When I was growing up in New Hampshire, I used to go hiking a lot with a group of friends. One of our running jokes was to announce that we had to go “due North”, which always meant up the mountain, no matter what direction it really was. I’m not sure why it was so funny, but it was.
Last night my Anne and me were watching Star Trek Enterprise because for some reason, this is one of the shows we agree on. (Sidenote: have you noticed that they jazzed up the theme song a little bit this season? They sped it up a bit and added some drums. It’s still pretty melancholy, but what do you expect from Diane Warren? It could only be worse if Celine Dion was singing it. OK, it isn’t quite Deep Space Nine depressing, but it’s up there.)
The whole crew seems like they need some sort of group anger management therapy session this season. The captain is torturing people and they’re all making brash decisions go after the Xindii, some new race that burned a big hole through Florida in an act of galactic ‘terrorism’. Now Enterprise is sent on a mission to find these Xindii and I assume bomb the hell out of them. Sound familiar?
Anyway, the captain is barking his usual obvious reactive commands:
Ensign: They’re hacking into our computer!
Captain: Block them!
Then maybe all this anger gets him confused because he says this:
Captain: Change our course 22 degrees North!
Umm, North? What exactly is North way out in outer space? If you haven’t been paying attention “North” is defined as the direction towards Earth’s North Pole or usually as we measure it, towards a particularly magnetically attractive area of earth someone near the North pole.
So how exactly do you define North in outer space? If they’re using Earth’s notion, then any direction is going to be directly back to Earth for a few light years.
‘Years’ have their own set of problems too. What planet? Why should Earth be the definition?
I hope we never encounter beings from another planet. Integration is going to be a bitch. We can’t even get computers with different software running on them to work properly together. How are we going to get machines made by different species working together?
I know, SOAP!!
I’ve always wondered why they never meet other ships at 33° angles, had problems with the lighter nitrogen count in their atmospheres, or sparked a massive civil war by offering to shake the Blrgrix genitals in greeting.
(There was some discussion about Galactic North being defined as the line from the core that bisects Earth, but again, there’s the bits about “Earth not sitting on the galactic plane” and “why does glorified lump of clay get to claim ‘North'”)
Still, I’m betting that the other races don’t really care if we call anything ‘North’, since all the cool kids line up on 001.001 anyway.
(Or we could simply follow Mr. Goldblum’s suggestion and switch to Macs. They don’t seem to have any problem connecting to advanced alien technology, provided they’re not blowing up New York, Paris and the White House at the time.)
Ah, but there was that episode last season where they encountered that race that found eating in public very offensive. And no matter what new species they encounter, they have no problem docking up with them or downloading their databases remotely and decoding them. We still have a lot of stupidity to evolve out of before we meet another race.