I'm hoping for a blue-ray copy of The Force Awakens for my birthday next week. Between Star Wars and Star Trek, I like Star Wars the most but they both have in common the concept of traveling at light speed. In those movies, how do they portray that?
For the first Star Trek, I think they placed a camera on the floor pointing up and dropped small pellets to make it look like stars coming towards it. It's all done with computer graphics now, but they ultimately give the impression of very fast motion.
Well, I don't want to disappoint you but realistically, it would look much different. While accelerating to light speed as fast as they show isn't currently possible, we are capable of traveling near light speed with the technology we have today. If we have enough fuel, we can build a rocket engine that continually accelerates.
However, as we approach light speed, what we'd see might be a little frightening. Because of the Doppler Effect, light from any source in front of or behind us would be shifted out of the visible spectrum. So, even though we could detect any stars in front of us, we couldn't see them. It would look like we're running headlong into darkness while also running away from darkness.
The stars we could see would be those in between but they'd also be shifted with those approaching looking kind of purplish and those retreating kind of reddish with all the other colors of the rainbow represented in the middle.
The ultimate effect would be that it'd look like we're completely surrounded by a sort of twinkling rainbow with nothing other than oblivion at either end of that rainbow.
As long as I could trust HAL, I think I'd rather sleep during the trip.
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