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Hi everyone, and welcome back to Geek Time. Hi, Brad.

Hey, how's it going？

So what are we going to talk about today？

We're going to talk about space travel.

The ultimate geek subject.

I love it.

Is it going to be the ultimate thing about Star Wars and Star Trek？

It's gonna be a little bit of a discussion of both and we'll talk about some other types of space travel as well. We'll talk about some real space travel and we'll talk about some theories based on that type of thing as well.

I really have to say in this episode, I'll be completely guided by you because growing up I never was interested in it, it’s just recently I got a little bit more interest in it. Whenever I think about space travel, first of all, I think about moon landing, but there's something before that.

Like the first person to go to space was Yuri Gagarin.

加加林, that I I’ve heard of.（尤里·阿列克谢耶维奇·加加林（Ю́рий Алексе́евич Гага́рин）

Yeah, that was back in 1957, Russian cosmonauts. It’s actually really funny that Russians they call themselves cosmonauts.

Like astronaut.

American wants to be different. So we came with astronaut, that is the same thing, really cosmos, astro-, astrophysics, right？It's the same type of thing, they just decided to have different words for it. Since then we've had the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong.

Now we have…since back in 1998, since its first launch, we've the International Space Station, and then now like China’s work on their space station.

国际空间站了。All of these are major milestones in space travel history, but in fiction this has been taken to much further.

Yeah.

A lot of things when we look at fiction, fiction is often based, somewhat, on fact, like there be some sort of theory idea behind it, and they kind of put that into space fiction, or space into science fiction, and then eventually somewhat comes true.

When you talk about space travel in fiction, for example in movies and all that, and thinking about the whole geekdom, you have to talk about Star Wars and Star Trek, and then I have the risk losing our friendship over this, what is the difference?

Don’t worry.

When it comes to like movies, that probably the two most popular space travel movies are like Star Wars and Star Trek. Star Wars and Star trek is actually TV shows and movie, the Star Wars is becoming more of TV oriented show but was primarily on the movies in the past. But they have kind of way of space travel.

But Star Wars, Star Trek, they're not just a movie or TV show, they're almost its own universe, for lack of a better word, 它就成了自己的完全的一个体系. I'm not gonna ask you, obviously the characters are different.

Yeah.

So, for example Chewbacca that's from

Get it right or else not…

…Star Wars; and Spock is from Star Trek,

Right.

But are there any different like conceptual differences有没有基本逻辑和概念的不同这两个系列？

So when you look at like Star Wars, Star Wars uses something called like a hyperdrive. Basically, what they do is it's almost like using a worm hole. But like in the whole idea of a worm hole is that in Star Wars, they use something called a hyperdrive which allows them to go into hyperspace. But basically, a lot of people put it into the idea that it's a special type of worm hole. Typically, when you think of a worm hole, it's an opening that goes from one end of space to another instantaneously almost.

就是虫洞。

However, in Star Wars this is like a worm hole that just it's like another type of space that allows you to quickly travel. So it basically opens up another realm of space that allows you to take a short...

That is a teleporting, almost like space teleporting.

It's not instantaneous like teleporting, but we will talk about something like that with Star Trek, but this is kind of like creating a faster way of traveling through a set of space because you're not in the real space, like kind of almost a subspace, but they call it hyperspace.

I see, as always I'm more confused. What about Star Trek?

Star Trek has, up until recently, basically worked on something called Warp drive.

Warp drive.

And what essentially does is creates kind of like this bubble around the spaceship, which kind of moves space rather than the starship in a sense, they are traveling at such speeds that it's you can travel, you can move that you're not really moving through space, but you're traveling in a sense, so it's kind of a weird way of doing it through the physics.

I see.

It creates this bubble. Now we're going to talk about time dilation in the advanced episode, but basically, if you were to travel that fast, you would age much slower than anyone around you. But using these types of space travel doesn't have that great of an effect, and so the bubble actually prevents time dilation.

I see so sort of sink up to some extent the time during space travel.

So it's kind of an interesting thing. Now the other type of space travel something not quite Star Trek or Star Wars related, but something more realistic, would be the use of a like a really fast drive, but basically using hibernation or kind of like a state of, like a suspended animation. So you're not actually awaking and aging during the time while you're in space, since it would be so long for you to travel.

And it's almost like freezing you in a way. OK, but nowadays perhaps when we were growing up space travel that's really just completely fictional, but now it's getting more and more like a reality.

One of the things that's kind of interesting happening now, we have two major companies that are kind of like going into something called space tourism. The space X is planning to go into space tourism eventually, but they're focusing more on providing a cheap way to move things into space, whereas Virgin Galactic is looking at more getting like short term space in space tourism

Essentially allowing people with money to experience space travel.

I think right now with Virgin Galactic, you can go on a 90 minute flight into space and it's not a space like you're orbiting the earth, but you're above the area where you're essentially in zero gravity.

It's such light gravity that you don't feel it anymore.

Like how far away is that from the earth, how high up?

If you go more than 50 miles above the surface of the earth？That's where analysis says you are an astronaut, but they travel up to 62 miles above; and so that's 12 miles higher than that, so the amount of time you actually spend in that lightweight area isn't the majority of the 90minutes, it's a small section of the 90minutes.

Obviously you need to get there. How much is it?

It’s like 1/4 of 1 million dollars.

For 90 minutes, but even say I have the money, that doesn't necessarily mean I can go, right？I'm assuming there will be some health-related restrictions. You can't just send anyone.

For that flight, you don't need to worry too much about health restrictions, there's a few things they probably are gonna check. It's more if you were actually going into space itself, like if you're going to go and like actually go a little bit further than that.

So you don't have to be trained like an actual Astronaut.

No.

I see. I've heard of this thing called space hotels. What's that about？

Space hotels are…the plan currently for a space hotel will be in 2027, they plan to launch the first space hotel.

That's very soon.

I'm kind of like worry to think about if that would actually be able to happen. Given space X current situation, it's quite possible, but I think it's a little far-fetched still.

But where is it? Is it gonna be like orbiting or is it gonna be floating？What is it gonna be like？

So it would be orbiting much like the International Space Station is？It's gonna be in that plane of orbit.

就像空间站一样按轨道飞行, and then what? people can stay there overnight or just for a short…?

It'll be like a nightly type of thing, right, so I'm not quite sure how long each individual person could stay there. They don't really have a lot of Information out yet, but it would probably be very short stays at least for right now. It all depends on how quickly they can get ships.

And how big is it? Roughly how many people can they accommodate?

So it's gonna be just under 400 people because it's gonna be about 280 guests and then probably about 100 some people working.

So a lot of staff members.

For something like that, you need a lot of people just in case something goes wrong.

You don't want to leave them hanging, so to speak. OK, that’s some basics about space travel. In advanced episode, we're gonna go into more details, things such as time dilation like you mentioned. Thank you very much for educating me on the subject of space travel. Thank you, Brad. If you're interested in the topic, if you have any information to share, and also if you're interested in ever going space traveling or staying overnight in the space hotel, let us know in the comment section.

If you want to go to Mars, let us know as well.

We'll see you next time, bye

Have a good day.