It's pretty clear I meant going to warp without a problem. I shouldn't have to spell it out so exactly. But I forgot for a moment that I was posting on TrekBBS.
You know what? Forget it.
Spoilers the wormhole in the first Star Trek movie. What was the big deal anyway?
- Thread starter urrutiap
- Start date
It's pretty clear I meant going to warp without a problem. I shouldn't have to spell it out so exactly. But I forgot for a moment that I was posting on TrekBBS.
You know what? Forget it.
The point is that it wasn't just the mild inconvenience you claimed, but was far more dangerous. You were talking about it like it was merely the equivalent of being unable to start your car, but it was more like being unable to steer or brake while racing down the freeway. All they could do was turn the engine off and hope they could coast to a stop before they hit something.
I always thought that was an odd phrasing.
Now excuse me while I go to what-they-used-to-call-a "general store" in my what-they-used-to-call-a "horseless carriage."
Kor
I thought it was completely clear what you said.
At the time TMP came out, the term "black hole" was a relatively recent coinage. There were some intermittent uses in the early 1960s, but it didn't start to catch on widely until 1967 or so. That's why "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (written and shot in late 1966) called it a "black star" instead. There was some science fiction in the '70s, like Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, that still favored the older, more technical term "collapsar" (short for "collapsed star") instead of adopting the vernacular term. So it makes sense that the film's science advisors in 1979 might have believed that "black hole" was a faddish nickname that would eventually fall out of use.
(On similar lines, I find it implausible when characters centuries in the future talk about dark matter. "Dark matter" is just a placeholder name we use because we don't know what it is yet, like "terra incognita." Once we identify what it is -- whether it's axions or primoridial black holes or sterile neutrinos or whatever -- we'll probably call it that instead.)
Though white holes are now considered unlikely to exist, the idea of a black hole as a cosmic shortcut hasn't entirely fallen out of favor. Specifically, a rotating black hole would have a ring singularity, and if the BH were supermassive and the singularity wide enough to pass through without being ripped apart by tidal stresses, it's theorized that it could be a passage to another part of spacetime, whether a different place, a different time, or a different universe. This is called a Kerr ring, and it's the basis of "Yesterday's Enterprise"'s description of its time warp as "a Kerr loop of superstring material."
Alternatively, passing through the ergosphere of a rotating black hole (a field of "dragged" spacetime around it) could send you on a "closed timelike curve" that could send you back in time and elsewhere in space as well. This is essentially what happened in "Tomorrow is Yesterday," even though that episode came out seven years before Frank Tipler worked out the theory! In my first novel, Ex Machina, I posited that this was what had happened to V'Ger too, since it seemed it had to get flung back in time in order to travel through multiple galaxies as indicated in the Spock Walk sequence. (Kirk's line that it came out on the far side of our galaxy is third-hand hearsay, not as reliable as the visual evidence in the Spock Walk.) It may even have been the same black hole/"black star" in both cases, since what are the odds there are two of them in such proximity to Earth?
That's pretty interesting. What's sort of funny is that based on the amount of data that V'ger managed to accumulate, I'd always thought that Voyager's trip encounter with the blackhole must have included a "sent back in time" component as well, yet it never registered how that is exactly what happened in "Tomorrow is Yesterday", even though I had previously thought that it made sense if it was exactly the same blackhole since it had been the only one established as being near Earth in Treklore.
Been ages since I watched it, and it doesn't appear to be available on Netflix
Coming soon in 4K to Paramount+.
NASA's Jesco Von Puttkamer was an advisor to Gene Roddenberry.
TMP wormhole by Jesco Von Puttkamer by Ian McLean, on Flickr
The wormhole scene in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" was included to add some real science to the movie, and to stress that space exploration was dangerous, not just to contrast Kirk and Decker. Here is Jesco Von Puttkamer's piece from "Starlog" [April 1980].
Had the asteroid not been pulled into the wormhole, maybe the ship would still be there?
See the dialogue I quoted earlier. Sulu said they were going to impulse power but Decker said it would take 22.5 seconds for it to take effect due to "inertial lag." So if the asteroid hadn't been sucked in during those 22.5 seconds, the ship would've just uneventfully returned to impulse. It was a rather clumsy way to approach the scene, creating the false impression that destroying the asteroid was what disrupted the wormhole.
It would've made more sense for the wormhole itself to be the peril, something they had to figure out a way to escape before it was too late. I guess they didn't do that because this was probably the first time the general public had ever heard of a wormhole in a work of mass-media fiction, so it would've been hard to explain what a wormhole was and what hazard it posed in the brief time they had available.
OK. Although the asteroid has to be destroyed before the Enterprise collides with it and is itself destroyed. And that will happen before the wormhole dissipates?
The wormhole was going to dissipate anyway. Decker's line about the 22.5-second lag before returning to impulse comes before the asteroid is detected. The asteroid was just a random hazard that threatened to damage/destroy them before the lag period was up.
Like I said before, it's like they're coasting down the road without brakes or steering and waiting for friction to slow them to a stop. The asteroid is the equivalent of a boulder in the road. Destroying it has no causal relationship to the wormhole dissipating; it's just a hazard they randomly encounter before they "coast" to a stop.
I agree that the execution makes it appear that destroying the asteroid is what dissipates the wormhole, which is unfortunate. On the other hand, the wormhole sequence is the only time we see the E actually do anything weapons-related, and given the criticisms the movie already faces for its pacing, even a single photon torpedo was probably better than nothing.
I know ideally Star Trek isn't about solving problems via superior firepower, but it is a little frustrating that they introduce this new ship and then we rarely get to see it do anything exciting.
I know ideally Star Trek isn't about solving problems via superior firepower, but it is a little frustrating that they introduce this new ship and then we rarely get to see it do anything exciting.
And in potentially another example of Trek accidentally predicting later theories and discoveries, maybe the "Tomorrow"/V'Ger Black Hole is "Planet Nine."
There's also a thematic element, in that the ship is both literally and metaphorically incomplete and broken without Spock.
Perhaps a better word is "unbalanced," since it was an engine imbalance that caused the wormhole and that Spock repaired when he arrived.
No, it was fine as it literally was. No, actually it was perfect. Perhaps you missed the word "metaphorically"?
I have this little pet theory that a warp imbalance prevents smooth warp travel…and asteroid or not, such an artificial wormhole is to be avoided…unlike the boom tube like DS9 version. So warp drive advances are incremental.
In Star Wars though, you want that perhaps to access hyperspace.
In Star Wars though, you want that perhaps to access hyperspace.
