Instant Genius - Dr Erin Macdonald: Is there any science in Star Trek?

Episode Date: February 13, 2020

This week we’re boldly going where no Science Focus Podcast has gone before. Dr Erin Macdonald is the new science consultant for the Star Trek franchise. With the release of Star Trek: Picard on Amazon Prime, she takes us through the science of both the new and classic series. She tells our production assistant and resident Trekkie Holly Spanner about supernovae, what a science consultant really does, and whether warp drive is possible. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: What if the Earth’s magnetic field died? – Jim Al-Khalili Building a base on the Moon, and crafting believable sci-fi – Andy Weir Dr Becky Smethurst: How do you actually find a black hole? Kathryn D. Sullivan: What is it really like to walk in space? Mark McCaughrean: How do you launch a successful space mission? Colin Stuart: The most mysterious objects in the Universe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit Name Audio, to learn more. Why I love what I do in Hollywood is that I'm not there to be a naysayer. I'm there to take an improv approach and say, all right, yes, and. You know, you want to do this crazy time travel type storytelling venue. Okay, how can we make that work? Let's just make sure that you don't say anything wrong.

Like, I'll just make sure that what you put in is mostly correct. and that your approach is good. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello, I'm Sarah Rigby, online assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine.

This week, we're boldly going where no science focus podcast has gone before. Dr. Erin MacDonald is the new science consultant for the Star Trek franchise. With the release of Picard on Amazon Prime, she takes us through the science of both the new and classic series. She tells our production assistant and resident Trekkie Holly Spanner about supernovae, what a science consultant really does, and whether warp drive is possible. Just so you know, we'll be moving from Thursday to Monday, so look out for our next episode in just four days' time. Now, here's Erin.

Have you watched the first episode of Picard? Yes, I watched it last night, just like a lot of other fans all around the world. And what did you think about it? Oh, I loved it. It had a great nostalgia feel, you know, I think it really, because I've been, obviously, I've been watching Discovery, I've been keeping up track with any of the other Star Trek stuff that's, you know, come out. But I think this really did feel like watching the old next generation content that, you know,

haven't seen in almost decades now. And yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a blast. I'm excited to see what the rest of the season looks like. Absolutely. What is it about Star Trek that you think really resonates with viewers? Well, I think that it's drawn people in as sort of a classic sci-fi, right? That it's got a vision for the future in terms of technology, in terms of philosophy, that draws people in as natural sci-fi fans. But I think what key, keeps bringing people back to Star Trek is the community around it. You know, that if you find yourself talking to another Star Trek fan, you will talk for hours and you've made a new friend. And so I think that, you know, the content of Star Trek, the amount of

stuff that's out there and just that general positivity that tends to surround it just brings out the best in people. And I mean, I have met so many friends just through being fans of Star Trek. that, you know, I think it really does create a community that surpasses a lot of other fandoms. Yeah, it's, it is almost like the original fandom. You know, we can talk about the surge of conventions and fan fiction and all of these things around fandom. And Star Trek was really one of the first on all those counts. Yeah. So what is it about Star Trek and sci-fi in that gets people engaged in real science? Well, I think Star Trek in general, and like you said, science fiction,

has always been used as an allegory for our own society. You know, it's a long accepted truth that Gene Roddenberry used Star Trek to tell stories about humanity that he couldn't do if it wasn't set in a future. You know, if it wasn't in the sci-fi world. And part of that is not just talking about humanity, that you can have people from different races and different genders and different cultures existing in the same world in the future,

but that they are able to utilize technology and that they're able to use technology that isn't available at this time to further that vision. And so if you go back to the original series, you know, they're using communicators that for us is what we're doing right now, you know, speaking, speaking thousands of miles apart. And that was possible, but it was prohibitive at that time. And now it's par for the course. You know, doing video conferencing wasn't a thing. That wasn't possible. 50 years ago. And now it is. But that was something

that was used in Star Trek. And so this idea that like it pushes us forward, seeing that vision is something that inspires us from a representation standpoint, from a philosophy of how we want to live our lives, and from a technological standpoint that it's like, that's our goal. That's where we want our society to be.

And now we have a road. Like now we can build. that roadmap of how to get there. And so the science in Star Trek has always kind of drawn people's attention because they feel like this is where I can get to one day. You know, we had video conferencing was a thing in Star Trek 50 years ago and it's something we use today. Flying around in spaceships is not something that we have, but it's something that we still strive for. You know, that's something that we still want. Yeah. So you've been brought in as a science. consultant for season two of Bacard. What does this job involve? Well, so my job is actually like a science

consultant for the whole franchise of Star Trek. So they have brought me in and I got my start kind of explaining science using Star Trek, using Star Trek to teach science. And what they've realized, they being the powers that be at Star Trek, they've always known that science is a big part of what Star Trek is. And so part of bringing me on is the fact that they have so many shows going on at this time, including Picard, that they want to really have science be a big part of that. So part of what my job entails is as a science consultant in Hollywood, what you do is you read scripts. You talk to writers, you talk to showrunners, you'll discuss the story arcs, you'll discuss episode to episode, what type of technology they want to use, what science is driving any story points. And it's mostly not so much me coming up with stuff, but being that past. through that I say, oh yeah, you know, that's a great idea. Oh, and by the way, here's some cool new technology that actually kind of ties in so you can kind of throw this science Easter egg in there.

Or stay away from saying this. You know, this is cool. Just make sure you phrase it in a certain way that is going to make sense. Yeah. And so that's kind of where my role stands. But then I also continue to provide fan content. You know, I have a video on Star Trek. where I explain how WarpDrive works, and I'll be a guest on the Star Trek cruise, where I continue to use Star Trek to teach science, and the fans really, really enjoy that. Is there any technology in Star Trek that you would like to see? Oh, Warp Drive is like mine. If we can go faster than the speed of light, like our whole universe opens up.

And Star Trek is actually, I mean, faster than light travel is a necessity for most science fiction. If you want to tell an interesting story about space travel, you have to travel faster than the speed of light. Otherwise, most of your story is going to be a little bit slow. Or just set in our own solar system, which is also fine.

But, yeah, we need faster than light travel. And the best thing about Star Trek is like, that is actually the anchor for Star Trek as a whole being what it is. you know, back in the movie First Contact, it was, you know, Zephrm Cochran invents warped drive and that's what causes the Balkans to show up and induct humanity into the Federation. And that is the anchor point for us to progress as a society. So I am 100% about warp drive.

That's all I want. Do you think it's theoretically possible and do you think we'll achieve it by 2063? So I think theoretically, mathematically it's possible. The science behind it is basically the idea that nothing on the surface of space time, nothing in our universe that has mass can go faster than the speed of light, because that is the construct of how our universe is set up. It's, you know, Einstein's theory of general relativity, that our universe is a sheet of space time.

And if you have zero mass, you coast along. the surface at a fixed speed, which is a speed of light. So nothing can go faster than that. But nothing says that spacetime itself can't go faster than the speed of light. And so what warp drive is, is this idea that, like, you build a bubble of space time around your ship, and that bubble propels you faster than the speed of light. So, like, mathematically, it passes the sniff test, you know, like, I'm okay with it mathematically. I think the, uh, the limiter to being able to do that is just our knowledge of space time itself, which we are continuing to advance through things like detecting gravitational waves, but also energy. That's basically,

if you want to warp space time, and you can do that through mass or through energy, you know, you have mass, you put a bowling ball on a trampoline, and that's going to curve space time, or you would use an equivalent amount of energy, and that's a lot of energy. And that's a lot of energy. And so our studies in energy is what will get us from point A to point B when it comes to developing warp drive. So I am 100% about it. We don't have a clear roadmap to get there by 2063, but I will be the first champion. I don't know if I would necessarily strap myself to the first warp drive, but I would be championing along from a distance. That makes sense.

Yes. Everyone has the internet in the pocket these days, and we can find out the answer to most questions in a few seconds. So do you think being a science consultant now is harder than it was in, for example, Kirk's Day? Oh, for sure. I think that when I present myself, when I introduce myself to writers and I tell them, you know, oh, I'm a science consultant. I would love to work on your story. There are a lot of writers who are like, well, I don't need a science. science consultant because I have the internet. And I don't think them for that. I think that that makes perfect sense, especially from a showrunner standpoint. Running shows are expensive to do. And if you have assembled a great team of writers, there are researchers in writers rooms. That's a, that is a

position. But those researchers are very broad scope. Me coming in as a PhD in astrophysics to be a science consultant is kind of a hard sell sometimes because of that exact point. It's it's oh, we can look it up. And they also, I think a lot of writers have had bad experiences with science consultants, not just because they can look stuff up on their own. They're not going to tell them anything they haven't heard before, but because there can be a lot of negativity around that position where they will submit a script or a story idea to a scientist. And that scientist will just turn around and be like, no, that doesn't work. Sorry. Science says no. But that's that's really where I take a different approach. My approach is for both aspects. Yes, you have the internet and that's great. And there are

a lot of good stuff out there. And Wikipedia for science is fantastic, is well curated. There's a lot of great content out there. But I'm the person who can filter through. the nonsense really quickly and take the very technical explanations and distill it for what you need. So I can quickly, I mean, for what it might take a writer a day to kind of curate and look through all the stuff that's out there, I've got a lot of that knowledge in my head already. And if I need to look something up, I know exactly where to look and I know exactly what is actual science and what is internet nonsense, of which there's a lot of out there. And even if writers have looked stuff up on their own, you know, I'm coming in in the

middle of a lot of shows that, like I said, Picard, you know, I was brought in after season one is wrapped. Star Trek Discovery has been going, you know, they're in their third season right now. And so a lot of these writers have been doing all this work before. My point is that it eases that burden for them, that they now have someone that they can reach to to do this stuff for them. And then from the positivity standpoint, you know, my role and why I love what I do in Hollywood is that I'm not there to be a naysayer. I'm there to take an improv approach and say, all right, yes, and, you know, you want to do this crazy time travel type storytelling venue. Okay, how can we make that work? Let's just make sure that you don't say anything wrong. Like, I'll always. just make sure that what you put in is is mostly correct and that your approach is is good. And I love that because I come from being a sci-fi fan as well as a scientist. So for me, it's a dream job.

Are there any concepts in sci-fi that are just not possible? Oh, I mean, as much as I think a lot of us want transporters, especially we have to go sit in an airport for a while. that really is one of those physics says no situations because of something called the Heisenberg principle. So Star Trek kind of has used multiple explanations through the past on how transporters work. And that has to do with, you know, does it break your entire body down and just map where all your components are and send that as data? Like we send emails. and then you get rebuilt out of other materials somewhere else,

or are they actually sending your particles from one place to another? And we see both explanations in Star Trek. But regardless, you have to break down your body into all of its fundamental components and rebuild it somehow. And in order to do that, you have to know exactly where all of your particles are. And Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in physics does not allow you to. to do that. You just can't know exactly where subatomic particles are at any point in time. But what Star Trek did is brilliant. And this is the sort of thing that I hope to bring to

writers' rooms in the future. They just have a component as part of the transporter technology called the Heisenberg Compensator. That's all it is. They don't say anything more than that. They just have a transporter and they have a Heisenberg compensator, which for us science geeks, we're like, oh, okay. So they compensate for Heisenberg's principle somehow. And we don't need to question it because it takes place hundreds of years in the future. And that's kind of, I love when science fiction does that. They just say, okay, physics says no, but we're a science fiction story.

So we solved it at some point. And we don't need to go in any more detail than that. I think a lot of artificial gravity generators do the same thing. There are a lot of sci-fi shows that are like, oh, we have gravity because we have a gravity generator. Don't ask us any more questions than that. We have a gravity generator. And that's fine.

And I 100% accept that as long as they're not saying anything wrong when they try to explain it, if they explain it at all. Yeah. So Star Trek in general, it seems to be getting darker with each new series. Do you think this is a reflection of our current perception of our current perception of the future? You know, it's interesting. I think a lot of people who watch Star Trek have always seen it as a bright, shiny thing. But if you go back to those original, there are some dark episodes, but it's still very flashy future sci-fi feel to it. They're still telling dark stories.

You know, if you watch Deep Space Nine, there are some dark episodes in there. And there are some story arcs that span seasons that are very dark. So I don't think like the recent Star Trek shows, I guess particularly discovery, because that's kind of a lot of the new content, is necessarily darker than it was before. I think it's just a stylistic approach to the visuals of it that makes it feel a little bit darker, as well as we've gone from being episodic storytelling from week to week episode to episode contained stories to being serialized where you're telling one story over the course of 13 to 16 episodes. That is what's new. And if you took Deep Space Nine or in some instance

as Voyager, but some of the recent, and actually Star Trek Enterprise as well, if you took like the Zindy War or the Dominion War and those stories and took out all, of the standalone episodes and just made it one, you know, 13 to 16 episode season, it would be dark and you would, and it's a dark story. But there were a lot of filler episodes. And I love the filler episode. Give me those filler episodes any time of day. But that's just not how we tell stories these days in general. A lot of the streaming culture, a lot of the science fiction stories, we're not getting week to week 24 episode seasons. more. We're getting 10 to 13, and this is, you know, from an American standpoint, I know the UK has done this for storytelling for a long time, but in America, we've been doing, you know, 24 episode seasons for decades. Now we're starting to take out those filler episodes and tell one story over a shorter amount of time, and sometimes those stories can feel very dark. And so while I do think that Star Trek has always been a reflection of where humanity is and where humanity is right now isn't in the best

place. I think that it's been doing that for years. It's been reflecting the darker parts of society for a long time. And that goes back to the original series, but I think more importantly in the Deep Space Nine and the Enterprise stories, those have always been very dark for better or worse. And I love that. So I think, yeah, it's interesting. to see how storytelling has changed more than the types of stories that are being told. Can we just talk briefly about the first episode of Picard? So it's, without giving too much away, the Romulan sun goes supernova, which very neatly ties it in with the recent reboot with Chris Pine, and it addresses the question of why Spock was

alone in trying to help the Romulans. We don't think our son is mad. massive enough to go supernova, but what is the likelihood of the earth being destroyed by our sun in other ways? Yes, so that is a great question. Yes, the Romulan sun goes supernova and destroys Romulus. Our sun is not massive enough. So if you look at solar masses, our sun is pretty average. So our sun is not going to spectacularly combust and explode. What is going to happen is it's going to run out of fuel over time.

So the way our sun works right now is that it is fusing hydrogen into helium. And when it does that, because it's got this really dense center, hydrogen and hydrogen particles are so close together. They fuse. They become helium and that releases energy, which we see is sunlight. And over time, that's going to use up all the hydrogen in the center of the sun, all the helium will then start to fuse into carbon. And then you're going to start to just get heavier and heavier materials until our sun just kind of runs out that it's only so massive. It's only going to fuse for so long. As it starts to run out of material, once all that hydrogen is burnt out and it's starting to fuse helium, what's going to happen is it's going to start to grow in size because the processes have changed.

and it becomes what we call a red giant. So what our sun will do is its radius, it'll start to grow, it'll start to get dimmer, it'll start to get redder, and it'll start to get a little bit cooler. Cooler in multiple aspects, but temperature-wise. It will swell until its radius is about where Earth is now. So it will almost consume Earth. Now, I've told this story to many audiences over many years. The worst situation is when I tell this story to a group of eight to nine-year-olds who are there to learn about space.

And then their eyes get wide and they start to cry because they are going to be consumed by the sun. But this is, you know, the sun is about halfway through its life cycle. So four and a half billion years, it's expected to live for about 10 billion years. So we're about halfway through that. So this is way, way, way, way in the future that this is going to happen. But when it swells to that size, Earth will be consumed, but the whole solar system is going to change. And actually places like Titan, which is one of Saturn's moons, is not going to be the worst place to live. And then it's not going to explode in the sense that it's going to combust and release a ton of energy at one time.

It's going to kind of fizzle out. When it fizzles out, we are no longer going to have sunlight. So that's really what our concern is. Earth is already long gone. If we're happily living on Titan, assuming we live for another 4 billion years, our biggest concern will be that we don't have any radiation from the sun anymore. And it will be, it will kind of fizzle out, and all of the material around the sun will be returned to space in the form of just base elements again.

All that stuff that's been fused will be returned to space as a cloud, as a nebula, and then stars will form out of that billions of years down the line. So it's just great cycle. And this is what Carl Sagan said decades ago, that we are all stardust, that our elements, the things that make us up, the things that make up the earth, all came from that cycle of stars' life, which is awesome. Space is awesome. So, yes, Romulus exploding is a great tie-in.

It is not something we need to worry about our star doing anytime soon. That was Star Trek science consultant, Dr. Erin McDonald, talking about the science behind the sci-fi series. The February issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. In it, we look into the greatest mystery in science, what actually is consciousness. Now, we have a message from our sister magazine, BBC Sky at Night. Back Garden Astronomy Week is back from the 2nd to the 9th of March. If you've ever wanted to get into astronomy but not known where to start,

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