Dust to Dust.

Yes, this article is about dust. This actually is about two article well one and a half, the first one is trying to discuss how some dust forms in deep space and the other is about how dust interacts with a magnetic field that is a combination of background magnetic field and from the flow of elections thru the Orion Molecular cloud. Now why study dust, well dust is what everything in the universe start out as either big star, planet or life form. Sorry for only half an article but got bogged down with stuff going in in the world.

Dust grain growth in deep space has long thought to have been like the core silicon grain accreated until there was an icy mantle around each one, and there total size was in the micrometer (μm) to millimeter sized grains. But new thoughts have come about that dust could start in cold less dense regions. The new grains would be negatively charged and would attract positively charge particles that were ionized by ultra violet photons from nearby stars, but these grain eventually grain enough positive charge to be repelled by one another and the growth of the grain would be stopped. The growth rate is given by da/dt=(n_si m_si<v_{si>)/4ρfsi, where nsi is the number density of silicon,msi is the mass of each silicon atoms at 28 times that of hydrogen, and <v si >is the average velocity of silicon atoms in the cloud. While fsi is elemental abundance of silicon and ρ i the density of the cloud. But at a point of 0.5 μm the particles gain enough positive charge to stop grain growth. </v</v}

The next article is about mapping the magnetic fields in the Orion Molecular Cloud 1 or OMC-1 which is located about 1′ northwest of the M42 the Orion Nebula that is located in the belt of the Orion constellation. To detect whether or not there is a magnetic field in the cloud you can use the Zeeman effect. This effect deals with the angular momentum spin of an electron, if an election is exposed to a a strong external magnetic field there will be two states with a difference in energy of 2j+1 where j is the angular momentum of the election. Another way to say this if see two spikes in a spectrum that are separated by this energy difference you can tell there is a magnetic field near the source of the lines. The OMC-1 has a lot young stars, over a thousand have been born out of this region in the last million years, the entire Orion area is a bunch of clouds. The particles of dust in the cloud can become magnetic when exposed to magnetic field and there is a stream of electrons flowing through this cloud, this not a plasma because a plasma is a quasi-neutral substance and this is not electrically neutral. Bu this flow of electrons creates a magnetic field. The magnetic field can effect the formation of stars if the cloud is supercritical then there is enough magnetic pressure to help the cloud collapse into a protostar. If the magnetic field is sub critical then there is not enough magnetic pressure for the cloud to collapse.

Sorry, no link for the first paper but it was pulled probably for editing but I already had it on my tablet and the idea in my head.

2007.04923.pdf (arxiv.org)

The Admirals tale part 5

After a couple of days of rest and healing the student was asked to the admirals office for a talk. The office was the top two floors of the the station, the first floor was filled with officers and cre behind terminals. There was a spiral staircase on one side upto the office of the admiral. Was guided to go straight up. On the top floor there was an anteroom with the Admirals assistant seating behind a desk and he informed the student to take seat and to look over the information on the different classes of vessels. There was a holopad that he pickup and press the on button. And it started to display the info on the fighters, quick, agile, be the protector of the fleet, probes be on the cutting edge of exploration, destroyers and frigates be the leaders at the frontier, cruisers be at the cutting edge of technology, carriers help setup new colonies. After about half an hour of waiting in the anteroom he was gestured to enter the inner office. In there were projections up against the windows, there were fleet movements, the inner harbour of the space station, and several crew schedules. The Admiral was seating in a chair facing away from the Smith and all the youngster could see was the outline of the high backed chair. “Sir, you wanted to see me?”

The chair turned around there was a tall athletically built woman with brown hair, “I will take sir, but we must talk about your future. They aren’t any more ships planned to go the university system anytime soon. Most vessels here are dedicated for missions all around this sector and beyond. I know according to your contract we can make transfer form civilian science course to the military, but I hope you won’t fight it. We can train in you in a number of craft while you are here, do have any idea in which type of craft you want to train for.”

”Probably the probe.”

”Fine I will tell them to expect you in training facility on the 10th floor in an hour.”

He went down to the 10 floor thru the turbo lift system. He entered a great room where a group was waiting around a larger version on what was on the holopad. Then they were all split up into different groups according to which kind of craft they were going to start with. The fight pilots specialized in tactics and formation flying, the freight pilots focused on the transfer of goods off their vessels. The cruiser crews trained on each sub-system they were specialize on . The Probe crews were bit jack of all trades, because sometimes there could be a full crew on board or just one and they might have to work on any of the systems. After a few weeks of theory on the systems they went to train in the simulators, they usual how to fly and how to cope with systems failures and do repairs. Also they were plugged in. Space travel even in hyperspace takes time because it takes such a long time between points that most crews go into hibernation. To make the process more seamless for the crews had implants that hooked directly into the nervous system and arteries. Also they were injected nanobots to do repairs on the body constantly. This left what some started to call the plug in the side where the crew member just had to remove the cover and connect to the vessel.

After several months of training, they were deemed ready for their first mission. They were all told to meet at shuttle in landing bay 290. There there was 8 people for the two probes that were going and 12 pilots for the fighters. They left thru a smaller door this one just a bit bigger than the shuttle itself, then they flew to a small escort carrier. There were two probes attached to either side of a thin connecting wing to a central area about 4 stories tall, on the spin on the top or bottom were placed 6 fighters. The probes had just a had a string of numbers on the, 712842 and 712843. He thought to himself 7th fleet, 1st exploratory group, 2nd task group, 8th wing, 4th squadron and 2nd and 3rd vessels.
The carrier itself didn’t even had name just 712841.

Here is the thing…

When I started this blog over 10 years ago the intentions was to do some debunking, some explanations of how scientists know what the y know and maybe get some attention for change of job from the call center from maybe doing some research for a science writer like Dr. Phil Plait, or Fraser Caine. At times it looked like something was going to come out of it. But nothing has come of it plus things have moved on since then and some of the people who I written about are grumpy because either I don’t say they know what they are talking about or like life in the Universe where they are sure there is none but as far as I know there wasn’t any such a declaration, or that in the Contact book review I did talk about using prime numbers for communication, there is also the movie which I have not seen in a while and I was planning using that in that review. Some of this fight deals with issues from a long time ago like some think I have an issue with woman in science because there was a person in the past who did not like computers and did stuff like complain that some people used computers at a conference 20 some years ago, or in her thesis project she did not write the program used in her thesis project. Here is the thing the first computers were used at Bletchley Park in England to help German codes during WWII and also in Las Alamos to help model the nuclear expulsion. Also if in the movie Hidden Figures some of the black human computers burrowed books on Fortran an early computer language and learned at night behind the backs of their employers at NASA. Their were some that thought they could change who I am because I like Star Trek and Star Wars and they didn’t want to be seen as “cliche” or a “stereotype”. This is just a couple issues from these people from the past. But now I have to find a job to afford to upgrades to the site and afford some equipment and such to do stuff here, in the past 10 years I have delivered phone books, moved furniture for an auction company, sold some scrap and a couple other jobs. So I do not what the future this website but there has to be some changes here and other places on the internet. I just needed to get this out of my system, at least I am safe, not much Covid activity is going not going help finding a job. Have a nice day.

Did All The Alien Civilizations Already Die Off

No, we don’t know that. This study was setup to determine what were the chances of life evolving, where it was likely to evolve into a civilization and how long it would survive either being destroyed by a supernova or by the civilization itself either thru climate change, war, a technological issue, I don’t think they had a virus being spread across a planet. The process they used was temporal spatial analysis, sounds something like a group of Timelords would use. This is actually making a model of a galaxy with regions of the size 0.01 kpc³ and running at an interval of steps of 1 million years, that might seem like big jumps but 1 million years is 1/1000 of a billion years and this is done to cut down the number of runs the program, one the parameters that is including in the program is a value to determine the likely hood of a civilization failing over time. They only use solar type stars from 1.2 to 0.8 solar masses, and Earth sized planets in this model.

To start they modelled the gas that could be made into stars as a function of the radius from the center of the galaxy and the function used to determine this was Σ_gas(r,0)=Σ_cexp[-r/h_r], where r is radius from the galactic center, Σ_c is the surface density of gas in the galaxy at 1.4 solar masses per parsec squared, h_r is the galactic scale height at 2.25 kpc and Σ_gas(r,0) is the gas density at certain radius from the center of the galaxy. The galaxy is disk so the amount of dust and gas above and below a certain range drops off so that is why the scale height is taken into account. Then the rate of star formation has to be taken into account using the mass of gas per surface from above by the constant A which is 250 solar masses per kiloparsec squared per million years which the amount of mas converted every million years to stars and the constant N=1.4.Then the lifetime of the star has to be taken into account and that is given by T_L=T_sun(M_sun/M_star)^2.5,where T_L is the the lifetime of the star, M_sun and M_star is the mass of the sun and star. More massive the star the shorter the lifespan. Also events that put the life on a planet like a super nova by destroying the atmosphere. There are two main types of supernova on is when gas piles up on white dwarf star coming from a larger nearby star this the Type I and then are the Type 2 supernova when a star that is over 8 solar masses explodes at the end of it lifetime, if a Type 2 went of within 0.008 kpc or about 26 light years of a planet most of the atmosphere would be blown off. These type of supernova happen an average from 1.96 to 3.35 times per century in a galaxy. To determine the area that a supernova would wipe out life a formula was used of D_SN=d_SNII*exp[-0.04(M_SNII-M_SNII)].
Where D_SN is the diameter of the effective area,d_SNII is 0.008 kpc, M_SNII is the absolute magnitude of the supernova and M_SNII is the mean magnitude of the supernova in the blue part of spectrum. Now the probability of life being generated on a planet is figured using the formula P_L=1-exp[-λ_a(T-T_min)], where λ_a is the probability of life per million years, T_min is the time that planet is too hostile for life to form usually assigned form 0.1 to 1.0 billion years. The final parameter is the probability of annihilation of intelligence,P_ann and three values were chosen that of 0, 0.5 and 0.99 where 0 is none are annihilated to 0.99 were nearly all are wiped out, 1 was not chosen because there is ate least on civilization that has not wiped itself out, but somedays you have wonder how long it has. Also two different time frames was used for a lambda of 10^-6 at 1 billion years at P_ann of 0, there were over 7 million civilizations and at the 5 billion year mark there were over 2 million years, at lambda =1 chances of life forming per million years there wer were over 8 million civilizations at 1 billion years and after 5 billion years there were over 3.5 million civilizations. At P_ann of 0.99 with a lambda of 10^-6 there were 80 civilizations at a billion years and 25 after 5 billion years, and with a lambda of 1 there were 105 civilizations at a billion years and after 5 billion years there were 25. So when there are reports that all the civilizations have died out is a bit stretch but makes great head lines.

There are several issues with this paper, first of assuming that life can only evolve around a G type star, other stars like the less massive k and m stars could also have planets that hold have liquid water. They would have to be closer to the parent star than the Earth to the Sun and this would increase the amount of radiation and M type stars are prone to be flare stars. And there also could be life evolving on moons of planets around other stars thus increasing the chances of life. Also the self annihilation parameter maybe just a by product of the times of when the Drake formula came out also just because the home world of a civilization is destroyed does not mean the entire race was destroyed maybe they realized that they needed to live on their own planet and move into space too. Plus the authors of the paper do say that this was not the absolute word on the subject but just an agreement where to look for life. I know some people will like me bringing Star Trek but in the Next Generation it was revealed in the final episode that we were still on trial from the first episode, but even without god like beings watching over us we are all trail all the time and we all have a say on if the human race survives or not. This can be as simple as wearing masks in public while a deadly virus is going around, or any number of things. What I don’t like about these studies is not the studies themselves but how they are reported as THERE IS NO LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE, WE ARE ALONE IN THE COSMOS. This gets a lot clicks to the websites that post them and some of them just read an abstract if that and just report the same thing as other sites. There are some people who think that a math model absolute proves the existence or lack of existence of whatever. But these studies are useful because it gives a better idea of where to look for planets that could have life or where to find objects in our solar system like Planet X, which could be one planet 10 times that of the Earth or number of smaller objects in that area.

Want More Sky Scholar

Well like or not he is back. Again trying to re write how stars work because he doesn’t like fusion or modern physics. One thing he goes one about is how if you don’t have a solid surface for the particles to bounce off of there is now pressure in a star. Lets look at a couple of formulas.

First the ideal gas law.

PV=nRT, where P is pressure, V is volume, n is the number of particles,R is a constant and T is the temperature of the system.

Now the kinetic energy, in thermal system it is KE=kT where k is a constant and T is the Temperature. Or kinetically we have 0.5mv² where m is the mass of the particles and v is the average velocity. Some particles will be travelling faster and others slower but most of them will travelling around the same speed. So 0.5mv²=kT and solving for T we have 0.5mv²/k=T

Again we have PV=nRT, or solving for pressure P=nRT/V_vol and subbing T for 0.5 mv²/T, we get P=nRmv²/(V_volk), so particles with movement no matter how small the movement has pressure.

Now to the Star forming nebula issue he has, first thing is that nebula just don’t collapse into stars, planets and moons. They often need a push or something to push the gases together. But as pointed out above all particles have some movement no matter how cold a nebula is. So particles inside a nebula might start to clump together on their own but because of their slow speeds this might start some seeds for larger objects. Also for a long time I have thought photo ionization from energy from nearby stars might ionize some molecules and atoms making them more attractive to others in the nebula and start small seed objects in the nebula but that is just speculation not really science. There is more in this video but there is no proof of lattices of carbon in the sun, Also we know there are no molecules in the Sun it is mostly ionized Hydrogen and Helium and may spectrum over the years have proved that.

Doctor Who

Intro

The Doctor the main character of the series that started on November 23 in 1963 the day after JFK was shot Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas Texas. The Doctor iss a member of a race called the Time Lords who reside on the planet Gallifrey 250 million light years from Earth in the constellation of Keresbios. This race have long mastered the travel of space and time in their ships called Tardises or Tardii (more on them later). The Time Lord have some remarkable abilities one which is to regenerate. Regeneration allows a Time Lord to completely change their bodies to another form when they are injured or ill to it being nearly fatal. Most of our cells do reproduce themselves for a number of times untill the original ones die, there are only so many times this can be done. This is usually regulated by parts of the DNA that do not code for any proteins but decrease in sized over time called telomeres, but if replace your brain cells you would end up ruining your memory, so how does the Time Lords do it. Also they have some psychic ability on example id the use of psychic paper which makes whatever the Doctor wants to show like Ids to top secret areas. One way the Doctor could do this is thru some kind of nanotechnology that could reads his mind and displays it on the paper, they could also might be able to able help in the regeneration process. In 1976 the Doctor visited the Matrix a super computer on his home planet where all the memories of previous Time Lords were uploaded to, again nanobotss small robots in the brain might be able to upload all the memories to the Matrix and when the Time Lord regenerates, the old memories are downloaded back. Now to their main tech the TARDIS or Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. As every body who has walked into it has noted it is bigger on the inside then the outside. This can be down with what is called exotic matter, one which is a form of matter that has negative mass and negative pressure. There is an experiment called the Casimir effect where two positively charged plates at placed closed to each other, the plates should repeal on another but they are sucked together. One explanation is that since there such a small space between them most particles can’t exist but there are few particles with negative mass and pressure so the plates collapse together. This matter arranged in a shell of two layers a bubble is formed with a small opening to real space tha happens to stuck as a 1950s London Police Box.

Battle at Canary Wharf

The Doctor thru all his journeys have only had three main enemies of the 50 plus years on the air, with many other monster of the week types and a few of those come back from time to time. The first one is the Master another Time Lord who at one time was a friend of the Doctor. The Master wants to role the entire universe and will do anything to do it, The Doctor wants to save the universe by helping people fight the bad guys. The two main bad guys from outside the Time Lords are the Daleks and the Cyberman. Both are cybernetic organisms, that is they are a combination of living and artificial components. The Daleks were once a humanoid race called the Kaleds that were in a war with another group on their own planet of Skaro. They had a brilliant scientist who wanted to wipe out the others completely and genetically engineered a creature that was a giant blob that would fit into an armored shell, that wheeled around, yes a genius thought this was a good idea. These blobs had traits like empathy taken out of their DNA, eventually they got so powerful that they threatened the Time Lords themselves in a Time War. At one point one of the Doctors was sent to the home planet of the Daleks to either wipe them out before they could do any harm or find a weakness. The Doctor just couldn’t give in to wipe them out, later he pointed out that the Daleks would unite a lot of groups together to fight them. The other cybernetic organism that comes up a lot are the Cyberman, which have two origin stories, on e there was once a twin planet of Earth that was flung to the outskirts to the outer parts of the solar system and another in the new series they are from another dimension. Both have the brains. Now some would think creatures with no emotions would be ideal but think all of life that would miss in life if you could enjoy stuff or the lessons you would learn if you could feel. Both they Cyberman and Daleks have weaknesses, the Daleks stairs well until the learned how to levitate,(There once was a t-shirt with a Dalek looking up some stairs saying. I want to believe.) The Cyberman had a few the main one in the old series was gold clogging their chest plates.

Now why are sci-fi shows so popular among people who study science and know that there is no sound in space or the distances between stars is so immense that we would have difficulty getting to other stars or it is impossible to travel in time. We all need people to look to for the best examples of ourselves, some find this in religious teachings were a god or gods try to control the universe. Science fiction is different they are generally mortals like they rest of us or they have some kind of limitations on their immortality like in the Highlander series where some can leave forever as long ass they don’t lose their head, or the Doctor who can regenerate whenever he is wounded too much and was suppose to have a limit on how many times. Then you have the Jedi of Star Wars where some can have extraordinary powers but still can die and then Star Trek were people a mostly mortal but can work around it at times. The Doctor started his journey to find why good wins over evil because evil does not have feelings like compassion, hope, or the ability to self sacrifice for benefit of the whole. The Doctor found that the answer to the answer to the question why does good when at times, it was because of one bloke in a blue box. Another appeal to these stories is what on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe dubbed Competency Porn, this is when the good guys win because they are well trained, intelligent and works together to get things done like in the movie Apollo 13 or in the Martian, the first based from a real life situation, were people in the situation and on the Earth worked together to solve problems of survival. This Year 2020 we need some examples of that and now that we have vaccines rolling out for a highly infectious virus causing a Pandemic maybe this year should be called the Year of the Doctors.

version 0.5 of something

For the the last few centuries people have been trying to figure out how the solar system formed. The theory that seems to have the mot evidence behind it is nebula theory or the LaPlace-Kant theory named after the first two people who came up with the theory or at least made the theory known. It i basically that there was a giant cloud of dust and gas. Dust in the astronomical sense are mall grains of silicon, iron and other metals or ice or a mixture of the two, the gas is usually hydrogen with helium and traces of CO, O₂, CO₂. Then there is an event that starts the cloud to collapse, like a shockwave from a nearby supernova, a jet from a nearby star or the solar winds of nearby stars. As the cloud collapses it spins and the tiny particles hit one another and either join together or bounce off each other and over time planets form. Since the discovery of the first non- pulser planet was discovered by Mayor in 1995 around 51 Pegasi, the model of how planetary systems seemed to be off because a lot of the first exoplanets were Jupiter sized giant planets orbiting close to their parent stars. Their was another team in the USA who weren’t expecting such short period planets, so they did not process their data at once but held off and were beaten to the punch of the first discovery. But with the discovery of more planetary systems and new instruments like ALMA telescope that can so the movement of grains in the clouds and disk as stars and planets form. These two papers discuss the theory of planet formation and how it is or will be detected at ALMA.

The first stage of planet formations starts in the early disk as particles are moving around the center of mass as they do this the drag caused by the drag of the gas, as they lose kinetic energy the migrate to orbit closer to the star and they tart to melt. Also as boulders about a meter from they are travelling so fast that they fracture. One way larger objects might form is that if large clusters of particles can collapse under the gravity but the shear force of the different speeds of gases and different directions might tear the collection apart before it has a chance to form but also these currents might increase the densities by 8o times for larger objects and about a thousand times for smaller particles and increasing the chances of these clumps to form a planetesimal and once they are about a kilometer in diameter gravity is the dominant force. Because of the limits of supercomputer time there are limitations on how well the early conditions can be modelled, even using planetesimals the size of 30 km it still takes 10 ⁸ to form the Earth. The growth rate of planetesimals to protoplanets, ranging from 0.01 to a tenth of the mass of the Earth was first determined by Sanfronov in 1969 by the formula dm/dt=πR² ΩΣ_pF_G, where Ω the Keplerian frequency as the body orbits at a distance a from central star, Ω=(GM/a³)^1/2, πR² is the surface area of the cloud of objects. F_G is gravitational focusing factor and is dependent on the random velocity of particles in the cloud and simply can be given by, F_g=1+v_esc²/v_esc². Where v_esc is the escape velocity of particle from the mass and is given by v_esc=(2GM/R)², so if the particles in the mass are slower than the escape velocity than they are more likely to clump together and form a protoplanet. Protoplantetss can grow in situ up to the isolation mass, if the protoplanet forms or migrates to out past the iceline, in our solar system that is about 2.7 AU, and have a mass about 10 Earth masses a gas envelope of hydrogen and helium will start to envelope around the protoplanet and that will form gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. The factors used model how the gas giants form are similar to those used to model the interiors of stars except instead of heat coming from fusing hydrogen the heat comes from the collisions or protoplanets. The first factor is the relation between the increase of mass to that of the radius and given by dr/dm=1/(4πρr²), where r is the radius and ρ of the forming object. Then there is the increase of pressure to the change of mass dP/dm=-G(M+M_core)/4πr⁴, and the energy released by the object as the mass increases is dL/dm=ε-TdS/dt, where T is temperature, S is entropy and t is time and finally the amount of temperature increase by the change in pressure dT/dP i either adiabatic which does give any heat or energy to the surrounding system or the heat transfer is radiative . But you need the initial condition to figure what will happen. These objects will continue to and be part of the nebula until they use all the matter around them.

Now in the inner part of the system there are a number of smaller bodies from 0.01 to 0.1 Earth masses, these objects when close to each other can alter each other orbits and cause them to collide into one another as they change orbital paths. Eventually planets close to the mass of the Earth will from a close to one another as they can do so to have stable orbits. Over time by the drag caused by the left over gas and material in the system.

1012.5281.pdf (arxiv.org)

Editorial note

I am working on a few thing like the Science of Doctor Who book by Paul Parsons, and reading a couple of paper on planet formation, and detection and few others. There are few other things too.

Star Trek:The Voyage Home

In the Star Trek movie franchise there is kind of a trilogy starting with the Wrath of Khan then the Search for Spock and then The Voyage Home. At the end of Wrath of Khan Spock dies and his body is left on the Genesis planet and his essence is placed in the mind of his pal Dr McCoy. The body of Spock is reborn on the planet and the movie is about how far true friends will go to help another friend. And they do reunite mind and body, along the way the burrow their ship the Enterprise, self destruct it and burrow a ship from another race the Klingons. And at the end of the movie they go back to Spocks homeworld of Vulcan, where the katra and body were reunited.

At the beginning of The Voyage Home, there is a ship coming into the solar system that is broadcasting a sound. First of it can’t be transmitted through space because there is nothing to transmit sound. Sound is a what is called a compression wave, it compresses a zone of material then there is a zone of less compression and our ears or some other device like a microphone changes the signal into something we can hear or recorded. But there are communication systems on ships or once in orbit around the Earth it could possibly transmit thru the atmosphere. Another thing it seems to be doing is sucking all the power out of spaceships and space stations in the Solar system and causing a lot of bad weather on Earth. The disruption of power systems could be done by at least three ways. One is that the ship is emitting particles like protons that are neutralizing the negative electrons aboard the other ships. It could be generating an electric field, a particle will exert an influence in the area around it this proportional to the amount of charge the particle has is inversely to the square of the distance of the particle, so an object with a huge charge could disrupt the flow of current on another ship. Another way is an EMP or Electromagnetic Pulse, when a nuclear bomb goes off it emits a lot of electrical energy and even if a bomb goes off kilometers away it can disrupt electronics and overwhelm them. The show Dark Angel was based off of this premise, a nuclear bomb was detonated in atmosphere above Seattle and caused all the electronics to fail. But the crew of the newly renamed Bounty on Vulcan figures out the sound is actually the songs of Humpback whales which by then are extinct. Now how do communicate to a probe speaking an dead language that no one speaks or knows the grammar, like how some view this site. /p>

How did they travel to the past. In reality objects of any mass will distort space and time around it. Larger the object more it will be distorted, a human doesn’t really do much, a planet does a lot more and something like the Sun will cause a lot of distortion. This will result in if are closer to the object time will slower than if you were orbiting the planet. GPS satellites have to take this into account because they send a time to the receivers on Earth and the receivers takes at least signals to calculate where you are on Earth. Now into the Scifi part of this, most ships in Star Trek use a warp drive. This drive uses power coils to distort space and time around it, stretching it like elastic band and also the encase the ship in small part of another dimension called subspace where the speed of light is much higher so it doesn’t violate relativity. So according to the in Star Trek universe physic they can travel back and forward in time by travelling around a star really fast. So they go back to the late 1980’s, which is when this movie came out, probably to help with the budget.

They arrive and find Humpback song coming from San Francisco and eventually find them at an aquarium that were going to release them into the wild soon. There was another problem how do transport to large air breathing mammals that live in the water. They had to convert part of the ship into a tank. Part of the group was sent to find material strong enough to hold the water led by Scotty. They find a plastics factory where they did have the material to do it but I guess since they did not have enough money to pay for the material gave the lead chemist instructions on how to make transparent aluminum a substance that can do what the polymer can do but only one sixth the thickness. Now there is an aside it is mentioned this substance isn’t suppose to be around for years. This brings into a bit of paradox, people who have thought about how time travel could effect the past and the flow of time have what is called the Grandfather or Grandmother Paradox. This is if you go back in time to kill you grandparents to prevent your parent from being born, you wouldn’t be born and you couldn’t of gone back in time. Another way of seeing is it if you back in time to kill a villain that everyone agrees on should be killed like Hitler, should you do it. There was a point in the first world war where a young British private had his rifle on Hitler but decided not to shot him because Hitler was unarmed. Now if killed Hitler 60 million people wouldn’t have died, but you wouldn’t have alliances that sprang up afterwards or the space race. So would giving a chemist the idea of a material change the history probably not. Eventually they find the whales in the north Pacific right before a whaling vessel tries to harpoon them. And they go back into the future with a whale specialists and the whales sing and save the Earth. The final scene the crew faces their courts martial and only one action is taken, Admiral Kirk is demoted to Captain and giving a new ship the Enterprise A.

For some Scifi is just sea stories in space but for Gene Roddenberry the creator of Star Trek and other Scifi authors see it as a way dealing with complex issues such the extinction of species like the Humpback whales or race relations, etc. Star Trek is generally seen as one of the best of the movies form the original cast, there is a rule that the even numbered ones are the better ones.

The Admirals Tale

part 2

He looked out into space thru the clear front of the tube, the blast must of put them back in reall space. . Below relative to him he saw the Bluenose headed down and to his right. He wasn’t connected yet. When a person knew they were going to spend some time in space they had a series of tubes and electrodes connected to various systems of their body. When you entered an escape tube or a berth you can easily connect yourself to the tube and go into hibernation. But since the students and cadets were not hooked up they had about a days worth of water and air in the tube.

”Wonder what a raider wants with science vessel?” Chimed in one of his companions.

”How can you tell it was a raider?”

”The roughness of the outer the hull and the design of the fighters.”

”How would you know?”, he partially snarled back.

”My father served as a fight pilot and is a cargo pilot. He has seen them a few time usually the hit and take some cargo they need, trade or sell but the Bluenose doesn’t have much for them. ”

Then all of a sudden there was a sudden tug above his head. “This the medical frigate Banting, hold on we’ll have you in a few minutes.” He saw the other tubes around him with cables attached to them and in the distance he saw another frigate gathering another collection of pods.

The there were three more vessels shimmering out of hyperspace, the three cruisers the Intrepid, the Sackville and the Warwick names popped onto the screen in front of him. Two of them come from two sides of the attacker then the third came down the z axis relative to the attacker. Then the attacker disintegrated into nothing. The three vessels all turned off their main engines and their braking thrusters and their port thrusters to turn starboard and out of the way of the material left behind.

The three cruisers attached cables to the wounded Bluenose and went off to hyperspace. The medical frigates keep reeling in their catches until they were aboard. The pods were put directly in the sickbay of the craft which took up the entire 4th deck of the craft. As soon a the cadet was checked over and found to only have a few bruises and scratches he was released to do whatever he wanted until they got to the nearest station. He went to the observation deck that was located right above the two partial decks of the bridge but all three could see out the main screen into space. Below you could see the staff going about their business, you could overhear some of the conservations below.

”They could use more medical personal on the Bluenose ”

”We could send over some from here, could you send over a shuttle and dock to the top port.”

”We could do that in about 15 minutes, it will be a few weeks until Halifax. But we should try to stabilize the crew and ship before we get there.”

Then the young student got to the intercom and interrupted, “ Could they need a hand over there, i would like to volunteer.”

”I will check with the docs, what is your name kid?”

”Jacob Smith”

”Okay, sit down a bit”

Fifteen minutes later he was standing on the fifth deck right under the top hatch. He heard the the shuttle touching down with a light thud. Then when the sensors on the airlock were satisfied the seal was good the crew on the shuttle open the hatch and a ladder was lowered onto the frigate. There were crate of medical supplies that had be raised thru the hatch by cables to the shuttle this took about twenty minutes and then several medical crew went aboard and finally him. He was to go over to help secure different sections of the crippled vessel to make sure they weren’t leaking air into space and making sure different sections were safe. On the way over to the larger vessel they could see the front was completely taken off and twisted beams were exposed and wires still sparked. The pressure dome on top was still intact but there was a crack forming. Only the central engine was going and only the port docking bay was still useful.

”You guys took a beating and fast.” ,said one of medics near him.

””Out of nowhere.”

Once aboard his former transport he was instructed to get into a space suit with its own life support and start walking up the port side with one of engineers to check things out. They went up a corridor and checked if any one was in there and what kind of structural damage there was. For the first part most of the rooms were empty because most of the crew was either their stations or started to fight the damage. As they got closer to the prow they could the damage increase with wall panels all over the place and a few injured crew laying on the decks. If there was injured crew they tell the medics where and moved on, the eventually got the front where the bulkheads came down and there thru the tiny windows in them you could see the orange of hyperspace. They eventually got to his tiny cabin where nothing at all disturbed. After a day of this he was ordered back to the Banting on the next shuttle. For the Next few weeks he stayed aboard the Banting reading and watching vids form all over the alliance.

They were all told about when they were going to arrive at the Halifax system. Since he had time to do some reading he looked up all he could about this new location. It was started as science out post to study the formation of planets around a brown dwarf. As time went by and the colonies came further and further out a forward base for exploration and commerce was needed. So the Halifax Citadel Station was built, it was 30 km in diameter, the central part was not pressurized, it was loosely based off of a design from old science fiction series. As the time to leave hyperspace was approaching the observation deck got crowded a the survivors left the med bay. Then they were back into real space, and Halifax Station came into view. The giant doors opened, they were 2 km on each side. The two medical frigates went in first and went to their berths on a landing pad that was encased by a force field and was pressurized. Then the Warwick and Sackville hauling the damaged Bluenose into to massive chamber, and the one of stations tugs took over and placed it in its berth. All over the station the inward facing windows were crowded to see the wounded vessel. Once off the Banting he down a corridor and eventually was were they were unloading the crew of Bluenose. Some you could still see the person inside, these were the ones that still needed medical attention but more then what was handy. Then there were ones that were blackened in respect, these were going to the morgue. The captain was in one of the ones that were clear. He was allowed to go aboard and get his things and was assigned quarters aboard the station.