"Star Trek is a language nearly everyone speaks."

 

For 50 years, Star Trek and its themes of optimism, equality and heroism have inspired people worldwide. 

Star Trek presents a positive future - a utopia without poverty or war. In that future, all of humanity has set aside their differences and joined together in an extraordinary task: to explore the stars, meeting every challenge with bravery and thoughtfulness. 

What began as a low-budget science fiction television show with modest ratings expanded into a franchise spanning seven television series, thirteen movies, and thousands of novels, comics and games. Star Trek has made a profound impact on our society.  Star Trek's ideas and memes are now so deeply embedded in the fabric of our popular culture that even people who have never seen it can name key characters and recite its catch phrases. Star Trek inspires art, science, architecture, music and literature. Star Trek is a language nearly everyone speaks.  

Brooks Peck, Curator - Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds

I recently discovered that, in honour of Star Trek’s 50th anniversary, the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle is hosting a retrospective exhibition on the Star Trek phenomenon, and its impact on the world. Accompanied (and chauffeured) by my tolerant* girlfriend Karli, we headed down to Washington state last weekend to take a look.

After checking into our hotel, we made our way to Frank Gehry’s multi-coloured architectural masterpiece, and forked over thirty bucks US each for admission to the museum in general and the Star Trek portion specifically.  Once inside, we passed on the opportunity for a $60 autograph from Brent Spiner** (or a $30 selfie) and made our way directly into the exhibition.

 

To be honest, I feel that if you’ve seen one display of artifacts from a franchise, you’ve pretty much seen all of them – I guess I’ve become jaded in my old age. It’s also a relatively small exhibition, considering the long history of the show and its spinoffs.

 

That being said, the exhibits are comprehensive, well arranged and well explained. There’s a good mix of photo ops and interactivity: a full range of starship filming models, a duplicate of Kirk’s command chair (and the original), an excellent touch-screen starship database, props and costumes from all parts of the franchise, a Borg regeneration alcove, a horizontal duplicate of a Jefferies Tube***, and a transporter set where visitors can act out a scene. (Sadly, we were stumped by the “KHAAAAAAAAN!” simulator - as were a lot of other people, as far as we could tell.)

There are some odd little surprises. The Borg cube, which I always thought was computer generated, turned out to be an astonishingly detailed model, and the signs of forcible disassembly with a blunt object are quite obvious in the seams of the bridge set pieces from the original series. (Although it was interesting to see the navigation console from the captain's perspective.)  

There also is a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek humour to the exhibition. The display booths are set against a background of fake orange rocks, very much in the style of those made famous by the original series, and random solitary tribbles punctuate the displays: perched on top of a divider, or nestled underneath the navigation console. 

Karli was completely taken aback by the unexpected prospect of Data’s severed head looking up at her through a sheet of plexiglass from a pit in the floor – I wonder how Brent Spiner felt about that particular nod to the Next Generation episode Time's Arrow?

The real key to the exhibition lies in the display on the upper level, which examines Star Trek's effect on society in general. The most impressive thing about Star Trek is its legacy - no other piece of popular entertainment has had the same kind of a sustained cultural impact that Star Trek has.

The mezzanine displays focus on that impact: artistic, scientific, architectural, and musical, and includes a multi-screen video presentation that examines the real-life influence that Star Trek had upon the world.  Scientists, astronauts, writers and actors discuss the manner in which the goals and ideals presented by Star Trek made a difference in people's lives.

As with all good science fiction, Star Trek shows us the future but comments on the present. The original series in particular offered the world a future in which many of the problems that plagued the Sixties no longer existed. Sequels and spinoffs have continued to look at contemporary problems to a greater or lesser extent, and Gene Roddenberry's original vision of a better world has show remarkable longevity.

(Although, let's be honest, it's difficult to place the Picardigan on the same level as Martin Luther King's request to Nichelle Nichols that she stay on the show in order to continue as a role model for black people.)

For me, the most interesting thing about Exploring New Worlds was not the exhibition itself, but the people attending it. There were fans taking pinup photos in the Jefferies tube, and people snapping pictures of a baby **** in the reproduction of Kirk's command chair - presumably the Next Generation of fan.

There were fans in costumes, fans in uniforms, fans in pointed ears, and one fan wearing a steampunk Star Trek gown. They posed as regenerating Borg, stood in line to stand in as actors in a transporter scene, and I saw one woman literally bounce up and down with joy when she saw the bridge set from the original series.

To quote a certain half-Vulcan science officer: "Fascinating."

- Sid

* And lovely.

** Denise Crosby was also on site for photo ops, but I 'm just more of a Data fan.  It was an interesting combination, though, considering that their characters were “intimate” in The Naked Now, an appropriately titled first season episode of The Next Generation.

*** I honestly had no idea that Jefferies Tubes were a mystery to the population at large, but apparently this is where we cross the line from well-known information - like phasers and transporters - into esoterica. Jefferies Tubes were the little tunnels used by engineering crewmembers to access various bits of the Enterprise’s infrastructure. If you ever saw Scotty lying in a cramped little space working desperately to fix something (usually the transporter) while smoke and sparks filled the foreground, he was in a Jefferies Tube. They’re named after Matt Jefferies, who designed the original U.S.S. Enterprise.

**** And then rushing to save him as he began to slowly topple over to one side.  Did Shatner ever do that?

"This is the action I've been waiting for!"

My friend Deb is a comic book character.

(You know, it says a lot about my life that this probably doesn't come as a surprise to anyone reading this posting.)

I'll let her husband Rob explain:

I wanted to let you know that I have created a comic book inspired by my wonderful wife, Deb. It's called Deborah Daring, The Private Eye With Attitude! Her comic book alter ego is a paralegal by day and an intrepid private investigator by night. 

I used to draw quite a bit and this all started with me drawing Deb as a super hero. The idea took hold of me and I decided to turn the character into a full blown comic book. While I did the initial concept drawings and all the writing, I ended up having to hire a professional comic book artist to help me complete the book. It was a lot of work and a ton of fun creating this comic and now it's time to share it with the world!

I decided to use the crowd funding website Kickstarter to help me raise the funds for printing and distributing the book, and the campaign is now live! So I encourage you to click on the link below and take a look. If you like what you see, or at least want to support my creative effort, please back my campaign by submitting a pledge. There are various pledge levels you can contribute ($3 and up) and every pledge counts! You can also check out a website I created for Deborah Daring, as well as a Facebook page.

Website: http://www.deborahdaring.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/deborahdaring/

Thanks in advance for your support! And if you know any comic book fans, forward the link to them and spread the word! Send any feedback or questions to info@deborahdaring.com 

Cheers,

Rob

If you'd like to support Deb's future as a PDF private eye, you have until the end of the month to contribute:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1802652009/deborah-daring-the-private-eye-with-attitude-1st-i

Now personally, I see my comic book character as more science-fictiony, maybe a bridge officer on a mission of interstellar exploration...after all, there's an awful lot of precedent for having a bald starship captain.

- Sid

Math homework.

There have always been people in the fan community whose commitment was so complete that they were compelled to determine the validity of the science portion of science fiction - to do things like calculate whether or not the U.S.S. Enterprise actually could travel the 16.5 light years from Earth to 40 Eridani A in four days* and so on.  

For the most part, I haven't been one of those people. I generally give most scientific questions the benefit of the doubt, or attribute any possible discrepancies to creative license.  However, I recently ran across the following paragraph in the David Weber/Steve White military SF collaboration In Death Ground, and it made me just a little curious - it was just a bit too glib:

"Fifteen light-seconds," Trang reported. "Coming into - missile launch! Multiple hostile launches! One hundred twenty plus inbound. Impact in two-seven seconds from mark!"

Okay, let's do some math.  They're fifteen light seconds away from the ships launching the missiles. Light travels 299,792 kilometers in one second, so that's 4,496,880 kilometers.**  Average speed or velocity (v) is calculated by dividing displacement*** (Δx or x) by time (t) , which gives us a result of 166,551 kilometers/second, which kind of makes sense if you just roughly calculate it - 15 light seconds, 27 seconds travel time, so a little bit faster than half the speed of light.

 However, that's the average velocity - obviously if you start at zero k/s, you need to accelerate to a higher speed to cover that distance in the same rate as if you had hit the ground running, so to speak. Thanks again to Google™, we find that acceleration (a) = 2x/t² - 2v0/t, which gives us a constant acceleration of 12,337,119 m/s² squared  (v0 is starting velocity, which in this case is presumably zero - or perhaps a negative value, the starships in question are retreating from their missile-launching enemy).

Final velocity of 333,102.213 km/s - hang on, that's faster than the speed of light, and the book is clear that the tech base for Mr. Trang's space navy doesn't include FTL travel.  But this sort of makes sense as a number, obviously your speed at some point has to be higher than the average speed in order to compensate for the fact that you started from zero.

I wasn't completely confident in my results, so I sought out our resident numbers guy, Andrew.  (Andrew was hired as a business analyst, but the manipulation of statistics and information is a large part of that, so Andrew is often pulled into discussions regarding math.)

To my astonishment, after I explained the question, he went to the white board in his office and produced the following off the top of his head:

Well, now I know why we hired Andrew.

Ultimately, the moral of the story is that the authors might not have done full due diligence on their math. (Or maybe their drive technology has a very steep acceleration curve.) For me, the real joke is that the missiles are supposed to explode when they hit their target.  I'm reasonably certain that if a multi-tonne projectile hits a starship while travelling at the speed of light, an explosion would be redundant. I'll leave it to the curious reader to calculate the amount of energy that would result from such an impact - just leave your answers as comments.  The actual weight of the missiles doesn't appear in the book anywhere to the best of my knowledge, so feel free to make your own estimate as to an appropriate weight for a weapon of this sort****.  Good luck - and please show your work.

- Sid

* 40 Eridani A is generally considered to be the location of Vulcan. This is one of those things that was never clearly defined in the original series, but when science fiction author James Blish was hired to turn the episodes into short stories for the purposes of novelization, he chose 40 Eridani A as being a likely candidate based on its distance from Earth, and over time this has become accepted as canon.

 ** To give you some perspective on that number, the Moon at its furthest from earth is 405,696 kilometers away, so eleven times as far as the Moon.

***AKA distance if you're not a mathematician.

**** As a guideline, a fully loaded F16 Falcon fighter weighs in at about 21 metric tonnes.

EDIT:  Sadly I've had to close down Comments for this posting, I've had one very enthusiastic but somewhat non-linear commenter who is just getting further and further away from the actual topic at hand.  My apologies, Tonyon.