To boldly go where no man has gone before

If Earth were Star Trek and the western nations were the United Federation of Planets and the nations where a certain peaceful-sounding but actually quite bellicose religion that shall remain nameless holds sway were the Klingon Empire, then the solution to our current dilemma on the international scene would be simple. Obvious and simple.

All we would need to do is to wait for the sequel, namely Earth: The Next Generation.

“Pshaw!” you may be saying. “Pshaw!”

And I respond, “No, really!”

Think about it.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the overly melodramatic James Tiberias Kirk, Captain of the Starship USS Enterprise (William Shatner, in a role he was born to play), has been succeeded by the cool, calm, and quietly cerebral Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart).

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Worf -- a Klingon -- is a member of the Enterprise crew. The Klingon Empire and the United Federation of Planets have ceased wartime hostilities and become galactic allies, while more sinister foes like the Romulans and the Borg require the former enemies to join forces to fight a common enemy. [Editor’s note. Regrettably -- and here’s the rub -- it took 80 years for this phenomenon to occur. --RWP]

Okay, so Star Trek: The Next Generation may not have Mr. Spock or Dr. McCoy or Lieutenant Uhuru, but it has a blind guy who can see better than his sighted shipmates (Geordi La Forge), an empath (the ship’s half-human, half-Betazoid counselor, Deanna Troi), an android as operations officer (Data), and a really neat bartender who looks like Whoopi Goldberg (Guinan).

It’s simple, really.

All that our world needs to resolve the current crisis are a blind guy who can see, an empath, an android, and a really neat bartender who looks like Whoopi Goldberg.

You read it here first.

Al Gore has gone too far this time

An article this week in The Guardian begins, “It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.”

Let me say that again, this time adding emphasis where it truly belongs: “It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.”

Let us suppress our looks of astonishment and forge ahead.

Here’s the entire article, but in case you don’t want to read the whole thing, let me summarize.

A man named Shawn Domagal-Goldman of NASA’s Planetary Science Division and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University have compiled a list of plausible outcomes that could unfold in the aftermath of a close encounter with Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI), to help humanity “prepare for actual contact”.

In a report entitled “Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis”, the researchers divide alien contacts into three broad categories: beneficial, neutral or harmful.

Let’s skip over the beneficial and neutral scenarios and get right to the good scary stuff. Here is an excerpt from the Guardian article:

........While aliens may arrive to eat, enslave or attack us,
........the report adds that people might also suffer from being
........physically crushed or by contracting diseases carried by
........the visitors. In especially unfortunate incidents,
........humanity could be wiped out when a more advanced
........civilisation accidentally unleashes an unfriendly
........artificial intelligence, or performs a catastrophic
........physics experiment that renders a portion of the galaxy
........uninhabitable.

........To bolster humanity’s chances of survival, the researchers
........call for caution in sending signals into space, and in
........particular warn against broadcasting information
........about our biological make-up, which could be used to
........manufacture weapons that target humans. Instead,
........any contact with ETs should be limited to mathematical
........discourse “until we have a better idea of the type of ETI
........we are dealing with.”

........The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of
........civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may
........be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as
........humans have pushed species to extinction on Earth.
........In the most extreme scenario, aliens might choose to
........destroy humanity to protect other civilisations.

........“A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in
........ the early phases of our expansion because a civilisation
........may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it
........continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering
........the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion
........could be detected by an ETI because our expansion
........is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere,
........via greenhouse gas emissions,” the report states.

........“Green” aliens might object to the environmental
........damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to
........save the planet. “These scenarios give us reason to
........limit our growth and reduce our impact on global
........ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to
........limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric
........composition can be observed from other planets,”
........the authors write.

[end of excerpt]

Yes, you read that correctly. It is particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greehouse gases because atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets.

So we are probably doomed. At best, we must live with a certain fearful looking for the invasion to begin. This is what happens when an entire generation of scientists grows up watching Star Trek on television.

Sharp-eyed readers will note that throughout this post I have retained the British spellings and punctuations from the original article. Personally, I think the conclusions drawn are the logical result of putting periods and commas outside quotation marks and spelling civilization with an s instead of a z. And Al Gore, of course.

If Klingons come, can Romulans be far behind?

(Sorry, folks, this is not a photograph of an actual alien. It is a scene from a movie called Mars Attacks.)

One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi

Last night we caught the evening news just in time to hear Atlanta TV anchorwoman Brenda Wood say that the space shuttle Endeavor would be passing over Atlanta about an hour later and would be visible for three minutes. We were instructed to look west, where Jupiter and Venus are the brightest objects in the sky, at 6:54 p.m. to see the spacecraft rising. By 6:57 p.m., the show would be over.

Mrs. RWP and I went out to the patio just in time to see the event, and it was quite impressive, the space shuttle Endeavor shining every bit as brightly as Jupiter and Venus and at the same time moving rapidly across the evening sky. To realize that the craft went all the way from one horizon to the other that quickly just boggles the mind, especially when the mind is mine and usually given to such thoughts as, “Why, at a few minutes before seven in the evening, is the sky already midnight blue?”. Suddenly I’m reminded of a bit of Longfellow’s poetry: “One if by land and two if by sea/And I on the opposite shore will be/Ready to ride and spread the alarm/To every Middlesex village and farm” and also of how dumbstruck Paul Revere would be at today’s space riders.

Vehicles orbiting the earth have become so commonplace that we rarely think twice about them any more. The space shuttle orbits the earth every 90 minutes, traveling at a speed of about 18,000 miles per hour. For the mathematically challenged among you, that translates to 300 miles per minute, or five miles per second. On the surface of the earth, traveling that rapidly would be downright phenomenal. For each second that you count -- here’s where the One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississipi, and so on come in -- you would be an additional five miles away from where your counting started. For example, if you began counting in West Palm Beach, Florida, each succeeding second would find you in Lake Worth, Boynton Beach, Delray Beach, Boca Raton, Pompano Beach, Lauderdale-by-the-sea, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, North Miami Beach. Now that’s traveling. You would arrive at each town nearly as fast as you could say its name. The only way I know of to travel faster is to say, “Beam me up, Scotty” and hope that the Enterprise’s trans-porter has enough dilithium crystals to work properly.

Get out a map and try my little experiment with your own locale. Think about the effect such speeds would have on your morning commute. (Note. Women living on farms are exempted from this exercise as their morning commute consists of walking from the house to the chicken coop in Vonda’s case or from the house to the tractor shed in Jeannelle’s case. My mother was transplanted from suburban Philadelphia to our acreage in rural Texas, and her favorite joke was about the farmer’s wife who went crazy. As the men in white coats were taking her away, they asked her husband, “Do you have any idea what caused her to snap?” and he replied, “Absolutely none. Why, she hasn’t even left the farm for fourteen years.” Thinking about that for a while might be enough to make any of us say, “Beam me up, Scotty.”)

P.S. -- We are leaving on a little trip to Tampa, Florida, in the morning. I probably won’t be writing any more posts until we return.

Is it just me or...

has anyone else ever noticed that in the “The Trouble With Tribbles” episode in the original Star Trek television series, when Captain Kirk said, “Who put the tribbles in the quadrotriticale?” the cadence and rhythm are identical to the old song, “Who put the overalls in Mrs. Murphy's chowder?”?

And what exactly is quadrotriticale, anyway? Obviously, it's a word invented for use in a science fiction series about life in the twenty-third century. But what is it? We all know (or maybe we don't) that triticale is a hybrid cereal grain produced by crossing wheat and rye, but what do you cross to get quadrotriticale? I'm biting my tongue to keep from saying that if you're a chicken you cross the road to get quadrotriticale, because that's where it is, on the other side. But this is a blog and the fingers work independently of the tongue.

Please excuse my rambling; it's late and I'm very tired.