{"id":189707,"date":"2010-02-20T23:43:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-21T04:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/02\/20\/damn-31\/"},"modified":"2010-02-20T23:43:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-21T04:43:00","slug":"damn-31","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/02\/20\/damn-31\/","title":{"rendered":"Damn!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Turns out that <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Star Trek<\/span> is impossible.<\/p>\n<p>At 99.999998% of the speed of light, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2010\/02\/17\/star_trek_scuppered\/\">the radiation from interstellar hydrogen striking your ship will fry you like an egg<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>Professor William Edelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine explained to New Scientist that while interstellar space has just a couple of hydrogen atoms per cubic centimetre, as the crew of the Enterprise hit the gas pedal, a compression effect would greatly increase the number of atoms hitting the spacecraft.<\/p>\n<p>As the spaceship reached 99.999998 per cent of the speed of light, &#8220;hydrogen atoms would seem to reach a staggering 7 teraelectron volts&#8221;, which for the crew &#8220;would be like standing in front of the Large Hadron Collider beam&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>This is a very bad thing, because humans in the path of this ray would receive a dose of ionising radiation of 10,000 sieverts, and as Bones McCoy would doubtless confirm, the lethal dose is 6 sieverts.<\/p>\n<p>The result? Death in one second.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And I was so looking forward to green alien dancing girls.<\/p>\n<p>Well, I guess that there is always recombinant DNA technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Turns out that Star Trek is impossible. At 99.999998% of the speed of light, the the radiation from interstellar hydrogen striking your ship will fry you like an egg: Professor William Edelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine explained to New Scientist that while interstellar space has just a couple of hydrogen atoms &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1069,1037,1015],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-space","category-weird"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189707"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189707\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}