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.