Minister's Notebook-- How 'Star Trek' Demonstrates the Limitlessness of God

Las Vegas, Nevada Church
Affiliated with the Intercontinental Church of God and the Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association

How ‘StarTrek’ Demonstrates the Limitlessness of God MP3

I spent part of a recent Sabbath viewing a sermon by Stan Roberts, “The God of Creation." In it, he effectively uses the analogy of a spaceship going the speed of light to demonstrate the limitlessness of God. It brought to my mind the TV series, “Star Trek” and its introduction of “warp speed” to designate how fast the starship Enterprise and other spacecraft could travel in the 23^rd and 24^th centuries, where the long-time series was set. Interestingly, the idea of warp speed is not merely something of science fiction. There have been more than one television program discussing the “science” of the Star Trek series and how some of the elements you see in the series might just be realities if mankind could make it some three centuries into the future.

”Warp speed” is the concept of traveling at speeds greater than the speed of light. Notice the following table of warp speed. Warp speed ranges from 1-10. Warp 1 is the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles a second or 669,600,000 miles in an hour. That is about 1 Billion kilometers per hour. The official Star Trek Warp Speed table is in kilometers per hour. 1 kilometer is .62 miles.

Speed	Kilometers per hour	x light speed
Standard orbit	9,600	0.00001
Full impulse	270 million	.25 (one quarter light speed)
Warp 1	1 billion	1
Warp 2	11 billion	10
Warp 3	42 billion	39
Warp 4	109 billion	102
Warp 5	230 billion	214
Warp 6	421 billion	392
Warp 7	703 billion	656
Warp 8	1.10 trillion	1,024
Warp 9	1.62 trillion	1,516
Warp 9.2	1.77 trillion	1,649
Warp 9.6	2.05 trillion	1,909
Warp 9.9	3.27 trillion	3,053
Warp 9.99	8.48 trillion	7,912
Warp 9.9999	214 trillion	199,516

The mind can barely imagine a spaceship going almost 200,000 times the speed of light. Seems quite fast doesn’t it? What you are about to see is the fact that despite this awesome speed, we remain prisoners of the Milky Way galaxy, where our solar system resides.

In the original series of Star Trek; the one with Captain Kirk, the starship Enterprise A could only cruise at Warp 6. It’s top speed, for short durations of time, was Warp 9.2.

In the follow-up series, “Star Trek, the Next Generation”, with Captain Jean-Luc Picard, which takes place almost 100 years later, the Enterprise D could cruise at Warp 8 and hit a top speed of Warp 9.6. The last three speeds you see in the table above are theoretical and not yet attained by 24^th century technology.

The next table shows that ships going this fast are effective in our local “neighborhood”

Speed	Time to Pluto 12 billion Kilometers	Time to nearby star 5 light years	Time to cross one sector of our galaxy 20 light years
Warp 1	11 hours	5 years	20 years
Warp 2	1 hour	6 months	2 years
Warp 3	17 minutes	46 days	6 months
Warp 4	7 minutes	17 days	2 months
Warp 5	3 minutes	8 days	1 month
Warp 6	2 minutes	5 days	18 days
Warp 7	1 minute	3 days	11 days
Warp 8	39 seconds	2 days	7 days
Warp 9	26 seconds	28 hours	5 days
Warp 9.2	24 seconds	26 hours	4 days
Warp 9.6	20 seconds	22 hours	4 days
Warp 9.9	13 seconds	14 hours	2 days
Warp 9.99	5 seconds	5 hours	22 hours
Warp 9.9999	0.2 seconds	13 minutes	52 minutes

Now the next table will show you both the limitations of man and the awesomeness of God. In the Star Trek series the Federations of Planets (like our UN, only in space) occupied just one of eight quadrants of the Milky Way galaxy—quadrants A-D on in the top half of the galaxy and E-H in the bottom half of the galaxy.

Speed	Time to cross one quadrant of the galaxy-10,000 light years	Time to travel to a nearby galaxy – 2 million light years
Warp 1	10,000 years	2 million years
Warp 2	1,000 years	200,000 years
Warp 3	257 years	51,282 years
Warp 4	98 years	19,608 years
Warp 5	47 years	9,346 years
Warp 6	26 years	5,102 years
Warp 7	15 years	3,049 years
Warp 8	10 years	1,953 years
Warp 9	7 years	1,319 years
Warp 9.2	6 years	1,213 years
Warp 9.6	5 years	1,048 years
Warp 9.9	3 years	655 years
Warp 9.99	1 year	253 years
Warp 9.9999	18 days	10 years

If you were a fan of the original Star Trek series, Captain Kirk was on a five-year mission to go “where no person had gone before." With a cruising speed of only Warp 6 [392 times the speed of light] and assuming they never stopped nor rested, they could only cover a small fraction of Federation Space. We can forget about travel to nearby galaxies. Both starships are prohibited from venturing outside our own galaxy. Even if the Enterprise D, with Jean-Luc Picard could cruise at its top speed, it would take more than a thousand years to reach a nearby galaxy. Forget about exploring it.

In another Star Trek series, “Voyager” we have a premise where the ship is immediately transported into the Delta quadrant and across some 30,000 light years of space. The whole series chronicled their journey back to Earth in the Alpha quadrant. That journey, at their cruising speed of Warp 8, was estimated at 30 years and that was just to get to the outer reaches of the Alpha quadrant. Once there, they would still have a few years, at top cruising speed to get to Earth.

Now, depending on our concept and factual knowledge of space, there are billions, if not trillions of galaxies in space. It is estimated that the Universe goes out in all directions [including straight up and straight down] to infinity. This is something the human mind cannot even begin to grasp. Assuming for a moment that you could have a self-sustaining starship flying through space at 200,000 times the speed of light, it would be tantamount to you remaining in your living room easy chair for the rest of your life. It is tantamount to you contemplating one grain of sand when there are a billion endless beaches full of that sand. This definitely begins to show us the awesomeness and limitless power of God!

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Las Vegas, Nevada Church of God - part of The Intercontinental Church of God and The Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association - Tyler, Texas