A few days ago, I checked out a book called Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe from my local library. It's a new book (copyright 2016) that I just happened to stumble upon in one of my favorite parts of the non-fiction section of the library (its Dewey Decimal number is 523). The author, Andrew Fazekas, has a website called thenightskyguy.com. It's not a particularly long book (only a few hundred pages), but it's filled with cool astronomy photos and images from Star Trek movies and shows.
The content of the chapters alternate between describing Star Trek universe appearances/references to real-life astronomical objects and a discussion of the contemporary understanding of science in that particular area. The end result is neither the The Star Trek Encyclopedia nor an astronomy textbook, but the pages are pleasantly designed with large full-color photographs.
The book includes some interesting "Are we there yet?" sidebars that discuss Star Trek technology that we might not quite have yet (but perhaps we're closer than I realized). Each sidebar includes a graph that charts our progress towards that technology as something like "Light-Years Away", "Getting There", or "Mission Accomplished". (Unless the author has a functional crystal ball, I don't understand how we can confident we can be of our progress toward the goals.) It does sound like we're closer to have tractor beams than I expected (page 54), and I learned on page 38 that we already have a medical tricorder (someone engineered a device called a "Scanadu Scout"). That's news to me!
Even though I've been a fan of Star Trek shows, movies, and books for many years, as I've been flipping through the pages, I feel like I've been learning more about the Star Trek universe than the actual Universe. While I've watched all of the Star Trek movies except for the latest one (it's on my to-do list, so please no spoilers) and I've seen most of the episodes of the various Star Trek TV shows ever made, I haven't been immersed in the Treker culture as much these last few years compared to when I was a teenager. (I think there was a summer that I watched several dozen episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.) Also, I've been reading more non-fiction science books and articles than science fiction the last few years.
Reading this book reminds me that God created a large Universe filled with a variety of planets revolving around various stars clumped into various galaxies, clustered into various groups, clusters, and superclusters (and probably even organized beyond what humans have already discovered). The size and complexity of the Universe boggles my mind!
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