Think of a bola (See image below); a weapon that’s two balls tied to either end of a string. When you throw it, the two balls spin around a point at the very center of the string.

Scale it up to make those two balls a planet and a star, the string is gravity.

Since our sun has so much more mass than Earth (or any other orbiting body in our solar system), the sun’s orbit is mass-proportionate to the orbital motion of Earth (and the other planets, dwarf planets, and asteroids). For instance, an object that is 1/100th the mass of the sun would have an orbit 100 times larger than the sun.

All the planets, dwarf planets, etc. are many in numbers, so their orbits aren’t perfect circles, as they all affect each other dependent upon how close they are in relation to each other, and the proportionate mass of each of them. But the sun as well as the planets are all orbiting around a central imaginary point to all of them.

Warp-Drive – Not so awesome after all

In many Sci-Fi movies, you see space travelers go from a standard space cruising speed, to some “warp-drive” feature that sends them to light speed within about one second.

There’s a problem with this though. That acceleration puts G-Forces on the body.

Gravity is measured in m/s/s (meters per second per second), and gravity’s standard value for this on Earth is 9.8m/s/s.

I know that’s a tad confusing, so let me explain.

Since this is theoretical, to be literal, you would have to remove all the air from Earth so there would be no wind resistance first. But once that is done, if you dropped any object above Earth, the first second, it would fall at 9.8 meters per second. The 2nd second would be 19.6 meters per second. The 3rd, 29.4 meters per second, and so on…each second increasing in speed 9.8 meters per second.

This is the acceleration of gravity, or often referred to as 1 g.

Knowing this, just to give you some examples of G-Forces people experience, many top fuel dragsters accelerate so fast, the drivers are exposed to 5 g’s of gravity, fighter pilots can get over 15 g’s of gravity, but risk black-outs doing so.

How many g’s can a person withstand?

Over a period of time, 15 g’s is about the most we can endure, and even then, only if you’re in peak physical condition. Because at 15 g’s, your effective weight is 15 times greater than normal, making your average 200 lbs. male a whopping 3,000 lbs.

But for a brief moment, like slamming into a wall (which are negative G’s, or deceleration vs. acceleration), humans have been known to survive as much as 46 g’s.

See link below, and poor John Stapps face, while achieving those negative g’s. He voluntarily strapped himself into a contraption that exposed himself to those high g’s for scientific research. If there was ever a hero who took one for the team of science, it’s that guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force

Now, here’s where the problem comes in for warp-drive.

In space, the fastest mankind has ever went is about 25,000 mph, when we went to the moon. So let’s assume that’s the approximate “cruising” speed that our Sci-Fi characters are bumbling about at.

25,000 mph is approximately 11,176 meters per second (m/s).
The speed of light is “slightly” faster, at a whopping 299,792,458 m/s.

So that means, that the acceleration is 299,781,282 meters per second per second (m/s/s) if they went from 25,000 mph to the speed of light in one second. If my calculations are right, and of course 1 g is 9.8 m/s/s, then that means that our Sci-Fi characters would be exposed to 30,589,927 g’s of force, roughly. Or 30,589,881 g’s more than any human has ever survived.

In order for them to accelerate to light speed from 25,000mph, and achieve no more than 10 g’s, a force that is still virtually unbearable, it would take approximately 3,058,992 seconds, 50,983 hrs, 2,124 days, or 5.8 years, then doubling of course to allow for the the equally powerful negative G-forces you’d achieve slowing back down.

So the moral of the story, is that they’d be human pancakes in a fraction of a second—which is not so cool after all. Not to mention, their space ship would be torn to shreds as well. While the writers at Star Trek deserve a little credit for identifying this problem and coming up with the idea of “inertial dampers” to overcome the effect, such inertial dampers fall under a category I like to call literary bullshit.