Spoilers the wormhole in the first Star Trek movie. What was the big deal anyway?

It kind of makes you wonder what other effects imbalanced warp drives may be capable of generating, besides blown up ships.

 

I don't know if you're being facetious, but that's exactly the idea in the film itself. It's made explicit that they can't safely go to warp until Spock corrects the imbalance. Given all the alert klaxons and the crew's urgency when the wormhole effect begins, it's clearly not safe or desirable, and presumably the increasing time dilation effect would only have continued to increase and basically frozen the crew in time if they hadn't shut down the engines successfully (the sequence took much longer than the 22.5 seconds stated in dialogue).

The most likely effect is just failure to engage warp. Other than that, though, given the intense gravitational forces involved, the ship might be crushed or torn apart by tidal stresses. If anything, a wormhole seems like a relatively benign possibility.

 

Although the Alcubierre warp drive wasn't concocted until 1995 -- and I'm not even sure the idea of a "warp bubble" existed before TNG -- the basic premise for warp drive is creating an artificial curvature of spacetime around the ship. It makes sense that a "warp imbalance" will skew this geometry into something that doesn't symmetrically protect the ship. If it did create a wormhole, they could get stuck in the throat like being inside the event horizon of a black hole, and not be able to re-emerge.

 

James Blish referred to "the bubble of subspace in which the Enterprise was enclosed" in his 1968 adaptation of "Tomorrow is Yesterday." The idea seems to date back at least to Jack Williamson's "Released Entropy" in 1937, which referred to a ship "drawn into a tiny subspace of her own by the field warp of the kappa coils." https://sfdictionary.com/view/119/subspace

ST:TMP's science advisor Jesco von Puttkamer explicated the idea in a 1978 memo reprinted in The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Though his memo doesn't have Alcubierre's mathematical rigor, it expresses essentially the exact same principle 17 years earlier -- a "new but small universe within the normal Universe" whose space-time curvature causes it to "surf" on a spacetime distortion that propagates effectively faster than light. (Puttkamer uses Williamson's definition of "a subspace" as the pocket space within the warp, while Blish used the more common sense of it as a hyperspace-like continuum through which a warp ship travels. Blish was thus the first person to link subspace to warp drive, since TOS only used the term in connection with subspace radio.)

The Introduction to Navigation manual accompanying the 1980 Star Trek Maps, written by John Upton, explains warp drive in a very similar way. "Since space is being moved relative to itself in a smoothly increasing rate as the center of the field is approached, no neighboring regions exceed the speed of light."

So Alcubierre didn't invent the concept of a warp bubble. He just found the mathematical proof that it was a valid solution of General Relativity. It's similar to how the idea of wormholes goes back to Einstein and Rosen, but it wasn't until Kip Thorne did the detailed math for Carl Sagan's Cosmos in the 1980s that physicists began to take it seriously.

 

I was suggesting a missed opportunity. They don’t have hyperspace in Star Trek, which seems FTL friendly (the Vaaduaar have a Babylon 5 type) Had R2 been there instead of Spock, maybe they get to V’ger faster

I seem to remember reading about rules for pilots’ airflow that came from putting batteries atop air-filled bladders…

 

Well, that's just a matter of terminology -- see the etymology link for "subspace" in my previous post, and compare it to the nearly identical definition for "hyperspace." Different works of science fiction use both terms to refer to the same thing, a hypothetical continuum beyond normal space that allows bypassing the lightspeed limit. And of course, each fictional universe makes up its own rules for how hyperspace or subspace works and how fast it is.

Indeed, Roddenberry actually did refer to hyperspace instead of subspace in his ST:TMP novelization. Perhaps he was following Puttkamer's technical advice, or perhaps he was emulating its use in Star Wars.

Of course, the real-world definition for hyperspace is 4-dimensional space, the next dimension up from our 3D space in the same way that 3D space is a dimension up from a flat 2D plane. Whereas the real definition for a subspace is a subset of the dimensions within an n-dimensional space; for instance, if string theory is correct and the universe has 11 dimensions, then our 4-dimensional spacetime would be a subspace of that 11D space, whereas the remaining 7 dimensions would be another subspace, another subset of the whole. (That's what I tend to assume Trek subspace is.)

 

Trekspace might have to be more complicated than that

Andromeda was pretty FTL hostile but for the sole means of propulsion that made no sense to me at all.

The reason I made my comment was to do some in universe brainstorming as to the old trope of how the newest fastest hero ship seems to stumble on an older Earth vessel that somehow, with a more primitive drive, winds up farther out. A TMP malfunction scenario being a possible explanation…a coil burning jump…accidental breakthrough. The TMP malfunction could have gone any number of ways

 

Here's the archived All Systems University web page explaining how slipstream drive worked: http://www.saveandromeda.com/allsystems/engineering/enginslipstr.htm

It was loosely based in ideas from string theory and quantum physics, but with some fanciful elements. The idea was that all the particles in the universe were linked by strings through a higher-dimensional space -- you could think of them as micro-wormholes of a sort (like how some theorists use micro-wormholes to explain quantum entanglement between particles) -- and that the links between large concentrations of mass like stars and galaxies were dense enough sheafs of slipstream "cords" that you could travel through them. And like quantum entanglement, it's independent of distance, so the slipstream path to another galaxy can be faster to traverse than the path to a neighboring star.

Plus it had the contrived bit of only being navigable by living beings, to explain why sentient starships needed living pilots and crew. I never liked that part -- I could see the dramatic necessity, but the handwave made no sense.

 

Very interesting -- I actually wasn't aware of the complete sci fi history of the "warp bubble". You are indeed correct: it sounds like Alcubierre's paper was essentially a proof of concept for a very old idea. Thanks!

 

The way I understood different FTL models was that warp was like surfing the wrinkle in a carpet you can shove along with your foot. Stomp it hard, and that bump pops up across the room? That’s a jump drive. Fold the carpet and poke a ice pick through…that’s a wormhole. Andromeda followed the threads I guess, and hyperspace is under the carpet..or subspace or something…

 

I have a bit of hearing loss…so the first time I watched this scene I was confused as I thought decker said

“belay that phaser hors d’oeuvre”

the sound effects distorted his voice

I use the subtitles for movies and had to wait to see the subtitles before I realized he said “phaser order”

now I get a chuckle every time I see this scene.

 

TMP has a lot of lines that I needed the novelisation and then latterly the DVD subtitles to understand. Kirk’s line, “You’re right” to Scotty in the travel pod always sounds more like “Yer late!” to me. Then there’s McCoy’s line in Ilia’s quarters where he says “Humans, Ensign Perez… us”, for years I wasn’t sure if DeForest was trying to say Enterprise or Ensign Prize.

 

That's because, unless I'm quite mistaken, it's being delivered in a nearly fourth-wall-breaking faux Scottish accent.

Seriously. I had the very same issue with that one, and it also sounded like either of those to me.

 

If we're doing TMP mondegreens, one I had when I was little, also from the Travel Pod scene, was when Scotty says, "Any man who could manage such a feat," I heard as "Any man with manufactured feet."

 

When it came to '70s and '80s movies, I usually read the novelizations well before I saw the actual films, so I guess I didn't have "mondegreen" problems. If anything, my problem is that sometimes I forget that a scene or line from the novel wasn't actually in the movie.

 

As usual with these kinds of topics, the original poster drops a bunch of questionable opinions and inquiries, and then never returns to the discussion.

 

But we love Star Trek, so it's lemonade season out of what life has given us, right?

 

I understood those perfectly in the theater in 1979.