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SCIENCE FICTION, STAR TREK
AND THE PASSION TO EXPLORE |
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Science fiction is something that I don't know has such a great track record at predicting the future. Who could, ultimately? It sure is by and large unknowable more than a few years out, even who knows what's going to happen tomorrow let alone 20 or 30 years down the road. But what science fiction, I think, has done, and this has been going back probably 150 years or so now, is inspire people to get interested in science, arouse people to understand science from the perspective of literature. It makes it more accessible, especially to young people. It probably is no coincidence that [TOS] premièred during the height of the space race, the Apollo programme, and that Star Trek took something of a break after that goal was achieved, and didn't really kind of come back into a popular science fiction programme again until we started to take those next steps with the Space Shuttle and the Space Station.
montage for the Apollo 11 moon mission 1969
So I think there has always been this kind of feedback or resonance between science and science fiction, Star Trek and space exploration.
Certainly there have been a number of people, serious physicists, who, in the wake of Star Trek, have looked at the question of whether it would be possible to construct something like a warp drive; how would one go about doing that; is it even theoretically possible? What about a transporter system?
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| the away team beams up, with a native baby, [#167 Friendship One] |
There's been a lot of work done recently about teleportation, and right now they're only teleporting quantum states of photons, and possibly quantum states of atoms or electrons and the other subatomic particles. But that's a far cry from the transporter. But the fact is that they are doing research into teleportation, which is astonishing; it's something that no one would have expected 20 or 30 years ago as something that could at some level become a reality.
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| the darkling Doctor and Kes are beamed aboard Voyager as they plunge into a chasm, [#60 Darkling] |
There is an extraordinary passion for exploration, I think not only in our society but around the world. More and more of these missions are international missions. The Cassini spacecraft that just went into orbit around Saturn after a 7-year journey from Earth was an international mission.
Cassini |
International Space Station |
There's international participation on these Mars Rovers, and we're building an International Space Station.
Mars montage including the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) (bottom row middle) and a view of the Mars landscape from the Viking lander (bottom right)
launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis |
The NASA Space Shuttle typically flies at least one crewmember from another country and that's something that certainly you could claim that Star Trek saw the writing on the wall back in the 1960s when Gene Roddenberry decided that he had to have an international crew, and in fact even a crew that had a few aliens among it. So that's something that's always struck me about Star Trek, the fact that we did sort of anticipate that going out into space with a global view of humanity, a global perspective, and bring together different nations and people co-operate in the exploration of space. |
[TOS] crew (publicity shot). Back row left to right: Montgomery 'Scotty' Scott, Pavel Chekov, Uhura, Sulu (features in [#44 Flashback]), middle row: Christine Chapel (the actress, Majel Barrett, plays the LCARS computer throughout Star Trek including [Voyager]), front row left to right: Leonard 'Bones' McCoy (mentioned in [#35 Lifesigns] and [#82 Message In A Bottle]), James T. Kirk (mentioned in [#79 Concerning Flight] and [#165 Q2]) and Spock (mentioned in [#30 Alliances] and [#172 Endgame, Part One]).
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