I was talking to my mom today and we got on the topic of how our upbringings and social environments were so vastly different. A lot of parents don’t understand that due to our sociopolitical circumstances, a lot of us carry a very wary nihilism and cynicism about us. My mother grew up in the wake of Vietnam, after which was a reasonably prosperous time. There were dark times, yes, but it was things that had happened while my mother, and most of her generation, were already grown.

Our generation was born into a war. One of my earliest memories was of 9/11. I was 4, so I didn’t understand at the time. I saw the footage, the collapse, the jumpers. 4 years old. And then the war started, or rather, picked up where it left off in the 90s. I can vaguely remember Bush’s “free speech zones”. Cages lined with barbed wire, often times people were locked in them by police. People were treated like zoo animals. The war, the attacks, suicide bombers. I thought it was normal because I’d never known anything else. I had never known peace. None of us had. Then the housing crash, the outsourcing, the foreclosures. In my hometown of Flint, MI, everyone worked at the general motors plants. The pay was good, until they began outsourcing. Plants closed, tens of thousands lost jobs. Flint had been in decline already but when the plants closed, it was over. We became an unsalvageable, polluted wasteland. Crumbling roads, burnt down houses, abandoned factories like ghosts along the sides of the highway. The water. We haven’t had clean water for years. We grew up poor, and so we learned to be happy without money. We learned to enjoy experience instead of material things. Baby boomers cant understand why no one in our generation wants a house, of course not, our hand had been burnt before, with the housing crash. Protests, riots, police gunning down children with no consequence. We’ve never known peace, so we’ve made our homes in the ashes of what came before us.

In college it’s like… the prevalence if casually being Not Okay is so surreal. We had a party last night and one of our friends got too drunk and the stress from classes got to him and he just… snapped. He was stomping around our parking lot in the pooring rain and 50 degree weather. For two hours this happened. Him screaming and he can’t keep his cigarette lit because it is really pouring and no one could get him in. One by one we would go out and try to reason with him. At least coax him onto the porch and out of the rain. I managed to get him to talk. I told him to let it all out. I told him to scream at me if he had to.

You have to let them know their feelings are justified. They have every right to be upset. Do anything you can to get through to them that their feelings are valid. Because I know how this works, this was nowhere near my first time doing this, and I know It’ll be nowhere near the last.

My friend and I managed to get him to sit on the steps because I offered him a a new lighter. And we just. Sat there. In the pouring rain, soaked to the bone. None of us spoke while he just let it all out. He yelled until he cried and we sat with him. The rain didn’t matter.

And it was just an unspoken thing out there. He knew I was going through the same shit because we’re in the same year and my other friend had gone through it the year before. He knew he was safe from judgement with us.

Our friend went back inside to set up the couch for him to sleep on and he finally spoke up. An apology for us having to see him like that. I told him I’d been in the same place. I told him that he needed to get it all out, that what happened was inevitable, and that we all knew it. I told him that this wasn’t my first time walking someone through this. I have become well versed with walking between the eggshells to get through to people.

Clear voice, no hints of pity, short sentences, simple questions.

These kids are under so much stress and there’s always a breaking point. This always happens. Eventually. The best we can do is stick together through it. Let them scream it out and yell and sob. Validate them. Promise them you won’t leave but you’ll keep your distance.

Promise them shelter from the storm when they’re ready to come back.

‪God can I just talk about the neutron star collision real quick. It’s just… when I was born there were only like 3 exoplanets. The discovery of GRB Afterglow is less than a month older than I. We hadn’t observed the effects of the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy. We didn’t know what Pluto looked like. We didn’t have the ISS yet. ‬

‪In twenty years we’ve learned so much. In twenty years we put rovers on Mars. We found water on Mars! Liquid water! We’ve found thousands of exoplanets. We got to see what Pluto looked like with New Horizons. We’ve mapped the stars in the center of our galaxy and we’ve proved that there’s a supermassive black hole there.

‪But god, the most incredible thing was gravitational waves. In 2015 LIGO recorded the first one, just a small little blip lasting a fraction of a second. But that’s all that was needed. We proved Einstein right nearly 100 years later. And then the one that just came out. I can’t even describe how incredible it is. For over 100 seconds we recorded these waves, massive waves. We were able to triangulate the source. ‬

‪We saw it. In a moment of planetwide esprit de corps we saw it. We saw the gamma ray burst. We saw the afterglow. Two neutron stars, no bigger than manhattan, colliding at nearly the speed of light some 130 million years ago. And we saw it. We took pictures of it. ‬

And look at all the papers that’ll be coming out of this. Some 3,500 people were involved with this. 3,500 people, from over 70 observatories and detectors all over the world, using hundreds of instruments, made this happen. Yesterday 40 papers were published, along with a flurry of press conferences and jovial announcements.

‪In a moment, our species graduated from electromagnetic observing to being able to detect ripples in the very fabric of spacetime. ‬

‪In twenty years, in a cosmic moment, we’ve stretched our legs and are beginning to take our first clumsy footsteps into the universe around us. ‬

I just saw Star Trek again and fucking Christ I’m emotional so let’s go.

My dad was a huge fan since the beginning. Watched them all as they came out. I remember watching Star Trek Enterprise with my dad when I was about 4. I have very fond memories of Star Trek from the beginning.

And then the reboots started in 2009, when I was 12. I was completely fucking lost when I was 12. My first suicide attempt was when I was 12. I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself. I got in trouble at school constantly. I had started smoking when I was 12. I drank. I was a piece of shit, I was lost, I didn’t have much going for me. (Don’t even get me started on the parallels between that and a certain trash lord soon-to-be captain)

And seeing Star Trek didn’t change all that, it didn’t change me being a piece of shit, but it started something. It inspired me. It reminded me of better times from my childhood. It lead me into learning about space and I realized that, fuck man, I really liked space. I liked LEARNING about space. And then I started to like learning. That movie set me down a particular path that lead me to be a better person. I learned math and physics and before I knew it I had began to consume college level material. And I learned from that that being smart - smart enough to get places and to raise eyebrows - wasn’t a “gift”. It was something you could learn. It was something that you could become through hard work. It snowballed into me getting my shit together. Something so small as a movie could start that.

And fuck, I really liked chekov. That wunderkind. I could be that. I wanted to be that. I wanted to be the youngest and the best at something. I now had a personal agenda to become that. That trope that he had became an objective of mine. Two parts out of spite, because no one thought I could do great things, one part for myself, to get myself out of that hole - early grave rather - that I had been in. And I did just that. I was the youngest person in my physics classes in high school. I was the youngest person in my physics, astronomy, higher math classes at college. One of the youngest research assistants at the university. I’m on track to be one of the youngest undergrads in the program and one of the youngest people in the program to be published.

Now by this time, I have other things going for me, I do astrophysics not out of spite, not because of that movie, but out of love of the field and dedication to the sciences.

But it’s what set the ball rolling. That god damn movie that came out at just the right time. That god damn movie that showed me what I could be.

And I think that’s why it hurt so bad when Anton Yelchin died. Because he was chekov. That character that I pushed myself to be like. That character that pushed me to be better. And it hurts because he’s gone and it made me falter. I was working a godawful summer job at the time that he died and it shook me because it made me look at myself and where I was. My mental health was shit because of that job, I wasn’t making enough money to survive. It scared the shit out of me. I was slipping and it scared me.

And then Beyond came out. And I saw it on opening day, I felt like it was my duty to. For myself and for Chekov. And it was different than the other two movies. It was hopeful and colorful and fuck I don’t know but seeing it helped. It helped me get some of that passion back that that fucking awful job all but stripped from me. And it was like a farewell of sorts too, I guess? A send off to Chekov, because I knew he wouldn’t be coming back. Not as I knew him, anyway. It felt like a bittersweet farewell to a childhood idol. Like I had grown up and that I was going to have to carry on without him. I was going to have to be my own role model now. It’s up to me what I can do. As stupid as it sounds, it felt like I was dragged out of that hole I had been in all those years ago and now that I was up and on my feet and going places, I have to go them alone now. It’s up to me what I do. It’s up to me who I choose to be. And I’m ready to take that on.

That’s why Star Trek has always been so much more to me. Beyond was so much more to me than a movie. It was both a goodbye and a new beginning.

I get asked a lot why I do astrophysics and math and all that. I get people saying things like “but that’s so hard! Why not something easier?” And, honestly? It is hard. It’s fucking hard. The hours you have to put into your studies is grueling. I rarely get time for my friends and family. But I will do it anyway. Why? Why bother with physics and math and all that theoretical nonsense? Because I’ve always been sad about being born too early for spacefaring. Like, we’re not going to become an interstellar, hell, maybe not even an interplanetary civilization in my lifetime. I’m not gonna live long enough to boldly go, to explore other planets, to find civilizations in galaxies far far away. I’m not gonna live to see it. I know I’m not. But the least I can do is help get us to that point. Any sort of scientific discovery, any sort of contribution to that future that I can make, I will do it gladly. I’m not gonna see that future, but I’m gonna try like hell to make sure someone does.

One thing that I like to think about is that some sort of alien civilization millions, maybe billions of years from now will find one of the voyager crafts we sent out. Like, they’ll find it and maybe they’ll figure out who we were and what we were and they’ll go looking for us. They’ll go search for the Mysterious Planet Earth and what they’ll find on it. What if they never find us, though? What if by the time they go looking for us, we’re already extinct? What if they go looking for us and all we left behind was a golden record with some etchings that we shot out into space some 40 years ago. What if all we learned, and who we were, and all of the other wonderful things about earth are forgotten forever because we didn’t think to preserve ourselves, or at the very least, the knowledge we learned along the way.

tbh i wish more scientists went into politics because most businessmen dont have the foresight to do what’s right in the long run like we’ve irreversibly fucked our planet into the ground. like, it’s too late to fix. if we went cold turkey right now on fossil fuels and making plastic and used only biodegradable materials and clean energy from here on out, it wouldn’t matter. the sea levels will still rise, cities and civilizations will be wiped away. we’ve passed the tipping point of fixing earth. it’s not a matter of “it might happen” it will happen. it is happening. your children, your grandchildren will be born into an environment completely foreign the one you were born into. your parents, even, were born into an environment different from your own. and that brings me back to putting scientists into politics. the only thing we can do now is leave. leave the planet. leave here. and i’m not talking about moving next door to mars, either. you cant terraform mars, humanity cant thrive off of mars. politicians, i feel, are obsessed with mars. “we gotta go to mars, we gotta go live on mars” maybe a manned mission to mars, of course, but live there? we’re wasting resources on mars? if you wanna talk about the longevity of the human race, you gotta start thinking ahead on an order of hundreds and even thousands of years. you gotta make ships that can take life out of the solar system, you gotta make ships that can support humans for hundreds of years, you gotta think of the bigger picture and politicians just.. can’t. and it makes me so sad that we’re not planning this right now and today. we’re not planning to leave earth and go elsewhere, we’re wasting time going to mars.

scientists are out there urging people that we need to leave the planet because it cant be saved now and politicians are still arguing over whether or not global warming is real, and they pretend there’s an argument over if it was our fault or not.