Speed Kills and Warp Speed kills even quicker:

This is a bit of a problem for Captain Kirk and his merry band. Apparently boldly going where no-one has gone before is exceedingly bad for your health when you go there near or beyond the speed of light.

This is because space, as well as being the final frontier, is also not quite a vacuum. There are a few hydrogen atoms knocking about, not many mind you. Put a cubic centimetre of “space” under a microscope (a very big and powerful microscope) and you’ll be hard put to find a couple of atoms of hydrogen. However, when you are belting along at the speed of light those atoms will still cause a few minor problems such as death within a second or so.

The denizens of the good ship U.S.S. Enterprise used to regularly travel at Warp factor 2 (or 3 or 4) without ill effect but a chap called William Edelstein at John Hopkins University School of Medicine says that at that speed those couple of hydrogen atoms per cubic centimetre will be zipping through the Enterprise like the particle stream from the Large Hadron Collidor out at Cern frying all of the ship’s electronics. Not that the crew would be that interested that their MP3 player had been zapped because by that stage they would all be toast anyway.

This has all been glossed over in Star Trek which, I suppose, that isn’t all that surprising. If every time Kirk had ordered Scotty to crank up the engines the whole crew had died and the Starship had been turned into so much high-speed scrap metal it would have been quite hard to carry the storyline on to any sort of satisfactory conclusion.

It is all a bit disappointing for any budding intergalactic spaceship engineer here on earth though. Now, along with some form of hyperspace engine, teleporter, life support systems, artificial gravity, photon torpedoes and anti-klingon death-rays they have to come up with something to negate a particle stream!

Even with all this however, it is still more plausible than Coronation Street or Eastenders; as Bones would say “It’s life Jim but not as we know it”