In the last few weeks there has been a firestorm of publicity about the new Star Trek movie and you've already noticed the A.R.E. team noting that we find it intriguing too! The ability of this story line to adapt to new audiences in yet another way should provide enough to make any creative person look twice at what they are doing, too.
Star Trek started out as a relatively low budget series. Amazingly, even though it continues to be shown in reruns thirty years after going off the air, the original series only ran three seasons. And the bridge of the original Enterprise was made mostly of cardboard and little light bulbs.
But probably no image in science fiction has had a more enduring impact than that of people beaming down to a strange planet or back up to their ship. The image of people being disassembled and disappearing before our eyes and then reassembling and reappearing somewhere else has made the phrase “beam me up” a part of our culture’s vocabulary.
Since the original series used this image and phrase to grab people’s imagination some amazing developments have transpired in science. This month’s BBC Knowledge magazine tells of some of the most important developments. In 1982 Alain Aspect proved that subatomic particles are somehow linked (the scientific term is “entangled”) in amazing and somewhat knowable – but not always predictable ways. Although not initially obvious to anyone, this meant that Newtonian physics would not be tidied up and continue to explain everything. There was a whole new world deep inside the world we knew. And that world was working in a way that could change lots of things. Computers, although still not able to take advantage of this new world, may one day be able to work at incredible speeds that make today’s computers look like a slug trying to cross a highway in the hot summer sun. And yes, earlier this year the first information was teleported from one charged particle to another particle over a meter away at the University of Maryland. It is a long way from transporting information across a meter of distance in a single particle to actually transporting all the information needed to transport an entire person across any significant distance. But scientists are now actually working on it, knowing that while our capacity to ever accomplish it may never arrive, the possibility that it can actually be done is now a realistic dream!
In every line of work there is something that seems impossible. Honestly, most of the impossible things in your work and ours are much more possible than beaming a person from one place to another. Yet often leaders find themselves overwhelmed by their circumstances. Their vision gets cloudy. Their judgment gets unsteady. Their passion to pursue a dream gets squelched. And in most cases it is not the task that is impossible. It is the leaders’ inability to keep believing that it can be done.
At A.R.E. we work with leaders who are trying to make real changes in the organizations in which they serve. From a local congregation, to a larger judicatory or non-profit agency, to a small startup business the issue is the same. When leaders see possibilities and pursue them with passion, good things can occur. When leaders lose sight of the dreams in front of them and the fire in their bellies goes out, it is hard to make good things happen.
What are the dreams in your work? Are you keeping them in your sights? Are you staying passionate about making them happen? If someday someone might really say, “Beam me up, Scotty” then certainly the thing that is looking too hard for you right now, might be possible too!
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