Ever watch an episode of Star Trek and wonder when you might get your hands on some of the gee-whiz technology from the show? Based on Friday night’s “The Science of Star Trek” event held at Brooklyn’s Galapagos Art Space as part of the World Science Festival, here’s a brief idea of what to expect in the future: Transporters – forget about it; Warp Drive – perhaps; Time Travel – maybe; Sentient Robots – definitely.
“The Science of Star Trek” brought together author and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss; astronomer and ET-hunter Seth Shostak; and theoretical computational researcher Eric Horvitz in a fascinating free-wheeling panel discussion hosted by actress Faith Salie (who had a brief, recurring role in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) that used clips from the various incarnations of Star Trek as jumping off points for scientific discussions. As the evening began, one thing became abundantly clear: Star Trek is as popular among members of the scientific community as it is with the general public, and scientists like to argue about issues raised by the television show.
One hot topic on Friday was the idea of alien life, or more specifically why aliens on Star Trek always look and act so human – Seth Shostak quipped that most Star Trek aliens appear as though they could be “fixed” with a quick trip to a plastic surgeon (on a side note, Seth stated he believed that we would very likely discover fairly conclusive signs of life beyond Earth within the next 20 years). A larger critique made about Star Trek aliens was that they always seem to be, in terms of technology, at about the same level as the humans in the show. In reality, all the panelists agreed that aliens, at least those with the ability to visit Earth, would be far, far more advanced than we mere humans. So, should we be worried then, as noted physicist Stephen Hawking expressed recently, that super-powerful aliens would quickly conquer Earth if they discovered our little blue planet? The panelists didn’t seem worried about Hawking’s scenario. Thanks to decades of mass media broadcasting, Earth-based radio signals have blanketed the nearby (“nearby” in galactic terms that is) neighborhood – amazingly, one new star system a day begins to receive “I Love Lucy” reruns. So any locally based super-advanced aliens already know we’re here, and they probably don’t find us interesting enough to merit a trip (a comparison was made to a person trying to strike up a conversation with a beetle). Another possibility to explain why ET hasn’t dropped by, as Eric Horvitz noted, is that alien civilizations may have destroyed themselves before they became super-
advanced enough to make an inter-stellar trip. If humans are any indication, it seems civilizations develop the ability for space travel at roughly the same time that they develop nuclear weapons, so it may be that aliens blow themselves up before they reach the “Star Trek” level. Or then again, they may just be robots.
The steady march towards a future of self-aware robots was another recurring theme of the evening. The panelists agreed that many scientists today consider the human brain a kind of super-sophisticated, biological computer, one that someday will be replicated by an artificial, silicon-based one, much like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s resident android, Data. And that day may be sooner than we think… Eric showed two clips from his work in artificial intelligence programming with Microsoft that featured computer-generated office receptionists, who were able not only to respond to human queries, but were also able to “read” the expressions and emotions of the humans speaking to them and to then incorporate this information into its responses. One compu-receptionist even showed a level of empathy towards a sick child.
So then, do we need to fear our future digital children? Sentient computers/robots deciding their human creators are no longer necessary is a staple in science fiction (think Skynet from the Terminator series), but the “Science of Star Trek” panelists didn’t believe this was necessarily the decision self-aware computers would make. Eric thought that sentient computers might even share our ethics and morality, while Seth and Lawrence thought that as sentient computers program other sentient computers, a new life form would emerge – one that may eventually replace humanity, but in an evolutionary sense, and that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. These evolved, thinking computers would have a different set of priorities and needs 
than humans; here the discussion circled back to the alien visitors question. The panel speculated that advanced alien societies may exist as sentient robots rather than as biological entities, since becoming digital is the next logical step (they indicated) in evolution. And for digital beings, coming to Earth to talk with the primitive organics just isn’t that interesting to them.
It made for a fascinating discussion and was typical of the discourse during the evening. The “Science of Star Trek” managed to talk about deep scientific issues in a way that was accessible to the layman audience, but without dumbing things down (a real credit to the panelists given their level of theoretical knowledge about the topics they discussed). And the evening was not without its lighter moments. Moderator Faith Salie got a round of laughs as she introduced a clip of herself from her role in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which then spurred a talk about the ethics of genetic enhancements 
(another area where the panel thinks we are rapidly catching up to Star Trek); while Lawrence Krauss used an inflated condom (the only prop available from the WSF staff he claimed) to give an excellent and entirely understandable explanation of how the Enterprise’s Warp Drive system would work under the laws of physics – but you can’t help but wonder what would Scotty think of the teaching methods?
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