the NASA pages about this spacecraft, I
saw some interesting figures. One was that it is a
six point three billion kilometer journey, and just so that
you get an idea of how far that is compared
to a light year. A light year is nine point
four trillion kilometers, so six point three billion kilometers still
nowhere near a light year. So it assuming that it
(39:22):
arrives on the first of February, in which you know,
that's I just took as an arbitrary it will have
flown for seven years, five months, and two days to
go those six point three billion kilometers. So I did
some I did some silly little math which was that
six million, six point three billion kilometers ends up being
(39:44):
six point three trillion meters. And then you have to
figure out how many seconds are in seven years, five months,
and two days. So I did two hundred three six
million hundred seconds. So if you do the math, then
that means that the average speed, and this is you know,
just an average because it does change, is twenty six
five nine seven meters per second. Based on the information
(40:06):
that I was able to find, so uhby I mean
not shabby, but still nowhere near the schools of the falcon. Uh.
But it also used about uses. The Dawn's engine used
fos of xenon fuel, being a neutral ly charged yeah,
and it used that the solar array to to ionize
(40:27):
everything's uh. And the solar array at one astronomical unit
provided about ten point three kilowatts of power. Uh. An
astronomical unit, by the way, is one million, seven thousand
and seventy one KOs. And you might say, well, what
the heck kind of measurement is that, Well, that's the
mean distance between the Earth and the Sun. Because the
(40:49):
distance actually changes throughout the Earth's rotation around the Sun,
it's not always exactly that far away. That's the mean.
So that's what we decided to define as an astronomical unit.
And I'm sure any aliens will be happy to take
us up on a discussion of why that's very human centric. Yeah, yes,
an astronomical unit is exactly the distance between your star
(41:11):
and your planet. Really enlightened guys, I mean I think
that they'll really take onto it like parsex. Yeah, they'll
be right up there. They're like I was having this
discussion with my Buddy eight parsex Ago like, oh, come on, like, hey,
I know how this goes, because I watched your Star
Wars documentary. So at the maximum thrust, Don's ion engine
(41:32):
expands about point to five ms of xenon per day,
and that produces a thrust of ninety two million Newton's,
which NASA explains is about the amount of force you
feel when you put a piece of paper on your
open hand. That's the amount of force which sounds so
incredibly unimpressive when you write, but in the in the
(41:52):
in the environment of space is plenty enough. And uh
so it says that the thrust changes the space crest
velocity about oh ten to the negative five meters per
second every second, and after about a thousand days, it
would achieve a velocity of a thousand meters per second.
So because there's no dragon space exactly. Yeah, so anyway, yeah,
(42:16):
about a thousand meters a second after a thousand days.
So that that that speed I gave you the twenty
six thousand seven per second. Obviously, again that's a that's
just averaging it out over the full distance. In fact,
it's just constantly accelerating, uh, not always at that particular speed.
But it will be or at that particular rate. I
shouldn't say it's accelerating at that speed. That's totally not misleading,
(42:38):
but at that rate. So yeah, that's that's one of
the ones that we're looking at. Now. There's also other
forms of propulsion that have been proposed, like solar sales. Again,
not something that's going to get you from Earth's solar
system to a distant solar system anytime quickly. Um, it's
more of a very efficient means of travel by harnessing photons.
(43:02):
The photons hit the solar sale and that's what provides
the propulsion to move the craft forward, which sounds kind
of incredible you think about that. You know, how much
kinetic energy can a photon have? Uh And and it
may surprise some of you to know that photons have
kinetic energy, but but that's true. I mean the Earth actually,
when the sun is hitting you, you weigh a little
(43:24):
more because the light is actually hitting again. Yeah, yeah,
that's why I never go outside. I don't like getting
pushed around by the sun or by nobody. And so, uh,
then I wanted to mention there's a theoretical engine. There's
there's a few theoretical engines. Yeah, the one that I
came across was an electromagnetic gravity drive by Yachoum Howser.
(43:48):
That's just a guess because I don't know how to
pronounce that name. I do not either. That sounds great
to me. Well, he's a physicist and a professor of
computer science at the University Applied Sciences in a solve
skitter and uh. And then he worked with Volter Drusher,
who was an Austrian patent officer, and they came up
(44:09):
with an idea that would use an electro magnet, essentially
a rotating ring above a super conducting coil, and then
they would pump a lot of electricity through the coil,
which would then create a magnetic field. Because we know
about the relationship between coils, electricity and then magnets magnets,
you know you can you can either if you run
(44:30):
electricity through a coil, you'll create a magnetic field. If
you run a coil through a magnetic field that's alternating
or that's that's uh, that's changing over time, a dynamic
magnetic field, you will induce current to flow through the coil.
That's this relationship between electricity and magnets. Thus the electro
magnetism that magnetic field will quote reduce the gravitational pull
(44:51):
on the ring to the point where it floats free
end quote. Uh. And that theoretically you could go from
Earth to Mars and about three hours using this in
a way that makes no sense to me. I mean,
it's it's talking about a The math requires that you
actually have extra dimensions to make it all makes sense.
(45:12):
And you know, in the in the standard model, we
essentially think of four dimensions, three in space and one
in time. But this would require two more dimensions, would
also end up in requiring extra fundamental forces besides the
strong and weak nuclear force, electromagnetic and gravity that we
are familiar with, there be two more and uh. And
it's possible that these things exist, but it's so far
(45:33):
exists as far as math goes, and not observation right right,
even even lower down or even though it drowning down
on the scale. There's a few other things that people
have kind of theorized about. One one is called um
this is probably not how you say it. Qber's warp
drive is the thing that NASA has talked about a
little bit, which which kind of kind of is similar
to the Doppler effect. It says that if you can
(45:54):
get space time to expand behind you in contract in
front of you, you can just kind of warp straight
through it. So, in other words, think of it this way.
You've gotta like imagine you have a map in front
of you, all right, a paper map, and you have
put a figuring on the leftmost edge of the paper map,
and your job is to get the figuring to the
right most edge and the least number of die rolls,
(46:17):
and there their spaces there that that represent how far
you can go. So uh, normally there would be a
hundred spaces between you and the and the right side,
and you're only able to roll the die x number
of times. Right, but you can just pick up right
if you were able to fold the edge of the
map so that it's right next to you, and you
(46:40):
roll a one and you move one space, and then
you unfold the map, you have just moved one space,
but you've traveled all that distance. That's the magic of
warp drive. People. We're talking about folding all of the
galaxy around us to accommodate our travel needs. And people say,
I'm a demanding traveler, but so so that's that's one.
(47:02):
You know, it sounds super easy on paper. Um, I
just explained that. Um. And the other being a being
creating wormholes. Um. You know, you know, a wormhole being
kind of a pokey thing through its shortcut on a
paper map. If you, if you, if you took instead
of a little figuring, you had a pointy figuring or
(47:24):
a pencil or something, and you and you stuck that
pencil straight through the two points in the map that
you wanted to travel between, and then sort of hit
hopped through the holes. So there's still some travel time,
but it's much more reduced. It's this is where we
get wibbly wobbly timmy whimy right right. But but hypothetically,
all we would have to do is build two super
dense rings giant super dense rings, charge them somehow, and
(47:46):
spin them near the speed of light. Oh that's easy, Yeah,
no problem. So the interesting thing here, by the way,
is that when we're talking about warping space, when we're
talking about actually moving or manipulating the space time continuum
or however you want to fabric break of space itself,
we actually get around the special relativity problem because your
actual speed doesn't need to be light speed. You are
(48:08):
just changing the distance and not changing You're not going
at this incredible speed. So time is still gonna travel
or stimes. Time is still going to pass differently relative
to someone on a different ship or a different planet,
but not at the amazing differences. You wouldn't need an
infinite amount of energy to move yourself, and you wouldn't
have an infinite amount of masks. And you also wouldn't
(48:28):
find out when you call back home that everyone you
know is forty years older. Uh, they might be, you know,
a few micro seconds older than you, but it would be,
you know, so small as to not as to be negligible,
except for things like communication and stuff where you have
to have exact timing. Obviously you have to have computers
to correct those calculations. But when it comes to, you know,
(48:49):
missing someone's birthday, you don't have to worry so much.
Daylight saving time would probably interesting. So anyway, Yeah, I mean,
there are people who are working on these theoretical drives.
It may turn out that the theories are just they're
they're not truly like theories in the sense of this
is really established stuff. We're just working more hYP they're
(49:10):
more like hypotheses that we have yet to prove um.
So it'll be interesting to see if we ever do
develop anything beyond the propulsion systems that we're currently looking into. Uh.
I mean, it would obviously be very helpful for anything
involving colonization or exploration, because otherwise it's going to take
us a really long time to get Yeah, you you
(49:34):
would have to build spacecraft capable of supporting multiple generations
of people aboard that with a very limited number of supplies,
because you know, you pretty much you have what you
take with you. You know, you know, most we don't
know of any shopping malls out there beyond Earth. You
have to have to grow it yourself up. So anyway,
(49:54):
that that kind of wraps up this discussion about uh,
Star Wars and hyperspace, the Kessel Run, what we're actually
looking into as means of propulsion in space. It's a
really interesting topic. I'm glad that we we grabbed this
one as our first episode, and hey, to all my
Star Wars fans out there, I just have to say,
live long and prosper. So yeah, if you guys want
(50:18):
to send in any emails, I'm sure lots of you
are thinking that you want to right now, I recommend you,
uh you use our mudd ass that's tech stuff at
Discovery dot com. Or let us know on Facebook or
Twitter that I was making a Babylon five reference. Just
now are handled there and say that I think pretty
(50:39):
sure it was the master. Um. Just drop me a
little note my handle at both Twitter and Facebook text
stuff hs W Lauren and I will talk to you
again really soon for more on this and bouthands of
other topics. Does it has to works dot com? This
(51:02):
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