I really miss the Friday night episodes of Battlestar Gallactica. Stargate on Friday nights is interesting, but it runs like a soap opera.

Which really got me thinking about story lines, and what makes a good story. There are so many humans, and we all have some traits and thinking patterns in common, yet we are also so different in what we find interesting. So writers have to scatter shoot a story line and see what sticks. At least I think there is some randomness to the types of stories that grab our attention. Yet there are certain types of universal stories that seem to hold attention across a majority of humans. We all seem interested in stories of creation. Across all religions there seems to be a fascination with "how all of this" got started. Even people that say they do not believe in a god seem to relish in scientific studies of early earth and "how life started". We all seem to want to know "where we came from".

So, where does Science Fiction fit in the scheme of things? It's certainly not universal. It's not religious. But I think it is one form of expression of our hope for the future. Sci-Fi fans, for the most part, hope that man will one day travel faster than light, that we will be able to say "Beam me up, Scotty" and the list goes on and on.

This train of thought led me back to technical problems with this "hope". We are not likely to ever solve the problem of "beaming up" a human being. If we ever become capable of dissassembling and reassembling a human body between two distant points, we'll be capable of far more than simply "beaming up". We'll be able to change our very nature, our physiology and more importantly, our beliefs, memories and genetics. If we were to ever reach the point we see on Startrek, will we even recognize ourselves? Will we possess the genetic memories and behaviors that even make us human? I have a feeling the ending will end up looking a lot more like "The Fly" than "Star Trek".

What about faster than light travel? What if we never reach relativistic speeds? What if it takes 10,000 years to travel to another star? How would we accomplish such a trip? How would we maintain a mission over 700 generations? Would we ever undertake such a mission? Could any event ever cause us to band together well enough to make such a trip possible? I think it's a lot more likely that we're stuck in our solar system for the forseeable future. I also imagine our attempts at faster than light travel with anything larger than a neutrino will end up soundling a lot more like a Darwin award than a scientific success. (I wonder if the speed of light problem is going to end up looking a lot like the neutrino discovery process - tons of money, lots of acrimony and decades before the results are successful.)

So here's my idea for a Scf-Fi story line. We're stuck here. Earth is it. There's no suitable place in the solar system for us to live, except for Earth. We're stuck with chemical combustion to drive us through space. We're stuck with an ever increasing population and ever decreasing resources. Will it be a happy ending, or will it be a horror story? As an aside, I think as long as we continue to pay our entertainers more money than God, while allowing our youth to ecshew science, math and engineering, we'll be watching sci-fi far into the future. (The good news here is that the TV's will be tricked out beyond imagination in the future. The bad news is we'll be watching instead of doing.)

I guess I better get back to coding, but I sure miss watching Battlestar Galactica.