This September 8th marks the fiftieth anniversary of the most influential events in space science: the premiering of the TV series Star Trek on NBC. This program and its spinoffs have been credited with inspiring hundreds of inventions. Star Fleet had cell phones and laptops decades before we figured out how to actually build one. Even NASA was inspired, naming one of its space shuttles after Star Fleet’s flagship, the ‘Enterprise’.
On the occasion of this momentous event, I’ve arranged a special conjunction that will allow you to do what any good Trekkie would do. On the night of the 8th, the Moon will appear above a triangle made up of Saturn, Mars and Antares. Be sure to get outside and check out where no man has gone before.
Well, except for the Moon... been there, done that. However, to get to some of the other places, especially the stars, we’re going to have to figure out the Star Trek’s warp drive.
While we’re a few years from Interstellar travel, we do experience Time travel every day.
Vision is the result of particles of light (called photons) striking your retina at the back of your eyes. When you see something happen, such as a car driving by, you see it because light has travelled from the car to your eyes. With the speed of light at around 300,000 kilometres per second, you see the car drive by pretty much as it happens.
However, when light arrives at your eye from distant objects such as the Moon, the Sun and the stars, even the speedy photons take time to complete that trip: 1.3 seconds from the Moon, 8.3 minutes from the Sun and over 400 years from the North Star.
You are not seeing objects in space as they are today, but as they looked when their light left them. You are seeing the Moon as it was a second ago, the planets as they were minutes ago, but the Big Dipper as it was in 1935, when Captain James T. Kirk was just a four year old pre-schooler in Montreal. If one of the stars in the Dipper had blown up in 1936, you will not even notice that it’s missing until some time in 2017.
In the daytime, we live in the present, but once night falls, what we see is photons of light finishing journeys through space that have lasted from a few seconds through a few millions of years. It is impossible to see the universe as it is today; on any given night we simultaneously view it as it was days, years and millennia ago. Only at sunrise do we return, once again, to the present.
The Enterprise may have had Warp Drive, but we can enjoy time travel, every night, from right here in our own back yard.
Live long and prosper.
