What are we going to find studying space?

Exploring space may lead us to get acquainted to other species, and it might as well be a great thing as the end of human civilisation. The various possibilities have been explored left, right and centre by sci-fi writers and filmmakers. While I believe that there is a 100% chance that Earth is not the only inhabited planet, I also believe that such encounters can lead to a happy ending or extinction with a 50-50 chance.

I believe that there must be other inhabited planets because there chances of having similar conditions for evolution on other planets are really high given the increadibly high number of stars and subsequently the possibility of solar systems. Even though chances of a winning lottery ticket is low, there are winners. And this in only if we do not consider some kind of doctoring that resulted in life on earth.

However, given technology's limitations and the distance between Earth and other planets, it is highly unlikely that we will meet life on another planet. We may meet life from another planet as they might also be interested and more technically developed, thus coming to see us.

Regardless of these low chances, I think exploring space has been beneficial for humans. Exploring in conditions that are harsh or extreme has led to several inventions that had wider benefits for people. Exploring space also means that scientists leave their comfort zone with an open mind, again with the potential to know more and to understand more as compared to good old scientific discovery on Earth.  

Vice Admiral insignia courtesy of SmithonianX

Best Star Trek story ever told?

I think this is an impossible question to answer. As the videos in the course were about history and how Star Trek has found a way to revisit and help you rethink controversial moments of history, I started thinking along those lines. My favourite episodes in that respect have been those that took place on the Holodeck or in an alternative reality, and considered the What if...? question. 

There are a high number of such episodes, but my favourite is the two-part episode Time's Arrow from the Next Generation. The theme is interesting for me for two main reasons. It plays with the idea of alien interference in the development of human society. The writers choose a "singularity", a so-called point of no return in human history, the period of the Second Industrial Revolution leading to all developments, but also all cataclysms of the 20th century and still having a major impact on our lives.  While I haven't read any serious considerations of a potential alien or time traveller impact on this sincularity happening, there is a wide range of publications tackling the idea of alien interference much earlier on in human history (eg. Erich von Däniken's books). As the Star Trek Next Generation series also play with this idea in the episode The Chase, exploring the idea from another perspective is even more interesting.

It is also significant if you view it from the perspective of the Prime Directive so crucial in Star Trek and for the Federation. The question I asked myself with regards to this is whether it had been possible to leave Earth intact, if it really had only been Mark Twain who discovered something strange, or if such time travel would have had an effect on our evolution even if the time travellers had erased every sign of interference as much as possible.

How to be All of These?

Intersectionality is a natural part of people's lives, and it is especially prominent when some elements of your identity are in conflict with each other or if external expectations related to your identity are conflicting. I don't think Star Trek influenced by experience, while many other things have, but at the same time I have always been conscious of the covering of this topic across the various series and films. At the same time, I think that some of my identities had a major impact on my public life as well as my beliefs and values. Coming from a European Jewish family I think I am pre-determined to be inclusive. However, the most important elements of my identity have often also been a source of conflict, in ways that are not too obvious.

I had the least number of conflicts or problems, surprisingly, raising from the fact that I am Jewish. At the same time, you are constantly aware of the dangers of growing anti-Semitism and also that it may change any minute. Intergenerational trauma is at play for all of us whose parents and grandparents were Holocaust victims or survivors.

A much richer basis for conflict has been my being a woman, and I am usually in conflict with religious feminists and equality preachers. First of all, I never personally experienced any disadvantage of being a woman. I've always had equal pay. I never felt that objects, services or the whole world is constructed for men as some think.  I have no personal experience of not being treated according to your merits just because your are a woman. On the contrary, I've always felt that I am treated better and more politely as a woman, and I don't even mind if a man offers to carry my heavy bag or opens a door for me. At the same time, I also believe that women should have a real choice in all respects, and since I also believe that is should be true for a decision to go to work or stay at home, I am too far from mainstream, especially European mainstream where they want to push all women to join the labour market. While I am a working woman and in my family this has been the case for women for generations, I can fully support those who decide to dedicate themselves to care and bringing up children.

Another major source of conflict is my being Hungarian and European at the same time. On the one hand, I cannot identify with many typical aspects of a "Hungarian" identity, especially not those related to politics. On the other hand, I have a strong Hungarian cultural identity that politics often try to take away from me and those thinking along the same lines. While I never had any disadvantage at getting a job being a woman, I indeed was scrutinised suspiciously for being Hungarian. In Western Europe there is some bad experience with Hungarians being lazy and trying to find excuses instead of delivering, so I had to fight for being accepted in my European work family.

Lately, it is also not easy to be a liberal European seeing how easily people are giving up all their rights. It is a major internal conflict to still support the idea of a demacratic Europe seeing that our governments are all playing from the script of China.

The most surprising difficulties are strongly linked to my professional affiliation. Being a parent and an expert on issues related to parents go very smoothly together. I think you should not specialise in this field if you don't have at least some parenting experience. But being accepted professionally is a totally different question. Representing parents as stakeholders at a discussion table means that you have to be much-much better prepared professionally than any of your table mates to be accepted. And to prove that you are not dumb "as all parents" are, you must go much further than any professional. This identity challenge has even taken me to acquiring a doctorate in the field at 50. 

Conflicting identities and healing from identity crises

Of the watchlist, the episode that is most interesting for me from a mutliple identities point of view is The Family from the Next Generation. 

On the one hand, we learn more about the upbringing of Worf by human parents, and interesting topics for someone working with parents. It is becoming a more and more important question in the case of adoption how parents can ensure that their child, coming from a very different culture, can not only be supported in understanding the identity of their adoptive parents, but also their birth culture. This would have always been an important matter, but with a child rights approach it is coming to the firefront. In my home country, adoptive parents are generally white middle class people while the overwhelming majority of adoptable children are Roma. They even look different having usually darker skins, so their parents really need to pay attention, especially since our society generally rejects Roma people. Not an easy task, pretty much similar to the task of raising a child of a former enemy, the Klingons, whose birth identity is similary obvious at first sight. 

On the other hand, this is an episode that also depicts the struggle of Picard with his own identity, something he had taken for granted for a lifetime, after his assimilation into the Borg. This raises several questions about the solidity of one's identity, and also about healing after your basic beliefs have been shaken by life experiences. Probably it is more topical than it has ever been since the premier of the series, with so many people, believing themselves to be liberals and having spent a lifetime on figthing for individual rights, have been converted to an autocratic, dictatoric way of life. For these people, healing after leaving the Borg Cube of Covidworld will be a long and painful process, I think.

Conflicts in Utopia?

I think you don't have to take sides when discussing if Deep Space Nine's more conflict-laden relationships went against Roddenberry's dream of a utopian future or if it highlighted the complxities of cross-cultural communication, social and business interaction. 

Roddenberry's utopian vision was basically about the future of mankind, and all crews encountered civilisations that have not or probably will not change and become the communism-like civilisation humans live in in the Star Trek universe. Some other civilisations have lived in long-standing conflicts or have been at war with each other. In the case of Deep Space Nine, Captain Cisco has to learn, sometimes the hard way, how to deal with conflict that doesn't exist in the human utopia anymore. In the Next Generation, Captain Picard may be the ultimate diplomat, but even he encounters huge tension or major conflict that cannot be solved easily.

I think the presence of conflict is a good reminder also for people trying to support inclusion in our present human world, too. We need to have tools and also develop some kind of reaction to groups that live for conflict, that want to exclude others or themselves. For an open person, it is shocking to encounter this, and tackling these topics in a fictional world helps us think and also probably develop strategies. It is easier as it is, again, done by defamilarisation, and it is much easier to be realistic and objective if you are not personally involved or emotionally invested. 

Sprechen Sie Klingon?

Answering questions on the usability of Klingon, I had to do some research. I've already made the confession that I do not speak Kligon at all, and my knowledge of the language doesn't go beyond Qapla. I do enjoy learning languages, but how they sound have a major impact on my motivation to learn them. I am learning a language that sounds awful, but at the moment I need it as I live in a country it is spoken (no, I'm not saying which one). However, I will never be tempted to elarn a language and use it in everyday life if not absolutely necessary if it doesn't resonate with me how it sounds. So, no Klingon in everyday life for me, thank you.

But it is no surprise that Klingon is not a "nice" lanugage. We've heard its father, Dr. Marc Okrand speaking about its creation. It was to sound agressive, guttural and very alien. At the same time, some other languages created for fictious worlds have been designed to sound kind and thus attractive. It is not only Tolkien who created Elvish languages that way, but the language of the N'avi in Avatar was invented with the same intention. I wonder if the original thought of people behind languages was that kind people speak kind languages. Or is it the other way round, and not only in the case of ficious languages? I don't have an answer to this, but if I compare two natural European languages that sound awful to my ears, I tend to say no. In the case of one such languages, the people are kind, helpful and inclusive, and also speak English, so you can avoid figuring out what they are saying in their native language. In the case of the other language, most native spakers I've encountered are rude, exclusive and think a lot about themselves. And guess what, they don't speak English.

Coming back to fictious languages and the colparison between them, what I've found in my research is that Klingon as well as Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones or Avatar languages all have the absolutely necessary basis for them being used in everyday life: they have a complex and full grammatic structure. I've found different opinions on the extent of their vocabulary, but that is something easy to overcome. My guess is that if there will be a growing fandom of people using these languages, their vocabulary will be further developed to find phrases for phenomena, inventions, issues not part of the fictional culture they were invented for. This is the natural way for languages to develop: if something becomes part of life as a new phenomenon, you need to name it and get the phrase accepted by the population spaking the langages. We see it all the time with new things popping up in our everyday life as a result of the ongoing 4th industrial revolution and sociatal changes. 

So, while Klingon is said to be the most developed languages at the moment by many, many other fictious languages have the potential to become languages actually used by people in everyday life. They also sound much nicer, so if English as the de facto common language of the world (and especially science) will ever be replaced, we may look into Elvish lanugages or N'avi   

 

Gender, race, sexuality in Star Trek

 I cannot point out an episode or film that made me stand back and rethink my own stance of these issues. As my first encounter with the universe was the Next Generation, I was actually quite surprised seeing how progressive its approach was and how much it fit the European approach as compared to the American one I had the opportunity to experience personally by then. However, when I watched the Original Series much later on, the depiction of an overwhelming majority of femal characters as sexual objects was strange even though I know that the 1960' was the time of Mary Quaint and the mini skirt.

With respect to gender, race and (a)sexuality, it has always been the Borg that fascinated me the most. We have had a long debate in Europe on integration (that sometimes takes the form of forced assimilation), and the Borg, to me is the depiction of why it is totally wrong. The most striking manifestation of this is them being grey. If we try to suppress that we are actually different in many ways, you simply use all colour, but also soul. 

Another interesting element is that they actually have a Queen Bee. While as an archetype it must be a female, in history you can see probably only men in the same position among humans. Those who wanted to make all their people uniform are all male as far as I can recall: Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Franko just to start with. Interestingly enough they all tried to make their people uniformally grey or black, for some reason colours were mainly missing from uniforms - be it military or the coat worn by all in China. I wonder if any woman woutl be capable of becoming such a queen bee of a country or nation. Strong female leaders - however few there have been in history - are not opressors in that sense. They may have been behind terrible acts, but they don't go for grey. Why could that be?   

Pardon my Klingon

I'm afraid, my Klingon doesn't go beyond 'qapla'. I may try to learn more on Duolingo once I have a high enough level of language I'm currently learning for everyday life and work: Dutch. Working internationally, but mostly in Europe, you need to have some survival phrases in most languages. The one I know in the languages of all countries I've visited is coffee with milk. Another phrase you are supposed to learn once you spend your first evening at a bar somewhere is Cheers. But in general, I have a pretty good knowledge of menu vocabulary in a number of languages. While you work, most people will understand English as the common language, but once you go out to have dinner, you have to be prepared especially in Eastern and Southern Europe. While many people think learning some basic phrases like Good morning or Thank you will impress your hosts, I agree with those who think it is not always worth, especially not squeezing 1-2 badly pronounced words in a public presentation.

Speaking lanugages of very different linguistic and historical origin, Hungarian, English, German, Russian and a bit of Dutch, I can say it gets interesting the moment you become interested not only in how you say things, but also why you say them like that. In many contexts you get to know certain special phrases that are very deeply rooted in local culture, thus you also learn about the cultual context. This goes beyond verbal language, there are often local non-verbal language rules that help you learn about context, culture and history more. Take, for example, the famous fact that Bulgarians shake their heads when agreeing rather than nodding. 

You learn more about the new culture when you don't or don't only follow a textbook or language learning programme. It is really interesting to see what the locals think absolutely necessary knowledge. Very often, if you speak English, you can navigate OK without very basic language, but you need to know some special phrases. In Dutch, one of the first phrases I was taught by a colleague is gedogen. Everybody knows that weed is freely available in the Netherlands. But it is not the case. It is a criminal offence to sell or process weed, but it is an issue that is gedoogt, it is totally accepted that you don't follow such a crazy regulation and you will also not be fined or jailed for it. See, you are already learning about Dutch culture.