- Whatever Star Trek says about warp reactors (matter / antimatter reaction) is valid. Reacts "some" amount of matter/antimatter every second.
- Klingon Bird of Prey can maintain an effectively infinite cloaking time from a human observation perspective, so it can be nearby.
- Warp reactor "occasionally" leaks (1% of 1% of 1% of reactions? I dunno...) so we might actually detect something. "Slightly" imperfect shielding.
- Problem: 5E1 J for OMG Particle (people say its a proton). 1.8E14 J for 1 gram of matter / antimatter annihilation. Except: 1 Proton = 1.6726231E-24 g. Proton rest mass energy is 1.503Eā10 J. So the particle is more energetic than a Proton / Antiproton annihilation event (by a lot). It's been upshifted More than 100,000,000,000 from the rest mass energy.
- It "might" work if the one proton escaping represented a single proton gaining enough energy to overcome reactor core shielding confinement, which, in my opinion, seems somewhat plausible physics by Star Trek standards.
- PS: Personal guess is a Q-Clearance [3] experiment at a DOE lab we deny exists.
To the casual HN reader - my recommendation to you is to neithet laugh at nor dismiss out of hand analyses such as this (even as logic intrinsic to them merits as much picking apart as any other analysis one sees everyday on HN).
Robin Hanson's description of long-lived stars (usually strongest in infrared - i.e. the 3 stars our eyes lack the spectral response to see for every 1 star that we do see when looking into the night sky) significantly updated my priors on the likelihood of intelligent, non-human life roaming about the cosmos.
Do those red dwarves have the heavier atomic elements necessary to make diverse biological interactions, on a planet geologically active enough to protect the biosphere with a magnetic field?
I recently encountered a description of how Earth relies on the remnants of some interactions between stellar remnants which would have been far rarer early on, even if red dwarf stars were present for so long.
