Uss Enterprise Quotes

Captain James Kirk was named after Captain James Cook and the USS Enterprise was named after the HMS Endeavour. Star Trek’s catchphrase “to boldly go where no man has gone before” was inspired by Cook’s journal entry “ambition leads me … farther than any other man has been before me”. Enterprise and Endeavour, the first and last space shuttles, were named after the ships of Kirk and Cook. There are bound to be other links between Captain Cook, Star Trek and the US Space Program and some Australian university will no doubt award a grant to explore this issue of undisputed national significance.

Isn’t antimatter what fuels the U.S.S. Enterprise?

Jake, did you see anything? I didn’t.” “Nothing, Captain.” “Astrogator?” “Just blankness. Please, can we have the lights on?” I flipped on the overhead lights. “Science Officer?” “USS Enterprise being chased by a Klingon cruiser.” “Sharpie, that’s a false report. The Enterprise doesn’t run from just one Klingon cruiser.” “It was going boldly where no man has gone before. Aside from that, I didn’t see a thing. Let’s try another universe; this one stinks.

Apparently this was based on postings on the Internet, and I thought it all ridiculous, not quite sure who these Ripperologists were. I joked that their threat brought to mind Klingons in formation ready to fire upon the U.S.S. Enterprise.

The last refuge of the Self, perhaps, is “physical continuity.” Despite the body’s mercurial nature, it feels like a badge of identity we have carried since the time of our earliest childhood memories. A thought experiment dreamed up in the 1980s by British philosopher Derek Parfit illustrates how important—yet deceiving—this sense of physical continuity is to us.15 He invites us to imagine a future in which the limitations of conventional space travel—of transporting the frail human body to another planet at relatively slow speeds—have been solved by beaming radio waves encoding all the data needed to assemble the passenger to their chosen destination. You step into a machine resembling a photo booth, called a teletransporter, which logs every atom in your body then sends the information at the speed of light to a replicator on Mars, say. This rebuilds your body atom by atom using local stocks of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Unfortunately, the high energies needed to scan your body with the required precision vaporize it—but that’s okay because the replicator on Mars faithfully reproduces the structure of your brain nerve by nerve, synapse by synapse. You step into the teletransporter, press the green button, and an instant later materialize on Mars and can continue your existence where you left off. The person who steps out of the machine at the other end not only looks just like you, but etched into his or her brain are all your personality traits and memories, right down to the memory of eating breakfast that morning and your last thought before you pressed the green button. If you are a fan of Star Trek, you may be perfectly happy to use this new mode of space travel, since this is more or less what the USS Enterprise’s transporter does when it beams its crew down to alien planets and back up again. But now Parfit asks us to imagine that a few years after you first use the teletransporter comes the announcement that it has been upgraded in such a way that your original body can be scanned without destroying it. You decide to give it a go. You pay the fare, step into the booth, and press the button. Nothing seems to happen, apart from a slight tingling sensation, but you wait patiently and sure enough, forty-five minutes later, an image of your new self pops up on the video link and you spend the next few minutes having a surreal conversation with yourself on Mars. Then comes some bad news. A technician cheerfully informs you that there have been some teething problems with the upgraded teletransporter. The scanning process has irreparably damaged your internal organs, so whereas your replica on Mars is absolutely fine and will carry on your life where you left off, this body here on Earth will die within a few hours. Would you care to accompany her to the mortuary? Now how do you feel? There is no difference in outcome between this scenario and what happened in the old scanner—there will still be one surviving “you”—but now it somehow feels as though it’s the real you facing the horror of imminent annihilation. Parfit nevertheless uses this thought experiment to argue that the only criterion that can rationally be used to judge whether a person has survived is not the physical continuity of a body but “psychological continuity”—having the same memories and personality traits as the most recent version of yourself. Buddhists

A crash of thunder shakes the storage room, startling us both. Another one follows on its heels, causing Beau to lift his head and howl. I scoot over to his side, scratching him behind one ear. “It’s okay, buddy. We’re safe in here.” I hope, I add silently. “Look at Sadie. She’s not being a scaredy-cat. Oops, sorry, guys,” I toss over my shoulder toward the cats. “Just a figure of speech. How’s it going over there in the USS Enterprise?” “You always talk to them like that?” Ryder asks me, his voice a little shaky. “Pretty much.” I look at him sharply, noticing how pale he’s gotten. A muscle in his jaw is working furiously, and there’s a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. “Are you okay?” He doesn’t get a chance to answer. Another clap of thunder reverberates throughout the small space, followed by a horrible cracking sound and then a terrifyingly loud crashing noise. I rise to my knees, looking toward the door that leads out. “What the hell was that?” Ryder reaches for me, his fingers circling my wrist in a manacling grip. “You can’t go out there, Jemma!” I struggle to release myself. “I’ve got to see--” “No! There’s a goddamned tornado out there. Shit!” He pulls me toward him, and I practically fall into his lap. He’s shaking, I realize. Trembling all over. “What is wrong with you?” I ask him. “What’s wrong with me?” His voice rises shrilly. “You’re the one trying to go out in a tornado. You’ve got to wait till the sirens quit.” “I know. But crap, that sounded like something came through the roof.” I scoot away from him, putting space between our bodies. I can smell him--soap and shampoo and the clean, crisp-smelling cologne he always wears. I can smell something else, too--fear. He’s terrified. Of the storm?

Heated seats or talk radio? Or music? I can do all of them at once if you want.” He starts flipping switches, making the corresponding sound effects. Leave it to Dan to turn his super fancy Range Rover into the USS Enterprise. My body betrays me and I snuggle deeper into the warming leather seats. “Where are we going anyway?” “Why, the happiest place in Natchitoches, of course.” He waves his hands in a broad gesture to encompass the whole town. I panic for a second when he doesn’t immediately put his hands back on the wheel. “Oh my God, will you be careful!” He smiles at me then glances down at his knee, which can apparently steer just fine. “I’d never endanger your life, fair lady.” I roll my eyes and take a relieved breath. Something walks into my thoughts and takes a seat. Is he…flirting? “Looks like no matter how hard you try, you can’t stop talking like you’re in the middle of a LARP game.” I find myself scratching at my nail polish again, so I tuck my hands under my thighs. “I didn’t know I should be trying to not talk that way. In fact, I try to find every opportunity to practice my verbal skills. I can’t seem out of practice when Craytor returns again.” He holds a fist up in the air. “Heads shall roll, maidens shall be rescued, and elves shall be insulted!” I make sure he sees my blank stare followed by a slow blink before saying, “Right. You never said where we’re going.” “The Phoenix, of course. We don’t exactly have Disney World Natchitoches.” He puts on an über-cheesy smile, which is way more endearing than the fake mischievous one he tried back at school.That smile turns on the heated seats around my heart. Oh God, did I just think that? Gross. He nudges my arm. “Get it? Because I said the happiest place in Natchitoches. And that’s a well-known advertisement slogan for—” I hold my hands up. “I get it. Really, I get it

By the beginning of March, enough of Iwo Jima was controlled that landings and take-offs could be maintained without fear of suicide attacks, and Enterprise remained off the island until March 9. “If the [USS Carrier] Enterprise and Task Group 58.5 had played a secondary role during the Tokyo raids, they made up for it at Iwo Jima.”[10]

My reputation is burning up and crashing to the surface like the USS Enterprise on Veridian III.

It’s hard to explain how important Star Trek is to me. I think I went to my first Star Trek convention when I was fifteen. So to hear that Leonard Nimoy—Mr. Spock—was on the phone, I was not processing what he was saying. I could only focus on his amazing voice. I thought this was a phone call to see if he’d agree to do the part, but in his mind, he had already agreed to do it! He had one specific note on the script, which is that Mr. Spock doesn’t use contractions when he speaks. He says “cannot;” he doesn’t say “can’t.” And I remember just being chagrined that I hadn’t intervened and had allowed this to go on. I loved Spock so much, I used to sneak lines of Mr. Spock dialogue from the movies and TV shows into Big Bang Theory and give them to Sheldon. There’s an episode early on where Sheldon and Leonard are having a fight, and Penny asks, “Well, how do you feel?” And Sheldon replies, “I don’t understand the question.” That’s from the beginning of Star Trek IV where Spock has reunited with his mind and his body, and is being quizzed by a computer about his status. So Leonard Nimoy was just one of many fanboy moments. I once said to LeVar Burton, “If I could go back in time and tell my teenage self there would be a day where I would eventually talk to three crew members of the USS Enterprise, I’d fall over and die.

The first video game based on a movie or television series is probably Mike Mayfield’s 1971 text-only game Star Trek, a strategy game about commanding the USS Enterprise against the Klingons. But Mayfield created the game as a hobbyist on a Sigma 7 minicomputer, a device that required as much space as several refrigerators. It hardly seemed to be at risk of becoming a commercial product.

During the chaos of the morning attacks, planes inbound from Enterprise, as well as a squadron of B-17 bombers coming from the mainland, had come under assault—from the attacking Japanese as well as the defenders. That was somewhat coincidental and to some extent unavoidable. Enterprise lost six planes in the melee. Halsey had been right to be worried. They were indeed shooting at his boys. By evening, however, defenders should have been alert to distinguish between friend and foe. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, incoming friendlies,” the control tower on Ford Island advised all ships and shore installations as this second group of aircraft from the Enterprise, the six Wildcats, entered the pattern with landing lights ablaze. But over the dry docks, nervous gunners on the Pennsylvania opened fire. That was all it took. The entire harbor erupted in gunfire. Four of the six Wildcats were shot down and three American pilots killed.

The absence of battleships in the task force that steamed with Enterprise toward Wake had little to do with the growing importance of the aircraft carrier as a strategic weapon. There were many officers in the Navy—“black shoes,” as opposed to those upstart aviators who wore brown shoes—who clung stubbornly to the doctrine of battleship might. But hurling fourteen-inch shells a dozen miles at one’s opponent was about to change. For Arizona or other battleships that might have accompanied Enterprise, it was a simple matter of math. The top speed of the Arizona and the standard classes of battleships built before the Washington Treaty was 21 knots (24 mph). Enterprise, the slowest of the three carriers then in the Pacific, could move along at 32 knots (37 mph). When it came to covering distances and getting the job done, Enterprise and its consorts were high-speed delivery machines. The plodding battleships simply could not keep up. Had they been along, the trip to Wake would have taken 50 percent longer, exposing the force to enemy submarines that much longer.

Whatever anxiety crew members on the Arizona and throughout the Pacific Fleet felt about the future would have been heightened had they known that on this same Thanksgiving day, the War and Navy departments in Washington issued what came to be called their “war warning” to all commands: “negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days.” At Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, met with Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., the commander of his carrier forces, and Army Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, commander of land forces in Hawaii. Kimmel and Halsey had already organized task forces of cruisers and destroyers around the three aircraft carriers then operating in the Pacific: Lexington (CV-2), Saratoga (CV-3), and Enterprise (CV-6). To guard against a concerted attack or sabotage, they adopted a general protocol that only one carrier task force would be in Pearl Harbor at any one time. At the moment, this meant alternating between Lexington and Enterprise because Saratoga had yet to return to Hawaiian waters after a lengthy overhaul at Bremerton. A similar alternating routine was supposed to be in place among the three battleship divisions. Of the nine battleships in those three-ship divisions, Colorado was currently in Bremerton undergoing its own overhaul. With the war warning in hand, Admiral Kimmel and General Short concerned themselves primarily with the outer boundaries of their commands and not with Hawaii itself. The chief topic they discussed with Halsey was the delivery of aircraft to reinforce garrisons on Wake and Midway islands. Short wanted to deploy Army squadrons of new P-40s, but Halsey quoted an arcane regulation that Army pilots were required to stay within fifteen miles of land and asked what good they would be in protecting an island.

Clusters of destroyers were tied up together at the far end of the East Loch beyond Ford Island, but it was the moorings along the island’s eastern side that commanded the most attention. These were home to the backbone of the Pacific battleship fleet. Numbered F-1, or Fox-1, to F-8 from southwest to northeast, the moorings, or quays, spread out almost three quarters of a mile. With good reason, everyone called it Battleship Row. By the evening of December 5, Battleship Row was home to the following ships: A small seaplane tender, the Avocet (AVP-4), tied up at F-1 for the weekend. F-2, which normally berthed an aircraft carrier was empty, Lexington and Enterprise both being at sea. Northeastward, California, the flagship of the Battle Force, moored at F-3. The oiler Neosho (AO-23), which was unloading a cargo of aviation gas and scheduled to depart for the states Sunday morning, occupied F-4. Then, things got a bit crowded. At F-5 and F-6, moored side by side in pairs, with fenders between them, sat Maryland on the inboard (Ford Island side) with Oklahoma outboard, and Tennessee inboard with West Virginia outboard. Astern of Tennessee lay the Arizona at F-7. All of these battleships were moored with their bows pointed down the channel to facilitate a rapid departure to sea.

is well known that increases in computer power and speed have been exponential. But exponential growth sneaks up on you in a way that isn’t intuitive. Start with a penny and double your money every day, and in thirty-nine days you’ll have over two billion dollars. But the first day your wealth only increases by a single penny, an amount that’s beneath notice. On the thirty-ninth day, however, your wealth will increase from one billion to two billion dollars—now that is a change impossible to miss. So like a hockey stick, the graph of exponential growth barely rises from the ground for some time, but when it reaches the beginning of the handle, watch out, because you suddenly get an explosive rise that is nearly vertical. It’s becoming crystal clear that we are entering the hockey-stick phase of progress with computers and other technologies. Yes, progress in artificial intelligence has been discouraging. But if we don’t self-destruct, does anyone imagine that we won’t develop computers within a few hundred years that will make the most advanced supercomputers of today seem like a toddler counting on his or her fingers? Does anyone doubt that at some point a computer could get so powerful it could direct its own future evolution? And given the speed at which such evolution would occur, does anyone doubt that a computer could become self-aware within the next few centuries? Visionaries like Ray Kurzweil believe this will happen well within this century, but even the most conservative among us must admit the likelihood that by the time the USS Enterprise pulls out of space dock, either our computers will have evolved into gods and obsoleted us, or, more likely, we will have merged with our technology to reach almost god-like heights of intelligence ourselves. And while this bodes well for these far-future beings, it isn’t so great for today’s science fiction writers.

Daniel C. Dennett, un filosofo della Tufts University che ne sa sia di neuroscienze che di informatica, sostiene che la coscienza stessa ha un aspetto essenzialmente narrativo, radicato nell’evoluzione biologica del cervello. Non ho la competenza per riassumere le argomentazioni di Dennett, ma vengo persuaso d’acchito dalle sue conclusioni – perlomeno se considerate come una narrazione esplicativa. Egli concepisce la coscienza essenzialmente come «creatrice di situazioni immaginarie in stesure multiple»; concepisce il sé come un come se, un «ipotetico Centro di Gravità Narrativa» – in breve, una fantastica e incessante narrazione. «Noi siamo le storie che raccontiamo a noi stessi e agli altri riguardo a chi siamo», afferma il professor Dennett – storie che rivediamo e rettifichiamo in continuazione e che in continuazione rivedono e rettificano noi stessi. A questo punto vi chiedo: il meditare su domande del genere ha mai reso chicchessia uno scrittore migliore? Non sarebbe più saggio se un narratore meditasse sulla casistica dell’amore, sui particolari di un tramonto, o magari sulle vicissitudini della nave spaziale U.S.S. Enterprise? Forse sì, forse no. Ma nel porci domande del genere, come nel creare di continuo situazioni ipotetiche, facciamo quello che ci viene naturale – che forse viene più naturale ad alcune persone che ad altre.