Defending my main man, Carl Sagan.

I guess I understand the point of this week's assignment, and I know we're looking at it explicitly from a special relativity standpoint, but I'm a little upset that everyone thinks my main man Carl Sagan (despite passing away before the film's completion) would have messed up something like this. So with my limited knowledge, I'll do the proposed assignment in regards to special relativity, and then try and defend why I think Carl Sagan was correct in the long run. (After all, this same thing happened in the novel he wrote and wasn't altered in the film version). Besides, you obviously already know this, Dr. Fragile. Is this a test? Do I win? I hope so.

The Saroni Paradox

The "Saroni Paradox", as it is will now forever be called, is a paradox concerning time dilation and near-light speed travel. On its most basic level, without adding in all the intricacies and nuances of it, it occurs like this: two humans (let's call one Costas and the other Epe to keep the joke going), are examining one another. Costas is living life on earth, while his more successful brother, Epe, is on NASA's first man-operated vessel traveling at near-light speeds. From the frame of the observer (Costas), any object (Epe) traveling at near-light speed would age slower; however, because of time dilation and "proper" reference frames, Epe would also think that Costas was the one aging more slowly. But once Epe returns back to Earth, he would find that poor Costas is indeed the one who aged drastically more, along with everyone else.

Contact

From a point of special relativity (which the film addresses earlier on), this same thing should have happened in the film. Ellie (Jodie Foster), drops through the WORMHOLE (will come back to this later) and is gone for a span of 18 hours on her intergalactic journey. To her disdain, however, when she returns it appears to everyone else on Earth that only mere seconds have passed -- and that she only dropped from the top of the rings of the machine straight into the water. The problem with this, in regards to special relativity, is that the reference frames are askew. If Ellie (according to her frame) was gone for 18 hours, a much larger span of time would have passed back on Earth -- more like 50 years. This is actually pretty interesting, because many problems could have arisen: they could have turned off the machine, everyone she knows and loves could have died, they could have gotten more contact messages since then, or even scarier, incorrectly assumed the machine didn't work and could have built yet another one and continued to send more people into the abyss. I think this is why they had the discussion earlier in the movie, because of all the possibilities.

Carl Sagan and General Relativity

I might be ruining the fun of the assignment by being a smart-behind, but even though I don't know all the specifics of it, I'm pretty sure wormholes operate in the realm of general relativity, and thus, cancel out the Saroni Paradox all together. All I know is that spacetime bends as seen in the picture above, and wormholes are literally shortcuts through the fabric of space. So Ellie isn't technically going at near-light speed, she's just cutting through spacetime and taking a shortcut. Carl Sagan couldn't have gotten the end of the novel (and eventually movie) wrong. It could be a lot more complicated than it was portrayed, but conceptually, I think he was on the right track. Shame on everyone else for questioning Carl Sagan's greatness. Except you, Dr. Fragile. I'm convinced you actually do know everything about the universe. Did I pass your test?

KHAAAAAAAAAAAN

Star Trek. I really love Star Trek.

Even when it gets so incredulously insane (saving the whales in modern day San Fran to interpret space probes in the future a la Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home / Data playing poker with holographic interpretations of Newton, Einstein and Hawking in the Next Generation / and so many more weird scenes I don't have time to discuss), I will always hold this series dear in my heart. I'm glad I get to dedicate this blog to analyzing it.

"Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."




This is more than a cool quote. And no, this isn't me saying it's my life's motto that I secretly say to myself every day in intense nerdy fervor or something (although I do, but that's not the point) -- it's essentially the main theme of the series. I've always said that Star Trek was a social critiquing of the 60's disguised as a science fiction show, because that's exactly what it is. Gene Roddenberry developed this series to showcase futuristic situations as analogies for contemporary problems on Earth in the 60's, and then showing how they could be rectified and resolved through humanism, optimism, and strong sense of idealism. In the original television series (I like to make a distinction between the shows and the films, for there are vastly different thematically -- the former verging on science fantasy and the later being the prototypical science fiction), moral issues such as discrimination, war, and slavery were frequently brought up and analyzed. The portrayal of race in the Enterprise crew was perhaps the most paramount of all its social awareness. Communications officer Uhura was an African American female in an era where her race was being discriminated against, Chief helmsman Sulu was a Japanese-American just decades after the second World War where a general distrust and harboring of ill will was still left towards his people, and in the later episodes, Chekov, perhaps the most astonishing development in the crew as a Russian member during the Cold War. In fact, even in the unapproved pilot, "The Cage" (the very first episode ever filmed) featuring Captain Christopher Pike, one of the first scenes showcases the captain's hidden misogynist views as a women walks on deck without being ordered, much to the disdain of one of his trusted communication officers, who happens to be a woman herself. Such examples of social criticism are frequent in the series -- it's only a bonus that the show is also a very good science fiction series with astonishingly good science concepts.

 And that's the focus of  my blog -- to analyze how these science concepts portrayed in the show further advanced Gene Roddenberry's vision of social criticism, and for added fun, their plausibility as well.


The Warp Drive

Plot Significance 

In order for the crew of the Enterprise to "boldly go where no man has gone before", they needed a plot device to get them there in a reasonable amount of time (mere moments of screen-time versus days, weeks, or years of travel). Besides the logistics of having a plot device that allowed for the quick portrayal of a crew experiencing intergalactic flight, the warp drive, as stated before, allows for the social criticism of contemporary civil issues in far away places. It allows the audience to more easily digest a social issue, such as racism, if the oppressed people are a group of aliens and not contemporary races on Earth. The exotic, alien locals only complimented the very real, very local problems of the 60's  lying underneath. This fantastical blanket was only able to be covered over the plots if they had a device to reach these faraway galaxies, and thankfully, the warp drive was their answer.

Plausibility

It's surprising that their answer was logically correct as well as artistically. It was only a year ago that I finally figured out the mechanics of the warp drive as portrayed in the Star Trek series, and boy was I blown away. I always thought the warp speed synonymous with concepts such as light speed as portrayed in the Star Wars films, but little did I know that there is some underlying truth in the Star Trek version of intergalactic flight.

"It never occurred to me to think of SPACE as the thing that was moving!"

This line was actually uttered in disbelief by Simon Pegg's Scotty in the 2009 film, and although he was referring to the equation of trans-warp beaming, this can pretty much be applied to the idea of warp as well, because, yes -- the thing that is moving is space. Spacetime as a tangible substance is exempt from the physically binding laws of light speed, and thus, can theoretically be manipulated to "bubble" the spaceship around it and carry it across galaxies within seconds. 

To compliment its real world plausibility, the newest Star Trek film, Into Darkness, portrays its warp core after a real life machine in the National Ignition Facility in California. In fact, the Department of Energy actually allowed them to shoot some scenes there. 

Though the actual significance of this particular machine as it relates to warp cores is basically null: the Enterprise is fueled with deuterium, the heavy variant of hydrogen, which the NIF uses in its fusion experiments. So, the real reason basically boils down to the simple fact that it looks cool. But still, kudos to them.



Transporter 

Plot Significance

So you use your warp drive to manipulate space and arrive at your planet of choice. How do you get down there? By boarding a shuttle and flying down there with a landing party, of course. Or, that's what you would have done if Star Trek: The Original Series had a larger budget. TOS was infamous for its cheap effects and props, no thanks to the small budget granted to them by NBC. But even with such a meager amount of cash, the designers for the first Star Trek series really worked well with what they had -- an abundance of props (regardless of aesthetic quality) and lavish sets. But what they couldn't use were shuttles. They did not have the time or the money to construct these sets and scenes portraying the captain and crew flying down towards the planet's surface. The idea of the transporter was actual quite clever -- it's not only efficient, but pretty cool as well.

Plausibility

The concept of the transporter is, in my view, the quintessential "plot over reality" device. The plot requires the seamless transportation of the Enterprise's crew to the surface, and the transporter fulfills that requirement. It doesn't fulfill any sound real world plausibility, however. The main idea behind the transporter is that it deconstructs an object or organism down to its atomic level and then rebuilds it exactly as before. The problem with this is that you would need to know a HUGE amount of information of every biological being -- the composition and location of each of its atoms. We only just figured out the entirety of the genetic code, so knowing the composition and location of each and every one of the atoms which will largely be specific to only that individual will take a little bit longer. Plus, there's no way to accurately tell where the exact position of atomic particles are, so reassembling them would be incredibly difficult and risky.

Red Matter

This one is just a short bonus I'd like to discuss, specifically how it relates to the larger scheme of things in the Star Trek universe.

Plot Significance

The ominous "red matter" in Star Trek (2009) was really a barebones plot device on its most basic level, used to achieve a specific goal; however, the goal it achieved with this, in my eyes, forgives and atones for the incredible impracticality of it. One of the many reasons I loved the reboot of Star Trek was that it didn't simply "rewrite" the history of Star Trek and everything that happened before it. As a grand gesture in the form of black holes and time travel, the red matter acknowledges the past events of the franchise and cleverly allows a new timeline for us to relive the iconic moments of the Enterprise all over again, in brilliant, modern movie-making technology, nonetheless. Instead of spitting in the face of the series' history, it complimented it. And black holes and time travel are always awesome in no matter what form. 

Plausibility

None. Null. Nada. A plot device through and through; however, Neil DeGrasse Tyson pointed out an interesting mistake in its portrayal in the 2009 Star Trek. Surprisingly, not having anything wrong with the existence of the red matter itself (saying it was "cool"), he said he couldn't suspend his disbelief in how it was initiated in the film. He said that if it really does create a black hole, it could have been deployed at any location -- it didn't have to be dropped into a hole leading to the core of a planet made by a massive drill. All you would have to do, essentially, would be to drop it on the planet's surface and the same effect would be achieved. 

Conclusion

Star Trek will always be one of my favorite pieces of entertainment. Complete, unabashed, unashamed love for this series. Being able to critically analyze on a scientific and artistic level for class is one of the high points of my existence. Thank you. 

P.S. 

This is the greatest thing I have ever purchased. 

Le marchand de la mort est mort.

"The merchant of death is dead."

This was the headline of a French newspaper in Cannes after being mistakenly informed about Alfred Nobel's death. Nobel, great engineer and inventor forever remembered by his patent of dynamite, was on the verge of being posthumously branded as the merchant of death because of a discovery he made in attempt to save miners' lives, a discovery made only to replace the more volatile nitroglycerin with a more stable alternative -- a peaceful discovery with a peaceful application forever scarred by humanity's perversion of it. 

So why do I mention this in a blog reviewing two films analyzing the discovery of a scientific achievement and its application of it afterwards? Because this isn't the first time this question of scientific ethic has been sought, and it surely won't be the last time anytime soon. 

"Fat Man and Little Boy" and "Gojira" both deal with the moral implications of the engineering of the atom bomb and then its eventual use and detonation. The former film delves into the conflicting moral consciousnesses of the engineers and scientists in the creation of this weapon while the latter is a allegorical film criticizing the implementation of this invention in the guise of a monster movie. But the question still persists: was this discovery of the invention wrong? I would have to say no. Even deeper, I would have to say the implementation of this invention wasn't entirely wrong either -- not on an ethical realm, but on a relative realm unique only to its situation. 

On discussing the moral positions of the scientists in "Fat Man and Little Boy", I'd like to recall back to my opening on Alfred Nobel. I purposely painted Nobel entirely as a victim of his own discovery, when the truth isn't that clear-cut. It is true that Nobel began his discovery like any other scientist would have, seeing a puzzle in the volatility in nitroglycerin and using his understanding to solve it, which he did by adding silica to create a malleable and stable paste, thus, dynamite was born. As Neil deGrasse Tyson has said, "A discovery itself is not moral, it's our application of it." The moral dilemma here, however, began upon Nobel's response to when he saw how his invention was being used for martial and warlike purposes -- he decided to opt in. He even continued manufacturing and patenting inventions for the armaments industry beyond dynamite. It was only later in his life when his moral consciousness weighed upon him, and he began making excuses as a comfortable way to defend his activity -- "Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops" (this is actually how the urban legend began that Nobel purely invented the dynamite as a weapon of such terror that would demote the idea of war forever more, an idea interestingly held by post-atomic detonation scientists in the US). His despondence is what eventually lead to him posthumously arranging the Nobel Peace Prizes. The question still persists, however -- should his discovery have been made knowing what it would have lead to? Yes.  Neil deGrasse Tyson continues from the quote above, saying "The world is accessible to us". Upon being asked the same question, coincidentally about the moral implications of the discovery of the atom bomb as well, he alludes to the discovery of smelting iron. Should the discovery of smelting iron have been prevented knowing that it would lead to the creation of the sword, a weapon of war? He let out a resounding "absolutely". I'm going to take a leap and say that all the combined deaths at the edge of a sword surpasses the deaths from the atomic bomb by far. But the creation of weapons was just one of many byproducts of the smelting of iron, most of which were beneficial in the progression of humanity's technological and scientific prowess. One detrimental application to a discovery shouldn't undermine the whole thing.

I put so much extensive focus on Nobel because he shared the same plight as the Manhattan Project scientists in regards to moral consciousness, the only difference is their inventions' initial purpose and eventual implementations were reversed -- dynamite was a peaceful tool turned weapon and atomic discovery began a weapon turned peaceful application (eventually). The moral quandary of the Manhattan Project scientists was that they fully understood that their scientific discovery was being weaponized from the get-go. Many held onto the Nobel-like belief that the US desperately needed a weapon of such destruction that it would forever secure its safety through fear. And in that moment, that assumption was right. As I stated before, I believe that the implementation of the atomic bomb on Japan was objectively right not on an ethical standpoint, but relatively due to the unique circumstance America found itself in opposition to Japan. Japan was under the leadership of extremist Prime Minister Tojo who instilled an utter sense of crazed nationalism into the country's citizens through which nothing short of a single display of shear annihilation would suppress them. Under the practice of extreme Bushido, even Japan's citizen populace was displaying fierce loyalty through suicide in a matter of ways to prove their devotion. The nation's army itself was already deploying an art of war not combatable against in the traditional sense of warfare through the form of kamikaze and guerrilla tactics. So that's exactly what the US did -- they combated Japan's nontraditional style of warfare with an equally nontraditional style in the form of the power of the atom. And only through this was the US able to suppress Japan into surrendering. The real problem began years later when the Soviet Union began atomic and eventually nuclear interest, because when you see someone with a big stick, you try and find a bigger one -- and that's the problem it always boils down to, which I think can be attributed to the human condition and not assigned and blamed on morals or ethics. 

Now onto "Gojira". I think it's obvious as to why the US wouldn't allow the complete and original version of the film be viewed until 50 years later. It humanized Japan's citizens in a way and quite literally framed America as a monster. Ego aside, I think the bigger and more realistic reason was because the US was still in an arm's race against the Soviet Union at the time, an arm's race comprised entirely of nuclear warheads. If "Gojira" was publicly shown in America during this period, it could make the populace sympathetic in the plight to rid nuclear weapons. The fact of the matter was that America couldn't have a sympathetic populace because they needed their full support as they continued to make more nuclear warheads in opposition to the Soviet Union's own nuclear arsenal. 

Ending my whole spiel on moral dilemma and now onto the literal possibility of a Godzilla creature, I don't think I can suspend my disbelief here. Godzilla is a big boy, and a big boy has got to eat. Tokyo really is a big entree, but unless Godzilla takes regular strolls to coastal cities and eats all their inhabitants on the daily throughout his lifetime, I don't think he can persist and thrive as an biological organism. And sadly, Japan isn't that big enough to support a diet like that. Besides, by his third of fourth meal in the quantity of a city, Japan would have already devised the oxygen destroyer, which leads me to my final piece of discussion... 

The concept of the oxygen destroyer is actually kind of cool. It's beyond stupid, but cool nonetheless. The main idea behind the oxygen destroyer is mostly apparent in its name, in which it dissolves all oxygen in water. I don't necessarily think it would dissolve Godzilla completely as shown (a la the law of the conservation of mass), but I think the effect would be pretty destructive regardless. In line with the main properties behind the atom bomb, if the oxygen destroyer followed suit and achieved its effects through the splitting of the oxygen atom, an interesting effect would occur either way --all the O2 would be split into individual oxygen atoms. I can still safely say this wouldn't dissolve Godzilla either, but the effect would still probably end in his demise.

***

I began this blog alluding to Alfred Nobel (and perhaps spent a little more time than necessary with this allusion, sorry) to drive home the point that scientific discovery and moral implications always have and always will collide. It didn't begin with Alfred Nobel, and it won't end (and obviously hasn't) with the scientists in the Manhattan Project. Ethics and science will always be opponents, but the discoveries themselves aren't to blame.