“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before.” – Introduction to each episode of the original Star Trek series

USS Enterprise model used in the original Star Trek series Credit: Shannon Lucas

Many of us will remember the Bush years as the administration under which Star Trek: Enterprise went off the air, an brief dark age when it appeared there would be no Star Trek on the air again for a very long time. Now we have Barack “Hope” Obama as President, and, with his administration, a brand new Star Trek movie, 43 years after the show first aired. The original Star Trek was a grass-roots phenomena, only able to stay on the air for a second and third season because of an unprecedented letter-writing campaign by its fans. The show thrived in syndication, leading to six television series totaling 716 episodes across 30 seasons, 70 million books in print, 40 video games, and this week’s release will mark its 11th feature film.

Nichelle Nichols, NASA Recruiter Credit: NASA

Highly progressive philosophically, Star Trek portrayed a future of world peace for Earth, a united human race venturing amongst the stars. The cast was ethnically diverse, with one of the first major African American characters on an American television series in Chief Communications Officer Uhura, whose name comes from the Swahili word for “freedom,” and who came from the “United States of Africa.¹” Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, was persuaded by Martin Luther King Jr. to stay on the show as a role model for the black community when she considered quiting after the first season.

In addition to Uhura, Star Trek included the first positive portrayal of a Japanese character in helmsman Sulu. In the midst of the Cold War, the show featured the Russian ensign Chekov on the bridge. The Scottish Engineer Scotty and country doctor Leonard McCoy rounded out the cast’s cultural diversity.

The show tackled social issues, like slavery and religious freedom in Bread and Circuses, where the crew encounter a planet similar to ancient Rome, complete with oppressed Christians. The episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, where the Enterprise picks up the last two survivors of a war torn planet, each half black and half white, but their colors on opposite sides of their faces, deals with the insane senselessness of racial discrimination. In numerous episodes, America’s cold war with Russia and the war in Vietnam were alluded to in the Enterprise’s encounters with Klingons and Romulans.

With a firm historical, moral, and intellectual grounding in its storytelling, Star Trek was able to become one of the most culturally influential television shows in history. The fans were able to convince NASA to name the first space shuttle orbiter after the USS Enterprise.

Cast of Star Trek in front of the Space Shuttle Enterprise Credit: NASA

In the episode Who Mourns for Adonais? the crew encounters Apollo, last survivor of a band of space travelers who inspired the Greek gods. This is a theme reflected in numerous Star Trek episodes, as with the Organians in Errand of Mercy, Vaal in The Apple, and the Metrons in Arena. Aliens with godlike powers resembles Michael Shermer’s spin on Clarke’s Third Law, “Any sufficiently advanced Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is indistinguishable from God.”

Star Trek offers the possibility of a similar future to the human race. The show has stood out and remained strong these four decades because of its positive message and vision. With their incredibly advanced technologies and their strong moral character, the crew of the Enterprise are role models for a human race. The documentary Trekkies reveals a fan base comprised of geeks and nerds, but they are also scientists, inventors, and doctors. The USS Enterprise’s name follows a long history of over 26 real-life ships from the HMS Enterprise (1709-1749) to the 1961 Aircraft Carrier USS Enterprise (CVN-65) to the 1976 Space Shuttle Enterprise and soon the VSS Enterprise Virgin Galactic’s first commercial spacecraft. The course of human history is one of incredible social and technological improvement, we are reaching further into the stars, where we have Star Trek’s visionary outlook to guide us.

“As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Starfleet personnel may interfere with the normal and healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes introducing superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely. Starfleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship, unless they are acting to right an earlier violation or an accidental contamination of said culture. This directive takes precedence over any and all other considerations, and carries with it the highest moral obligation.”

¹ The original pilot for Star Trek included a woman in the role of second-in-command, but network executives at NBC demanded she be cut from the show. Despite the show’s progressive vision, the mini-skirts and secretarial positions women filled in the show have always been an unfortunate part of its history, and not part of Gene Roddenberry’s original vision. Later spin-off shows would put women and other ethnicities in leadership positions.

“I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed.” – Max Tegmark

The ancient Greeks, Hindus, Buddhists, and Medieval Alchemists thought the universe was composed of five classical elements: air/wind, water, Earth, Fire, and Aether/Space. Recently, I came across the most basic way to categorize everything in our universe into two eleements, matter-energy and information.

In the realm of physics, everything is matter-energy, a single element that takes two basic forms as explained in special relativity. Then Cybernetic systems came along, which described systems in terms of matter-energy interactions, but added the element of information, which creates a feedback loop for the system. Throughout history, some philosophers and theologians have considered information processing a separate element, the soul, but we know this Cartesian Dualism is a conceptual illusion.

Cartesian Duality Credit: Rene Descartes

Roundworms do calculus to find food or avoid unpleasantness. Computers do calculus too. They do this with logic-gates inside the arithmetic logic unit (ALU), an electro-mechanical sequence of events in the circuitry that produces a result we read on a screen and understand through an electro-biochemical sequence of events in our brains, two very different matter-energy systems understanding the information in very different ways, but interfacing nonetheless.

Photons reflected off our surroundings hit the retinas of our eyes, which signal the brain via the optic nerve, where 100 billion neurons make sense of the image and decide how to react. It is unacceptable to write this symphony of interactions off as information. It seems as though we are simply labeling “information” what we cannot yet explain through matter-energy mechanisms in detail.

Can information be reduced to matter-energy, and return us to only that single element? Matter and energy were once considered two separate and distinct elements, until Einstein came along and proved they were the same thing with the E=mc² equation.

Stuart A. Umpleby published a paper in the journal Systems Research and Behavioral Science titled Physical Relationships among Matter, Energy and Information, which attempts to connect these three concepts. Using Einstein’s established mass-energy equivalence formula, the relationship between the frequency of light and photon energy, which is observed in the photoelectric effect, and Bremermann’s limit, which is the maximum rate at which any system can compute based on E=mc², 2×10⁴⁷ bits/second/gram, Umpleby comes up with the following triangle connecting the dots:

Energy-Matter-Information Triangle

Information is difficult to define in this context. It’s not the words on a sign, as the photons being reflected from the symbols exist regardless of there being an observer to see them. It’s not data, as numbers, charts, statistics are only meaningful at the moment someone sees their patterns in real-time or brings them into awareness from memory. Information is processing, an action, a verb. It does not exist when there is not a brain or computer to create it. Information and consciousness are synonymous, the merging of data and the immediate awareness of its significance.

Another diagram I found online, makes this relationship linear rather than triangular, information comes from matter, through energy:

Energy-Matter-Information Transformations

There is little else I could find on this question, and nothing concrete. All of this is still vague, speculative. Humans started out working primarily with matter through agriculture, then we began producing massive amounts of energy with the Industrial Revolution, now the Information Revolution is putting this question right in our collective face, and, in doing so, brings the possibility of answering it.

Century Plant

According to W.H. Barreveld, without the date palm, the human race would not have been able to migrate out of Africa. Dates provided an energy-dense food for journeying across the desert, are mentioned 30 times in the Bible, and 22 times in the Quran. Every part of the palm, its wood, leaves, fruit, and nuts are useful, and civilization has been relying on them going back more than 5,000 years with the Mesopotamians.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Is up at 365tomorrows. It’s about a programmer who writes an application capable of inferring a universe from the laws of reality.

Director Almod peered at the computer screen frowning in contemplation, “I don’t get it.”

“It’s a star,” Jaed offered helpfully.

“I know it’s a star,” Almod gaze never broke from the image. “So what?”

“Sooo…” the smile gracing Jaed’s face only moments before had vanished, “So it was made from scratch.”

Almod looked at her, quirking an eyebrow, “On a computer.”

“Yes. On a computer,” Jaed’s hands began playing with one another in that way they were prone to do when she was anxious. This was not going the way she had planned, “I gave the computer eight decillion virtual hydrogen atoms, described in exquisite detail, and defined an environment with physical laws just like our own Universe, and…” Jaed’s mouth scrunched up at the look on Almod’s face.

“And it made a star,” the Director’s frown deepened.

“I–I don’t like to think of it as making a star, so much as the computer inferred a star,” Jaed swallowed.

“What are the applications of this?”

“It’s a proof of concept for the Cartesian method,” Jaed stumbled over the words trying to get them out. “In the 17th century, the philosopher Descartes argued that everything about reality could be known through logical inference. In the 18th century, John Locke argued that reality could best be understood through experimentation, and this has been the dominant paradigm for centuries, the scientific method. The only place Descartes’ idea has had any relevance is mathematics.”

Director Almod’s eyes were starting to glaze over, and Jaed’s hands continued wringing one another, “So you see, this program, this simulation, is a proof of concept. I’ve given the computer a cloud of the most basic atom to work with, and, using gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, it has inferred fusion, producing helium. It has even inferred several gas giants in orbit around the star. So you see…?”
“Hmph,” Almod grunted and Jaed’s heart sank. “We live in a Universe a few billion years old–”

“13.5 billion years old…”

“–Running that on a computer, even accelerated, you might have something useful to the company in… What? A few million years?” the Director shook his head, “I’m sorry, but we can’t dedicate more computing power to something with such mediocre chances of profitability. We don’t do science experiments here.”

Almod left the room without another word, leaving Jaed to swivel back to her disparaged accomplishment. Helium now made up 0.27 percent of the atoms in the simulation, Oxygen and Carbon made up 0.006 percent and 0.003 percent respectively. Neon and Iron were there too, and when the star eventually went supernova, Jaed was certain it would produce all the other elements found in the Universe.

But that event was decades away (not “millions of years” as Almod had grossly exaggerated), and would only occur if the server was allowed to run that long. In the meantime, Jaed could at least watch her simulated Universe of a single star for her personal enjoyment, maybe get a Discover magazine article out of it.

She zoomed in on a tiny speck of clumped matter, a planet made of carbon was orbiting the star. It had an atmosphere as thick as the layer of varnish on a globe. H2O molecules were pooling on its surface, forming lakes and oceans.

There was also a strange discoloration spreading across the planet that puzzled Jaed. There were no chemical reactions with the few elements present in the simulation that she could think of to produce the color green.