Serious Sci Fi: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is the fourth installation of film adaptations of he original 1966 television show Star Trek. In this film, James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and his crew travel back in time to save two humpback whales in a sort of "save the whales, save the universe" plot. (Are lame Heroes jokes still vogue?) The crew must split up in order to abduct, store and transport the two whales efficiently, or else...

Many of you have difficulty suspending disbelief long enough to believe that one can time travel (accurately) by using a space vessel to "slingshot" around the sun. Perhaps, due to the fact that my dad raised us on Star Trek, it's easier for me to deal with this uncritically. Perhaps I fear the consequences of closing minds to, as Mulder would say, "extreme possibilities." I do have a problem with Star Trek IV, however. If you guessed that it involves Mr. Spock mind-melding with a whale then you've guessed wrong. My problem has to do with the actions of Scotty in the above divide and conquer situation, or what I call the Montgomery Scott Paradox.

Mr. Scott's job, in preparation for saving the whales, is to acquire panels of ultra-thick acrylic glass which will be used to construct water tanks in the ship's cargo bay strong enough to transport two humpback whales and tons of water. Since Mr. Scott does not have enough money - 23rd-century economics is apparently drastically different from 20th century economics - he gives Dr. Nichols of Plexicorp the chemical formula for transparent aluminum in exchange for several sheets of plexiglass. Dr. Leonard McCoy, always concerned with the ethical implications of peoples' actions, censures Mr. Scott for giving Nichols the formula and potentially changing the future with possibly dire consequences. Mr. Scott brushes off the accusation humorously, responding, "How do you know he didn't invent the thing?" According to the novelization of the film, Dr. Nichols did, in fact, invent transparent aluminum.

The Montgomery Scott Paradox is better known as the predestination paradox. (Apparently people talked about this paradox prior to Star Trek IV. All I know is that I sure as heck didn't...) If Montgomery Scott's knowledge ultimately originates in the knowledge of Dr. Nichols, and the knowledge of Dr. Nichols originally comes from Montgomery Scott (as depicted in the film), then the result is an infinite loop in which the knowledge doesn't have any true origin. There is no original idea, no inception, only the transmission of an idea that technically should not exist. Assuming that only one timeline / dimension / reality exists (which we technically can't do after the events of J.J. Abrams's Star Trek), this exchange of knowledge without origin cannot happen.

The only way out, according to my imagination, is through multiverse theory, though the intermingling of tangent universes and the propagation of knowledge across dimensions. Even with the help of multiverse theory, however, I have trouble coming up with a concise account of how one can solve this paradox. The Montgomery Scott paradox from Star Trek IV remains, to this interpreter at least, a serious difficulty.

(If anyone can provide an acocunt of how to resolve this paradox, please feel free to make me look like a fool. I would love to learn from your science / sci-fi expertise.)

Serious Sci Fi: The One

In the 2001 film The One, actor Jet Li plays a couple different versions of Gabe Law. Our protagonist is a version of Gabe Law who is satisfied with his life until another Gabe Law from another dimension comes to kill him. The antagonist (Gabe-Law-killer) is motivated by the fact that when one Gabe Law is killed, his strength and power is distributed to all of the rest. His goal is to kill all other versions of himself and become the one with all of the power. The only thing standing in his way is the fact that our protagonist has gained just as much power as our antagonist and he doesn't want to die.

Modern audiences have very little problem with some version of multiverse theory, which teaches that there are a variety of different universes where the world has changed because someone somewhere made a different decision. Sometimes this is the result of time travel and past intervention (Star Trek) and sometimes the different decision merely creates a tangent universe that cannot be sustained for long (Donnie Darko), but sometimes the universes have presumably always existed (Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy) and the multiverse is either infinite (Sliders) or finite (the DC multiverse is comprised of 52 universes). My point is that your ordinary, everyday citizen of the USA is likely to seriously consider that we live in a universe that is part of a multiverse. Maybe this same citizen believes that there is a nexus of all universes, a place that connects one universe to the next (The Dark Tower series, Captain Britain). As a result, audiences might even take the premise of The One seriously.

I think there are some serious problems in taking a movie like The One seriously. We can probably all agree that if there are multiple universes then corresponding individuals will either experience important life moments (birth, death, etc.) at the same time or at different times. As my buddy David Baggett pointed out to me, multiverse theory has no room for the former, for people to be born and killed at the same time across universes. Certainly, this could occasionally happen in one or two universes, especially if there are infinite universes (the multiverse of The One, however, would have to be finite if antagonist Gabe Law is ever to become the one), but if every decision can change the world then it must be able to change not only when one is born and when one dies, but also whether one is born at all.

This leaves us with a universe where everyone is born and dies at different times. For the sake of simplicity, however, let us line up every birth on a number line; let us assume, for this argument, that every version of an individual is actually born at the same time. According to a bell curve, a few will die far too early, and their power will, almost immediately, disperse to the others, and then much later they will start dying out more consistently. Even if we let each individual die naturally, which is a stretch, there will necessarily be one who dies last. Retirement homes would be packed with superhumans, and if the elderly wished to leave they could easily overpower their captors. Armies wouldn't employ the young anymore. After all, one seventy-year-old could potentially overpower an entire platoon of eighteen-year-olds. The oldest individuals would rule the world, not because of respect or experience, but because nobody could defeat them. Because we do not witness these things, the science behind The One seems to be lacking.

The only way I can think of to mend the multiverse of The One is to suggest that it is much more like Highlander than is superficially evident. The immortals of Highlander can only be killed by the sword of another Highlander, resulting in the quickening, a process where the killer absorbs the victim's powers. For The One to work, only murder by an other-dimensional variant could bring about the power-up. There would have to be different energies assigned to beings of different universes (Fringe, Crisis on Infinite Earths), and that energy itself would have to be the catalyst that distributes the power that once belonged to the victim before death. Unfortunately, the "there can be only one" science (magic?)of Highlander is much harder to swallow than multiverse theory itself.

Even putting aside the difficulties of travel between universes in the multiverse, The One simply seems a little too far-fetched to be considered serious science fiction. Of course, that doesn't make the film any less interesting. As you can probably tell, I found Jet Li's The One incredibly interesting. The One is at least interesting enough to give rise to the preceding essay, and that's more than I can say for a lot of movies!