Alan N. Shapiro interviewed by Gerry Ryan about Star Trek
I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Gerry Ryan on April 30, 2010, Ireland’s premier radio and television broadcaster and interviewer.
Gerry was a great communicator.
Gerry was a huge Star Trek fan.
On June 1, 2005, I was interviewed for 45 minutes by Gerry on the Gerry Ryan Show – Ireland’s most popular FM radio programme – about my bookStar Trek: Technologies of Disappearance (Berlin: AVINUS Press, 2004).
This is a partial transcript of the interview. I am still attempting to locate the full transcript.
I think that this interview provides strong evidence that Gerry was a serious intellectual who cared deeply about the future of humanity.
Gerry Ryan: Many of us, especially the Star Trek fans listening this morning, will have dreamt of the day that all of the technologies that we’ve seen and witnessed on the programme in its many incarnations, Star Trek, would one day become reality. Interstellar space travel, that would mean that you’d get to work in seconds, in a different part of the galaxy possibly. No more time wasted in rush-hour traffic. If you got bored with your life, you could do a bit of time travel. And we’d all be talking Klingon whenever we needed to. And my next guest knows more about Star Trek than most. He admits that his knowledge borders on the pathological. His name is Alan Shapiro. And he joins us now in our Limerick studio. Alan, good morning, you’re very welcome.
Alan N. Shapiro: Hi, how are you.
GR: Very good. I’m very excited to talk to you. Because you’re not only a StarTrek fan, but you’re also somebody who’s taken a very keen practical and scientific interest in the technologies that have been displayed on Gene Roddenberry’s child known in its various incarnations as Star Trek. Of course, Roddenberry himself is now floating around in molecular dust in space, isn’t he?
ANS: Yes, and I think that Roddenberry actually did not understand what the original creativity of Star Trek was all about, because he simplified it as a humanist philosophy of all of humanity coming together. And what I’ve done is a very close study of the best stories of The Original Series of Star Trek, which were written by the top science fiction writers of the time. And what we see is that there are existential values embodied, for example, in Mr. Spock, who is very concerned with respecting other cultures, and these alien species that they encounter. And it’s the philosophical, existential values, ethical values of Star Trek, that created the original passion that the fans have. And we have to look at how something originates, in its moment of originality, how it came to be so loved and something that fans were so passionate about, and not what Paramount Pictures has made out of it, into an industry of endless reproduction and repetition of formulae. Not what scientists have made out of it, because, to come back to what you started with, science is being driven today by pop-science science fictional culture. Should I just go on and on?
GR: I’m fascinated to hear you say this, because one of the hallmarks of The Original Series – for those of you who grew up particularly in the sixties – one of the hallmarks of The Original Series is that the stories were very much of a moral or philosophical nature. Frequently, they were old-fashioned moral stories. I can recall a visit to a planet where everything was paradise and idyllic. The women were beautiful. There was no work. The rivers flowed freely. There was no pollution. Food was free. The architecture was magnificent. The environment was perfect. And yet, constantly, throughout the whole story, Captain Kirk was telling everybody that no, this was not the place for them, they’ve got to get away from there, that this was not meant to be, mankind was meant to have challenge in his or her life. And I often remember going — that’s nonsense, I’d really love that planet. But of course he was absolutely right. The technology that surrounded the story featured the communicator, the transporter, the dilithium crystals, teleportation, warp speed.
ANS: Virtual reality, the Holodeck.
GR: But that was only the icing on the cake of the story.
ANS: An episode similar to the one that you mention is called Shore Leave, when they arrive at a planet, and it’s an Amusement Pak Planet created by an advanced civilization where they have virtual reality technology. And anything that you imagine in your head gets materialized, instantly produced by an underground factory and you see it. But Kirk and McCoy and the others in the landing party, they don’t know about this technology, they don’t know that they’re on a virtual reality planet, so everything that happens is a surprise to them. And this is a brilliant literary episode where they experience what I call the surprise of virtual reality rather than its standard technological humming along, as you have in The Next Generation with the Holodeck, where it’s all completely known what this technology does. And I think what we have to see is that we’re living in a time where technologies are more and more integral in our everyday life. And we have to see that it’s not just about how do they work, the computer code, the physics that’s behind them, but what does it mean to us as human beings. In the original Star Trek, the accident of technology is central. The transporter accident of The Enemy Within that splits Captain Kirk into the Weak Kirk and the Evil Kirk, and that episode connects with a whole literary tradition of stories about the double, the shadow self, the mirror self, that we need this – sorry to speak a little philosophically – we need the non-identity of ourselves to ourselves in order to be human. And we’re living now in a culture of cloning, not just the cloning that we debate should scientists be allowed to clone humans, but an entire media culture of cloning, which the more recent Star Trek is an example of, where it just repeats itself and repeats itself. The genetic code. The idea that human existence is reducible to an information formula, an information matrix. The original Star Trek is completely opposed to this. It’s a worldview of the radical sixties and it’s completely opposed to the technocultural worldview of today.
GR: Despite the fact that Star Trek originally is set obviously in Deep Space, involves travel over very substantial distances using the technology of warp drive, the teleportation thing is there, and of course it’s a very sophisticated spaceship that has enormous potential not only as a vehicle for transport, but also as a warship. Despite all of these things, the series and the scripts do all embody all the naivete and the hope and the optimism and the spiritual nature of the sixties. You’re dead right. Star Trek: The Next Generation — they have to work very hard. You have the Empath and you have Picard, who is maybe the most philosophical person in the script. And these people have been parachuted in to make this high-tech celebration more human. Isn’t that of course what’s happened?
ANS: They’ve turned Star Trek into a formula, the repetition of the formula. It’s supposed to be a completely established universe. What the Star Trekindustry of Paramount Pictures emphasizes is: here is this array of characters, here are these alien species, here is the fleet of starships, the technologies. What interests me is not an established universe, but the artistic creation that came at the beginning and made us love Star Trek, and then the industry is just cashing in on that base of fandom. What you just said a minute ago, it’s exactly right. For me, it’s the good side of America. I am American. I’m very critical of American culture, its consumerism, its militarism. But in the original Star Trek, there is this spirit of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes, Kennedy. Space represented… so many young people recognized themselves in the space programme. I was ten years old myself in 1966, stayed up late at night watching these original Star Trekepisodes. I’m a computer programmer, software developer. In America, I noticed the fans of Star Trek are engineers, computer programmers, fascinated by the technologies. I now live in Germany. What I’ve seen there is a completely different Star Trek culture of fans who are focused on these ethical, existential, philosophical values.
GR: That’s very interesting to divide the Star Trek fan bases into these two very distinct areas, those who are obsessed with the technology of it and want to actually get their hands on the technology – or some sort of fake version of it – and those who are more interested in the philosophical values of The Original Series and the theology of Roddenberry’s original ideas.
ANS: But these engineers and computer technologists – in my thesis in my book – they are also secretly fascinated by the humanistic and philosophical values. The secret resistance of the masses. And the technology for them is actually an excuse to express their passion for science fictional culture. And you see that in science itself. If we take the three main Star Trek technologies that actually theoretical physicists and experimental physicists are working on today. And those are teleportation, time travel and faster-than-light speed, which of course is called warp speed on Star Trek. Now with teleportation, you have this quantum entanglement. Physicists in Switzerland and many universities – there are articles all the time in the newspapers about this – they’ve brought to realization actual teleportation of photons and of atoms, exploiting some ideas of quantum physics, so-called quantum entanglement. And they’re able to actually send an atom or a particle of light to a remote location instantly, at light speed. With time travel, fifteen years ago time travel was considered a ridiculous notion by serious theoretical physicists. It was considered unserious, unscientific. But because of the influence of Star Trek on scientists, they have decided to work on time travel. So there is a new branch of physics called wormhole physics. And a wormhole is a kind of black hole. It’s a construction, an idea. A wormhole is a black hole in space that does not have a point as its centre, but has a rotating cylinder as its centre, and the rotating cylinder could be technologically controlled so that a spaceship could pass through the cylinder without being crushed. Because as we know a black hole has infinite density and is the end of time. There is no time in a black hole. But if you could pass through a black hole, you could emerge on the other side in a parallel universe, in a faraway location in space, in another time. You could do time travel. Of course, on Deep Space Nine, there is the wormhole next to the Bajoran space station where the series takes place. So an explosion of official, legitimate, mainstream theoretical physics scientific interest in the wormhole physics of time travel. And that was considered ridiculous twenty years ago. Same thing with faster-than-light speed. Einstein – who by the way I believe was right – in his special theory of relativity said light speed is a constant. It is the absolute speed limit in the universe. You cannot go faster than that. Because of the desire, the wish of Star Trek fans – who happen to be physicists – dreaming of interstellar space travel, because without a technology of faster-than-light speed it would take a thousand years just to get to the next solar system, Proxima Centauri, you have to have this technology of faster-than-light speed. And now you have dozens of serious theoretical physicists working on that problem, dreaming up what they call exotic configurations of spacetime, exotic topologies. A spaceship the size of 10 to the minus 36 millimetres in size with a simulated, pseudo-Enterprise-sized spaceship inside the microparticle spaceship. Ridiculous, exotic, essentially science fictional notions.
GR: Now of course the beauty of The Original Series was when you saw them being teleported to another ship. That’s absolutely fabulous. Imagine if you could do that. You kind of left it at that. [Portion of transcript missing] Overtook your fascination with the technology. Now we stop and we analyze the technology as you’ve just said.
ANS: Yes, that’s very well expressed.
GR: [Portion of transcript missing] replication of the technology. They may be able to move a photon. Moving a human body.
ANS: I believe that they will do that.
GR: Not in our lifetime. Maybe?
ANS: I believe that when we talk about science fiction, science fiction technologies, it’s actually a symptom of what’s going on in our culture today. That’s what chaos theory is all about. We are separated from the future by an abyss of chaos. [Portion of transcript missing] [Science fiction is never about the future, predictions of the future, or the “accuracy” of those predictions. It is about the present, the reality of the present that dominant ways of thinking prevent us from seeing. No one predicted the fall of the Soviet Union or the World Trade Center. We can recognize the impossibility of imagining what the world will be like a hundred years from now simply by imagining the obvious impossibility of people a hundred years ago imagining the world we live in today.] Today we are dreaming of [Portion of transcript missing], [and this is] telling me as a science fiction theorist something about what’s going on in our culture today. The definition of what a human being is is changing. We are so obsessed [Portion of transcript missing] to enter a cloning system. We would be willing to accept our own death. It would be so fantastic to beam myself from Paris to New York to avoid the jet lag. We would be willing to accept any change in what it means to be human to do that. Look closely at the science of quantum teleportation. Exactly what they’re talking about is that the version of myself that will arrive in New York is not actually me as I am at the sending station. The version of myself that will arrive in New York is not me. A copy of me recreated from my informational blueprint.
GR: Jumble up all the molecules that go to make your body [Portion of transcript missing].
ANS: No, not at all.
GR: What does it do?
ANS: The original idea of Roddenberry was the disintegration of your molecules, and their reintegrated at the receiving station. But now we have a different idea, due to the evolution of computer technology. [Portion of transcript missing] [Over the decades, the copious science fictional “explanations” of how Star Trek‘s beaming technology really works, or might someday be able to work, have undergone discernable paradigm shifts. The original notion was that of the dematerialization- rematerialization, matter-to-energy conversion and back physical transporter. This was followed by the concept of the blueprint formula-like, cloning- or information-based digital transporter. Finally came the idea of the “entangled photon pairs” quantum teleporter, which holds the most promise as a real techno-scientific research direction, and has already been built experimentally by physicists for light particle “passengers.”]
GR: [Portion of transcript missing]
ANS: [Portion of transcript missing] Bits and bytes.
GR: So you’re reduced to binary.
ANS: It’s a blueprint formula. A new instance – I don’ know if that’s an understandable non-philosophical term – of yourself will be created at the receiving station, a clone, manufactured in an industrial process.
GR: But definitely not the transportation of Alan Shapiro from New York to Paris.
ANS: I’ve met many people – philosophers and scientists – who absoutely accept that as me. Cook up another instance of me in New York. That new instance of me will have all my memories, all my consciousness.
GR: And that’s OK.
ANS: It will not know that the previous instance was killed. Which is also part of the process, the exhumation of the previous clone. [From the viewpoint of computing, a server application or suite of servlet controllers running on the digital transporter’s parallel processors does concurrent loads of three modular software objects or distributed beans: my genetic data and core memories; the vectors of the target location; and the polled micro-encephalogram of my buffered, unstored memories and real-time intentions, emotions, concerns, and organ coordinates. The software program then parses the various input data streams and synthesizes a formatted output data stream which it passes to the abiogenetic subsystem along with the instruction to cook up another metabolic unit of the “me” series. Gene Roddenberry’s original modernist conception of a physical transporter did not suggest any real threat to prevalent ideas about human subjectivity because the mental picturing of the transmission of a person’s phased matter stream or “energy” within the force field of the annular confinement beam still evoked traditional associations and images of the point-to-point transportation of an intact bodily self. The newer postmodernist digital transporter and hypermodernist quantum teleporter gesture towards a paradigm shift in the predominant definition of what it means to be human. Within this posthuman paradigm, it is conceded that a copy of myself, either created from the same model informational digital pattern or emanating from an initiatory quantum mechanical techno-scientific coupled entanglement, is identical to me. Formulated in terms of the implied new relationship to mortality, it will be a question of accepting the death of the original subject just one single time when the inaugural, startup clone of myself is manufactured. This “death,” moreover, will be fortuitously rationalized by the technoscience-driven conquest of cool as a small price to be paid for the acquisition of a useful and generalized cybernetic prosthesis. Who will not agree to the minor inconvenience of his own “departure” or not be willing to ignore the minor philosophical technicality of “who is really me?” in economic exchange for being able to travel instantly from Paris to New York? Who will not consent to a system of cloning when it grants me a sort of immortality? It is worth noting, however, that this is not the view of Star Trek‘s seminal stories about the transporter like The Enemy Within or The Next Generation episode Second Chances. In the stories themselves, Star Trek is complexly ambivalent, resisting, and critical towards the presuppositions and values of techno-culture. The already accomplished technology of quantum teleportation goes even further in shaking up the fundamental significations of identity, difference, and metamorphosis for human existence. A crucial characteristic of quantum mechanics known as entanglement occurs under certain experimental conditions. Subatomic particles become “inextricably linked” in such a way that a change to one of them is instantly “reflected in its counterpart,” no matter how physically separated they are.]
GR: It’s fascinating. Thank you for speaking [Portion of transcript missing].
ANS: [Portion of transcript missing]
GR: You will be taking part in the Intensive Week of discussion at Framemakers at St John’s of the Cross Church. Talk about challenging.
ANS: Tomorrow morning at 11:00 at the converted church in St. John’s Square. I will be giving a talk about Star Trek for one hour.
GR: [Portion of transcript missing]
ANS: [Portion of transcript missing]
GR: That is Alan Shapiro, the author of Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance. You can tell that he takes it very, very seriously indeed.