By Emily Levesque, University of Washington
Astronomy is a fascinating field of science. In the middle of the 20th century, a television program on space captured the national imagination. Combining cutting-edge special effects with a knack for imagination and storytelling, it inspired viewers young and old to ponder the mysteries of the universe. We are talking, of course, about Star Trek.
Did It Start with Star Trek?
Star Trek premiered in 1966. It was the product of Gene Roddenberry’s imagination, enthusiasm for space travel sparked by the space race, and a boatload of science fiction influences.
For decades, many professional and amateur astronomers have credited fictional worlds or stories with first inspiring their interest in the stars. People grew up on E.T. and Star Wars, and devoured books like Carl Sagan’s Contact. Today, we refer to fanciful stories about adventures in space as science fiction, but stories of adventures in the night sky stretch back for centuries, if not millennia, and can be found in countless indigenous histories.
A Space Adventure
Let’s look at an example: one story of astronomy and exploration imagines a newly created universe, with its creator traveling across the land and filling it with new people and languages. This creator carried a bunch of languages with them, and every time they created a people, they gave them a language. When they got to the western ocean, they liked the land so much that they stayed there, filling it with people who spoke all sorts of languages.
This made communicating difficult, and it quickly caused a problem because the creator made a small design mistake: they’d built the sky too low. It was convenient at the time, letting people travel in and out of the sky at will, but it also meant tall people were whacking their heads on it and it was forever getting in the way.
Eventually, a huge gathering was called. Nearly everyone came, and they all managed to agree on a common word and signal that would let them lift the sky at the same time. They lifted again and again and slowly lifted the sky to where it is today.
Is This How the Big Dipper Came to Be?
The problem was that a few people missed the meeting. This included three hunters, one of them with his dog, chasing four elk through the forest. The elk went running up into the sky and the hunters followed them, not realizing that while they were up there everyone else was lifting the sky until it was too high for them to make it back down. This meant that the four elk were stuck in the sky and so were the three hunters. Even the dog got stuck in the sky, sitting by his hunter’s side. The story tells us that they’re still up there today; in fact, you’ve probably seen them. They make the constellation that we know as the Big Dipper.
This is a story from the Snohomish people, whose traditional lands are just north of Seattle. It’s a fictional story, but just like any other good space adventure it imagines a time when people could freely travel into the heavens and makes listeners look at the stars for a little longer. Anyone hearing this Snohomish story would immediately recognize the Big Dipper afterward whenever they looked up, and most would probably make a particular effort to look for the hunter with his hard-to-spot dog. Today, a curious listener might investigate further and learn that they’re named Mizar and Alcor, and that there are actually six stars contained in that apparent pair: Alcor is a binary star system and Mizar is a quadruple system.
This article comes directly from content in the video series Great Heroes and Discoveries of Astronomy. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Science Fiction Writers
Science fiction, as we traditionally think of it, has always held a deep fascination with space travel and faraway worlds: Jules Verne imagined a trip to the moon in one of his books; Orson Welles made an indelible impression on listeners with a fictional radio broadcast describing an alien invasion; and authors from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Ray Bradbury to Andy Weir imagined the perils and adventures of a journey to Mars.
Many of these science fiction authors simply used space as a setting—they may use a dangerous planet or hostile aliens as story elements, but the details of their books are less about the physics of stars and galaxies and more about the feelings, imaginings, and politics of the people they feature. Still, for countless audiences, especially younger audiences, these stories brought their imaginations into space and fed their curiosity about the wider universe.
Science Fiction in Movies and TV
Star Trek was immensely influential in this arena. Today, astronomers who study the science of life on other worlds remember an episode from season one where the Enterprise crew encounters silicon-based life forms. This was a pretty good fictional premise, rooted in the shared atomic properties of silicon and carbon, the atoms that form the backbone of almost all biological molecules found on Earth. Star Trek also offered early and progressive role models: Lieutenant Uhura is a favorite of many scientists today who saw themselves in the brilliant black professional woman who worked as the crew’s translator.
A decade after Star Trek premiered, movies and television had decisively joined books as key mediums for science fiction. By the time Star Wars arrived on the scene in 1977, space was a common setting for stories. Star Wars added its groundbreaking special effects to the mix, making space come alive for people in a way it never had before. Still, these visually spectacular mediums were mainly being used to tell imagined stories: space was a setting or a backdrop, with educational content left to classrooms and textbooks, or to planetariums.
Common Questions about Science Fiction
Star Trek was the product of Gene Roddenberry’s imagination, enthusiasm for space travel sparked by the space race, and a boatload of science fiction influences.
Many of the science fiction authors simply use space as a setting—they may use a dangerous planet or hostile aliens as story elements, but the details of their books are less about the physics of stars and galaxies and more about the feelings, imaginings, and politics of the people they feature.
Star Trek offered early and progressive role models: Lieutenant Uhura is a favorite of many scientists today who saw themselves in the brilliant black professional woman who worked as the crew’s translator.
