The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 21, 2010

Official News page 5


REAL LIFE NEWS: WARP FACTOR FIVE? NOT IF YOU WANT TO LIVE!

by Hazed

Bad news for anyone hoping to emulate Captain Kirk and his crew: a scientist has announced that traveling at warp speed will kill you.

The problem, according to Professor William Edelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is interstellar hydrogen. While there's precious little of it out in the depths of space between stars - just a couple of atoms per cubic centimeter - as the starship Enterprise speeds up, a compression effect kicks in which would greatly increase the number of atoms hitting the ship.

As the spaceship reached 99.99998% of the speed of light, "hydrogen atoms would seem to reach a staggering 7 teraelectron volts" and humans in the path of this ray would receive a dose of ionizing radiation of 10,000 sieverts. Just 6 sieverts is enough to kill a human, so the result would be instant death.

How disappointing.

Of course, by the time we have the technology to make a ship go at warp speed, we may have come up with some kind of forcefield that will protect us from the deadly hydrogen...

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