NASA Fact-Checks Star Trek's Starship Enterprise | WIRED

As the new Star Trek film debuts-- warp speed, deflector shields, teletransportation-- what's real and what's not? No one better to tell us than Nasa's engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab.


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NASA Fact-Checks Star Trek's Starship Enterprise | WIRED

Special thanks to Brian Muirhead, Anita Sengupta, and the team at JPL that made this possible.

[raygumm]

a tricorder isn't an ipad. a PADD is. duh.

[thewyj]

Those weren't deflector shields they were just regular shields. Deflectors are to protect the ship from physical impacts at warp speed, rather than shields which protect against incoming energy. Just saying...

[jamalcolmson]

I think the terrifying aspect of the transporter, is that the process would essentially kill you and replace you with a living duplicate of you that is entirely unaware that its original has died, and believes with absolute conviction that it is the original.

[redhawkmillenium]

"How do we take from a living thing a digital image of it and recreate it as a living thing. That's, um, that's an interesting problem."

I get the feeling this is the understatement of the century

[Nine-Signs]

"Everything they do has a basis in physics" That was until JJ abrams got a hold of it and now shit works off pixy dust just because "insert coincidence in a mystery box"

[alexandrakalandarishvili]

the sound trek in the background is amazing!

[kevincozens]

The first device that was like a tricorder was the Tricorder Mark 1 made by Vital Technologies in 1995.

[ashkrikorian]

pretty decent video. However the deflector dish is not the same as shields as she describes... the deflector dish repels matter away. This is why the ships can travel so fast and not worry about hating anything small in front of them. If a ship travels at warp1 and hits a pebble... its toast.

[genostellar]

I really don't like the transporters. I'm with Bones on this one, but for different reasons. His concern was being scatterd across space and never reassembled (or at least, never reassembled correctly) while mine is that we will not actually transport the material across space, we will destroy the person on one end and then rebuild the person with new material on the other end, which would not be the same person, and even if we did send the material across space there's a problem with memories where if the connections in your brain regarding your memories are ever destroyed, even if you rebuild them they won't contain your memories. We don't really have any way of making that part work, so it still wouldn't be you.

[BirthquakeRecords]

I wish videos like these actually had experts on Star Trek’s fictional science and tech on hand. Trek is surprisingly hard scifi, especially when you include supplemental materials like the technical manuals. Basically every aspect of the technology is explained in-universe, and it would be much more interesting to hear these real-world experts reacting to the minutia of Trek’s technology.

Give Mike and Denise Okuda a call!! Or any hardcore trekkie. At the very least get someone there that knows the difference between deflectors and shields lmao. The magnetic shielding NASA uses sounds a little bit more like the 22nd century “polarized hull plating” tech than deflectors or shields.

[theabe]

I read a while that some researchers have been able to transport or "beam" a light particle/proton from one end of the lab to another. If we were to do this for organic material, I suggest something small like skin cells first. You can probably measure if it's the same cell by its rate of decomposition.

[NovaScotiaNewfie]

iPads are not tricorders. TNG, DS9 and Voyager have PADDs.

[j.o.a.t]

I find it odd that scientists say that it would be easier to create a bubble around the ship to allow the warping of space and time when multiple times in most if not all of the star trek series they refer to it as "the warp field bubble" and that the the ship uses said bubble to travel faster than light. The warp engines use the explosive power of matter and antimatter to form the warp field bubble in which the ship sits and manipulates for different warp factors. Oh and lets not forget the full name of warp drive Time Warp drive

[brookestephen]

i can't believe artificial gravity and impulse engines weren't first!!! Ripping people apart to reassemble them far away WOULD FRIGGIN HURT LIKE HECK!

[calimango]

Tl;Dr "we don't have that yet."

[JuHraj]

Once they go through the transporter, they are essentially immortal. If they die at any point after they were copied, they can be simply assembled again indifinetly. It's like respawning in a video game. Their original version is destroyed anyway, so it shouldn't matter.

[Exc]

Lawrence Krauss wrote a book called "The Science Of Star Trek" quite a few years ago. I recommend it.

[karstenschuhmann]

One thing in our reach and very inspiering are the large scale touch screen panels.

[NicolaiWeitkemper]

Two major problems with Beaming were not addressed: 1. Digitising every atom/… of one' body results in WAY too much data. 2. We can't even do that, because of the Uncertainty Principle.

[coreydavis]

No you electromagneticly speed up subatomic particles in a human body and modulate and transmit it to another place. Then demodulate the signal and slow down the bodies subatomic particles.