Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent
(Image: Comicon de Montr?al 2012)
Truth got stranger than fiction in low Earth orbit this week as the crew of the (fictional) starship Enterprise entered into a fascinating dialogue with the crew of the (non-fictional) International Space Station. The exchange sent sci-fi fans into uncontrolled paroxysms of geeky rapture.
The catalyst was the arrival of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield at the ISS (via a Soyuz space taxi) on 22 December. A major-league online social networker, he has been tweeting some stunning images of the Earth and the atmosphere in between his shifts as the station's flight engineer.
His orbital imagery prompted William Shatner - Captain James T. Kirk of the Enterprise in the original?Star Trek?TV series -?to tweet: "Are you tweeting from space?" to Hadfield.
The astronaut crafted his reply in true Trek tradition: "Yes, Standard Orbit, Captain. And we're detecting signs of life on the surface." Such were the words often uttered on the show when the Enterprise pulled up above a strange, new world.
Cue floods of Twitter ecstasy. The message was retweeted over 5000 times and "favorited" by 3700 users. Responses varied from "this conversation is VERY cool!!" to "I feel there's a story here" and "an astronaut messages a starship captain - LIFE IN THE FUTURE!".
It didn't end there. Enterprise helmsman Lieutenant "Mister" Sulu, aka actor George Takei, posted the pair's cosmic communication on Facebook, and then joined in on Twitter, joking about not wanting to beam down in a red shirt - the Enterprise's red-shirted crewmembers had a notoriously short life expectancy.
All it needed now, said Hadfield, was for Enterprise science officer Spock to join in. "Live long and prosper," tweeted actor Leonard Nimoy shortly after, quoting his character's celebrated, uber-civilised Vulcan greeting.
A shift in the matrix then moved the twitversation to follow-up series Star Trek: The next generation, with the show's Wil Wheaton (who plays the starship's Wesley Crusher) offering the ISS some handy advice on how to defeat pesky nanorobots.
Then things gloriously returned to the world of non-fiction with the involvement of Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon. He lamented: "Neil and I would have tweeted from the Moon if we could have but I would prefer to tweet from Mars. Maybe by 2040."
The fictional inventions of?Star Trek haunt many a real innovation, whether it be the multifunctional handheld communicator (pretty much a smartphone), a real-life tractor beam or multispectral cloaking devices. The recent Twitter storm suggests the franchise's dilithium crystals are far from depleted as an inspirational construct.
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