There are many, many stupid things which go through my head as I attempt to sleep. What sort of a future are we leaving our children? How can we we stem the worldwide rise of fascism? And, of course, where do all the missiles fired in Star Trek go?
Admittedly, this last one is new, and in my head purely because of a tweet by Soren Bowie, writer for American Dad:
I am not a Star Trek expert so forgive me if this is a stupid question but when the Enterprise is in a dog fight and fires torpedoes but misses, where do those torpedoes go? Are there just a cloud of nuclear bombs careening around space after every alien ship fight?
— Soren Bowie (@Soren_Ltd) June 4, 2019
…and now I can think of LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE.
It’s not just Star Trek: it’s Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica and every other sci-fi franchise. All of them involve ships blasting stuff at other ships and not nailing their targets 100 per cent of the time.
And also, if you’ve ever wondered whether there are aliens out there and that they’re zipping around in spaceships and yet still having artillery battles as though they’re 17th century war frigates, then this has practical consequences.
Ahoy!
Just think about it the huge battle above Endor that is the third act of Return of the Jedi, for example:
Thousands upon thousands of laser blasts are unleashed around the Death Star, many of which hit something – but a greater amount miss their target.
That’s great for Wedge Antilles and his plucky band of pilots, but less great for whatever might be on a straight line behind them because that blast is going to just keep going.
Yeah, Ackbar, we know.
On Earth if you fire a bullet it’ll travel for a while before things like gravity and air resistance slow it down. In the vacuum of space, that doesn’t apply.
Newton’s First Law of Motion states (in part) that an object that is in motion will not change its velocity unless a force acts upon it. So that missile/laser blast/mysterious space plasma is just going to keep going… and going… and going… until it impacts something or gets close enough to a planet or star or black hole to have its path gravitationally altered.
And in open space, that could take billions of years. There’s surprisingly little stuff out there and space, as Douglas Adams so accurately said, is big. Vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big.
And full of bubbles, apparently.
So, if there really are civilisations out there having spaceship pew-pews at one another, the inhabited bits of the universe should be criss-crossed with laser beams and explosive space ordinance from potentially millennia of interplanetary battles.
And if they’re not (spoiler: as best we can tell, they’re not) then… then maybe we’re really on our own in this corner of the Milky Way.
On the other hand, we did see a mysterious high-speed object – ʻOumuamua – zip through the solar system in 2017. And sure, it was almost certainly a comet – but maybe, just maybe, it was a massive explosive fired a long time ago from a galaxy far, far away…