In the sci-fi cinematic universe Star Trek, warp-powered spacecraft can travel 299,792 kilometers in a vacuum in one second.
However, a new short video by astrophysicist James O'Donoghue, who was formerly an employee of NASA and now works at the National Space Agency of Japan, tells what would become of a spacecraft like the Enterprise if it went from the Sun to Pluto in reality. The video was posted on the scientist's twitter.
There is no established FTL scale in Star Trek. However, Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda, technical consultants for The Next Generation, published a manual in 1991 that contains some hard numbers, and this is what O'Donoghue relied on in his work.
Thus, the scale assumes that the warp factor of 1 is equal to the speed of light, and the upper limit of the warp factor - 9.99 - is more than 2140 times higher than it. The ship "Enterprise", which the scientist portrayed, flew from the Sun to Pluto precisely starting with a warp factor of 1 and accelerating to 9.9 (approximately 2083 times faster than the speed of light).
At an initial speed corresponding to the speed of light, it would take the spacecraft five hours and 28 minutes to reach Pluto, which is about 5.9 billion kilometers from the star, and the path to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, would take four years and three months.
Form factor 5 is about 213 times faster: in this case, the journey from the Sun to Pluto took only one and a half minutes. Meanwhile, the Enterprise would have reached Proxima Centauri in a week.
At a warp speed of 9.9, the ship would reach Pluto in less than 10 seconds and Proxima Centauri in 18 hours.
Promotional video:
However, travel even at maximum warp speed from one end of the Milky Way to the other would take almost 96 years. This is where the problem arises: 96 years is longer than the average human life expectancy today.
Even if the Enterprise flew at a "transwarp" speed, which is 8323 times the speed of light, it would take 24 years to travel through our entire galaxy. Meanwhile, we would get to Andromeda - the galaxy closest to us - in 300 years.
As O'Donoghue emphasizes, the fastest man-made spacecraft is NASA's Parker Solar Probe: it is capable of moving at 192 kilometers per second, or 692 thousand kilometers per hour. If he flew from the Sun to Pluto, he would have to wait almost a year.
Therefore, the scientist makes disappointing conclusions, humanity and its technological capabilities are still too far from travel even within its own Galaxy. And even if we achieve the kind of progress that is depicted in the films, it is far from the fact that every corner of the Universe will be accessible to us.