Beam Me Up, Scotty.

What fascinated me about Star Trek was its view of the future. It was a world that, in retrospect, was a paradise that from time to time was threatened by Klingons (my favorite villains), the Romulans (cousins of the ultra-logical Vulcans), the Borg, and the Dominion (shape-shifters from a wormhole bordering Deep Space Nine). I yearned that such a world would come to pass; especially in terms of their technology. And, in certain respects, that technology has come full circle. In the original Star Trek they had a thingy called the communicator that allowed them to communicate with their ship orbiting in space. Guess what? We have cell phones that allow us to speak to anyone on the planet via signals that are bounced off satellites orbiting the earth. The show also had sliding doors. Well, duh, go into any supermarket or office tower these days and you have sliding doors letting you in and out. Some things, however, were a bit more obtuse. Think of the transporter room where a human could travel from one place to another instantaneously. In science circles it’s called teleportation. And I won’t even try to explain the mechanics behind that. But the most interesting thing was warp drive. This allowed the starship Enterprise to travel anywhere in the universe. As I understand it, this entails bending of space time. If you can bend space time in front and back of a spaceship, the space-time compression in the back will provide thrust for the spacecraft to move forward at phenomenal speed. Thus you could travel to Mars in, let’s say, twenty minutes rather than years. I don’t think this is going to happen anytime soon.

So, friends, I’ll be on line with the rest of the lemmings to see the newest installment of this priceless entity. Good or bad, I’m going to enjoy this show. Like everybody else I’ll stuff my face with pseudo popcorn drizzled with pseudo butter and go where on one has gone before (for the 1000th time).