Wednesday, August 13, 2008

The Philosophy of Star Trek

I've been reading Wil Wheaton's blog which has been instrumental in writing this post for two reasons. It's an idea I've had rattling around in my head for awhile, which reading Wil's blog not only reminded me of it, but I found it very encouraging to write it because Wil Wheaton says, "Don't be afraid to suck!" So here goes.

I have always been a Star Trek fan, not of The Original Series (TOS) which would always be part of that Sunday-morning-there's-nothing-but-crap-on lineup, but of The Next Generation (TNG) which was always part of the mom-can-I-stay-up-half-an-hour-longer-to finish-this-episode lineup. I liked Star Trek for many reasons besides extending my bedtime, namely, that Wil Wheaton was cute (and still is, I might add) but mostly just because I am a nerd and it was interesting.

My favourite character on TNG and later, on the much maligned Voyager, was the most inhuman one. Data, on TNG, and the Doctor on Voyager. These two characters one, an android, the other, a computer hologram, where created by humans to help humans, yet were not created to be human. It always happened though, that these inhuman characters longed to be human, and set off on a long journey to understand humanity.

It's kind of odd, though, once you realize that these people are both actors, and are actually human beings trying to understand what it means to be human. Obviously, we don't have everything sorted out if we are continually questioning what it means to be human. We are still struggling to understand ourselves and our place in this world, and we believe that we will continue to do so when we are travelling beyond this world many years in the future. We will have figured out so many other things like Warp drives and transporters, and will travel far across the galaxies but will still not have completed the deep inner journey into ourselves. We will encounter aliens and make attempts to understand their language and cultures without fully understanding our own.

The funny thing is that being human sometimes means sucking big time. Any time an alien race vows to make something better at the cost of something tremendously human, like our emotions (think of The Invasion) we fight for our right to suck. We would rather have war and poverty and all the things we currently have if giving those up meant giving up a part of our humanity. I don't know if we will ever be able to have world peace as human beings, but for now, I am content to suck along with the rest of my fellow human beings. Thanks, Wil.

"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." -Emerson M. Pugh