THE DAILY BLADE: Everything The Stiletto Knows She Learned From Star Trek
For 40 years, Star Trek has been a source of entertainment to science fiction fans, and inspiration to space buffs, engineers, inventors and astronauts:
† Flip open your cell phone – isn’t it roughly the same size, shape and weight as a communicator?;
† What else could NASA have named the first space shuttle but Enterprise? Ditto British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, who named the first suborbital vehicle in his planned spaceliner fleet the VSS Enterprise;
† A medical device company developed a needleless injection modeled on Dr. McCoy’s HypoSpray;
† The military is working on transparent aluminum to armor plate the windows of combat vehicles; and
† Financed in part with a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Duke University engineers are trying to figure out how to build a cloaking device.
Space.com offers this tribute-cum-retrospective of what is arguably the most influential program ever to air on television:
Created by Gene Roddenberry and billed as a ‘Wagon Train to the Stars,’ Star Trek debuted on Sept. 8, 1966 on a five-year mission that is as entrenched in the American lexicon as apple pie and baseball (both of which have popped up in episodes at one time or another, in fact).
"It’s so American because in America we integrate people into one," says NASA astronaut and Trek fan Mike Fincke of the show, adding that Roddenberry’s concept of people rising above their differences to explore space can be seen in the International Space Station (ISS). …
Maybe Star Trek was a sign of changing times. The show aired the first interracial kiss – between Kirk and Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) in Plato’s Stepchildren – and uttered the first televised "Hell" – from Kirk in The City on the Edge of Forever. While groundbreaking in the 1960s, such things seem tame given what’s on the tube today.
"They’ve always managed to be topical, all the way from race relations in the 1960s to the end of the Cold War (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)," says Fincke, who spoke to actor Scott Bakula – the latest Starship Enterprise captain Jonathan Archer – from orbit during his Expedition 9 mission to the ISS in 2004. "It serves as a parable for human behavior by taking subjects in a fantastic sense so we can discuss it close to home."
Roddenberry was an unabashed idealist who portrayed human beings as having risen above a history of slavery, racism, subjugation, war, disease, ignorance and poverty. He foresaw a future in which the peoples of the Earth would be united (one could argue that NAFTA and the EU are harbingers of this vision), as would other planets (in a UN-like organization). All very kumbaya. But make no mistake about it: Even in the Star Trek universe, the United States of America would be the dominant superpower guiding our planet - and our galaxy - to unity.
Want proof? The United Federation of Planets and Star Fleet Headquarters are both located in San Francisco. Clearly, Roddenberry believed in the intrinsic goodness, decency and courage of the American character.
The Stiletto still buys into much of Roddenberry’s vision. Where she parts company with him is his naivete on economic matters. His future utopia is based on communism, which was discredited as a viable socioeconomic model in the last century and is being discarded – albeit incrementally – by communist and socialist nations worldwide, with the notable exception of Cuba.
Update
Hazelton Adds Teeth To Anti-Illegal Immigration Ordinance
The Hazleton (PA) City Council passed a new version of its Illegal Immigration Relief Act to armor-plate it against a legal challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union that could go all the way to the Supreme Court. The new law, approved by a vote of 4-1, yanks a company’s business license within three days after discovering its use of illegal workers, and allows legal employees to sue their employer for work lost as a result. And landlords will have to pay $250 a day for every illegal alien they are accommodating. Hazleton's Hispanic population has reached about a third of the town's 31,000 residents in the last five years, with an estimated 25 percent of immigrants believed to be illegal. Other towns struggling to deal with rising crime and overburdened social services attributed to illegal immigration are copying Hazelton’s approach.
The latest town to jump on the bandwagon is Sandwich, MA. The town's board of selectmen voted 4-to-1 Thursday night to endorse a home-rule petition that would deny, suspend or revoke the license of a business with illegal immigrant workers.
The proposal must next be approved at a town meeting on Sept. 25, and then by the state Legislature to become law. If enacted, the ACLU is expected to contest the law To become law, in court.
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