We watched one of the Star Talk episodes last evening, with
Neil deGrasse Tyson speaking with another astrophysicist about Tyson’s
interview with George Takei, about Star Trek. The interview and ensuing
discussion was fascinating at many levels.
Watching Takei (Sulu to the uninitiated) speak of his early
WW II experiences made me gasp. Takei’s entire family, including the three young
children were basically arrested and shipped to an internment camp for the
duration of the war, solely because they were Japanese-Americans. Note, please,
that nothing remotely similar occurred to, say, Italian-Americans, or
German-Americans. And, perhaps as bad, or maybe even worse, after the war
ended, his family was simply released back into the ghettoes of America, with
no money, jobs, or places to live. When
they were arrested, their entire assets and sources of income were taken away
and not returned. Thus when they were
released, they had no wherewithal to continue life as it had been before the
war. I have worked with one of those detainees, a remarkable woman who helped
to found the Japanese-American Memorial Foundation (http://www.njamf.com/AboutUs/AboutUs.html)
.
What struck me about the discussion with George Takei, and
my own discussions with Cherry Y. Tsutsumida was the calmness surrounding the
discussions of this awful period of pure American racist policy. Both had moved
on and become strong characters in their own right, and each contributing to
our nation’s culture in wonderful ways, Cherry as a public health officer, and
Takei as a prominent television actor. Takei was just a little kid—he was interned
between the ages of 5-9. Yet, here he is speaking with astrophysicist Tyson
about the science of Star Trek and its impact on American life. Remarkable
indeed.
Star Trek contributed not only some pretty fancy notions
about future science developments, but its cast provided hope for a
multicultural universe in our future. We
had Caucasian-Americans, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, Russians, Scots,
aliens of several cultures, and both men and women in key roles. Racism, unlike on planet earth, seemed
non-existent. There were warring
cultures, to be sure. Who could forget The Borg? Yet, there was even considerable
hope for inter-species cooperation.
The science behind Start Trek ranged from the wholly
plausible—personal communicators, doors that sprung open by themselves, fully
humanized robots, microwave machines, laser weaponry, talking computer systems—to
the not yet plausible – warp drives delivering multiple speed of light
velocity, “beaming” people by disassembling and then reassembling their atomic
structure in a different place and time. But the science was more fun than
serious. It was the interaction among the staff and between that starship staff
and other cultures that provided the most entertainment.
And remember, it was only a few years between the beginning
of this show and our actual landing of men on the moon. Science was on the
march. Could Mars and other planets be far behind? Indeed, could interstellar
travel be far behind?
Well, it turns out that we humanoids preferred war to
science—think Vietnam, and then our Middle East debacles (it would seem all
enterprises in the Middle East are debacles by definition). We do love our wars. So science has had to
take a back seat to killing.
So, watching this program was an exercise in lost
opportunities. We could have done so much to advance our knowledge of our
universe. But we really do like killing better.
