Beam me up Scotty...

Beam me up Scotty...

The television serial “Star Trek”, developed in the sixties, was a wildly popular cult classic. So much so, that when the original actors who played the key roles got old, the studios got a new bunch of actors, updated the saliences and went for it one more time, calling it “Star Trek,... the next generation”. In many ways it captured the popular imagination in the same way as the Sean Connery James Bond movies did. Bond also goes on and on in new incarnations and avatars.

“Star Trek”, the younger, still puts in an occasional dated appearance on Star Plus channel. There were memorable characters in it that have been retained in the update. There is the pivotal Captain Kirk of course, with an older and more mature actor playing him. There is the Vulcan, Mr. Spock, with pointy ears and a total lack of emotion, a person very similar to a human, but run entirely by logic! The First Officer is Scotty, forever manning the bridge of the Starship Enterprise travelling the galaxies, and at the receiving end of the celebrated phrase “beam me up Scotty” which ended many a half hour episode in the decades before satellite beams and footprints.

Captain Kirk on his travels, whenever he wanted to return to the Starship Enterprise, would say the phrase into a device rather like a cellular phone of today. A beam would come down from the ship to wherever the Captain might be located, and hey presto, he’d be “beamed” back to the Starship, just as if he was faxed through an invisible elevator! The Star Trek serial was prescient science fiction that is rapidly turning into reality.

Not only have we got space shuttles going in and out of earth’s orbit with great regularity now but we also have hundreds of satellites in geostationary orbits collecting and beaming down all sorts of information and imagery. We have space stations where astronauts live and breathe for months. We have missiles and warheads capable of flying unerringly to targets thousands of miles away and others that can arrest them in mid-flight. We have stealth bombers that can hit a specific chimney from the stratosphere. We have communication technology galloping forward from the telexes and faxes of yore to the modems, e-mailings, cellular telephony and the Internet of today.

There are already prototype planes that can travel between London and Sydney in a couple of hours but the researchers are trying to reduce the effects of the several gravities built up, so that ordinarily unfit people don’t blow-up in the attempt!

Technology marches inexorably on. How long will it be before we can dispense with aeroplanes altogether and just get beamed to England or America? Imagine traffic jams on the beamways as harried businessmen gesticulate wildly at languid holidaymakers to clear their path. And after that why not time travel back to the past or future like the phenomenally successful films in the eighties? That was beaming too even if Michael J Fox did it stylishly in a De Lorean in a techno-update of the man-and-horse syndrome.

Life, it is said, imitates art. It is doubtful that Star Trek, the serial, will go on long enough to see its viewers speaking into little cellular phone-like devices instructing their myriad Scotty archetypes in many tongues, to “beam me up”. But that won’t take anything away from its prescience.

(582 words)

By Gautam Mukerji
1 August 1996
First published in The Pioneer, India, 1996www.dailypioneer.com on August 26th, 1996 in the MUSINGS slot