Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (26 page)

• • •
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY,
STAR TREK
^*

I
n 2011
Star Trek
turned forty-five. Meanwhile, the television signals from all its broadcast episodes continue to penetrate our Milky Way galaxy at the speed of light. By now the first episode of the first season, which aired for the first time on September 8, 1966, has reached forty-five light-years from Earth, having swept past more than six hundred star systems, including Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Vega, and an ever-growing number of lesser-known stars around which we have confirmed the existence of planets.

It must have been a long wait for eavesdropping aliens. Their first encounter with Earth culture included the earliest episodes of the
Howdy Doody Show
and Jackie Gleason’s
Honeymooners.
With the arrival of
Star Trek
some fifteen years later, we finally offered extraterrestrial anthropologists something in our TV waves that our species could be proud of.

In its many incarnations for television, film, and books,
Star Trek
became the most popular science-fiction series ever. Yet if you watch some of the original episodes, it’s not hard to see how the show got canceled after three seasons. In any case, were it not for a million-plus letters written to NBC, the show would have been canceled after two. The
Star Trek
seasons happened to coincide with the most triumphant years (1966–69) of the space program as well as America’s bloodiest years of the Vietnam War and the most turbulent years of the civil rights movement. Apollo spacecraft were headed for the Moon, and the show went off the air the same year we first stepped foot there. By the mid-1970s, after the final Apollo mission, America was no longer heading back to the Moon, and the public needed to keep the dream, any dream, alive. With a rapidly growing baseline of support,
Star Trek
became more successful as reruns during the 1970s than it had been as a first-run show during the 1960s.

No doubt other reasons also contributed to its success. Perhaps it was the social chemistry of the international, racially integrated crew, which supplied television’s first interracial kiss; or the crew’s keen sense of interstellar morality when exploring alien cultures and civilizations; or the show’s glimpse into our technologized spacefaring future; or the indelible split infinitive in “to boldly go where no man has gone before,” spoken over the opening credits. Or maybe it was the portrayal of risk on alien planets, as the landing parties would persistently lose a crew member to unforeseen dangers.

I cannot speak for all Trekkers. Especially since I do not count myself among them, never having memorized the floor plans of the original starship
Enterprise
, nor donned a Klingon mask during Halloween. But as someone who, then and now, maintains a professional interest in cosmic discovery and the future technologies that will facilitate it, I offer a few reflections on the original show.

I am embarrassed to admit (don’t tell anybody) that when I first saw the interior doors on the
Enterprise
slide open automatically as crew members walk up to them, I was certain that such a mechanism would not be invented during my years on Earth.
Star Trek
was taking place hundreds of years hence, and I was observing future technology. Same goes for those incredible pocket-size data disks they insert into talking computers. And those palm-size devices they use to talk to one another. And that square cavity in the wall that dispenses heated food in seconds. Not in my century, I thought. Not in my lifetime.

Today, obviously, we have all those technologies, and we didn’t have to wait till the twenty-third century to get them. But I take pleasure in noting that our twenty-first-century communication and data-storage devices are smaller than those on
Star Trek.
And unlike their sliding doors, which make primitive whooshing sounds every time they move, our automatic doors are silent.

The most gripping episodes of the original series are those in which the solutions to challenges require a blend of logical and emotional behavior, mixed with a bit of wit and a dash of politics. These shows sample the entire range of human behavior. A persistent message to the viewer is that there’s more to life than logical thinking. Even though we’re watching the future, when there are no countries, no religions, and no shortages of resources, life remains complex: people (and aliens) still love and hate one another, and the thirst for power and dominance remains fully expressed across the galaxy.

Captain Kirk knows this sociopolitical landscape well, enabling him to consistently outthink, outwit, and outmaneuver the alien bad guys. Kirk’s interstellar savvy also enables his legendary promiscuity with extraterrestrial women. Shapely aliens often ask Kirk, in broken English, “What is kiss?” His reply is a version of “It’s an ancient human practice in which two people express how much emotion they feel for each other.” And it always requires a demonstration.

Star Trek
is not without its occasional gaffe. In one episode, the crew must locate a stowaway bad guy. To this end, Captain Kirk produces a clever wand that greatly enhances the sound of people’s heartbeats onboard, no matter where they are hiding. While demonstrating its function to his crew, Kirk confidently declares the acoustic magnification of the device to be “one to the eleventh power.” If you do the math, you get: 1 × 1 × 1 × 1 × 1 × 1 × 1 × 1 × 1 × 1 × 1, which of course equals 1. I was prepared to blame William Shatner for flubbing his line, which should have been “ten to the eleventh power,” except that in another episode I heard Spock make the same error, at which point I blamed the writers.

Most people, including the producers, never realized that when the starship
Enterprise
travels “slowly,” with stars gently drifting by, its speed must still be greater than one light-year per second—or more than thirty million times the actual speed of light. If Scotty, the chief engineer, is aware of this, surely he should be declaring, “Captain, the engines can’t take it.”

To travel great distances quickly requires the warp drives. These are a brilliant sci-fi invention that is sufficiently based on physics to be plausible, even if technologically unforeseeable. As when you fold a sheet of paper, the warp drives bend the space between you and your destination, leaving you much closer than before. Tear a hole in the fabric of space, and you can now take a shortcut without technically exceeding the speed of light. This trick is what allowed Captain Kirk and his
Enterprise
to cross the galaxy briskly—a journey that would have otherwise taken a long and boring hundred thousand years.

I have learned three of life’s lessons from this series: (1) in the end, you will be judged on the integrity of your mission, whether or not your mission was successful; (2) you can always outsmart a computer; and (3) never be the first person to investigate a glowing blob of plasma on an alien planet.

Happy anniversary,
Star Trek.
Live long and prosper.

• • •
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

HOW TO PROVE YOU’VE BEEN ABDUCTED BY ALIENS
^*

D
o I believe in UFOs or extraterrestrial visitors? Where shall I begin?

There’s a fascinating frailty of the human mind that psychologists know all about, called “argument from ignorance.” This is how it goes. Remember what the “U” stands for in “UFO”? You see lights flashing in the sky. You’ve never seen anything like this before and don’t understand what it is. You say, “It’s a UFO!” The “U” stands for “unidentified.”

But then you say, “I don’t know what it is; it must be aliens from outer space, visiting from another planet.” The issue here is that if you don’t know what something is, your interpretation of it should stop immediately. You don’t then say it must be X or Y or Z. That’s argument from ignorance. It’s common. I’m not blaming anybody; it may relate to our burning need to manufacture answers because we feel uncomfortable about being steeped in ignorance.

But you can’t be a scientist if you’re uncomfortable with ignorance, because scientists live at the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. This is very different from the way journalists portray us. So many articles begin, “Scientists now have to go back to the drawing board.” It’s as though we’re sitting in our offices, feet up on our desks—masters of the universe—and suddenly say, “Oops, somebody discovered something!” No. We’re always at the drawing board. If you’re not at the drawing board, you’re not making discoveries. You’re not a scientist; you’re something else. The public, on the other hand, seems to demand conclusive explanations as they leap without hesitation from statements of abject ignorance to statements of absolute certainty.

Here’s something else to consider. We know—not only from research experiments in psychology but also from the history of science—that the lowest form of evidence is eyewitness testimony. Which is scary, because in a court of law it’s considered one of the highest forms of evidence.

Have you all played telephone? Everybody lines up; one person starts with a story and tells it to you; you hear it and then repeat it to the next person; the next person then passes it along. What happens by the time you get to the last person, who now retells the story to everybody who’s heard it already? It’s completely different, right? That’s because the conveyance of information has relied on eyewitness testimony—or, in this case, earwitness testimony.

So it wouldn’t matter if you saw a flying saucer. In science—even with something less controversial than alien visitors, and even if you’re one of my fellow scientists—when you come into my lab and say, “You’ve got to believe me, I saw it,” I’ll say, “Go home. Come back when you have some kind of evidence other than your testimony.”

Human perception is rife with ways of getting things wrong. We don’t like to admit it, because we have a high opinion of our biology, but it’s true. Here’s an example: We’ve all seen drawings that create optical illusions. They’re lots of fun, but they should actually be called “brain failures.” That’s what’s happening—a failure of human perception. Show us a few clever drawings, and our brains can’t figure out what’s going on. We’re poor data-taking devices. That’s why we have science; that’s why we have machines. Machines don’t care what side of the bed they woke up on in the morning; they don’t care what they said to their spouses that day; they don’t care whether they had their morning caffeine. They’re emotion-free data-takers. That’s what they do.

M
aybe you did see visitors from another part of the galaxy. I need more than your eyewitness testimony, though. And in modern times, I need more than a photograph. Today Photoshop software probably has a UFO button. I’m not saying we haven’t been visited; I’m saying the evidence brought forth thus far does not satisfy the standards of evidence that any scientist would require for any other claim.

So here’s what I recommend for the next time you’re abducted into a flying saucer. You’re there on the slab, where of course the aliens do their sex experiments on you, and they’re poking you with their instruments. Here’s what you do. Yell out to the alien who’s probing you, “Hey! Look over there!” And when the alien looks over there, you quickly snatch something off his shelf—an ashtray, anything—put it in your pocket, and lie back down. Then when your encounter is over and done with, you come to my lab and say, “Look what I stole from the flying saucer!” Once you bring the gizmo to the lab, the issue is no longer about eyewitness testimony, because you’ll have an object of alien manufacture—and anything you pull off a flying saucer that crossed the galaxy is bound to be interesting.

Even objects produced by our own culture are interesting—like my iPhone. Not long ago, the people in power might have resurrected the witch-burning laws had I pulled this thing out. So if we could get hold of some piece of technology that had crossed the galaxy, then we could have a conversation about UFOs and extraterrestrials. Go ahead, keep trying to find them; I won’t stop you. But get ready for the night you’ll be abducted, because when it happens, I’ll want your evidence.

M
any people, including all the amateur astronomers in the world, spend a lot of time looking up. We walk out of a building, we look up. Doesn’t matter what’s happening, we’re looking up. Yet UFO sightings are not higher among amateur astronomers than they are among the general public. In fact, they’re lower. Why is that so? Because we know sky phenomena. It’s what we study.

One UFO sighting in Ohio was reported by a police officer. Some people think that if you’re a sheriff or a pilot or a member of the military, your testimony is somehow better than that of the average person. But everyone’s testimony is bad, because we’re all human. This particular police officer was tracking a light that was darting back and forth in the sky. He was chasing it in his squad car. Later it turned out that the cop was chasing the planet Venus, and that he was driving on a curved road. He was so distracted by Venus that he wasn’t even conscious of turning his steering wheel back and forth.

It’s yet another reminder of how feeble our sensory organs are—especially when we’re confronted with unfamiliar phenomena, let alone when we’re trying to describe them.