ATOM ORBITER CROSSWORD SERIES

This was actually brought into the original 1960s TV series to keep its budget down (even simulated starship landings are pricey).īut if teleportation was to ever work, scientists say it wouldn’t actually be able to move matter.

Teleportation, at least the Star Trek-style that helped popularise the idea, means beaming matter from one point to another by breaking it down into tiny, transmittable form (those glimmers of light you see on screen) and then reconstructing it again, with hairstyle still intact, at the other end. What if we could take a “shortcut” through a wormhole? Or move space itself around our ship? Or suppose we have to build huge generation ships to see us through hundred or even thousand-year trips between the stars? Would you sign up to boldly go where no one has gone before then? Could humans ever teleport? Now, as our space missions eye destinations many light years away (that’s trillions of kilometres), scientists are hunting for even more of these loopholes in the laws of physics. And they never even ended up somewhere weird like inside a rock or a giant alien’s digestive tract.īut is this vision of a star-hopping, teleporting human race total fantasy? Science-fiction writers might gloss over some of the finer technical difficulties of faster-than-light travel but scientists are yet to rule it out as impossible – “it’s just mind-bogglingly hard”, says experimental physicist Ben Buchler at the Australian National University.Īnd yet already Buchler and other scientists have teleported lasers across rooms and even into space, and frozen light mid-air – like a Sith lord straight out of Star Wars – with the help of strange quantum phenomena. Star Trek promised us a lot, didn’t it? Not only did Captain Kirk and his crew travel the universe lightning fast using handy warp drives that could distort spacetime, but whenever they felt like going on a jaunt to a nearby planet they needed only to step up to the ship’s teleporter and utter those immortal words, “Beam me up, Scotty” and they would find themselves dissolving and reassembling in the next scene. We fell among the stars of the Trapezium, which glowed with the lovely green of interstellar ionized oxygen.Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Of course there is the stereometer, which I designed to insure the three dimensional effect and the polychromatic regulation which governs the ionized metallic particles.į2 that threw out vast quantities of ionized radiation at all times, and right now it was at the peak of a sunspot cycle. The kzin had launched screeners and then ionized them with a conversion blast to blank out the human sensors.

Plasma sail - I checked the ref, found screeds about the system, a vast electromagnetic field enclosing a spheroid of ionized gas that interacted with the solar photon flux like a lightsail. Those jets of ionized molecular gas generated by the protostars, those Herbig-Haro formations? The ionizing ultraviolet that spurred their development and provides them energy also photodissociates them, and they play a game of Scylla and Charbydis with their environment. On the Moon, though, the surface is dangerous: big temperature swings between sunlight and shadow, ionizing radiation constantly sleeting in from the Sun and stars, micrometeoroids peppering the ground and sandpapering everything exposed to them. They were in radio blackout, twelve long minutes of silence when the friction of reentry ionizes the air around the orbiter, cutting off all communications.Īfter the unusual chemistry was documented and all the data collected that I analyzed, the science team studying Sirius B swept the area with fully ionizing Xenon-Chloride excimer lasers and vaporized all the debrisincluding the wispsto clear the path for their probes. It shone with the strange dim green of ionized nebular gases, and the dark spreading wings of it blotted out the stars of Ophiuchus, and slowly grew to hide the Serpent and even the Scorpion.įrictional heating surrounded the racing orbiter with a blaze of ionized gases. Rising through the ionized clouds was a cluster of fiery ellipsoids, vessels shaped out of sheets of flame and controlled thermal energy.įor around two decades, evidence has been mounting that hormesis holds true also for ionizing radiation. The borer, really just a pocket fusion torch, worked by vaporizing and ionizing a small percentage of the rock.

Atom orbiter crossword