Are Scientist close to building a real Starship Enterprise?

Answer 1

No, but I believe we can someday. What we need is some life support system on it, a device to control gravity, enough fuel for it to last a few years, a way to launch something that huge, and a way to keep in touch with it.

Answer 2

Nowhere close. I wish they were. Some of the specifics:

A few promising experiments that relate to the teleportation concept have been performed, but only working with single particles and with very erratic results.

We're nowhere near a good theoretical idea of how to travel at speeds such as the Enterprise.

Life support capabilities and controlling for gravity are still well behind what we would need as well.

I'm not a scientist, just a reader, so this is my laymans take on things. I can only imagine the myriad challenges our current limitations would impose on us if trying to build an Enterprise-esque ship.

Answer 3

Not a chance, sorry. Star Trek is a science fiction series based on imaginary technology and a wishful assumption that we will one day explore space the way our forebears explored remote lands during the era of European colonial expansion.

The distances to the stars are on a scale we can hardly imagine. It would be child's play for a cockroach to crawl from Iowa to Australia by comparison to planning a flight to even the nearest star. (28,000,000,000,000 miles)

The transporter was invented by the producers to create more plausible timing to help insert station breaks and commercials. Transporter technology is not possible in the real world.

Neither is warp drive or any other form of hyperdrive, antimatter power generation, or Lt. Uhura's bra.

I am sorry, but it is just fiction. We may explore the solar system in detail some day. We may not. At the rate we are depleting the world's capital resources, we will probably not be able to do any space exploration after about 50 more years.

So enjoy it as entertainment. Don't expect it to ever actually happen. And consider the real adventures that face us here on earth: overcoming poverty, ending war, improving education, eliminating greed, reducing population, defeating AIDS, and the numerous other critical achievements on which the survival of the human race depends. Those are the REAL Final Frontier!

Enjoy!

Answer 4

awesome question!

no.
the answer is no.
um. we're closer than we've been before, but...

okay. lets deal with this a little more clearly,
what would we need to build a real starship enterprise?

1) a consistent way to shield ourselves from radiation in space
2) a reliable way to get the energy we need to keep warm and grow/store food
3) a means of generating gravity
4) warp drive.
5) vulcans
6) somewhere to go.
7) a means of communicating back with earth in a timely manner.

So, what have we got?

1) thick lead and clever placement of magnetic fields might be able to keep us from getting cancer and dying... but... there's lots of radiation out there, and the faster we go, the harder the radiation will hit us.
2) we can use nuclear fission. fusion would be nicer, but, we can't do it yet.
3) getting gravity the way they do in star trek would be stupid and difficult. we would have to figure out a way to warp spacetime in just the right way to make us think that the ship had an up and a down. It's easier just to make the space ship a cylinder and spin it. it's not as pretty, but it gets the job done.

4) Okay, so a physicist named Alcubierre was inspired by star trek, and invented a way for a ship to wrap itself up in a ball of energy... the ball of energy would then pull and push itself forward faster than the speed of light. this is called the Alcubierre warp drive. pretty cool, eh? the problem is that, to do it, we need a form of matter which causes gravity to "push away" instead of "pull together". some physicists think that our universe is full of this stuff, and that it's this "negative energy" goo that's causing our universe to expand the way it does. other physicist think that they're full of hot air. the moral of the story is that if the negative energy exists, we can build a warp bubble. the problem with that, though, is that it'll take SO MUCH negative energy that the ship won't be able to cause the bubble itself. so our starship enterprise wouldn't be able to "wrap itself" in the warp bubble from the inside...
5) plastic surgery and psychological neuroses.
6) it's a pretty good guess to say that our universe is full of earth-sized planets which are just-the-right distance away from their stars to support life. that said, they're too small to see right now, so we don't actually know anything for sure.
7) "captain, starfleet is sending a subspace communication"... in star trek, the universe is imagined as an ocean... well... a lake. and the "subspace" is like a cell phone system. the real universe is much more complicated: time flows at different rates in different places, and depending on how fast you're moving... signals probably can't travel faster than the speed of light... the moral of the story is that einstein's relativity makes phoning home a LOT more complicated than getting to the other side of the galaxy. why? because in a relativistic universe, there's no such thing as "simultaneous". someone SUPER clever might come along and build the quantum-equivalent to two cups with a string tied between them, but i doubt it.

so the moral of the story, i guess. is that some parts of the starship enterprise are really difficult, like shielding the passengers from radiation; some parts are physically improbable, like the existance of the negative energy you need to build a warp bubble; and some parts are physically unrealistic, like "real time" communication between people light-years apart.

Answer 5

Beam me up Scotty.

Containing antimatter with real (baryonic) matter is a real problem. Anything antimatter comes in contact with, light, force field, beryllium walls, doesn't matter, will result in a spectacular 100% efficient annihilation of both matter and antimatter.

Even if we could produce antimatter in such quantities for the starship's engines, warping the fabric of space (wormhole theory) is just that. A theory.

But ion fusion drives seem to be a possibility, and that should be much better than the chemical propulsion we have now. It's not so much how quickly you can zip to light speed, it's how much fuel you can carry. If you could accelerate steadily at 1G for a couple months, you're going to be moving along at fair fraction of the speed of light.

Maybe in 100 years we may have an extrasolar ship. If the funding exists. That's a big "if."

Answer 6

Close...not at all. Potentially possible...a big maybe that currently leans towards NO...at least from the point of all the nice Hollywood whistles and bells.

To accomplish Gene Roddenberry's Enterprise humanity will have to overcome these obstacles.

1) Prove Einestein wrong. With some interesting twists of quantum mechanics and other DEEP physics not yet even broached let alone understood, there might be some twists to exploit to pass the ungodly SOL(Speed of Light or .... outta luck) barrier. The universe, for a microsecond, is believed to have expanded faster than the SOL at its first moment, so that gives some mathematical backing to the remote possibility. I personally believe that there is some mechanisms of physics to maybe one day overcome this. But that leads me to number 2.

2) Inertia, friction, gravity wells, space debris. Unless you spend YEARS accelerating you'll be like a bug on a windshield at the rear of the spacecraft. Anything pass 1G accleration and the human body starts suffering serious physiological effects that aren't too pleasant after a few minutes. Most would be fatal. Also space, despite its relative Vacum, is FAR from empty. Atoms of gas are everywhere, as is space debris, asteroids, comets, etc. The emptiness of space soon becomes like sticking your head out of the car behind a semi thats dumping gravel and boulders at you and your car...not to pleasant or survivable unless we develop currently implausible SHIELDS. Magnetic fields and dark matter gives some plausibility to maybe one day 'inventing' such a necessary device, but for now I sooner expect to take a stroll on Mars than find realistic solutions for all this.

3) Relativity-as it applies towards time. As you spend a day at lightspeed, all your great,great, great, great, great, great grandkids will have been born and died.

4) Faster than light communication- Potentially the ONE thing hear most likely to evolve. Subatomic particles, most currently hypothetical, might one day unlock this one...but thats all just hypothetical thinking.

5) GOOD MAPS! What you see in space isn't what you get. Stars move, planets collide, comets are abound...see number two for more detail. This right hear is probably the show stopper unless we somehow (doubtful) leave this dimension for some bizarre state of being that is immune from everything out there. If you SEE light at lightspeed, but you travel faster then it, then there is nothing to see to avoid the black potholes or stars your are going to drive head into.

6) Transporters - They are doing some interesting stuff with quantum and molecular transportation, but its almost beyond doubtful a living creature could EVER be perfectly reassembled from all the molecular pieces.

So Star Trek as we know it is nigh impossible. hwever there might be some future interstellar travel possible if we become proficient at omniscience and becoming something not apart of normal laws of physics. I think someday we will find SOME sort of work arounds for some of these, but the rest I'll leave to the dreams of the dreamers. Final verdict: A hopeful maybe but currently not likely.(Tell Nicholas Copernicus that man would ever Fly above the Earth or Walk on the moon and the best scientist of his century would have laughed at you.)

Answer 7

Well, I won't go into the details. But I can tell you this: This century has been the biggest advancement in technology in history, so, who knows what's on the horizon! Going by our current pace and speed of research, no, we aren't very close, but who knows, a breakthough could happen anyday! It depends on how much of an Enterprise you want. If you want the photon torpedoes and phasers, don't hold your breath. If you want a spacecraft that can get you around the universe in a realisitic period of time, that probably isn't too far off.

Answer 8

Interesting question. You didn't say which scientists and which planet. It would be nice to have a very similar working model. The shape might be a problem along with the alleged operational system. As you may have heard already is that our illustrious government may have already procured extra terrestrial spacecraft from somewhere. As to whether it could go to war with an alien race with more experience etc is more than highly doubtful in fact very laughable and arrogant wouldn't you think? There are some interesting and highly questionable websites out there to see. Here's one. If it were true it would have been closed down.............wouldn't it?

http://www.book-of-thoth.com/videostream-watch-1.html

Answer 9

No :(

We don't know enough about physics to have warp-drive (or you could say, we know enough about physics to know that that is impossible).

Aside from that, a ship of that size would cost way too much for even any group of nations to build.

We need to understand more about psychology, human physiology, self-sustained environments before we can stick that many people on a ship for that long of a period of time.

A couple places where we are close or have similar technology is we can use centripetal force as a kind of "synthetic" gravity on ships (I think this was hinted at in a recent movie), and our virtual reality capabilities are similar to the holodeck... although they aren't as simple as the Star Trek version seemed to be.

Interestingly! we have recently taken another step towards teleportation like that used in the series. http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193400533&cid=RSSfeed_eetimes_semiRSS

Answer 10

Well, they sort of have. One of the first Space Shuttles was called "Enterprise."

As for a facsimile of the NCC-1701, no. There's no hyperdrive anywhere near the horizon, nor are there phasers or photon torpedoes.