Saturday…….and all is well……but only after I cleanse the brain of the filth that is our politics…….a regular purge keeps the demons away…….today I found the ultimate of nerdism!
Remember the conventions full of Trekkies? Dressed like Orion slave girls or Klingnons or Androrians and a couple of Spocks with a sprinkling of Uhurra ………and then there were the endless spin-offs……NG, Voyager, DS9, etc…..and on to the space burials of beloved members of the Star Trek family…….all that aside there is a cool story taking shape……..
In its time, the original Star Trek series has inspired many inventions – the flip-open mobile phone (based on the crew’s communicators), handheld medical diagnostics (based on its tricorder) – but now an engineer of 30 years standing says we should go the whole way and build the Starship Enterprise.
The cost? A trillion dollars (£648bn) – but if spread over 20 years, argues “Dan”, who has proposed the idea, it would cost only 0.27% of the US’s gross domestic product, or about half what the Apollo project did in the 1960s.
“Just look how many young people were inspired to study engineering by the character Scotty from Star Trek,” he writes on the website buildtheenterprise.org, which was set up to push the idea. “Well, I bet a lot of young people would be inspired if we actually built the first generation of /Scotty’s ship/.”
“Dan” admits that it won’t actually be the dilithium-powered warp-driven faster-than-light photon torpedo-bearing galaxy-class starship piloted by Captain James T Kirk. He writes: “The Star Trek adventures in the NCC-1701-x Enterprise ships take place starting in the year 2245. Our technology today is just not up to building a starship; that will have to wait for a Gen4 ship or later.”
What can I say? The Nerd in me loves this story……thoughts?