Hi, I'm Dr. Erin, astrophysicist
and science advisor for the Star Trek franchise.
And this is The Science of Star Trek.
Picking up communication, sir.
I have a fix on it, Captain.
I believe I can lock on it.
We send signals all the time here on Earth
to communicate with one another.
A long time ago, it used to be that you'd need to have
a wire connecting people who wanted to talk to each other.
Now, though, we have devices like smartphones,
which allow us to talk or message other people
without any wires whatsoever,
which is helpful for when starships
like the U.S.S. Protostar are communicating with each other.
[Dal] We're just now approaching
the closest Federation comm relay station.
Could you imagine a bunch of starships all connected
by wires throughout the galaxy?
When we send a message from our phone,
it travels at the speed of light in a really low energy part
of electromagnetic radiation called radio.
The electromagnetic spectrum is made up
of different regions.
Radio; microwave, which heats up our food;
infrared, which is like heat;
visible, which is what we see
in all the colors in a rainbow;
ultraviolet, which gives us sunburns;
X-ray; and gamma rays.
As signals in the electromagnetic spectrum carry
more and more energy,
they move into these different regions.
Now, signals in the electromagnetic spectrum,
like radio signals, don't have any weight.
So, they travel through our universe
in a straight line at one speed,
which we call the speed of light.
The speed of light is so fast that, in one second,
light could travel around the Earth over seven times.
Try to picture it.
One Mississippi. Seven times!
Could someone explain that to me?
This means if we were able
to travel at the speed of light,
we would be able to get anywhere really fast, right?
Unfortunately, space is also very big.
So big, in fact, that light
from the next closest star to us takes
more than four years to reach us.
If we wanted to talk to someone on a planet,
or starship near that star, Proxima Centauri,
it would take more than four years
for our text message to reach them.
[Chakotay] Day 72 since the Vau N'Akat
captured the Protostar.
They're planning to launch it back
through the wormhole with a weapon aboard.
Half my crew's gone, but I'm trying to hang on.
How? How is that possible?
You can think of our space as a sort of fabric,
and all the stars and planets
and you and me are like bowling balls,
marbles, or grains of rice on this fabric.
With space being so big
and communication between stars taking so long,
what if there were ways we could make a shortcut?
Well, theoretically, there might be.
Imagine taking the sheet of our universe,
folding it, and then stapling it together.
That staple is now a shortcut
between one part of space to another,
and light, a message like the one Chakotay sends to Janeway,
or even between you and me,
could just hop through instead of taking the long way.
This is what we call a "wormhole".
And while we haven't detected, or made any yet,
it's a cool theoretical way to shorten
these huge distances in space.
Oh.
Well, it looks like I won't be the only one
who needs time to process all this information.
I'm Dr. Erin Macdonald, bringing you all the science facts
behind the science fiction in Star Trek.