Philosophical Musings of a Book Nerd

This book is a complete and utter waste of time and space. While I like physics and while I enjoyed reading this book when it was given to me as a birthday present, when I think about it, and in fact the more I think about it, the more pointless it becomes. Granted, science fiction has been a vehicle for technological development in the past, and it still works in that way (just look at Gibson's prediction of the internet, or even the mobile phone). However, much of the ideas in Star Trek stretch from pure fantasy to downright idealistic. Star Trek is little more than a television franchise, or a cash cow that generates income simply through a name.

One thing Star Trek does is identify a problem that the laws of physics and then creates a device that will solve that problem. Okay, we do that today, but we require a lot more than a writer's pen to solve the problem of faster than light travel. Star Trek creates the warp engine, but the problem is that the faster one gets to light speed, the heavier one becomes, and of course when one becomes heavier, the amount of energy required to increase velocity increases. Thus, to get to light speed one needs an infinite amount of energy to push an object of infinite weight. Even then, compared to the distances between stars, light speed is pretty slow.

I could go through and look at all of the items the author explores, and he even has a chapter of alien life. The belief is that if life can evolve on Earth then life can evolve elsewhere, we just have to find it. Do we really want to find it? Well, all of the geeks do, but if this extra-terrestrial life turns out to be more like the predator and the alien as opposed to the Vulcan, then we are all in trouble.

The final thing that I must touch on when evaluating any Star Trek literature is the concept of a human utopia. To the Christian, this is not going to happen this side of the second coming. While we, while on Earth, can attempt to make life here as tolerable as possible for as many as possible, we are never going to get to that state, so we wait in longing for Christ to return. To the material secularist, it is possible, and usually the main thing holding us back from reaching that utopic state is religion.

I must disagree with that because all we need to do is to look at communist Russia to see what happens when one takes God out of the picture and puts man in his place. I'm am not going to mention Nazi Germany simply because the Nazi's weren't athiests.