Borrowed from the Star Trek Academy page….
Surprisingly, Star Trek is celebrating its 50th anniversary. There is now a hands-on exhibition consisting of Starfleet Academy where aficionados (OK, Trekkies) can go through the tests and at least feel like they are piloting the USSS Enterprise in space, but maybe without the free-fall nausea since you’ll be at a steady 1G all the time. For more information have a look at http://www.startrek.com/article/coming-in-2016-the-starfleet-academy-experience (the initial announcement) and follow any links you feel like. Also http://acad.sfi.org/ has a nice flavour. For what’s on offer, go to http://starfleetacademytour.com/about-the-exhibit/ and have a poke around….
For the older amongst us (yep, that includes me) who saw the Moon landing in 1969, that was exciting, but maybe it’s Star Trek that actually captured the imagination and made us think of what might be possible in the future (our future?) rather than the reality of fuzzy pictures of that giant leap for mankind. The supporting technologies shown made people think also of how useful it would be to have them, which spurred inventors to try to replicate them for real. There is a Tricorder X prize on offer, and it looks like someone will win it. The flip-up communicators have been replicated as mobile phones. NASA has been working on various ideas for warp-drives, though this does remain science-fiction at this moment in time. Tractor beams have been produced, though they are still incapable of producing a large force.
What science-fiction does is to enable people to let the imagination run out further than the text-books currently allow. Before you can make something new, you need to actually think of what needs it will fulfil and what the effects will be on society. It’s hard to think in a vacuum, and the imagination of the SF writers can (and does) spark off an engineering challenge to actually make it into reality. A.C. Clarke invented waldoes in imagination, but people saw the usefulness of that magnified (or reduced) size and force and so we now have them for handling large objects and also for microsurgery. Other SF looks at the social effects of some technology advances, which can be pretty dystopian at times as in Bladerunner. Asimov’s Caves of Steel was another dystopia in some ways, and also an exploration of the various alternate dystopias (and a few utopias) in subsequent novels. Of course, we also have the 3 laws of Robotics from Asimov, and some examples of what happens if they are bypassed.
We need the dreamer fithp (reference “Footfall” by Niven and Pournelle) to provide outlandish ideas, that maybe someone else will get the inspiration of how to make it reality, and also to speculate on the upsides and downsides of such inventions and technologies. It’s also fun to put the textbooks aside for a while and just put yourself into a different world than the somewhat tribal battles we see around us at the moment. To boldly go….
The post Starfleet Academy appeared first on Revolution-Green.
