The Galactic Barrier!

[johnnybear]

I'm wondering what everyone thinks of the barrier and it's two or possibly three appearances in the show. Do we count the barrier in Is there in truth no beauty as the Galactic Barrier or as a type of time barrier caused by the engines?
JB

 

[Melakon]

Memory Alpha considers it to be the barrier, saying the Enterprise was trapped in a space-time continuum within the galactic barrier. I try not to think about the barrier too much, since each time we see it, it never seems to affect the crew in the same way twice.

 

[johnnybear]

True, but the second time The Enterprise encountered it 99% of the crew were reduced to cubes anyway!
JB

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

The galactic barrier was not one of my favorite Star Trek creations, and it ironically appeared in the very first episode made.

Melak..*cough*..Dr. Severini is right. It is different every time. It imbues awesome mental powers ... it's plain energy ...it's a timeless void . What next?!

It's almost the original series' equivalent of the nexus in its vagueness.

Also, in Where No Man Has Gone Before, if they crossed the barrier, wouldn't they have to cross it again in order to return?

 

[Melakon]

I think in "Where No Man...", they never got competely through it, and were bounced back into the known galaxy. It might have been better if they'd used a different name for the phenomena each time, like subspace distortion, or spatial anomaly, but Treknobabble had not yet been mastered. They just recycled the expensive effects footage each time using the same term.

They definitely would have had to cross it twice in "By Any Other Name", if the episode had returned to the planet where they found the Kelvans.

 

[Green Shirt]

Also, in Where No Man Has Gone Before, if they crossed the barrier, wouldn't they have to cross it again in order to return?

I also got the impression they "bounced back" off of it and stayed in the galaxy. Otherwise, the episode seems to suggest that Delta Vega is "outside" the galaxy. Probably wrong, but that's the way I see it.

 

[Commishsleer]

Is there supposed to be a galactic barrier at every 'edge' of the galaxy? Perhaps in WNMHGB there was a small barrier for a little section of the galaxy.
All other times the Enterprise exited the galaxy at a different place and wasn't affected by it.

I was wondering whether anyone else has heard of this. I think I read somewhere years ago, either in a magazine, book or online that when people scoffed at him, the writer of WNMHGB apparently could scientifically prove that there was supposed to be an actual edge to the galaxy. Not that it turned people into monsters just that it existed. I just can't remember where I read this and haven't been able to find it again.

 

[Warped9]

I always accepted that they just bounced back into the galaxy in WNMHGB without actually crossing through. Later in BAON the modified engines allowed them to penetrate all the way through. And assuming the shields had been modified as well prevented any adverse effects to anyone aboard as was seen in WNMHGB.

And despite similar footage I accepted the zone seen in ITITNB to be something entirely separate and different.

 

[drt]

In some 80s fanon tech manual I recall it speculating that the barrier was an artifact, erected for some unknown reason around the galaxy.

 

[Spock's Barber]

I wish that there was an impenetrable Galactic Barrier between my work desk and my bosses' office so that he could never catch me goofing off.

 

[Warped9]

In the novel "The Wounded Sky" they offer an explanation that the barrier was something cyclical and thus not always present.

 

[uniderth]

If I remember correctly in Where No Man Has Gone Before Kirk actually give the order to turn around before the get through the barrier. It is only when traveling through the barrier the other way do people getting shocked.

It would seem that when traveling out the barrier I it's just really rough turbulence. But when traveling from outside the galaxy inward it has harmful effects on humans.

If you will recall in the account of the Valiant they are swept through the barrier by the magnetic storm. It is only when they return through it under their own power does it kill six crewmen and give one powers.

So it would seem that the direction of travel changes the effect the great Barrier has. Traveling outward is rough but not lethal while traveling inward is somewhat lethal to humans.

I really like the idea of the great barrier being some sort of artifact. Judging by the effect the barrier was designed to keep something out of the Galaxy. Perhaps the barrier while only partially lethal to humans is completely lethal to that something.

What is that Something? Where does it come from? It must be immensely powerful to errect a barrier around the galaxy in order to keep it out. Also, who erected the barrier? They must have been quite an advanced and powerful species.

There is some GREAT story stuff here!

 

[johnnybear]

The Enterprise cannot cross the barrier at light speed and can only do it with the warp engines! Kirk orders the ship back in WNMHGB and two members are irradiated with super energies while in BAON the Kelvans had adapted the engines and perhaps the shields so the harmfull effects (Negative energy) doesn't harm the occupants and in ITITNB they don't seem to reference the limbo they are trapped in as the Galactic Barrier despite the reused footage!
JB

 

[Dale Sams]

The barrier is to protect the Milky Way from intergalactic invaders. Like in that Phineas and Ferb ep.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

 

[T'Girl]

Kirk orders the ship back in WNMHGB and two members are irradiated with super energies

More than two, there were multiple deaths amongst the crew. Also, Dehner and Kirk's dialog after the barrier could mean that more than Dehner and Mitchell were "shocked" and survived. The others perhaps simply didn't "turn" later.

 

[Christopher]

In the novel "The Wounded Sky" they offer an explanation that the barrier was something cyclical and thus not always present.

Not cyclical, but transient. It was the radiation front from the explosion of a "metastar" in one of the galaxy's satellite clusters.

I always liked that explanation, because it makes so much more sense than the idea of a barrier on the "edge" of something that doesn't even have a definable edge. There is no point where the stars stop and empty space begins; it's just a gradual decrease in density. Not to mention that the edge of the stellar disk is not actually the edge of the galaxy at all, because there's also the stellar halo, the gaseous halo, and the dark matter halo beyond it.

I also don't care for the hasty assumption people make that, just because the Barrier exists at the single part of the "edge" that's reachable by Starfleet, it must extend around the entire galaxy. That's failing to appreciate what a tiny fraction of the galaxy the Federation encompasses.

 

[publiusr]

I also seem to remember it being somethng to help keep the thing at Sha Ka Ree in check--a zone near the Shapely center not far from SGT A*, and then the outer fence--but one formed by the metastar

An actively feeding galactic core black hole can prevent star formation:
http://news.discovery.com/space/gal...s-can-kill-galactic-star-formation-140227.htm

I seem to remember a Scientific American illustration that showed a glaxy that did seem to be surrounded by a type of bubble some years ago...

Maybe a galactic heliopause of some type...

 

[Christopher]

^I considered the idea of the Barrier being a galactic magnetopause, but when I looked into it, I found that such a boundary would be many thousands of parsecs beyond the edge of the stellar disk. I can't think of any astronomical phenomenon that would form any kind of shrink-wrap barrier around the stellar disk itself.

 

[publiusr]

In terms of the shrink wrap--I can imagine two sheets of paper close together. One can say that ancient Warp travel is like a breath of air between them--they move towards each other. The combined heliopause zones of the stellar disk holds it at bay--but never far from travel.

The edge of the table is always there

 

[Maurice]

The Barrier was erected by the Federation to keep the Andromedan invasion fleet out, until Travis betrayed... oh wait, wrong Federation.