Star Trek--The Naked Time

I'm not sure what's worse about this episode--the fact that it only takes the Starship Enterprise's crew 4 minutes to wake up from mass insanity and blast themselves out of a dying planet's orbit with a hastily-conceived theory or the fact that only under the influence of alcohol (er, gravitationally charged water molecules) do the members of the Enterprise crew start making sense. For example, Reilly, the self-absorbed Irishman who takes over Engineering (don't they have security officers down there?) and declares himself "captain," is quite possibly one of the best characters that the show's producers ever invented. I wish all of us could be like him--uninhibited, full of a brimming-over sense of joy that cannot be contained in the rules, ranks, and prejudices of our society, and to a very large extent, I think that more Christians should look at this example of true unfettered happiness, rather than to the staid secularist stoicism of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy as a model for how they should act in this world.

Of course, as you might suspect, I find myself agreeing most with the young officer who eventually takes a knife to himself in the crewmen's mess (albeit what clearly appears on camera to be a bread knife). This is, to me, the show's "voice of reason," the lone crew member who expresses what I think anyone in his shoes would be feeling: a fundamental sense that man does not belong in the vacuum of space. While this notion runs counter to Roddenberry's optimistic futurism, and while I therefore, as a viewer, am supposed to be antagonistic toward it, I find this crewman's words to be, in many ways, the only truly honest words in the whole episode. Outer space, as any former astronaut will tell you, is a dangerous place for humans to be, and the prospect of finding oneself caught in a vacuum without a spacesuit is probably more frightening to those who work and fly in orbital space than it can ever be to anyone else. Wouldn't you, if you were assigned to a spaceship flying light years--even light decades--away from the solar system, away from Jupiter, Mars, and Earth, knowing that one wrong move by your superiors would expose you to space or get you lost from your home on Earth forever, be just a little afraid?

Here we get to my point about Star Trek, about optimistic futurism, and about all "space opera" television series. Let's face it, ladies and gentlemen--these kinds of shows have to break basic rules of science just to get off the ground. Warp power, matter/energy transport, phasers and shields, these are all technologies that require so much energy that we could very well blow ourselves up (to say nothing of our planet and our solar system) trying to invent them. (Of course, we probably would have a hard enough time coming up with the kind of technology that would allow people like Kirk, Spock, and McCoy to walk around, ride elevators, and conduct sword fights like normal people on Earth do when they are in a zero gravity environment, but I digress.) Yes, it is true that we have invented machines that have brought us to the sky and into orbital space, but traveling between the stars? Forget it. The kind of energy it would take to break the space/time continuum (or even bend it a little) would be greater than our puny factories and power plants could manufacture, and it would almost certainly endanger the fragile balance of our solar system.

Man can't colonize space on his or her own.

Personally, I think that the further we were to get away from our planet in terms of traveling ability, the more we would find ourselves depending on our Creator. Think about it--if you were in the equivalent of a big tin can surrounded by nothing but a cold, dark, pressureless vacuum, wouldn't you consider offering up a few prayers? I certainly would. I have always thought that interstellar travel (and even interplanetary travel) would be a big mystery to the human race . . . until Jesus came back and explained how we could do it. Maybe he won't--after all, there's nothing in the Bible to suggest that we would go anywhere other than Earth after Jesus' second coming--but it's still an idea I have. I wonder . . . if, after we have technologized our world into ruins in a vain attempt to attain a semblance of godhood, might we be given freedoms and new horizons beyond our wildest dreams by a loving, forgiving God?

Something to think about, friends.