Spoilers the wormhole in the first Star Trek movie. What was the big deal anyway?
- Thread starter urrutiap
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Well, they were about to crash into an asteroid...I'd freak out...
It was caused by a warp imbalance, was not stable, was destructive and was sucking objects into it which posed a huge danger to the ship.
It's not complicated.
Danger to the ship, failing to get the warp drive working when they need to intercept an intruder light-years away. What's the big deal?
On top of it, Kirk gave the wrong order, which Decker had to correct, which heightens the interpersonal conflict, since Decker thinks Kirk abused his rank for personal reasons, which was half true.
The flip side of that half-truth is that, once they were engaged with the intruder, Kirk gave outstanding orders, many of which went over Decker's head. In the end, all three of Kirk, Spock, and Decker worked together to save the day, and they probably would have failed without any one of them.
On top of it, Kirk gave the wrong order, which Decker had to correct, which heightens the interpersonal conflict, since Decker thinks Kirk abused his rank for personal reasons, which was half true.
The flip side of that half-truth is that, once they were engaged with the intruder, Kirk gave outstanding orders, many of which went over Decker's head. In the end, all three of Kirk, Spock, and Decker worked together to save the day, and they probably would have failed without any one of them.
Not that wormhole, but the wormhole that the Enterprise ended up in due to warp engine imbalance or whatever, and they also had to destroy an asteroid.
Kor
Well, the ship was about to be destroyed due to an asteroid, as well as an engine imbalance. So, yeah, that's kind of a big deal with the whole ship being destroyed and all.
Unless that isn't supposed to be a that big of a deal?
Because they are considered a very sexually desirable race. So much so that they are not allowed to have sexual contact with "less evolved" species, like humans, hence the whole "Oath of Celibacy" comment.
The whole Deltan concept from TMP was dumb and should have been ignored.
The thing to keep in mind is that wormholes were a pretty obscure concept back then, hardly ever used in fiction, at least not under that name (though similar things appeared as "black holes" or space warps or the like). They were proposed by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen as a solution of the General Relativity equations, but they were a minor curiosity that wasn't paid much attention until Carl Sagan asked physicist Kip Thorne to come up with a scientifically plausible means of faster-than-light travel for his 1985 novel Contact, and Thorne discovered new possibilities that led to physicists taking the idea more seriously, which eventually trickled out into fiction. ST:TNG's use of wormholes in "The Price" was just about the earliest mass-media use of wormholes as we typically see them portrayed today, as a traversable shortcut between two distant points in space.
So the use of the term "wormhole" in TMP was ahead of its time, and thus it wasn't used in the way we find familiar today. The wormhole in TMP was a disruption of the warp field resulting from its instability -- think of it like the equivalent of a boat getting sucked into a whirlpool and dragged into the depths. It warped time inside the ship as well as space, as we saw, and it probably would've destroyed them if they hadn't been able to shut down the engines in time.
Right. Like I said, prior to 1985, you were more likely to see that sort of thing referred to in fiction as a black hole -- or as a black hole with a white hole on the opposite end (see "The Magicks of Megas-tu") -- than a wormhole. The term "wormhole" was coined by John Wheeler in the 1960s, but the idea didn't catch on in fiction until after Contact. TMP is the only use of the term "wormhole" that I'm aware of in film or television prior to TNG: "The Price." Things like Sliders, Stargate, Farscape, etc. (and DS9, of course) all came later.
Spoilers Warnings for a movie that came out when Jimmy Carter was President...
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The big deal with the wormhole was that they couldn't go to warp -- let alone high warp -- and that asteroid they were about to run smack into would've destroyed them.
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The big deal with the wormhole was that they couldn't go to warp -- let alone high warp -- and that asteroid they were about to run smack into would've destroyed them.
Re-read what I said. They couldn't go to warp, then I added "let alone high warp", which they needed to intercept V'Ger.
They couldn't go to Warp 7 to intercept V'Ger if they couldn't even go to Warp 1.
They were at warp. The wormhole instability happened after they achieved warp 1. It was the result of an instability in the warp field turning the warp bubble into a different, more dangerous and uncontrollable kind of faster-than-light spatial distortion, and it dissipated once the warp drive shut down.
http://www.chakoteya.net/movies/movie1.html
That makes it clear that they were above the speed of light during the wormhole event. Of course, a warp drive and a wormhole are variants of the same physics, both distorting spacetime in a way that effectively shortens the distance to a destination so that you get there faster than a beam of light in normal space -- the former by "surfing" on a distortion wave that compresses space in front of it, the latter by creating a "tunnel" through spacetime that's shorter on the inside than the outside. So the idea was that it was the imbalance in the warp field that distorted the spacetime metric from a warp bubble into a wormhole.
Note also that after they got out of the wormhole, Kirk ordered Ilia to "lay in a new heading" to intercept the intruder. That tells us that they'd moved significantly through space while they were in the wormhole, far enough that they needed to recalculate how to reach their target. That wouldn't be the case if they'd been slower than light. On the contrary, the wormhole probably sent them significantly further than warp drive could have in the same brief time -- but since it was unstable and uncontrolled, they had no way to predict where they'd come out. Or when, given that it distorted time as well.
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