Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [128]
In the specific comment you made about Star Trek, the mysterious cloud being “one-half light-year outside the Galaxy,” I agree certainly that this was stated badly, but on the other hand, it got past a Rand Corporation physicist who is hired by us to review all of our stories and scripts, and further, got past Kellum deForest Research who is also hired to do the same job.
And, needless to say, it got past me.
We do spend several hundred dollars a week to guarantee scientific accuracy. And several hundred more dollars a week to guarantee other forms of accuracy, logical progressions, etc. Before going into production we made up a “Writer’s Guide” covering many of these things and we send out new pages, amendments, lists of terminology, excerpts of science articles, etc., to our writers continually. And to our directors. And specific science information to our actors depending on the job they portray. For example, we are presently accumulating a file on space medicine for De Forest Kelley who plays the ship’s surgeon aboard the USS Enterprise. William Shatner, playing Captain James Kirk, and Leonard Nimoy, playing Mr. Spock, spend much of their free time reading articles, clippings, SF stories, and other material we send them.
Despite all of this we do make mistakes and will probably continue to make them. The reason—Thursday has an annoying way of coming up once a week, and five working days an episode is a crushing burden, an impossible one. The wonder of it is not that we make mistakes, but that we are able to turn out once a week science fiction which is (if we are to believe SF writers and fans who are writing us in increasing numbers) the first true SF series ever made on television.
(Nevertheless, scientific errors crept into the show such that today books and Web sites have been devoted to Star Trek bloopers.)
Later, after Roddenberry’s fame skyrocketed along with the series (now in syndication with multiple spin-off series and feature films, generating hundreds of millions of dollars), the Star Trek creator was asked to comment on any number of deep issues, especially those of a religious and spiritual nature. Roddenberry was a humanist in the purest sense of the word—he had a deep love of humanity and held out the greatest hope for our future, without depending on a higher power to achieve happiness. He offered these thoughts on God and UFOs to Terrance Sweeney for a book entitled God &, published in 1985:
I presume you want an introspective look at this. I think I’ve gone through quite an ordinary series of steps in life. I began as most children began, with God and Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny all being about the same thing. Then I went through the things that 1 think sensitive people go through, wrestling with the thoughts of Jesus—did he shit? Did he screw? I began to dare to believe that God wasn’t some white beard. 1 began to look upon the miseries of the human race and to think God was not as simple as my mother said. As nearly as I can concentrate on the question today, I believe I am God; certainly you are, I think we intelligent beings on this planet are all a piece of God, are becoming God. In some sort of cyclical non-time thing we have to become God, so that we can end up creating ourselves, so that we can be in the first place.
I’m one of those people who insists on hard facts. I won’t believe in a flying saucer until one lands out here or someone gives me photographs. But I am almost as sure about this as if I did have facts, although the only test I have is my own consciousness.
Roddenberry’s philosophical humanism was tempered with a practical realism necessary in dealing with