The Computers of Star Trek (11 page)

With that thought firmly in mind, let's consider the much more complex problem of a full-scale war in outer space. This has always been one of the mainstays of science fiction. Great battles between opposing star systems have filled the pages of science-fiction magazines for as long as there have been science-fiction magazines. Scholarly articles were even written on the subject, such as “Space War,” published in 1939, in which the noted rocket scientist and science writer Willy Ley discussed possible weapons for spaceships. He concluded that ordinary cannons using explosive shells would be quite effective because, to save weight, ships wouldn't be heavily armored. Though these early studies were detailed and intelligently presented, none of the writers could guess the amazing advances that would occur in the physical sciences in the next half century. Nor did any science-fiction writer predict the astonishing revolution that would take place in cybernetics.

Some of the best episodes of both
Deep Space Nine
and
Voyager
have dealt with battles in the interstellar void. As when
Voyager
encountered the Borg battling Species 8472 in “Scorpion.” Or even more interesting, the huge space battle with the Dominion shown in
Deep Space Nine
adventures “Favor the Bold” and “Sacrifice of Angels.”

In the latter episode, Commander Sisko leads a fleet of six hundred Federation starships on a desperate last minute mission to free
Deep Space Nine
from the forces of the Dominion. However, an armada of more than twelve hundred enemy ships blocks Sisko's
path. The commander states that the only way to save
Deep Space Nine
, and thus the Alpha Quadrant, is to punch a hole through the Dominion fleet so that the Federation starships can get to the station. The collision of the two fleets and the ensuing conflict make for exciting television. But none of it makes much sense.

Consider the Dominion blockade that Sisko must somehow force his way past. This conflict isn't a naval battle or even a dogfight between jet planes. It's war in space.

According to
Star Trek
technical lore, phasers have a range of 300,000 kilometers, and their power fades significantly over long distances. As coherent energy beams, they obey the inverse square law, so the farther the target, the less effect the beam will have. Suppose the twelve hundred Dominion ships were deployed in a square, thirty-five ships to a side. A formation tight enough to blast any vessel trying to get through would make the square approximately 10 million kilometers on a side. That's a pretty big blockade. But when starships moving at impulse speed travel at 75,000 kilometers per second, it's nowhere near big enough. Why fight when you can go around? A Federation ship could fly the entire length of this blockade in 133 seconds. Not much of a detour. It's as if the German High Command had tried to stop the invasion of Normandy by building a ten-foot-high wall the length of a tennis court on Omaha Beach.

Nor does Sisko's fleet have to travel merely at impulse speed. Why not just accelerate to Warp 2 ( 10 times the speed of light), zip around the blockade in 3.3 seconds, and head off to
Deep Space Nine
? Even easier, why not just fly at Warp 2 or better between the enemy ships? Phaser beams propagate at the speed of light. A ship traveling faster than light would be gone before the enemy even knew it was there, and the phaser beam would never catch up.
^j

Engaging fleet against fleet in outer space makes little sense. It's reminiscent of those stylized Revolutionary War battles in which opposing armies knelt in straight lines to fire at each other across a green meadow. But sending a fleet in a group to save the station made no sense anyway. A more intelligent strategy would have six hundred ships approaching the station from six hundred directions. Traveling at different warp speeds, coming in on many different paths, using cloaked ships, the dynamics of battle would tax the most elaborate defense strategy. The entire Dominion fleet would have a hard time coping with such an attack. And no human mind could choreograph it—but a computer could.

Battles between opposing fleets make no sense unless one of the fleets is guarding a location, such as a planet or space station. Even then, the human element in such a battle would be insignificant. Computers will fight the wars in space, not men. Human reflexes are too slow. In space war, there's no time to issue commands like “Raise shields” or “Fire on my mark.” If you report that “they're powering weapons,” the news is already too late by the time the words are out of your mouth. Talking doesn't work when events are moving at nanosecond speed.

Suppose we're on a routine exploration mission. The ship has just emerged from warp drive at the edge of an unknown solar system. Life signs are detected by the long-range sensors on the fourth planet of the solar system and you, as captain, order the ship to approach the world at full impulse power (1/4 the speed of light, 75,000 km/sec). Being cautious, you put the ship on yellow alert. Shields are immediately raised and phasers armed.

As the ship approaches the green and blue world, an enemy ship swings out from behind its moon, approximately 300,000
kilometers away, the farthest range for phaser attack. It instantly attacks. The next few ticks of the clock are filled with action.

Phasers operate at the speed of light. From 300,000 kilometers away, it takes the fire from the enemy ship one second to strike our shields. The shields flare but hold. Reacting in milliseconds to the energy burst, our ship's computer takes control of the helm and accelerates the ship in evasive maneuvers. At the same time, the computer's artificial-intelligence battle program goes into action.

The enemy vessel is moving at impulse speed, 1/4 the speed of light. Though the signals detected by the sensors travel at light speed, there's no way to track the attackers. If the ship is 150,000 kilometers away, it would take the sensors a half-second to detect its position, then another half-second for the phaser fire to reach its target—a total of one second. During that second, the enemy will have traveled another 75,000 kilometers, probably not in a straight line. These are ships that accelerate to ten times the speed of light in the time it takes to fade to a commercial; they can literally turn on a dime. (To prevent the crew from being squashed to jelly by the accelerations involved in such maneuvers, they have something called “inertial dampers.”) In theory, the enemy could be anywhere within a sphere of radius 75,000 kilometers—a volume of 400 trillion cubic kilometers, or a space big enough to hold 2,000 Earth-size planets. In this situation the idea of having weapons “locked on target,” as they so often are in
Star Trek
space battles, is meaningless. The ships are moving too fast, over too huge a volume of space, for sensors to do any good.

One reason computers must handle the battle is that people can't react in milliseconds. In space war, there's no time to hesitate, no time to blink, no time to sweat. But there's another reason that has nothing to do with speed.

Controlled by computer, our ship's phaser bank spreads an array of beams 150,000 kilometers ahead of the enemy's last known position.
The battle has become a guessing game. With the helm completely under the computer's control, the ship continually veers from its original course, trying to maneuver the enemy into a position where its options are reduced. In the meantime, the attackers aren't waiting for us to act. Less than a second after the first exchange of phaser fire, they shoot again but miss. Our computer, programmed with thousands of combat simulations, has analyzed and compared the situation to similar encounters. An artificalintelligence program has extrapolated the course the enemy expected us to take and avoids it. It's a battle between two computers. Humans don't matter. If anything, they're a danger.

People are too predictable. They tend to react in certain ways to danger. That's why boxers study films of their opponent's fights. Habits developed over years are difficult to break. A computer programmed to change course randomly won't always resort to “Attack Pattern Omega” when the ship is fired on. Reacting predictably to an attack, showing any kind of pattern or tendency, would be instantly detected by a computer programmed to detect just such behavior and use it to direct phaser fire. The safest path is a random one, and only computers can act (almost) randomly.

Our phasers fire again, again in a wide-spread array, hoping to catch the adversary as it shifts position. Another hit. The enemy's computer isn't programmed as well as our computer. It follows a fairly unsophisticated battle plan. Their shields flare then go dead. A moment later, their ship explodes. In space battles, there is no chance to surrender.

The entire fight lasts less than five seconds. No chance to yell “Shields up!” In space, once a battle begins, there is no time for talking. Sorry, but human reflexes can't react to beams traveling at the speed of light. No one can steer a spaceship moving at 75,000 kilometers per second and successfully avoid phaser fire traveling at light speed. No human can analyze thousands of attack possibilities
and choose the best one in less than a millisecond. Only computers are capable of managing battles in interstellar space.

This is not to say that the human element would never be present in space war. When faced with overwhelming odds (such as the battle with the Dominion fleet), the logical choice for the ship's computer would be not to engage the enemy. Only Sisko's determination that the Federation break the blockade compels them to attack. Despite having control of the helm and weapons, the computer is still subservient to the captain's commands. If he demands attack, the ship attacks, calculating the best possible actions under desperate measures. Perhaps the frequently used “Attack Pattern Omega” isn't a specific formation but merely a command telling the computer to fight on no matter how overwhelming the situation.

Of course, battles managed by humans are much more interesting, and the writers of
Star Trek
aren't the only ones to sacrifice believability for spectacle. Down the cineplex aisle, on a movie screen far away,
Star Wars
is no more believable.

Remember the stirring space battle scene right after the
Millennium Falcon
escapes from the
Death Star
? The fast-paced episode where Luke and Han destroy several attacking enemy fighters? We're looking at a level of technology not too different from
Star Trek
, so it's reasonable to suppose the attackers are flying at roughly impulse speed somewhere in the neighborhood of 75,000 kilometers per second. Their ray guns are firing some type of energy beam that travels at 300,000 kilometers per second. Yet Luke and Han are swinging their futuristic ack-ack guns with human reflexes, using human eyes, squeezing the triggers with fingers that operate on millisecond, not nanosecond timescales. This fight, shown at aerial dogfight speeds, could never happen in outer space.

Worse, consider the climactic attack on the Death Star. Why is Luke piloting the ship and firing the guns, instead of R2D2? The
robot's reflexes are infinitely faster than the human pilot's. More to the point, exactly how long does Luke spend flying in that trench leading to the access tunnel? Some minutes, that's for sure, based on the number of conversations he has with Han Solo and Obi Wan Kenobi. The Death Star has been described as being the size of a small moon. At most it has a radius of 2,000 kilometers, giving it a maximum circumference of somewhat over 12,000 kilometers. If Luke's flying at 75,000 kilometers per second, he'd circle the Death Star six times every second. Obviously, he's traveling a lot slower. But then how does he dodge those ray cannons shooting laser beams that travel at light speed? The universe of
Star Wars
is even less logical than the universe of
Star Trek.

Humans are always shown in control of space battles for the simple reason that people find the concept of humans being out-thought or out-maneuvered by a machine distasteful. We're back to the original series' mistrust of computers, though better disguised. One of the basic mantras of this belief is that computers can't compete with humans because machines are incapable of original thought. Dare we observe that in a future of artificially intelligent computers, instantly remembering ten thousand battle scenarios might even the odds?

How close are we to this
Star Trek
future? In 1995, the Army Medical Department Center and School opened a $7.3 million-dollar Battle Simulation Center at Camp Bullis, Texas. The 13,000-square foot, high-tech facility is designed to use computer-based scenarios to teach medical staffs how to plan and carry out medical missions during major wartime campaigns. Computers simulate battlefield environments and train participants on the best ways to treat casualties and use supplies.

The Battle Simulation Center is merely one of the many projects that forms a part of the U.S. Army's Stricom Project. STRICOM stands for simulation, training and instrumentation command.
This high-tech branch of the Army is working on developing new warfighting concepts using simulation technology. One area of Stricom is devoted entirely to Inter-Vehicle Embedded Simulation Technology (INVEST) which would enable fighting vehicles and stations to use common reusable simulations components and scenarios. One of the goals of the system is to enable “direct-fire” or “line-of-sight” interactions between live and virtual systems.
¹
Project STRICOM a hundred years in the future, maybe much less, and you have the battle scenarios described in this chapter.

Battles in space are going to be machine against machine. Humans aboard ship are going to be spectators, nothing more. Besides, if we take the lessons of the previous chapter to heart, it's quite probable war in space will involve one ship trying to infect its opponent with a computer virus. Why waste resources on photon torpedoes when a simple subspace transmission can cripple or destroy the enemy in milliseconds?