The Devil in the Dark

When I was a boy, I loved Star Trek. For nearly twenty years, Portland’s KPTV (channel 12) broadcast the series at 4pm every Sunday afternoon. We didn’t have a television for much of my childhood, but most of my friends did. Whenever possible, I would watch Star Trek.

When the series was released on DVD a few years ago, I bought the first season, but I never watched it. It’s been gathering dust.

A few weeks ago, I decided to make some clam chowder. This is a laborious process. Though I enjoy it, the work takes a couple hours, and much of it is mindless. “I should watch something on the computer,” I thought. “I should watch Star Trek.” And so I did. I’ve been watching one episode a night ever since.

Many of the early episodes are truly awful — there are good reasons the show struggled to stay on the air. But by the middle of the first season, things began to click. The writers and producers discovered their characters and figured out how to tell their stories.

I plan to do a full review of season in about a week, but I want to take the time to mention one of my favorite episodes: The Devil in the Dark. On an important mining colony, a mysterious creature is terrorizing the workers. This mysterious beast can move through solid rock, and it dissolves anyone it touches. Fifty men have died in just a few months. The Enterprise is summoned to eliminate the problem.

Initially, Kirk and company intend to destroy the creature. But, as he is wont to do, Spock begins to suspect that there’s something deeper to the problem. He’s right, of course. First of all, the life form is silicon-based, something that is seemingly impossible. Second, it is highly intelligent. And finally, it is merely defending its nest, which has been disrupted by the mining activities.

Watching the episode tonight, it was shockingly obvious that this is where my appreciation of inter-species friendship and communication originated. It was from watching this episode of Star Trek when I was a boy that I developed an appreciation for other animals, and began to suspect that other species might harbor intelligence that we, as humans, could barely comprehend. From there, it was only a small jump to similar philosophical positions.

Many of these Star Trek episodes don’t stand up well upon re-viewing. I haven’t seen them in twenty (or thirty!) years, and what I loved as a boy is sometimes almost unwatchable as an adult. (The Corbomite Maneuver is mind-numbingly bad.) But The Devil in the Dark is as good as I remembered. Amazing that much of the framework of the adult J.D.’s belief system can be traced to one hour of television made in 1965…

Errol Morris on the Impossibility of “Truth”

Errol Morris is a brilliant film-maker, but did you know he’s just as good with essays?

Nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious. When someone says that something is obvious, it seems almost certain that it is anything but obvious – even to them. The use of the word “obvious” indicates the absence of a logical argument — an attempt to convince the reader by asserting the truth of something by saying it a little louder.

Long and involved, but worth it…

[The New York Times: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?]

Pastabagel’s Background Noise Theory

At Metafiler, Pastabagel writes that he believes some people require constant background noise (where noise is defined not just as auditory, but also visual, etc.) in order to escape self-reflection. That is, some people are so afraid of self-examination that they do everything they can to avoid it by cluttering their life with a chaos of sight and sound:

Have you ever known people who have to turn on a TV or a radio the moment they enter a room, or can’t stand to do work without some sound on? These are people who are desperately afraid of confronting some truth about themselves, so they try to drown it out with constant distractions. And people like this tend to congregate (because they all like the noise the others are putting out), which is why whole neighborhoods are like this. The noise is clamourous and demanding of your attention, and therefore it’s safe. They can deal with the street, they can’t deal with what’s in their heads.

The background noise doesn’t have to be auditory either. Clutter and general messiness are optical versions of the same background noise. People will buy junk and never throw anything away because they are creating a visual garden of distractions. Their eye can dance over a room for hours and see different things in the clutter each of which triggers some superficial memory. But the mind is so busy processing what the eye sees and recalling the seen objects context that theirs no time for thinking the thought “Why do I collect all this stuff?” The classic case here is the suburban family that fills their house with junk, or the teenager who plasters their room with posters, etc.

The noise can also be mental — constant text messaging, video game playing, etc to fill up the isolated islands to downtime in everyone’s day. The point is not simply that they like the noise, it’s that they create the noise. The turmoil they create out here mirrors the turmoil in their mind, and drowns it out.

I know people like this. In many ways, I am one myself. (To some extent, we all are.) But I find that the times I am most relaxed, am happiest, are the times the background noise is absent. Why do I love being alone in the woods? No background noise of any kind. Everything is a blank slate.

Very zen.

The Trouble With Time Travel

And now it’s time for another Geek Thoughts.

Here’s why I think all Earth-bound attempts at time travel are doomed to failure: Unless the time travel also involves some sort of spatial component, the time traveler is going to reappear in empty space. The Earth is in motion. The solar system is in motion. The galaxy is in motion. The universe is in motion.

By the time you finish reading this sentence, the Earth will have moved far beyond where it was located at the beginning of the sentence. If you were to travel back in time (or forward in time) just one minute, what is it that would keep you tethered to the Earth as opposed to some absolute location in the universal scheme of things, an absolute location essentially in empty space? (Or, at the very least, in the middle of an ocean.)

I’m not saying that time travel is impossible — though I believe that’s likely the case — I’m just saying that time travel is impractical, and isn’t likely to produce anything other than a bunch of space flotsam.

Teleportation, on the other hand, might be practical. If it’s instantaneous.