So first of all, I realize that I haven’t posted in a while. It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about it, it’s just that I’ve been spending the little time that ResNet works towards online physics homework. Posts like this one started out on paper so I have been working on it.

Now with that out of the way I can start on the actual topic of this post!

Last Wednesday night I came across seasons 1 and 2 of the original series of Star Trek at Game Haven. They were used, of course, but in good condition, and most importantly they were over half the price of the new ones online ($26 and $29 versus $60ish and $80ish). Game Haven also had a buy one get one free deal on DVDs. So guess what I did…..

I happily brought my uber cheap loot home and didn’t touch it until last night when I decided I needed some background noise while doing home work and cleaning my room. Needless to say not much cleaning or homework got done.

The episode was called “Where No Man Has Gone Before” the star date was 1312.4 and it was the third episode of season one. You can read about it here http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061027/ or better yet watch it yourself. I haven’t seen this episode since I was little kid. In fact, I haven’t seen many since I was a little kid. While watching it, I realized that my thinking had changed. Actually, I think it changed to some degree due to doing this research paper.

When I was little I took the things that happened and the things they said and thought as if that’s just the way it was in the future (of course I knew it was fiction, but make believe was much more fun). I would think some things were really cool and I wondered how the machines worked. Now my thinking is different.

I realized that instead of being a little kid amazed at blinking lights and Spock’s eyebrows, I was analyzing everything about the episode. When I finally gave up on cleaning and my graphics homework and gave in to my distraction, I let my analyzation run wild with my imagination. Instead of being just a college student wasting time with 1960’s SF, I was a random person (hopefully not a red shirt) following the crew around trying to understand everything that they were saying and doing. I was using all of my relevant knowledge and critical thinking skills to keep up.

I wanted more than just to be entertained, I wanted to understand. I wanted to ask questions, but I knew Shatner wasn’t about to stick his head out of the the screen, hold my hand, and walk me through the episode using baby steps. I had to guess and figure out things for my self. I tried to imagine my self as a modern day scientist / engineer that found herself transported to the future on the crew of the USS Enterprise. I tried to think and question the information presented in the episode keeping that in mind. Some things I saw didn’t surprise me, like technology. It would make sense that our future society would eventually be advanced enough for that type of space travel ect. given the “evidence” in the show that we had had alien contact for a while and shared information with other civilizations. Some things did surprise me, namely the ESP.

With our science’s current opinion of ESP it is surprising to see the science officers to talk about it like it was well documented and not scoffed at. In fact the crew members ESP scores were tested before the voyage. Spock doesn’t even question it that much! I personally know from being nerdy and learning magic tricks of how to “bend” spoons and “read” minds like the artists on tv can. So it really surprised the scientist I was playing in my head about their reaction to this. The episode showed that these things were happening, but the crew didn’t seem as surprised as I would have been. This made me wonder what type of paradigm shift must have happened to the earth science in Star Trek for ESP to get credibility like that.

This is a good example of how SF can make you think about current science and use critical thinking to analyze hard to understand situations. In this episode you couldn’t just say “well none of this exists anyways, so there!” you had to think “Wow, that’s odd! This shouldn’t be happening, but apparently it is…. and the crew is in danger.. What can I observe about the situation and what knowledge can I apply to understand what’s going on to keep everyone safe?”

Using SF in a class room or for your own sake can be beneficial in so many ways. Not only can you see examples of good factual science you see counter examples of bad fictional science. You see things that we may one day have and wonder about how they’re built. You also get to see things that shouldn’t happen, but in the story line it is, and you get to see how the characters address it and wonder how you would go about collecting knowledge and approaching it. If you approach SF like a scientist/engineer you can have more fun than just watching it and you learn a lot too. You might be inspired to Google something or find a book on a topic. You might even realize something about the way you think and decide if that’s good enough for you or not.

I plan on watching the episode again tomorrow morning, well, at this point I suppose it would be later on today, and taking detailed notes about analyzing it. I will post these notes later on. I am also going to be on the look out for what I want to call the three types of science fiction in science fiction :

1. The “Are you serious? Did you sleep through elementary school science your entire life?” type of science where things are blatantly wrong. Examples can include wrong values, math, and definite things that are just silly like finding that the Earth had a second moon that has been hiding from us the entire time or normal plants can stand up and start chasing people.

2. The “That’s impossible right now, but that’s what they told the Wright brothers too. This is set in the future anyways so maybe it’s just the distant future,” type of science where things could be true in the future. Examples include artificial intelligence, advanced space flight, advanced computing, and hopefully sonic screwdrivers.

3. The “Are you serious? That’s impossible! There is no way that could work out that way with our current rules!” type of science where there needs to be a paradigm shift for the science to be true. These are basically times where the “silly ancestors in 2011 just didn’t know any better”. These could easily be thrown in with group 1, but I would say these are “more true” than the cases in group 1. The ESP in this episode is an example of this. While it is true that our science says that ESP doesn’t exist, the episode supplies evidence that they consider it credible. So there had to be some sort of new understanding between our time and theirs to have this type of evidence. This type of fiction is more believable than some in group 1 that might say that a sun flower is going to kill you in your sleep.