Data plays poker with Hawking, Einstein, Newton

I grew up watching Picard, Data and LaForge battle the borg. For this history and science geek, second only to Picard’s “Engage!”, the iconic Star Trek TNG moment is Data on the Holodeck, simulating a poker game with his three scientific heroes: Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking.

Because I’m currently living on one of the most remote places on the planet, surrounded by parsecs of water, forests and fog, I feel no less isolated than Data, on the Enterprise, out near the Romulan border, and today I found myself imagining my own holodeck poker game. Which three would I invite?

Interestingly, my mind went first to living persons (Rachel Maddow, Johnny Depp, Richard Dawkins), but they’re alive—I could just beam them up to the transporter room. No, to be true to the established traditions of holodeck poker, they would have to be simulated real dead people. Data spent time on the Holodeck solving mysteries in the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes, but for poker and conversation, he preferred real but extinct personalities.

So who would it be? Sadly, I am primarily monolingual. So like Data, computer translations notwithstanding I’ll stick with speakers of English. How about…

Benjamin Franklin

Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Katherine Hepburn

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.

Robert Ingersoll.

My creed is that: Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.

Who are your Holodeck Poker partners, alive or dead?

The Prime Directive. It was the unbreakable rule. God, I loved it when Picard would break the rules. A few years ago I realized that Star Trek (TNG) had shaped my ethical make up more than my parents, teachers, the bible, Kant, Hobbes, the list goes on. Believe it or not, Star Trek was normative. This became problematic when it came to application, which is the cold-fusion impossibility for any ethical theory. It tells us what ought to be, but does it also enable us to do what we ought?

I was a teenager before I noticed the plot device on which every more in Star Trek found its expression. Di-lithum crystals paired with replicators. Unlimited energy and the means to use it however you needed. No more hunger, poverty–no more natural disasters. The tacit argument goes a little like this:

Injustice was the result of an unresolvable imbalance of wealth and power. Once the human race has the technology to provide a truly egalitarian standard of living, the better parts of human being can be cultivated. There’s the catch. Two catches actually.

First, we don’t have di-litium crystals and replicators. There’s still not enough to go around. Second,–thank you Joss Whedon (Serenity)–the effort to make human beings ‘better’ usually lands us in a some form or other of genocide.

What’s the answer? Huh. That’s a big one. Maybe it looks a little like this: Shifting our posture away from one pole of human capacity toward the middle. Balance our self-preservation instinct with out empathy so that your survival and my survival are entwined. And, be careful of making human beings ‘better.’ I don’t think we can make human beings better, nor do I think we can make the world a better place–better in the sense of being something other than they are. So, what do we make better? We improve our superstructure. We can challenge our culture of consumption, which has become a thinly veiled neurosis: if I buy more I can avoid death.

Not sure we need crystals to change what we can change. Just a thought.