Saturday, May 17, 2008

Burn baby, Burn!

One hundred and thirty-eight days.

I know this has nothing to do with writing, but it is an interesting story about an amazing 107-year-old light bulb that has been burning 24/7 for all those years. Check out the explanation in the comments. Talk about a green bulb that would kick the damn energizer bunny's butt! Makes me think about the episode on the original Star Trek series when they found Vger (Voyager) which had been retrofitted by an alien culture to wipe out imperfect life forms but stops its incredibly long mission temporarily when it erroneously thinks that Captain Kirk is its pappy. (Makes me wonder how many children Kirk really had in the universe.) Shame they had to use the basic same plot in the first Star Trek movie.

But, what if an alien race had visited here in the past. What if they had a ship programmed to return here. What if they all died enroute. What if the seemingly benign ship misinterprets a programming message and starts to eradicate life on Earth. Would Hezbollah lie down with the Massad in order to create a counter-attack like in "Independence Day"? Or would there be a Congressional Hearing while the Earth burns to find out why Condeleeza Rice didn't create a plan to deal with this eventuality when she was in office? I'm thinking we send it the Texas Rangers to deal with that unruly alien computer.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That episode was called "The Changling" but it wasn't the Voyager. It was simply a deep space probe.

Supposedly, the union of man and machine in the 1st Star Trek movie resulted in the creation of the Borg I'm not sure that's canonical, but it is supposed to be in the post series lore.

My kids devoured all of the Star Trek shows.

Rick Bylina said...

It does not compute. I am wrong. I am not perfect. I must wait thirty seconds and be thrown out into space and then blow myself up. Oh woe is me.