The Physics of Star Trek (14 page)

However, holograms aren't all there is to the holodeck. As noted, they have no corporeal
integrity. You can walk through oneor shoot through one, as was evidenced by the wonderful
holographic representations created by Spock and Data to trick the Romulans in the episode
“Unification.” This incorporeality simply will not do for the objects one would like to
interact withthat is, touchon the holodeck. Here techniques that are more esoteric are
required, and the Star Trek writers have turned to the transporter, or at least to the
replicators, which are less sophisticated versions of the transporter. Presumably, using
transporter technology, matter is replicated and moved around on the holodeck to resemble
exactly the beings in question, in careful coordination with computer programs that
control the voices and movements of the re-created beings. Similarly, the replicators
reproduce the inanimate objects in the scenetables, chairs, and so forth. This “holodeck
matter” owes its form to the pattern held in the replicator buffer. When the transporter
is turned off or the object is removed from the holodeck, the matter can then disassemble
as easily as it would if the pattern buffer were turned off during the beaming process.
Thus, creatures created from holodeck matter can be trapped on the holodeck, as the
fictional detectives Cyrus Redblock and Felix Leach found to their dismay in the
Next Generation
episode “The Big Goodbye,” and as Sherlock Holmes's nemesis Professor Moriarty surmised
and then attempted to overcome in several other episodes.

So here is how I envisage the holodeck: holograms would be effective around the walls, to
give one the impression of being in a three-dimensional environment that extended to the
horizon, and the transporter-based replicators would then create the moving “solid”
objects within the scene. Since holography is realistic, while (as I have explained
earlier) transporters are not, one would have to find some other way of molding and moving
matter around in order to make a workable holodeck. Still, one out of two technologies in
hand isn't bad.

Where does all this leave the pure holograms, like the holographic doctor of the
Voyager
series? The answer is, Absolutely nowhere. With just the scattered light and no matter
around, I'm afraid that these images would not be very effective at lifting, manipulating,
or probing. However, a good bedside manner and compassionate words of advice, which are at
the heart of good medical practice, can be dispensed by a hologram as easily as by the
real thing.

SECTION

THREE
The Invisible

Universe, or Things That Go

Bump in the Night

In which we speak of things that may exist but are not yet seen extraterrestrial life,
multiple dimensions, and an exotic zoo of other physics possibilities and impossibilities

An aerial view of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia,
Illinois, housing the highest energy accelerator in the world, the Tevatron, and the
world's largest production and storage facility of antiprotons. The ring housing the
4-mile in circumference accelerator is clearly

discernable. The circle in the foreground outlines an accelerator upgrade, the Main
Injector, under construction.
(Fermilab Photo)

John Peoples, director of Fermilab, shown with the antiproton source which he designed.
The antiprotons produced by collisions of protons on a lithium target are stored in a
circular beam using the array of magnets shown in the photograph.
(Fermilab Photo)

A portion of the accelerator tunnel, 4 miles long, located 20 feet below the ground,
housing the proton-antiproton beams, and the array of superconducting magnets (lower ring)
used to steer and accelerate them to energies approaching 10
12
electron volts.
{Fermilab Photo)

One of the two large detectors at Fermilab built to analyze the high-energy collisions of
protons and antiprotons. The 5000-ton detector is moved in and out of the beam on large
rollers.
(Fermilab Photo)

The Harvard radio-telescope located at Harvard, Massachusetts, used to obtain the data for
the Megachannel Extra Terrestrial Array (META) experiment designed to search for the
signals of extraterrestrial life in our galaxy.

The META supercomputer array designed to scan millions of channels at a single time in the
search for a signal of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy.

The new Billionchannel Extra Terrestrial Array (BETA)supercomputer which will be part of
the next generation search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31). This is the nearest large spiral galaxy similar to our own,
located about 6 million light years away.
(Lick Observatory Photograph/Image)

A photograph of our own galaxy obtained using radio and microwave detectors aboard the
Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite. This is the first true photograph of the
Milky Way showing its spiral structure, as edge on from the vantage point of the earth.
(NASA/COBE)

A high resolution photograph of the core of the galaxy M87, which is thought to house a
black hole in excess of 2 billion solar masses. The small disk of ionized gas at the very
center, almost perpendicular to the large radio jet seen to be emerging from the center is
rotating at about 750 kilometers per second, which gives strong dynamical evidence for the
existence of such a black hole.
(Holland Ford and NASA)

The Search for Spock
“It's difficult to work in a group when you are omnipotent.”

Q,
upon joining the crew of the
Enterprise,
in “DŽjˆ
Q”

"Restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation ... whenever
possible.... The colony is integrated as though it were in fact one organism ruled by a
genome that constrains behavior as it also enables it.... The physical superorganism acts
to adjust the demographic mix so as to optimize its energy economy.... The

austere rules allow of no play, no art, no empathy."

The Borg are among the most frightening, and intriguing, species of alien creature ever
portrayed on the television screen. What makes them so fascinating, from my point of view,
is that some organism like them seems plausible on the basis of natural selection. Indeed,
although the paragraph quoted above provides an apt description of the Borg, it is not
taken from a Star Trek episode. Rather it appears in a review of Bert Holldobler and
Edward O. Wilson's
Journey to the Ants,
and it is a description not of the Borg but of our own terrestrial insect friends.
1
Ants have been remarkably successful on an evolutionary scale, and it is not hard to see
why. Is it impossible to imagine a cognizant society developing into a similar communal
superorgan-ism? Would intellectual refinements such as empathy be necessary to such a
society? Or would they be a hindrance?

Gene Roddenberry has said that the real purpose of the starship
Enterprise
was to serve as a vehicle not for space travel but for story-telling. Beyond all the
technical wizardry, even a techie such as myself recognizes that what makes Star Trek tick
is drama, the same grand themes that have driven storytelling since the Greek epics love,
hate, betrayal, jealousy, trust, joy, fear, wonder.... We all connect most closely with
stories that illuminate those human emotions that govern our own lives. If warp drive were
used merely to propel unmanned probes, if the transporters were developed merely to move
soil samples, if medical scanners were utilized merely on plant life, Star Trek would
never have made it past the first season.

Indeed, the “continuing mission” of the starship
Enterprise
is not to further explore the laws of physics but “to explore strange new worlds, to seek
out new life and new civilizations.” What makes Star Trek so fascinating and so
long-lived, I suspectis that this allows the human drama to be extended far beyond the
human realm. We get to imagine how alien species might develop to deal with the same
problems and issues that confront humanity. We are exposed to new imaginary cultures, new
threats. It provides some of the same fascination as visiting a foreign country for the
first time does, or as one sometimes gets from reading history and discovering both what
is completely different and what is exactly the same about the behavior of people living
centuries apart.

We must, of course, suspend disbelief for such entertainment. Remarkably, almost all alien
species encountered by the
Enterprise
are humanlike, and they all speak English! (In their defense, the Star Trek writers
invented, in the sixth season of
The Next Generation,
a rationale for this. The archeologist Richard Galen apparently discovers that a wide
variety of these civilizations share genetic material, which was seeded in the primordial
oceans of many different worlds by some very ancient civilization. This is a notion
reminiscent of the Nobel laureate Francis Crick's [only partly] tongue-in-cheek theory of
Panspermia.)
2
This has not escaped the notice of any trekker, and it was perhaps most colorfully put to
me by the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow, who said of the
aliens, “They all look like people with elephantiasis!” Nevertheless, he is willing to
ignore, as are most trekkers, these plot contrivances in order to appreciate the Star Trek
writers' exploration of alien psychologies. Hollywood screenwriters are generally neither
scientists nor engineers, and thus it is natural to expect that most of their creative
energy would go into designing alien cultures rather than alien biology.

And creative they have been. Besides the Borg and the omnipotent prankster Q, over two
hundred specific life- forms populated the Star Trek universe at the point when I gave up
counting. Our galaxy is apparently full of other intelligent civilizations, some more
advanced and some less advanced. Somelike the Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans, and
the Cardassianscontrol large empires, while others exist in isolation on single planets or
in the emptiness of space.

The discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence could be, as emphasized by the
practitioners of the ongoing search, the greatest discovery in the history of the human
race. Certainly it is hard to imagine a discovery that might change our view of ourselves
and our place in the universe more than this. Nevertheless, after three decades of
concerted searching, we have yet to find any definitive evidence for any form of life
outside our own planet. One might find this surprising. Certainly, if there is life out
there, it seems inevitable that we should find it, just as many of the civilizations that
independently emerged on several continents here on Earth eventually ran into each other,
sometimes traumatically.

Nevertheless, when one thinks in some detail about the likelihood of discovering
intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the daunting nature of the search becomes
clear. Consider, for example, that some other civilization in the galaxy was informed
somehow of exactly where to look among the 400 billion or so stars in the Milky Way to
find a planet that could support life. Say further that they were directed to look in the
direction of our Sun. What is

the probability even then that they would discover our existence? Life has existed on
Earth for much of the 4.5 billion years since it formed. Yet only in the past half century
or so have we been transmitting any signals of our existence. Furthermore, only in the
past 25 years or so have we had radiotŽlescopes sufficiently powerful to serve as radio
beacons for observation by other civilizations. Thus, in the 4.5 billion years during
which aliens might have been scanning the Earth from space, they could have discovered us
only during the last half century. Assuming that an alien civilization chose to make its
observations at some random time during the planet's history, the possibility of
discovering our existence would be about 1 in 100 million. And I remind you, this applies
only if they knew exactly where to look!

There have been whole books written about the possibility of life existing elsewhere in
the galaxy, and also about the possibility of detecting it. Estimates for the number of
advanced civilizations range from millions on the high side to one on the low side
(liberally interpreting our own civilization as advanced). It is not my purpose to

review all the arguments in depth here. I would like, however, to describe some of the
more interesting physical arguments related to the origin of the sorts of life the
Enterprise
was sent out to discover, and to discuss some of the strategies currently being employed
here on Earth to search for it.

The a priori argument that life should exist elsewhere in our galaxy seems to me to be
compelling. As noted, there are roughly 400 billion stars in our galaxy. It would seem
truly remarkable if our Sun were the only one around which intelligent life developed. One
can propose what on the surface seems like a more sophisticated argument to estimate the
probability that life like ourselves occurs elsewhere, starting with obvious questions
such as: “What is the probability that most stars have planets?” or “What is the
probability that this [particular] star will live long enough to sustain life on a
planetary system?” and then moving on to planetary matters, such as “Is this planet big
enough to hold an atmosphere?” or “What is the likelihood of its having undergone
sufficient early volcanism to produce enough water on the surface?” or “What is the
probability of its having a moon either massive enough or close enough to produce tides
sufficient to make tidal pools where life might originate, but not daily tidal waves?”
While I will discuss some of these issues, the problem with trying to determine realistic
probabilities is, first, that many of the relevant parameters are undetermined and,
second, that we do not know how all the parameters are correlated. It is difficult enough
to determine accurately the probability of everyday events. When one sets out to estimate
a sequence of very small probabilities, the operational significance of such an attempt
often becomes marginal.