40 Days until the Star Trek 40th Anniversary!

In 40 days, hundreds of Star Trek fans will descend upon the Sci-Fi Museum and Space Needle in Seattle to celebrate “the show that changed the world” in an intimate 40th anniversary celebration and conference. As we count down the days in anticipation of meeting our favorite stars up-close and personal, several of the conference presenters and panelists have submitted blog entries to whet our appetites. Yet, this blog is as much about you, the fan, as it is about the “stars” of PlanetXpo’s STAR TREK 40th Anniversary Gala Celebration & Conference. We want to know how Star Trek has changed your world, too! Did you become a doctor in the hope of emulating McCoy’s bedside manner? An engineer so you, too, could be a miracle worker like Scotty? Perhaps you went into the entertainment industry after hearing Uhura’s sultry voice. Or became an Olympic medalist after viewing Sulu’s impressive fencing skills. The possibilities are endless. So, send your story of 500 words or less to Amy Ulen, and you may be selected to appear on this blog. Send a photo, too, if you have one.

We have 40 days until we celebrate 40 years of Star Trek, so we’re kicking off the party with one blog entry each day until we hit 40. Hailing frequencies are open!

Blog #1 by Dr. Seth Shostak,
Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute

There was always something reassuringly campy about that first Star Trek series, and I don’t mean the way they managed to engineer the Enterprise to have exactly 1G of gravity so the crew didn’t walk funny.

For example, there was an enormous wall of flashing lights behind Captain Kirk’s command chair…it looked like a Times Square light-bulb sign after a lobotomy. The lights flashed quickly and, as far as I could tell, pretty much at random. This was, I supposed, important information pertaining to something happening in or around the starship. Very hi-tech, at least in the days before personal computers shrunk all information displays down to 17 inches diagonal measure.

But what did it mean, this ten-foot-high-at-the-shoulder light show? What was it trying to tell the crew, and what human could possibly process that luminous banner of bits? The obvious suggestion – that this was the equivalent of the cockpit displays in an aircraft – seemed ludicrous. So I came to believe that Kirk actually ran the Enterprise with an “on-off” toggle switch under his seat. It was an idea I felt comfortable with – perhaps because it was an interface even I could master.

The campiness was confirmed when one of the Star Trek writers showed up at Caltech for an informal chat one evening with a handful of students. This fellow doled out droll tidbits of pseudo-information (such as the fact that Leonard Nimoy’s ears were real, but William Shatner’s were prosthetic), all of which had the Techers enthralled and bemused. At one point, I asked the affable screenwriter, “well, how fast is Warp 1, 2, etc., anyway?” Mind you, this was before the technical manuals for the show were written, so my question was earnest, honest and true.

“Well,” the writer replied, “Warp 1 is the speed of light. Warp 2 is the speed of light squared. Warp 3 is the speed of light cubed…” It didn’t take long for the students to apply some inductive reasoning and figure out the algorithm. This started my brain reckoning at what Warp number you would careen completely out of the Galaxy before you could even smash the brake pedal.

Fortunately, before I could blurt out the result of my calculation, one of the undergraduates (who were, as everyone knew, much smarter than we grad students) interceded: “So…suppose I define the speed of light as ‘one light-year per year.’ Then Warp 1 is 1. Warp 2 is 1 times 1. Warp 3 is 1 times 1 times 1. Warp 4 is…”

All speeds were the same speed. Warp 10 was no faster than Warp 1. The visitor from Hollywood threw up his hands: “Hey, man, I’m just a writer.”

Every week we watched Star Trek while doing physics problem sets. Outer space became familiar, even friendly. Maybe that was Roddenberry’s intent: to bring to life the ultimate, humanist dream. Facts are, true space – the real “final frontier” – is dark, bitterly cold, enormously vast, and implacably hostile. But not within the monochromatic, occasionally upholstered interior of the Enterprise. Here was a comforting refuge in a cosmos that was both immense and dangerous. It was a warm womb in a perilous world – at least until those flashing lights scrambled your brain.