Timey-Wimey stuff

A Candorville comic strip, and a brutal flame war remembered

About twenty years ago, when we Gen-Xers used the term “flame war” to describe arguments with random strangers - and when we waged our wars with quotes and links instead of quips and memes - I was a regular at TrekBBS. I got into it one day

with someone who had viciously mocked my suggestion that because starships travel at relativistic speeds, the Enterprise crew should be many decades younger than their contemporaries on Earth.

“That’s not how warp travel works, you imbecile,” is how he began his comment. I replied that I wasn’t referring to warp travel, I was referring to how they seem to always make it clear that they have to travel at impulse speed to leave a solar system before going to warp, because reasons. And that it takes mere seconds for them to accomplish that before they blast into warp. That means, even if the Enterprise flies “up” to escape the ecliptic plane of a star system, they still have to be traveling close to the speed of light at impulse, in order for it to happen so quickly.

I sent the guy links to resources explaining how time moves far more slowly for an object approaching the speed of light than it does for an object at rest. He replied with a string of insults. I suggested he watch Planet of the Apes, if scientific journals were too complicated for him. I went on to write that since the Enterprise crew went to high impulse practically every week, that meant that by season seven, decades - or even centuries - should have passed on Earth for every year the Enterprise crew was impulsing around in space. I wrote that he should be big enough to admit he’s wrong. And as Captain Picard once said about his run-in with a brutal Nausican, “I also may have said something about his questionable parentage.”

He didn’t reply. A week went by, and I’ll confess I checked every day to see if he’d apologized and admitted that I’d beaten him. I realized then that time may move slower if you approach the speed of light, but it moves even slower than that if you’re waiting for someone to concede a point. He wrote back nearly a month later, and said, simply, “that’s not how warp travel works, moron.”

Kids today don’t know how good they have it. They get alerts when random strangers continue the pointless, bitter, time-wasting internet feuds they’ve engaged in. WE had to check manually.