What killed the Defiant's crew?

[Metryq]

Timo wrote:

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objects beamed in from the extreme cold of space

A vacuum does not have a temperature, although other factors come into play. The Apollo CSMs did a slow roll for "passive thermal control" so that one side would not get toasted from direct exposure to the Sun. What were conditions like out near the barrier when the Enterprise took aboard the Valiant's recorder? What about Nomad? It had just been shot at by a photon torpedo, and it apparently possessed a highly advanced power supply—what about emissions from that?

Yes, the transporter is magical in many ways. And beaming something into or out of a vacuum opens up that perennial debate about how the transporter works—is it a wormhole-like "gateway" that literally transposes matter from one place to another, or is it a disintegrator-reintegrator with a computerized buffer that can "filter" out undesirable things?

Maybe the transporter killed the crew. Someone left the cap off, and the vapors began to phase out the entire ship...

[CorporalCaptain]

Metryq wrote:

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A vacuum does not have a temperature, although other factors come into play.

There's no such thing as a perfect vacuum. There's always some background radiation, at least as far as is known by science. In Kelvin, 2.7 degrees is as cold as space gets, naturally [http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/as...s/980301b.html].

[Metryq]

I understand that there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum. To return to my Apollo CSM example, if you stuck a thermometer out into cislunar space, would it heat up or cool off, relative to your comfy internal environment? If space were "extremely cold," how could the CSM be heating up, thus necessitating the roll? Obviously, energy can be absorbed by the CSM and re-radiated without a solid carrier, like dust or gas. And the photons themselves technically do not have a temperature, neither hot nor cold. Yet by your reasoning, anything transported in from open space should be "extremely cold" to the touch.

[Timo]

In this particular case, we can establish the temperature of space quite satisfactorily, the very same way we establish it here down on Earth: by sticking a black body analog in the volume we want to examine and assessing the temperature this object reaches at the eventual equilibrium - in shadow, and in sunlight, for two very different readings.

So let's stick a thermometer in space at the distance of one AU from the Sun, that is, in the vicinity of Earth. In shadow, we get something close to 70 Kelvin, or minus 200 degrees Celsius. In sunlight, we get about plus 120 degrees Celsius. Not too bad in terms of survival; many planetary environments are more extreme.

But the Valiant marker would probably have reached an equilibrium more than 1 AU away from the nearest star. Delta Vega's sun was said to be a few lightdays away; unless she were really hot, temperatures at the Barrier would probably be in the order of just a few dozen Kelvin, enough to liquefy the air around the recorder marker when it got aboard unless some adjusting were done. The piece of the Charybdis beamed aboard explicitly came from a place with very low temperatures (indeed, below zero Kelvin was quoted!), again dangerously cold by any standards. Objects floating in open space near stars would probably be constantly exposed to local sunlight and might actually be hot to the touch, but I don't think any such were encountered in Star Trek, as the heroes and villains would typically only go near stars when also going near the local planets... In practice, everything interesting and worth picking up would be found on planetary orbits.

Timo Saloniemi

[CorporalCaptain]

Metryq wrote:

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Yet by your reasoning, anything transported in from open space should be "extremely cold" to the touch.

I never said that.

[blssdwlf]

Did the crew immediately touch the Valiant marker? I don't recall that they did.

[Timo]

Nope, we never saw anybody touch it. Only the Charybdis wreckage, plus assorted other shrapnel in VOY, was immediately manhandled. But the recorder marker should have been condensing the moisture in the air, and very probably the air itself, madly from the very moment of beam-in. Unless its temperature were "compensated", the way the temperature of the TNG wreckage must have been.

Timo Saloniemi

[publiusr]

Now I seem to remember a Sci Am article that postulated an alternate universe where there was no weak nuclear force:

http://gordonmccabe.wordpress.com/20...her-universes/

That might interfere with life: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0609050

I think the interphase itself may have been a weakless emboltment--also helping to explain the choice of triox.

The void where Kirk found himself might be the void in Dr. Who or Traveller, or perhaps a universe with our no-fun laws of physics.