�鶹��

Available for over a year

Good morning. As President Trump says that he will withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, it raises the wider question of how we deal with technology in shaping the world. At the same time much more powerful rocket technology is being developed. Entrepreneurs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson are all working on space tourism and human settlement on the Moon and Mars. This technology is almost with us with Sir Richard saying recently that his company will be in space ‘in weeks, not months’. Yet, in addition to this, is a fear of an increasingly lucrative military space race with the main rivals to the US being China and Russia. In the recent and posthumously published Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Professor Stephen Hawking warned that human aggression and these new technologies could destroy the entire human race. As a solution he wanted more manned space exploration, “If humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in going boldly where no one else has gone before.” He echoes Star Trek on purpose. Its creator Gene Roddenberry believed that as we explored space, on the bridge of the Enterprise all races would be brought together, that is apart from a few problems with Klingons! Perhaps that view is a little naïve, but science fiction has a deeper role. As Professor Hawking himself comments, ‘(it) is not only good fun, but it also serves a serious purpose, that of expanding the human imagination’. In a world of immediate problems and complex agreements, imagination can ask the questions of whether there is a better world and how might we get there. In this I am drawn not just to science fiction but to the teaching of Jesus. When in John’s gospel, Jesus met a woman by a well in Samaria, he didn’t say to her ‘Have you ever considered the eschatological consequences of the atonement’. He spoke about her receiving the gift of living water, engaging her to imagine what it would mean for God to be part of her life. What would life be like if, in her and in my life, physical and spiritual thirst was quenched. This week, I give a keynote address on Star Wars at a European conference on ‘Myth and Audiovisual Creations’. With issues facing Europe and indeed the world this can be seen as trivial escapism. But Star Wars, and much science fiction, by stretching the imagination through story, ask how we can live together and question whether the race for technological military supremacy is the way forward.