Sci Fi TV science or fiction?

Again, the definition of his 3 classes is not whether they may ever be achievable in practice or not, just whether they violate currently know laws of physics or not, regardless of the technological or practical challenges involved. I'm not defending that any of these technologies will ever be realised, I just pointed Finnforest to an interesting book if he is interested in this kind of stuff, don't shoot at me for that.

A warp drive does what it says on the tin - it warps space, it is not using wormholes, which (incidentally) we may not call hyperspace. If you include folded space, (which is not the same as warped space), then they represent the four basic fictional methodologies seeking to overcome the vast distances in space and the problems associated with crossing them. None of these rely on any theoretical science to say that the method is practical or even possible or whether any real-space matter could survive the journey at all (which in all of them is highly unlikely).

 

[there is a fifth method that relies on a substance such as antimatter, (or counter-terrestrial matter or negative matter, as it was known before the 1920s), to affect time and space, though now-a-days that usually used to facilitate one of the other four, erm... much like the Alcubierre drive (which is as much SF as any other), which relies on the hypothetical concept of negative mass].

 

Since warping, folding and wormholes are not hyperspace, they would occur in natural space, with all the matter present between the two points being traversed still present in the warp, fold or hole, it is just the distance between them that is compressed (or the time taken to travel that distance is compressed, depending on how you look at it).

 

The collision of two galaxies will result in some physical damage to both systems - stars (and other celestial objects) will die in the process, the speed at which this occurs is immaterial, it will occur and the stars involved will be unable to avoid it. Also, current thinking is that the space between galaxies is far from empty, it's just that we don't know what it is filled with (dark energy being a strong contender). As is frequently pointed out on this forum by Friede, solid objects are far from solid with the distances between subatomic particles being far greater than their physical size, yet solid objects cannot pass through each other unscathed.

 

Warp speed (keeping this in the Star Trek universe for a moment) is significantly faster than the speed of light (for example Warp-5 is approximately 214 times the speed of light) so the energy release in colliding with an atom of hydrogen at that velocity is measurable (energy = atomic weight/Avogadro constant * velocity squared), in fact at warp 5 it has 45,688 times more energy than at light speed. Sure a single atom of hydrogen is still not going to cause any noticeable damage to a star ship, but a cloud of many hydrogen atoms will and space is far from empty - remember that stars are formed from within dust clouds where hydrogen is the most abundant element and if we take the mass of our insignificant little star as an example, the mass of hydrogen involved is (erm) astronomical. Also if every star system has an equivalent of a Kuiper belt and/or an Oort cloud (and given how stars are formed there is no reason to assume otherwise) then the space between stars is a minefield of debris significantly larger than a single hydrogen atom and much denser than a cloud of hydrogen atoms; couple that with the simplest observation that if you are warping or folding space then you are reducing the distance between every object within that space which in turn increases the density of space considerably, then the chances of hitting something are incredibly low to the point of being inevitable.

 

 

Thanks but you didn't say anything I didn't know or which contributed to the discussion (although it may certainly have been useful for others, not saying you shouldn't have posted at all).

You're welcome, I hope I can understand that you agree with me in that a path through 'hyperspace' between event A and event B, through a wormhole, 4-D or whatever you want to call it, would not hit any material object lying in the actual 3-D space between A and B.

Mmmmm, not so sure about it, a wormhole is by definition a tear in our spacetime, connecting two space-time events directly even if they are not in a relativistic causally connected timeline cone.

Why should there be any mass in that path? The fact that hypothetically we (ordinary matter) could travel through that wormhole does not (at all) necessarily mean that ordinary matter would be lying there in the path.