14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek The Motion Picture

DECKER: Voyager Six disappeared into what they used to call a black hole.

Oh really? And how did that happen?

The two real-world Voyager probes are pretty swift, and Voyager 1, the quickest, is zipping away at a healthy 17 kilometers (11 miles) per second, putting it (in 2020) about three times as far out as Pluto. Sounds far, "but that's peanuts to space." Cosmically speaking, it’s still just on the Sun’s doorstep. By the movie’s time it would only manage to get about 183 billion kilometers (114 billion miles) from the sun, about .005 (1/219th) the distance to our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri.

So, just where would this black hole have to be for Voyager 6 to have fallen into it?

The two real world Voyagers have an expected operational life of about 50 years, so assuming the black hole must be somewhere a Voyager could reach before it went dark from lack of power (so anyone would know what happened to it), that black hole must be within 17.2 billion kilometers (10.6 billion miles of the Sun). A starship puttering at warp 1 would cover that distance in a day, and at higher warp speeds would cross it in minutes.

If there were a black hole close enough to our solar system for Voyager 6 to fall into, surely Stafleet, with its amazing sensors capable of surveying star systems at ranges of light years would know about it. It would be hard to miss that warp drive speed-bump!