Warp speed vs wormholes

[James89901]

Which one would you prefer the most if you had to chose one to be real?

Let's say warp speed looks like it does in star trek and wormholes are similar to that of interstellar.

The obvious advantage of the wormhole is that it's instant. So that's great haha. However then you lose the experience of travelling great distances extremely fast, and if it would look similar to star trek, then who wouldn't want to see that frequently?? Not to mention all of the cool planets and species you might see and meet along the way and get to experience, which you might not of if you took the quicker option.

Driving places sometimes can be a lot of fun in today's world. So choosing between driving and having teleporting... Yeah people would almost certainly teleport haha But still, it's just a different use of your time really.

I suppose it comes down to whatever the situation is and if someone would like the destination they're travelling to more than the journey/moving fast. Or if they like both equally.

I'd say most would chose the wormhole. But the warp speed would be more fun probably.

 

[The_Baroness]

I'd prefer warp drive.

Sure the Wormhole is quicker, but it'll take you from point A to B and that's it. Warp Drive is slower, but doesn't limit where you can go.

Besides, it's not about the destination, it's about the journey.

 

[C.E. Evans]

Warp drive definitely.

Wormholes are quicker, but with only one exception, they're also inherently unreliable in Trek. You could easily travel 70,000+ light-years in the blink of an eye, but you could also end up stranded with no way to get back.

 

[James89901]

I'd prefer warp drive.

Sure the Wormhole is quicker, but it'll take you from point A to B and that's it. Warp Drive is slower, but doesn't limit where you can go.

Besides, it's not about the destination, it's about the journey.

Sorry, maybe I should of specified that I meant artificial wormholes that can be created at will. So travel to anywhere, from anywhere is possible.

But yeah I agree that the journey can often hold a lot of enjoyment. Depending on the destination, it can be more enjoyable. Like if you're being driven towards your own execution haha.

Point to point travel does also offer up more time to do other things I guess as well. So that's an added bonus of wormholes. Although if you were travelling on the enterprise, you could still do quite a bit of stuff anyway during that time.

 

[James89901]

I really should of mentioned they're artificial wormholes haha. So they can be created and destroyed at will, and go anywhere.

 

[SG-17]

Coaxial Warp Drive.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Warp drive would be slightly less terrifying to be in human hands. Wormholes could be used for kidnapping and invasions at best. At worst as a WMD, like opening up a wormhole to the sun’s corona over a big city.

 

[James89901]

Warp drive would be slightly less terrifying to be in human hands. Wormholes could be used for kidnapping and invasions at best. At worst as a WMD, like opening up a wormhole to the sun’s corona over a big city.

Yeah but we can already make our own little suns for a split second here and wreak havoc haha Plus, the type of anti-matter technology in star trek is more worrying than the Sun in terms of WMD's. Not to mention old mate Soren's trilithium haha.

Fear of WMD's is misplaced in my opinion. The thing they're most directly responsible for is ending a world war and preventing another one through deterrence. Maybe one day they'll annihilate us all. So far they've benefitted us greatly.

 

[Lt.Smokey]

Sorry, maybe I should of specified that I meant artificial wormholes that can be created at will. So travel to anywhere, from anywhere is possible.

But yeah I agree that the journey can often hold a lot of enjoyment. Depending on the destination, it can be more enjoyable. Like if you're being driven towards your own execution haha.

Point to point travel does also offer up more time to do other things I guess as well. So that's an added bonus of wormholes. Although if you were travelling on the enterprise, you could still do quite a bit of stuff anyway during that time.

In this case, I would take the wormhole. Warp speed would limit you to one section of the galaxy, which I don't suspect is as rife with life or other interesting things as Star Trek portrays. More likely to find something if we can travel instantly to anywhere.

 

[Shawnster]

The obvious advantage of the wormhole is that it's instant. So that's great haha. However then you lose the experience of travelling great distances extremely fast, and if it would look similar to star trek, then who wouldn't want to see that frequently?? Not to mention all of the cool planets and species you might see and meet along the way and get to experience, which you might not of if you took the quicker option.

Meh, not much to see at warp, really. Rainbow stars that streak by (or particles hitting the navigation deflector, depending on your opinion), but that's about it. Or the warp effect is some streaky blinding blueish white cloud or something. Again, nothing much to see. The real visuals are when you come out of warp. It's then you see the stars unfiltered by an atmosphere, see the planets and nebula and all the other cosmic sites.

Wormhole might be instantaneous but if it pops you out in space you still get the visuals.

Now, an Iconian gateway or a Sikarian device that instantly transports you to another planet light years away? Yeah, that's like walking from one room to the next. Definitely no visual wonders there.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

A Stable WormHole is said to be "Incredibly Rare". The fact that there is one between the Gamma Quadrant and Alpha Quadrant is entirely due to the WormHole aliens living inside deciding to stablizie it.

Otherwise you get things like the Barzan Wormhole where one side is fixed, and the other side is moving about randomly.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Yeah but we can already make our own little suns for a split second here and wreak havoc haha Plus, the type of anti-matter technology in star trek is more worrying than the Sun in terms of WMD's. Not to mention old mate Soren's trilithium haha.

Fear of WMD's is misplaced in my opinion. The thing they're most directly responsible for is ending a world war and preventing another one through deterrence. Maybe one day they'll annihilate us all. So far they've benefitted us greatly.

It’d be even easier, even more destructive, instant and impossible to track.

 

[Timo]

In much of Trek, wormhole is what happens when your warp drive backfires.

So should we think wormholes are simply very fast warp, with all the characteristics - speed, blurring of scenery, trouble steering - taken to a satisfying extreme?

I choose "both", then, reserving the option of deciding how fast my warp/wormhole is, from walking pace to infinite speed. Although I'm left wondering if a high warp beeline from A to B kills every bee on the line while a wormhole hop from A directly to B leaves them merrily buzzing. Or whether going to high warp takes you away from this universe and its bees, and thus amounts to the wormhole travel in full.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[at Quark's]

Warp drive would be slightly less terrifying to be in human hands. Wormholes could be used for kidnapping and invasions at best. At worst as a WMD, like opening up a wormhole to the sun’s corona over a big city.

That's true for almost any powerful technology. You probably also wouldn't want to think about the uses terrorists and criminals would make of the transporter, were it ever actually invented. And such wormhole technology could be incredibly useful, too. Had Voyager been equipped with such a wormhole drive, they would have been home in seconds instead of spending 7 years in the DQ

A Stable WormHole is said to be "Incredibly Rare". The fact that there is one between the Gamma Quadrant and Alpha Quadrant is entirely due to the WormHole aliens living inside deciding to stablizie it.

Do we know that for a fact? I'm not sure there is a quote in DS9 somewhere to that effect, though we do know the prophets can "shut" the wormhole if they desire- then again its entrance can also be "collapsed" by Federation-level technology, apparently. AFAIK, the wormhole could have been stable as a natural phenomenon, with the "wormhole aliens" (wherever their origins might be, exactly) deciding to inhabit it at some point, since nothing is ever said about the origins of the Prophets. Also, "Incredibly rare" does not equal "impossible". I think DS9 simply claims it to be the first stable wormhole discovered by the Federation.


As for the warp/wormhole question In general, why would it have to be an either/or situation? Suppose the Federation discovers how to generate /destroys these artificial wormholes in a manner practical enough to outfit ships with the "drive" some time after VOY's time. they wouldn't suddenly lose their old warp capability. They'd most likely use whatever form of travel is more convenient from that time forward, possibly outfitting their ships with a dual drive system. It also might resemble the use of shuttles vs. transporters. Usually the transporters are the most convenient and hence preferred option, but there are situations where it's better/more prudent to take the shuttle, even when it's slower.

 

[James89901]

In much of Trek, wormhole is what happens when your warp drive backfires.

So should we think wormholes are simply very fast warp, with all the characteristics - speed, blurring of scenery, trouble steering - taken to a satisfying extreme?

I choose "both", then, reserving the option of deciding how fast my warp/wormhole is, from walking pace to infinite speed. Although I'm left wondering if a high warp beeline from A to B kills every bee on the line while a wormhole hop from A directly to B leaves them merrily buzzing. Or whether going to high warp takes you away from this universe and its bees, and thus amounts to the wormhole travel in full.

Timo Saloniemi

Well a real life wormhole throat would in theory not affect any of the space between the two mouths. They're just 2 points in space-time that have been folded to one another. The localised space of the two mouths have been manipulated, either artificially or naturally, so only that space at both ends has been stretched to meet one another. The space in between has not been stretched or "warped". If it had, that would then be considered warp speed.

Warp speed certainly seems like the more dangerous option because you still have to pass through all of the space in front of you somehow.

Now if these star trek ships have the ability to compress the space ahead of them and then put their ship into a field that somehow keeps them in the same space-time as the rest of the universe. Then perhaps they also have the ability to compress all of the space that contains their ship in an inwards direction that is perpendicular to their velocity vector. Thereby making their cross section extremely tiny and making the likelihood of a collision with anything very small. They'd still need shields obviously, but just not as powerful ones because they'd be needing to deflect a lot less debris.

 

[James89901]

Well a real life wormhole throat would in theory not affect any of the space between the two mouths. They're just 2 points in space-time that have been folded to one another. The localised space of the two mouths have been manipulated, either artificially or naturally, so only that space at both ends has been stretched to meet one another. The space in between has not been stretched or "warped". If it had, that would then be considered warp speed.

Warp speed certainly seems like the more dangerous option because you still have to pass through all of the space in front of you somehow.

Now if these star trek ships have the ability to compress the space ahead of them and then put their ship into a field that somehow keeps them in the same space-time as the rest of the universe. Then perhaps they also have the ability to compress all of the space that contains their ship in an inwards direction that is perpendicular to their velocity vector. Thereby making their cross section extremely tiny and making the likelihood of a collision with anything very small. They'd still need shields obviously, but just not as powerful ones because they'd be needing to deflect a lot less debris.

That's something I never considered before in star trek haha. Why don't they have multiple warp fields? Compress the space 3 dimensionally rather that just in front. Sort of make themselves like a miniature black whole which can travel basically haha.

If they're compressing the space in front to the point where they can travel at 9000 times the speed of light, or whatever they do. Then we can assume they can compress the space around them by a factor equal to that increase above light speed. So they could make the space around them come in 9000 times. Probably even more so actually because the ships wouldn't be travelling at light speed through their warp fields. They'd be going much slower. Probably max impulse speed. So 1/4 the speed of light. They couldn't actually travel at light speed whilst in warp. That's still impossible in the star trek and real world. So their compression abilities might be capable of 10s of thousands of times smaller than real space.

At such small spaces with so much mass within it. I wonder if shields would even be necessary. Maybe a spec of space dust would every now and then come into contact with the warp field, then be shrunk and hit the ship at the size it is and also not as light speed, but rather whatever velocity it was travelling at plus the ships velocity, which would be far lower than light speed, as mentioned before. What's space dust going to do anyway? Go right through the ship or a person and take out an extremely small amount of particles with it? So what? Haha if you get stabbed in the heart with a very small needle, it does nothing to you. Same thing would happen if a bit of dust travelled through you at like 200,000 thousand kilometres per second.

Plus it would almost never ever happen. It'd have to hit a point in space so small that you can't even see a giant star ship that occupies that space.

I know star trek can't obviously think of everything, but that's a cool thought about warp speed and how they could improve it and minimise risk.

 

[Shawnster]

Back when it was rumored Kate Mulgrew might need time off/limited role on Voyager, I came up with an idea to keep Voyager going but limit her role.

Voyager encounters a second sporocystian lifeform and is flung back home to the AQ. Janeway is stranded in the DQ. A year later Voyager is equipped with a drive that creates stable wormholes invented by Lenara Kahn from DS9 episode "Rejoined.". Voyager returns to the DQ ti search for and rescue Janeway.

 

[James89901]

Back when it was rumored Kate Mulgrew might need time off/limited role on Voyager, I came up with an idea to keep Voyager going but limit her role.

Voyager encounters a second sporocystian lifeform and is flung back home to the AQ. Janeway is stranded in the DQ. A year later Voyager is equipped with a drive that creates stable wormholes invented by Lenara Kahn from DS9 episode "Rejoined.". Voyager returns to the DQ ti search for and rescue Janeway.

That's quite a cool idea if she did have to leave. It'd still let the show carry on as usual, sort of. I

probably be a bit of a loss to star trek in general to lose warp drive as the main means of travel though. I for one enjoy seeing the ships in warp or going to warp or coming out of it. Quite a bit more than I enjoy how they travel through wormholes.

Perhaps something about that proposed wormhole drive could be that it can only be used once every few months or something. That way at least warp drive stays around as well.

 

[Ocanain]

As far as I understand via string theory, white holes or wormholes are real but aside from that warp travel is much cooler. The concept of diversionary plus-light speed is a bit of a stretch but I still find it more fantastical and intriguing than wormholes.

 

[Lord Garth]

Wormholes are the way to go when given a choice. It doesn't matter how fast warp drive gets, or transwarp, nothing beats going from one location to another instantaneously. Even though it's a spore drive and not a wormhole, instantaneous travel is what gives Discovery an edge.