Wanna get away? GO UP OR DOWN!
Once again, a sci-fi space show treats three-dimensional space as a flat earth ocean. This week’s Star Trek: Discovery shows the Discovery and Enterprise “surrounded” by enemy ships.
This seems to be de rigueur for TV and movie spaceships, with a few notable exceptions including The Expanse – which shows ships behaving as if they’re actually in space, not banking like aircraft. (Sadly, though, Expanse producers still give us sounds in space. I guess TV needs to add aural excitement somehow.)
In space, ships don’t fly around like they’re in the air. And every time two ships come face to face, they wouldn’t always be oriented exactly the same, as if they’re on a flat surface. And, spaceships wouldn’t necessarily be laid out like ocean-going vessels, with decks plotted horizontally. (The Expanse gets this one right, too.)
And here we see in the otherwise excellent Star Trek: Discovery, ships threatening the Discovery and the Enterprise… as if they’re on a flat ocean somewhere. “Escape is impossible! Unless we, you know, go up or down.” (And “up” and “down” are meaningless in space.)
This book explains why Rome, still one of the longest-lived republics in world history, traded the liberty of political autonomy for the security of autocracy. It is written at a moment when modern readers need to be particularly aware of both the nature of republics and the consequences of their failure. We live in a time of political crisis, when the structures of republics as diverse as the United States, Venezuela, France, and Turkey are threatened. Many of these republics are the constitutional descendants of Rome and, as such, they have inherited both the tremendous structural strengths that allowed the Roman Republic to thrive for so long and some of the same structural weaknesses that led eventually to its demise. This is particularly true of the United States, a nation whose basic constitutional structure was deliberately patterned on the idealized view of the Roman Republic presented by the second-century BC author Polybius. This conscious borrowing from Rome’s model makes it vital for all of us to understand how Rome’s republic worked, what it achieved, and why, after nearly five centuries, its citizens ultimately turned away from it and toward the autocracy of Augustus.
