Star Trek, throughout all its incarnations, has been notable for predicting many of the technological advances we now take for granted. Everything from Uhura’s wireless ear piece to flip-open communicators to data pads have their equals (in one form or another) in the present day, whether they be blue tooth, cell phones, Palm Pilots or Blackberries.
But who knew that an astronomical phenomenon would be the next prediction on the list to come true! But before I go any further, we need some background information…
Here is a bit of the synopsis of the second season Star Trek - The Next Generation episode Where Silence Has Lease:
While en route to the Morgana Quadrant, the U.S.S. Enterprise is engulfed by a mysterious “hole” having no dimensions and void of all energy and matter. Captain Picard is perplexed by this mysterious oddity which cannot be measured or defined in human terms, and the crew is caught in a trap which, by their standards, does not even exist.
Unable to escape from the powerful hole, Riker and Worf decide to investigate an abandoned starship also marooned in the trap. On board the ship, the officers are confounded by a series of inexplicable incidents, but return safely to the Enterprise.
The crew is then confronted by a giant human eye which peers in at them through the main view screen. The being, calling Itself Nagilum, explains that he is using the Enterprise in an experiment to study human life — specifically, the many ways in which humans die. Wishing to observe death in all of its forms, Nagilum plans to use one-third to one-half of the crew as human guinea pigs.
It was a solid, creepy episode…but I never expected real life to imitate THIS sort of art. The following story I found today on the CBC News website:
THERE IT ISN’T: SCIENTISTS DISCOVER HUGE VOID IN THE UNIVERSE
Last Updated: Friday, August 24, 2007 | 11:08 AM ET
Astronomers observing a distant region of space say they have discovered something truly remarkable: a whole lot of nothing.
The enormous void, nearly a billion light years across, is empty of normal matter such as stars, gas and galaxies. It’s even without dark matter — the mysterious unseen mass often inferred from observations of regions outside our solar system.
And while it’s not the first void to be discovered in the universe, it is the largest, said Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota.
“Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,” said Rudnick, who reported his findings along with Shea Brown and Liliya Williams, also of the University of Minnesota, in a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
“What we’ve found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the universe,” Williams said.
Several thoughts are running through my mind (after I stopped laughing the laugh only a long-time Trekkie like me would understand)…but the one over-riding throught is the advice the Enterprise First Officer, Commander Riker, gave to to the helmsman after surviving their encounter with the killer-void in space…perhaps something our own puzzled scientists should take under advisement:
“Oh, and Ensign Crusher…if you find any other holes…steer clear.”
