Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related FFQ: Speed of things travelling in space...

Okay - so I know that, as far as science knows at the moment, travelling faster than the speed of light is simply not possible. However, we're not talking about the 'real world' here .

Let's say a certain planet exploded 35 years ago and a certain spaceship and/or pieces of said planet landed on earth about 7 years later. Now, scientists just 'saw' the planet exploding last year - so it's taken 35 years for the light to get this far - meaning the planet is 35 light years away. So how much fast than the speed of light would the spaceship/pieces of planet be travelling?

Does that make any sense at all?

Planet 35 light years away explodes.
Spaceship/pieces of planet land in 7 years, but visible light from said explosion takes the expected 35 years. How much faster than the speed of light must the ship travel?

Or can I just stick with 'much' faster than the speed of light ?

Carol [who has no idea how to caluculate such things]

Okay, the ship needed 7 years, but the light 35?

I'm not really great in maths, but for me this makes the ship 5 times faster than light.

Since the light can travel 300.000 km in one second, this ship would make 1.500.000 km in that same second. Which would approximately be 1.000.000 miles per second.

Another way of doing it is that the ship used space folding technology and so only appeared to be faster than light.

That way, you can get away with the ship arriving whenever you want it to and not breaking too many of the laws of space and time.

Of course, you could then have the ship arrive within seconds of the planet exploding.

Ooh, that gives me an idea for a really depressing short story. I'll need to discuss that with D8a.

D8a's Muse.

So that would be like Warp 7 in Star Trek terms?

Carol [who MUST mention that she originally had it at 30 years and 4 years - much harder math at least in my perpetually tired state]

And - I've strained my physics [is it even physics?] knowledge already. I know sound travels considerably slower than light. So, if a signal was sent from said planet via a radio wave, how long would that take to get there? Would it make a difference if it was low frequency or high frequency on the radio spectrum?

*sigh* It's only a small part of the fic, but I'd like to try to get it right.

And does anyone know how far Krypton is actually supposed to be from earth [because, let's face it, no one's really sitting there trying to figure out what planet I might be taking about]?

Thanks again .
Carol

Okay - yes, me again.

I googled the whole sound v. light thing and am pleased to note it is physics, but everything beyond that is beyond me . So I found a continuum of waves on a website. Someone [coughJorElcough] is trying to send a distress signal. I'm thinking that sound waves would take WAAAAAAY too long. Could you send a message of sound or something some other way [gamma rays or something]?

A scientist on earth gets said message several years before said explosion is visible on earth but doesn't understand the message [the whole language barrier thing].

Thoughts?
Carol

Like ST warp tech...yes, only better.

While sound does travel slower than the speed of light, radio waves are part of the some electromagnetic spectrum as visible light, and so would also travel at the speed of light, so, in your instance 35 years.

However, in the real universe, the signal would be so messed over by passing stars and whatnot, that the signal would have to be repeated over and over for the receivers to finally mesh together the entire content.

D8a's Muse, who has convinced D8a to write up the short and place all blame on you, CarolM. Once I have it betad, I hope you enjoy.

I guess Jor El would use the usual way and use radio waves. ( I seriously hope that is the actual term) Sound needs a medium and since there is vacuum outside our atmosphere sound wouldn't be able to travel through space.

Radio waves are electromagnetic waves, just as gamma rays, x-rays and light. They all travel with light speed. The only differece between them is the wave length and the energy of these rays.

By the way, radio waves are far less dangerous than gamma rays.

Oh, I should mention that the massage you are talking about would need humans to listen in. Like SETI (Search for extraterrestrial Intellegence) does it. Chances are low that you would hear it accidentally from just one night of watching the sky with a radio telescope. I just thought I should mention...

Okay - so speed of lightish in space for radio waves! And since this isn't 'our' universe, can we pretend that they'll arrive here in near perfect condition or so?

And yes, this particular scientist has been studying this part of the sky for quite some time and it's not just some random thing.
Carol [who may have to talk to D8A's muse about the whole time folding thing... is that anything like a wormhole?]

In a word, yes.
for more research try the following.
Wormholes_in_fiction

Faster-than-light

Both of these will be either very helpful or you will get a headache.

Probably both.

D8a's Muse.

No, warp 7 is the speed of light to the seventh power. All the warp factors are exponential. Or at least that's how it was explained to me when I was a young trekkie at my daddy's knee.

The ship getting there in seven years is only 5 times faster than the light getting to Earth from the same planet, so it's just "five times the speed of light."

Okay - my head hurts way too much for something that may only be mentioned in one scene... Not sure if the muse is planning on using it for more than that...

Oh - wait, no it's going to be in at least 2 scenes! Muse just struck, but I still don't know that it's going to be a big plot point.

I still want to get it right though.

And most likely headache is the answer there, D8a's muse.
Carol

Edit: Okay so I looked at the wormhole thing. I like the idea. Is a wormhole instantaneous? Or does it take time? Or could it go either way? Kind of like flying takes a certain amount of time but flying on the Concorde is much faster but only takes half the time - that kind of thing.

Clark's ship almost HAD to use a wormhole or to create it's own. First, he appears when he is still a baby. Unlike the movie he hasn't aparently aged three years. Second, if there were no wormhole, then how did the Kryptonite get there when Clark was still a baby?

The odds of chunks of kryptonite appearing *now* right in this part of space are miniscule given the vastness of space.

But the odds of chunks of his home planet following Clark in his ship are actually pretty good.

As for the speed...if it took 3 months to arrive (and most of that time might have been spent just travelling the solar system from whereever the ship came out of the wormhole)...you'd think Clark's diapers ould have been really really dirty.

Since they weren't, that suggests that the trip either took no time at all, or there was a robo-nanny on the ship.

(Robo-nanny...hmmm...a fic?)

But the ship was pretty small for a robo-nanny...

See - I was thinking some sort of suspended animation for CK - not really sure why. But then when the capsule was opened it... unsuspended? Something like that. He wasn't necessarily a newborn when they put him in the ship [do we ever actually see him being put in? Or just when Tempus is trying to kill him?] I figured the Kryptonite came along with the ship, caught in it's... gravitational field?? Kind of like Apollo 13 when it blew up part of the Service[?] Module [it's been a while since I watched it/read the book].

Or selfcleaning diapers of course !
Carol

I went ahead and wrote the Robo-nanny story. It's called Surrogate, over in fanfic. <g>

I suppose suspended animation might work..."

It's been a long while since I watched "The Foundling", but didn't we see Lara put baby Kal-El into the spacecraft in one of the five globe messages?

I like the idea of the wormhole as well. It certainly explains how he could get to Earth so quickly and how the Kryptonite got here at all.

BJ (whose mind is boggled by this discussion)