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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

star trek

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From Science Fiction to Science Possibility

Dr. Ronald E. McNair was the second African-American to work in space (the first was Dr. Guion “Guy” Bluford), and died with his Space Shuttle crew members when the Challenger exploded shortly after take-off in 1986.

My alma mater, Texas Tech University, is one of 200 US universities that runs a McNair Scholars program for low-income, first-generation college students and graduate students from historically underrepresented populations. The program has been federally funded since 1986 as part of the Congressional response to the Challenger accident.

Three years ago, Dr. McNair’s brother, Carl McNair, shared with NPR how Ron had achieved his goal of becoming an astronaut. He achieved his goal because he dreamed and acted beyond the norms of his time. Carl has also written about Ron in the book In the Spirit of Ronald E. McNair – Astronaut: An American Hero (2012). In the clip below, Carl reflects on how both reading and Gene Roddenbery’s Star Trek: The Original Series inspired his younger brother.

A show came on TV called Star Trek. Now Star Trek showed the future where there were Black folk and White folk working together. And I just looked at it as science fiction, because that wasn’t going to happen really. But Ronald saw it as science possibility…

How was a colored boy from South Carolina wearing glasses, never flew a plane—how was he gonna become an astronaut? But Ron was the one who didn’t accept societal norms as being his norm; that was for other people. And he got to be aboard his own Starship Enterprise. —Carl McNair

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Humankind as Plague

Big Think‘s Tauriq Moosa revisits Alan Weisman’s World Without People. Star Trek fans might recall Q’s first trial of humanity on The Next Generation. Moosa asks: how could we justify human existence to such aliens if evidence for our value is limited?

Are We a Plague? Well, That Depends

Climate change and imported disease may have killed them, but most paleontologists accept the theory Martin advocates: “When people got out of Africa and Asia and reached other parts of the world, all hell broke loose.” He is convinced that people were responsible for the mass extinctions because they commenced with human arrival everywhere: first, in Australia 60,000 years ago, then mainland America 13,000 years ago, followed by the Caribbean islands 6,000 years ago, and Madagascar 2,000 years ago. — Alan Weisman

As Moosa explains, writers, scientists, and philosophers have been exploring whether humanity is Earth’s boon or threat or some indeterminate combination of both for several centuries. Their question remains unsettled, though: there’s still too much uncertainty about environmental stability, population levels, geo-cycles that are beyond human interference, and the impacts of our technologies on life and the systems that supports life.

Check out the World Without Us and Scientific American websites for some engaging graphics, like New York City from Day 2 through Ice Age.

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When the Pilgrims Met the Borg (Stueart)

My friend Jerome Stueart recently shared his 2010 story “When the Pilgrims Met the Borg: Faith, Perfection, and the Assimilated Pilgrim.”

It’s a fantastic mash-up of colonial America and the Star Trek universe, written in the voice and style of Plymouth colony’s William Bradford.

My faith, it scares me.  Its efficient, courageous march across the landscape of the New World, taking Pilgrims, Natives, Quakers, Fishermen and turning them into Borg–seems to match our purpose, but not our aim.  Do we seek to create only those who agree? — Jerome Stueart