One
of the reasons why I love Star Trek
so much is that it excites my imagination with creative yet outlandish and
implausible ideas. To be able to go
faster than the speed of light, or move backwards in time, or through other
dimensions of reality, or to tele-transport from one location to another, or to
create "life" by using a computer program projected as a solid, interactive
hologram – these are all ideas to set the imagination on FIRE, yet none has
been scientifically proven. That’s not
to say they are necessarily impossible. They are definitely impossible by today's standards, but who knows what science may be found in the future that makes them possible. But at the very least, they are definitely implausible. The impossibility appears when you begin multiplying all the implausibilities.
For
instance, everything we scientifically know right now says that we cannot go
faster than the speed of light, because only things without mass, such as
light, can go that fast. The minute you
add mass, the possibility for light travel falters, so that even a tiny spec of
dust, which has at least a teensy bit of mass, would become infinitely heavy if
it ever achieved the speed of light, and would require an infinite amount of
energy to attain and then sustain that speed.
So
the writers of Star Trek, in their
infinite wisdom, expanded upon real science, coming up with wildly inventive
ideas that sound like logical extensions of modern day knowledge. In short, they’ve created things that don’t
exist yet, but sound like they possibly could.
For example, to solve the problem of sending objects with mass (such as
the Starship Enterprise) into space faster than the speed of light, they came
up with the concept of the warp engine, which is supposed to render the
Enterprise mass-less by surrounding and concealing the ship with mass-less
energy, in effect warping the space around the ship. They achieve this by coming up with yet
another inventive concept, mixing a very volatile fusion of matter and
anti-matter in a warp core.
Likewise,
the “impossible” concepts of such things as the transporter and interactive,
sentient holograms have been made possible in the world of Trek by “twisting”
what we know to be scientific fact and mixing it up with scientific fiction
(hence, the popular term “science fiction” which is rooted in scientific fact
and expanded through imagination into the realm of science that sounds logical,
and even cool, but doesn’t really exist – at least, not yet).
Of
course, Star Trek, and other science
fiction, isn’t created just to develop current scientific concepts. These ingenious stories were and are, first
and foremost, entertainment, and their entertainment value is only enhanced by
these plausible sounding growths of contemporary scientific data. For example, the Next Generation episode “Rascals” (trailer linked here) is not possible, yet still
enjoyable.
Aside from the general impossibility
of a device like the transporter, we have a story about four grown adults who
are turned into pre-teens during a transporter accident. The explanation and solution to their plight
is basically just technological and medical “gobble-de-gook,” but that’s not
the point of this story. The point of
this particular yarn, and most of science fiction in general, is to excite our
imaginations with an intriguing idea (“What if a transporter malfunction
changed some of the crew into children?”) and to explore that idea in an
interesting, thought-provoking, and entertaining way. Granted, the writers of this specific episode
only partially succeeded in the task, for although the main plot about the
plights of Picard, Guinan, Ro Laren, and Keiko is interesting, the
subplot involving the Ferengi take over of the Enterprise, and the crew being
saved by the newly shrunken crewmen, is fairly weak, and
probably added because the main plot just wasn’t enough to fill out an entire
episode. Yet despite this weak subplot,
this was still a very intriguing episode, in part due to the inventive sci-fi
creativity, and allowing for some quality character insights, particularly with
Picard.
This
is just one example, as Star Trek is
littered with virtually hundreds and thousands of resourceful, engaging, and
stimulating ideas, all while staying within the realm of the “scientifically
impossible” by today’s scientific standards.
The
reason I bring all of this up is to once again argue for that famous, age-old
debate I love to write about: creationism versus evolution. You see, I do not deny that evolution is an
intriguing concept, just like Star Trek’s universal translator and those
magical replicators, or that, like these fictional models, it is rooted in
scientific fact. Yet, just like these
examples from Star Trek, the
scientific facts surrounding the theory of evolution have been merged with some
scientific fictions in order to make it seem more plausible, when, in fact, it
is actually impossible.
But
let me put Star Trek on the
backburner for now, and cite another example to make my point. The movie Face/Off starring Nicolas Cage
and John Travolta is an action-packed, captivating, and well made movie (The trailer is linked here). Travolta plays Sean Archer, an FBI agent on
the trail of murderous terrorist Castor Troy, played by Nicolas Cage. Castor Troy was the man responsible for the
death of Archer’s son six years before during an assassination attempt, and
Archer has been doggedly pursuing Troy
with a personal score to settle. At the
beginning of the movie, Archer finally succeeds in catching Troy and putting him into a coma. Also captured is Troy’s younger brother
Pollux, yet Archer and the city are still sitting on a time-bomb since Pollux
and Castor designed and planted explosives that could kill thousands of
innocent people unless the FBI can find it and diffuse it in time. Only the Troy
brothers know its location, with Castor in a coma, and Pollux refusing to talk.
The
story then becomes quite implausible when Archer agrees to undergo a surgical
procedure to have his face removed, and to have Castor’s face surgically
grafted on so he can assume Castor’s identity, and fool Pollux into thinking
that he, Archer, is big-bro Castor, so that Pollux will unwittingly give him
the location of the bomb. To fool
Pollux, Archer’s body is also altered to look like Castor’s, and a
micro-receiver is implanted in his voice box to give him Castor’s voice as
well. With the surgery a success, Archer
is effectively able to enter a prison facility disguised as Castor, and after
only a few hours, fools Pollux into revealing the location of the bomb.
Now the plot turns from implausible to impossible by merely multiplying the implausibilities into the realm of the ridiculous. The real Castor
Troy wakes from his coma to discover his face has been sliced off. He quickly contacts some of his goons by
phone, who successfully kidnap the surgical specialist who preformed the operation
to transform Archer into Troy ,
and force him to perform a second surgery.
As with Archer, Castor is now given Archer’s face, body, voice, and
identity, and he and his goons promptly set fire to the lab, and kill the
doctor and the only two FBI agents who knew of Archer’s covert mission. Wow! How did they manage that without getting caught? Any number of things could go wrong with a plan like that! With the real Sean Archer now stuck in prison
as Castor Troy, the real Castor Troy now pretends to be FBI hero Sean Archer,
and sleeps with Sean’s wife. Add on top of this Archer’s prison break from a prison no one has ever escaped from before, or how Archer’s wife and daughter don't suspect a thing! The outcomes of some later action
scenes are unbelievable, to say the least.
I actually liked this fun but silly action film, but my
point here is that many of the occurrences in the plot may be implausible, but
when taken as a whole, it becomes utterly unbelievable, and quite impossible,
yet we suspend our disbelief because it is still intriguing and holds our
interest due to the creativity of the story, and everything from the acting and cinematography and the use of slow-motion and music keeps us interested. It becomes an entertaining impossibility.
And
evolution is the same; an interesting and intriguing idea with a lot going for
it and flawless on the surface, but if one were to really stop to analyze it,
it is completely impossible. If you
think the events of the movie Face/Off
are just too coincidental and far-out to be believable, just remember that
evolutionary scientists ask us to accept their theories that are at least a
hundred times more implausible than the plot of Face/Off, and demand that we accept this as fact. What the evolutionary scientists present as
scientific fact is actually more difficult to believe in than the fantastical, futuristic, technological wonders of Star Trek.
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| Sentient holograms, good guys and bad guys changing faces, and wild, evolutionary intermediate species: Interesting and fun, of course, but not believable for a second! |
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