The main weapons in Star Trek are phaser beams – as I understand it, they’re beams of light which are “in phase”, thereby packing a hell of a destructive punch (I imagine a kind of super-laser).
Now, when the good ship Enterprise fires at an enemy ship and misses (which seems to happen more often than not), the beams just keep going on past the target. And on, and on, and on …
And they’ll keep going on until they eventually do hit something. That might not happen for a couple of centuries, and in another part of the galaxy entirely.
That doesn’t seem to worry them at all, though it would worry me that a missed shot today could, in a hundred or a thousand years’ time, hit a ship or a planet belonging to a culture that didn’t even exist at the time that I fired the shot, and that a future war could come from that – the culture would probably blame its neighbours rather than someone from ancient times half a galaxy away.
I mean, you could put a “stop” on a photon torpedo – if it don’t hit anything within a set time, it deactivates or (since the mass of the torpedo itself, travelling at speed, would be enough to severely damage anything it collided with) self-destructs into sufficiently tiny safe fragments.
But how do you set a self-destruct on a beam of light?
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