If You are a Patriot and Don’t Loathe RINOs…

Well this is the week my old McCarthy vs. Dungsmear question would have repeated.

We know the answer. Dungsmear.

But now let’s talk about RINOs in general, and why they are the lowest form of life in politics.

Many patriots have been involved with politics, often at the grassroots, for decades. We’ve fought, and fought, and fought and won the occasional illusory small victory.

Yet we can’t seem to win the war, even when we have BIG electoral wins.

I am reminded of something. The original Star Trek had an episode titled Day of the Dove. It was one of the better episodes from the third season, but any fan of the original series will tell you that’s a very low bar. Still, it seems to get some respect; at a time when there were about 700 episodes of Star Trek in its various incarnations out there, it was voted 99th best out of the top 100.

In sum, the plot is that an alien entity has arranged for 39 Enterprise crew, and 39 Klingons, to fight each other endlessly with swords and other muscle-powered weapons. The entity lives off of hostile emotions, you see and it wants a captive food source. (The other 400 or so Enterprise crew are trapped below decks and unable to help.) Each side has its emotions played and amplified by the alien entity; one Enterprise junior officer has false memories implanted of a brother who was killed by Klingons. The brother didn’t even exist.

Even people killed in a sword fight miraculously heal so they can go do it again.

The second best line of the episode is when Kang, the Klingon captain, notes that though they have won quite a number of small victories including capturing Engineering, can’t seem to actually finally defeat the Enterprise crew. He growls, “What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*”

Indeed. He may have been the bad guy, but his situation should sound familiar.

We are a majority in this country. We have a powerful political party in our corner. There is endless wrangling.

And yet,

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?

In our case, that power is the RINOs in our midst. They specialize in caving when on the verge of victory. Think of Obamacare’s repeal failing…by one Republican vote. Think of the way we can never seem to get spending under control (and now our entire tax revenue goes to pay interest on the debt; anything the government actually does now is with borrowed money).

We have a party…that refuses to do what we want it to do, and that refusal is institutionalized. If you’ve been involved with GOP politics, but haven’t seen this, it’s because you refuse to see it. Or because you are part of the problem yourself. (If so, kindly gargle some red fuming nitric acid to clear the taste of shit out of your mouth, and let those not part of the problem alone so they can read this.)

We fight to elect people, who then take a dive when in office. But it’s not just the politicians in office, it’s the people behind the scenes, the leaders of the national, state and county branches of the party. Their job is to ensure that real patriots never get onto the general election ballot. They’re allowed a few failures…who can then become token conservatives who will somehow never manage to win (Jordan), or can be compromised outright (Loren Boebert).

That way it doesn’t actually matter who has a congressional majority. I remember my excitement when the GOP took the Senate in 1980. But all that did was empower a bunch of “moderate” puddles of dog vomit like…well for whatever reason forty years later the most memorable name is Pete Domenici. And a couple of dozen other “moderates” who simply had no interest in doing what grassroots people in their party–those same grassroots people who had worked so hard to elect them–wanted them to do.

Oh, they’ll put up a semblance of a fight…but never win. And they love it when we fight the Dems instead of fighting them. Just like that alien entity, whose motto surely was “Let’s you and him fight. It’ll be delicious!”

If you think about it, your entire political involvement has come to nothing because of these walking malignant tumors.

That should make you good and mad.

The twenty five who blocked Jordan, and the hundred people who took that opportunity to stab Jordan in the back in the secret ballot should make you good and mad.

I’ll close this with another example of RINO backstabbing, an infuriating one close to home.

In my county, the GOP chair is not a RINO. She got elected when the grassroots had had enough of the RINOs. Unfortunately the state organization is full of RINOs, and the ousted county RINOs have been trying to form a new “Republican Party” and get the state GOP to recognize them as the affiliate. I’m honestly amazed it hasn’t happened yet.

In other words those shitstains won’t just leave when they get booted out; they’ll try to destroy what they left behind. It’s an indication that they know we know how important that behind-the-scenes party power is.

So they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll ever stop.

We cannot win until the leeches “on our side” get destroyed.

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*

We know it. What is going to be done about it?

*NOTE: The original line was actually “What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory.” I had mis-remembered it as feeds. When I checked it, it sure enough was “supports” and that’s what I originally quoted. On further reflection, though, I realized my memory was actually an improvement over the reality, because feeds is a perfect contrast with starves. I changed it partway through the day this originally posted, but now (since this is a re-run) it gets rendered this way from the start.

If one must do things wrong, one should do them wrong…right.

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.

Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.

I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

Given the results of our most recent elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.

This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you lying piece of rancid weasel shit?

In Defense of Ranked Choice Voting

One of the biggest obstacles to direly-needed change is RINOs, and one of the weapons in their arsenal is the “Wasted Vote” argument.

Periodically a third party has arisen, trying to hold RINOs to account by putting pressure on them from outside of the party, since doing so from the inside has historically done very little good. But, even if you find a third party candidate who perfectly reflects your views, you’re likely to vote for the RINO anyway. Why? Because if you don’t, the Democrat might win, and that would be even worse. So if you vote for that third party (that few will vote for), you’re throwing your vote away and increasing the likelihood of the Democrat winning. (It’s half as much a gain for the Democrat, as actually voting for the Democrat would be. Not as much, but half as much. Because although you denied the R your vote, you did not flip your vote to the Democrat.)

The Republican Party Establishment knows you don’t love them. But they know you hate the Democrats worse, and they use that to continue to herd you into supporting them. With gritted teeth you cast your vote, but your vote counts the same whether you cast it enthusiastically. And the other alternative, pissing on the voting apparatus to express your actual feelings, is probably a felony.

But what if you could vote for that third party without increasing the chances of the Dem walking away with the prize?

This is what ranked choice voting, or instant runoff voting, can do provided it is properly implemented. (And this includes the votes, and only genuine votes, being counted honestly, of course. However, I’m going to compare it to what we have today, and pretend that is honestly done too. RCV can’t work if it’s not honestly administered, just like our current system isn’t working because it isn’t honestly administered.)

The idea behind RCV is to vote by expressing your order of preference. You could vote for the Patriot Party, then for the RINO Party as your second choice (and ignore the Democrat, the Green, the Overt Socialist Schmuckmonkey Party, etc).

What does this do? It nullifies the wasted vote argument. Your vote will be counted for the Patriot party, first, then instead of it being “wasted” when the Patriot Party loses, it ends up going to the RINO. Actually, it’s just barely possible that the Patriot Party would actually beat the RINO, if people weren’t all individually afraid to vote for it.

It’s just like the famous “Prisoner’s Dilemma” where your fear of other peoples’ actions prevents you from doing the optimal thing–and vice-versa. As long as Job Lowe is afraid to vote Patriot because he’s afraid you’ll vote RINO, you’ll have to vote RINO because you fear that Job Lowe will, because he fears you will.

So on the whole I like RCV. It gives you a no-risk way to vote against the RINO scum, and in favor of someone who deserves your vote.

The problem is, as done here in the US, it comes packaged with a “jungle primary.” A bunch of candidates get to put their name out there, and the top four (or so) candidates get onto the “main” ballot. This gives party establishments their way around the threat of a good third party bumping them off. Because they know that few people bother with primaries, and third parties don’t have the resources to run in a primary…so they throw two or three establishment hacks into the primary and they will probably beat the third party. The result is the RINOs end up with two of the four slots in the general election, and the Dems get the other two. Now there’s suddenly no third party candidate on the ballot at all.

If we were to combine RCV with the present system where each party could nominate exactly one candidate to appear on the November ballot, or at the very least, ensure minor parties could get onto the ballot with at least one candidate regardless of the primary, we would be getting somewhere, but the establishment is smarter than we like to give them credit for. They will support the jungle primary + RCV “solution” rather than the more appropriate one-candidate-per-party + RCV solution.

It’s not RCV that is the problem, it’s the primary structure grafted onto it.

Justice

It says “Justice” on the picture.

And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.

But what is it?

Here’s a take, from a different context: It’s about how you do justice, not the justice that must be done to our massively corrupt government and media. You must properly identify the nature of a person, before you can do him justice.

Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):

Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

Ayn Rand identified seven virtues, chief among them rationality. The other six, including justice, she considered subsidiary because they are essentially different aspects and applications of rationality.

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 or 2026 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1,982.10
Silver $23.82
Platinum $910.00
Palladium $1,080.00
Rhodium $5,000.00

This week, at Friday close:

Gold $2,003.70
Silver $24.42
Platinum $941.00
Palladium $1,094.00
Rhodium $4,900.00

Markets appeared to have closed at 11:45 on Friday, rather than 3 PM mountain time.

Silver is doing very well right now for some reason, it has busted $24.

Some people who analyze this stuff online are puzzled at gold’s recent climb, so it’s possible it’s being pumped and dumped.

Star Trek Was Often Clueless

As gigantic a leap ahead as Star Trek might have represented for TV science fiction (I don’t think it was beaten for almost 30 years, and that was by Babylon 5) it still had its forehead-smacking moments when it comes to the science.

Yes science fiction is considered by many to be arbitrary flights of fancy, but the fact is, when it is written science fiction, there are conventions to be followed. It should at least display an understanding of natural laws. This is even honored in the breach. By which I mean that oftentimes, the premise of the story involves a new scientific discovery, so of course there will be violations of current scientific principles. But the point is that everyone understands it’s a new thing–and the “new” science has to be internally consistent.

By no means is all, or even a majority, of science fiction about space travel, but when it is (especially in the sub-genre called “space opera”), it almost certainly will assume that some sort of faster-than-light travel is possible. Either there will be some sort of propulsion system that does it, or there will be some sort of wormhole or jump point, where you instantaneously jump from one star’s planetary system to another. (The wormhole is infinite speed, effectively…travel time involves getting to (or from) the wormhole, from (or to) some nearby planet or other location the action is going to be.)

Star Trek went with the former. A lot of other Hollywood produced stuff went the other way, or with some combination. It saves them from some opportunities to really be stupid.

In general, Hollywood doesn’t follow the convention I mentioned above; it regularly has ridiculous science howlers in it. The scriptwriters came nowhere near a STEM education and are a) clueless and b) usually don’t give a rip.

In particular, every single Hollywood production I am aware of that uses propulsion systems for faster than light travel simply doesn’t do the math and has no conception of what they’re dealing with. They don’t understand how fast light goes, and they don’t understand how big things are.

And that includes Star Trek.

When I remembered that bit about “What is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory” I blew the dust off my original Star Trek Blurays and watched that episode. Then I got sucked in; I’ve been lightly binge watching Star Trek (the Original Series, as it’s now referred to to disambiguate it from all of the spinoffs) since then. And it’s just appalling sometimes, on this score (but it must be said the main goal was to tell good stories, which it was much more successful at).OK so first things first. Let me explain the actual situation.

Let’s discuss interplanetary travel first.

The distance between the Earth and the Sun averages out to about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers. For historical reasons I’m not getting into now (but did in other posts), this is called an astronomical unit (AU) and is the “yardstick” we use inside the solar system. We in fact used it for a yardstick long before we had any idea how much it was…because we knew the ratios of planetary distances long ago. We knew, for instance that Jupiter was 5.2 times the distance from the Sun as is Earth, long before we knew how much in absolute terms either of those distances was. Today. of course, we’ve measured an AU to within a few hundred meters, and as of 2012 it’s now defined to be exactly 149,597,870,700 meters. (If we end up refining the measurement, we’ll end up with an AU not quite equaling the distance between the Earth and the Sun, because we’ve nailed the number in place.)

The furthest planet out is Neptune; its orbit is almost exactly 30 AU in radius. There are a lot of smaller objects further out; the furthest one that’s reasonably well known to science popularizers is Sedna. It’s in a very elliptical orbit with an average radius of 484 AU, with a maximum distance of 892. (It’s much much closer right now). Another body, Leleakuhonua, is at 1085 AU average distance, max is 2106 AU. It too is near its closest approach of “only” 65 AU. Right now it’s roughly 80 AU away. (We would never be able to see either body if it were at its furthest distance. This tells us there are almost certainly many bodies way out there, at or near the farthest extents of their orbits, that we can’t see.)

When we do start traveling between the planets of our solar system in earnest, we’ll probably spend most of our time inside the orbit of Neptune, or perhaps a bit outside it where Pluto is, but places further out than where Sedna is today, will be lengthy undertakings–expeditions.

What sorts of speeds will be needed? We’ll certainly want to move faster than the planets themselves do! The Earth moves 6.28 AUs in one year (i.e, 1 AU times 2π or times τ if you like using τ instead of π), or roughly an AU every two months. It’s moving at 29,785 meters per second or 107,230 kilometers per hour. If that’s as fast as we travel, Neptune is roughly five years away, one way. (And Earth moves a lot faster than Neptune does.) If you are thinking 5 weeks to Neptune is what people would put up with (similar to oceangoing ships crossing oceans), you need to be able to move 52 times faster, or at over 5 million kilometers an hour.

That, as it happens, is about one half of one percent of the speed of light, which is roughly a billion kilometers an hour. This is way, way ahead of anything we can do now, but much slower than light speed. And though it would require engineering we haven’t even imagined yet, it doesn’t necessarily bust the laws of physics (unless you insist it be done with souped-up rockets…like in The Expanse). One could write good stories with speeds and timespans like this.

And Star Trek got this nearly right, at least once. The Enterprise has “impulse” drives that push it at slower than the speed of light, c, and there was an episode, Elaan of Troyius, where the Enterprise was traveling from one planet to another…in the same planetary system. The command was for “speed factor point zero three seven”, which probably meant 0.037c. This allowed for a leisurely (several days) trip between two planets. It’s probably still about ten times too fast, but…maybe the star was bright and the planets had to be farther apart than (say) Earth and Mars would be. However, in spite of this rare moment of near-lucidity, this episode is no paragon of doing simple arithmetic to sanity check things, as there is a rather big blunder in it elsewhere. I’ll get to that.

OK, now let’s consider interstellar distances and travel.

It’s bigger. A lot bigger. And we’re going to need a bigger yardstick. There are two yardstick between stars. The one astronomers use amongst themselves is the parsec. How big is that?

A parsec is the distance at which, something an AU across will appear to only be one arcsecond wide. (That’s not how it was originally derived, but it’s equivalent…and a lot easier to describe.)

Those of you that shoot (and I hope that’s all of you) likely know that by happy coincidence, two spots an inch apart on a target that is 100 yards away are just about 1 arc minute apart. Which is to say the angle between the line from the first spot to your eyeball, and the line from the other spot, to your eyeball, is 1/60th of a degree. Almost but not quite parallel. Since a quarter is very close to an inch across, one MOA is how big a quarter appears at 100 yards.

One second of arc is an angle 1/60th as big as that. So it’s 1/60th the width of a quarter at a hundred yards…or you can move the object further away instead of making it smaller: it’s also the width of a quarter at 6,000 yards, or 18,000 feet…or about 3 1/2 miles.

Now put an object 1 AU across (some stars are actually that big), far enough away that it’s one arc second across.

An AU is BIG, so this has to be far, far away. In fact, it’s 30,856,775,814,913,673 meters away (almost 31 quadrillion million meters). That’s not an exact figure, and there can’t be one, because computing it from an AU (which can be expressed exactly) involves π.

The other yardstick, the one astronomers use talking to non-astronomers, is the light year. This is the distance that light (traveling at about a billion kilometers an hour) travels in 365.25 days. This is: 9,460,730,472,580.8 meters. Nine and a half trillion kilometers. Or a bit under 6 trillion miles.

The nearest star to our Sun is Proxima Centauri. It’s 4.2 light years or 1.3 parsecs away. The sun itself would be impossible to see without binoculars at about 75 light years’ distance. Many of the bright stars in our night sky are intrinsically much brighter than the sun and are hundreds of light years away.

Four light years is often taken to be a good average distance between stars (though I suspect it’s high).

The entire galaxy is a disc a hundred thousand light years across. Even as we gallivant around from star to star…getting outside of the galaxy is a long trip, unless of course you go perpendicular to the disk. The center of the disc is about 26,000 light years away. This is plenty of room for Star Trek to write zillions of episodes, especially given that the galaxy is estimated to have anywhere between 100-400 billion or even more stars in it, and as near as we can tell, a large percentage of them have planets.

Now that I have given you both scales, let’s relate the interplanetary scale to the interstellar scale.

A light year is 63,241 AUs. A parsec is 206,265 AUs.

Those are commas not decimal points.

Proxima Centauri, the nearest interstellar destination, is about 268,000 AUs away. And we can’t even do one AU yet!

If a single AU is likened to a mile, Proxima Centauri is about as far away as the moon. We can walk a mile. To get a man to the moon we need the biggest rocket ever built.

For our previously-supposed society that can travel around the solar system in a few weeks, to make the transition and be able to travel to the nearest star, is like going from a man who can walk 30 miles…to the Apollo moon rocket, all at once. It’s by far the biggest “jump” in capability we will ever make; it will make crossing the oceans instead of hugging the coasts in sailing ships look like a tiny innovation. It’s basically impossible without huge advances in technology.

And, let me just remind of something. The furthest we have actually sent a manned mission is to the Moon. How far away is the Moon? Sit down and realize how puny we are: The Moon is 0.00257 AUs away. Roughly 1/400th of an AU. No, we haven’t begun manned interplanetary travel! We’ll need to go several AUs to get to Mars (the shortest route is under an AU but is much harder). Thousands of times further than we have yet gone.

OK with the stage set, let’s consider interstellar travel. If we want the ship to get there in less than years, we must have faster than light travel. Because light takes 4 years or so to get from one star to the next. For this the creators of Star Trek invented warp drive and wrote some word salad about how it works by warping space. (Interestingly, a serious physicist has postulated that if we could bend space a certain way, we could actually travel faster than light…and the press has called it a warp drive; you may have seen articles about it. He’s done the math to back it up, so it’s not word salad. All we need is a way to bend space.)

Warp drive speeds are given in Star Trek as “warp factors.” It’s never explained in the show, but in a book written by Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, it’s stated that to figure out how fast a warp factor is, you cube it. So for Warp Factor 2, you’re traveling 2x2x2=8 times the speed of light. Which means getting to Proxima Centauri in just over six months. That’s too long, honestly. But you can go to Warp 6 and cruise forever without damaging the engines, and that’s 6x6x6=216 times the speed of light. And that puts Proxima Centauri 7 days away. It’s just barely possible that’s the sort of time Star Trek‘s Enterprise spends going from one star to another, but realistically, you’re not going to always be going from one star to its next door neighbor. The next crisis could be dozens or even hundreds of light years away.

In other words, even a few hundred times light speed is too slow for Star Trek to make sense.

Later on (and this is not official Star Trek as far as I know) it was posited that those warp factor multipliers apply in completely empty space, but interstellar space always has some dust and gas, plus the occasional actual star, and so warp factors get boosted…by over a thousand times, depending on how thick the interstellar medium is. (And even in a nebula, it’s actually a near perfect vacuum.) I’ll call this the “fudge factor.” And again, so far as I know it’s not “official” Star Trek.

The fudge factor does make things make more sense. Many episodes end with Kirk ordering the Enterprise on a course to the next episode (basically) at Warp 1 or 2. Unless you want the entire remaining five year mission to be taken up just getting to the next episode, you’ve got to move faster than 1x1x1=1 or 2x2x2=8 times the speed of light.

Sometimes the bridge crew actually says something is a parsec away (or so) and they can be there in minutes. Again, you need the fudge factor for this to make sense.

The problem comes in when Warp speed is mixed up with short distances.

That same Elaan of Troyius episode that I praised before, has another scene in it. A hostile ship is charging at the Enterprise at warp speed. I.e. as fast, or faster, than the speed of light. The problem came in when the bogie was 100,000 km away, and the bridge crew was counting down how far away it was.

At one times the speed of light, it would take 1/3 of a second for that ship to cover the distance. But it’s doing warp six. So the distance gets covered in 1/648th of a second instead. And that’s without the fudge factor, which makes it 1/1000th as long a time as that. The bridge crew would literally have no time at all to react.

Sigh.

But there is worse.

Another episode where the Enterprise is traveling within a planetary system is Paradise Syndrome. The Enterprise has to divert an asteroid heading for an inhabited, Earth-like planet. The asteroid is two months away. In our solar system it would be a “near-Earth object” traveling about the same speed as Earth…which as I mentioned is about 1 AU in two months. So the distance to cover is 1 AU or so. Since they are delayed on the planet (Kirk was missing, and of course they were searching for him), they have to get to the asteroid as fast as possible.

Spock orders warp nine. 9x9x9=512 times the speed of light (without fudge factor). How long will it take to cover that 1 AU distance?

Light takes 500 seconds to get from the Sun to the Earth…which is 1 AU. In other words, it should take less time for the Enterprise to travel that distance at warp nine, than it took for Spock to give the “Ahead warp factor nine” command. (That’s assuming, of course, the ship can accelerate from 0 to warp 9 in less than a second.)

Even if it’s two or three AUs away…it’s still going to take at most a handful of seconds to get there, even without the fudge factor. Since warp nine stresses the engines, it would probably have been okay to order warp six and take a few extra seconds. (Not that a mere one second of warp nine should cause problems!)

Instead this is shown as taking hours, if not days. And the engines are near the breaking point when they get to the asteroid. They end up frying the engines trying to divert the asteroid, and the Enterprise has to go back to the planet on impulse power, hours ahead of the asteroid…for two months…to try to find Kirk and rescue him before the asteroid destroys all life on the planet. (This too also ignorant, this time ignorant of orbital dynamics. The asteroid is in an orbit about the star, not under power. Therefore the Enterprise can be on the same trajectory without using power. If it is using any power at all, it should outrun the asteroid.)

Another episode that needs a callout is Space Seed. It wasn’t that famous an episode…until Star Trek II hit the movie theaters. Because Space Seed is the episode that introduced Khan Noonien Singh (played by Ricardo Montalban).

Khan’s backstory is that he and his band of merry supermen and superwomen escaped Earth in 1992 aboard a DY-100 ship…a ship far, far ahead of anything we can build today (anything interplanetary that can hold 3 people in it is…much less something with the big corridors we saw in Star Trek, holding dozens of people). The ship was meant for interplanetary travel but fortunately for the viewer (unfortunately for the Enterprise), they had suspended animation, and so the ship could travel for nearly 300 years…and somehow end up WAY out there among the stars for the Enterprise to find it.

Uh, but look at those numbers. Interstellar travel is tens of thousands times further than interplanetary travel.

We have sent objects out of the solar system, five of them. The furthest is Voyager 1, which after almost 50 years is a mere 152 AU away, and it will be tens of thousands of years before it gets as far away as Proxima Centauri (and it’s not headed in that direction).

There’s simply no way Khan’s ship could be at interstellar distances, much less far enough out that the Enterprise is only now stumbling across it, three centuries later.

Fortunately, I can usually ignore stuff like this for the sake of enjoying the story. But it would be nice if these TV shows would actually employ someone who can do arithmetic and use a calculator! Because that’s literally all it takes…that and knowing that distance equals speed multiplied by time.

I’m lucky that I can see all of this and still enjoy the show.

A couple of postscripts.

First, everything I’ve said applies to the original series. Star Trek the Next Generation (and Deep Space Nine and Voyager) are set a century after the original series, and the warp drive there is quite different…it’s probably the same as the “Transwarp” that was being tested in some of the movies made to go with the original series. Warp factors are much higher, and warp ten is infinite speed.

Also, here is a video about a scale model of our solar system in Melbourne, Australia. Distances and planetary sizes are to the same scale, 1:1,000,000,000 or 1 millimeter = 1,000 kilometers. The thumbnail shows the sun. Pluto is almost six kilometers away.

But there is a little surprise. Proxima Centauri is part of the model…quite close to the Sun in fact! What is it doing there? Didn’t I just get finished trying to convey how ridiculously far away it is compared to planets?

Well yes. But it just so happens that at the scale of the model, Proxima Centauri is 40,000 km away…and that’s one trip around the earth! So start at the sun, go past Mercury, Venus, etc…and Neptune, and yes they included Pluto for laughs. Then keep on going…all the way around the world and you’ll hit Proxima Centauri just before getting to the Sun again.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!