Lessons learned from watching Star Trek

The good news is that there will be amazing and absolutely scientifically impossible technologies available to you. The bad news is that these amazing technologies have about a 25% failure rate and when they fail, they fail catestrophically. The transporter will either magically transport you to another world or it will create an evil version of you hell-bent on your destruction. The lesson to be learned is that technology can make the most mundane activities into an adventure. Whether it be traveling to work or creating a Word document, technology will always have its dark side. Anyone that bought Microsoft Bob knows what I’m talking about.

Aliens are the Yin/Yang of the universe. By that, I mean that there are only 2 kinds of aliens; those that want to be your best friends and those that are hell-bent on your destruction. There are no in-between aliens that couldn’t care less about you. That means that the lessons that we’ve learned on Earth will not help us much when dealing with aliens because let’s face it, at least 99.999% of the earth’s population are entirely disinterested in your daily activities. Aliens on the other hand will view everything that you do as either an opportunity to get closer to you or an opportunity to vaporize you. That is, if you’re lucky. We all know about aliens’ preference for probing.

There’s an old joke that goes, “If a person that speaks two languages is called bilingual, what is someone that only speaks one called? An American.” As it should so happen, in the future it will be completely unecessary to learn another language because everyone will speak English. Even if it’s a race of creatures that you’ve never met, they’ll speak the Queen’s English as if they graduated from Oxford. If they don’t, that’s a pretty good sign that they’ve got a secret supply of probes nearby.

Diversity apparently isn't a very good ideas as it didn't make it into the 23rd century. Spock was the only alien on the Enterprise. Of course he was also Kirk’s best friend so he was one of the good aliens.

Light bulbs will be at a premium in the future. Whenever one of the hell-bent aliens wants to destroy the ship, the captain orders “Red Alert” and all of the red light bulbs light up. But whenever the aliens just make menacing noises, the captain will order a “Yellow Alert” and there are no yellow lights. Either the yellow bulb making technology will have been lost or people of the future will be very self-conscious about not appearing jaundiced.

I use a computer everyday. I do not want it to talk to me. It can play my MP3’s but that’s it. The last thing that I need is to get into an argument with some Microsoft creation about what font I should be using.