{"id":148,"date":"2009-11-14T18:17:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-14T18:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2009\/11\/looking-down-from-the-heavens-at-the-heavens\/"},"modified":"2009-11-14T18:17:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-14T18:17:00","slug":"looking-down-from-the-heavens-at-the-heavens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2009\/11\/looking-down-from-the-heavens-at-the-heavens.html","title":{"rendered":"Looking down from the heavens, at the heavens."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

I finally caught up with the bonus features on the Blu-Ray editions<\/a> of the last few Star Trek<\/a><\/i> movies this week, and one sentence kind of jumped out at me. It comes courtesy of Michael<\/a> Fincke<\/a>, an astronaut who appears on the Star Trek: First Contact<\/a><\/i> (1996) disc via the featurette \u2018Greetings from the International Space Station\u2019:<\/p>\n

I\u2019d really love to be in heaven someday, looking down to see my great-great-grandchildren living on Mars and going to other star systems, and using some kind of faster-than-light drive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the popular imagination (briefly satirized a couple months ago in The Invention of Lying<\/a><\/i>), \u201cheaven\u201d is generally thought of as somewhere \u201cup in the sky\u201d, past the clouds but perhaps not as far as outer space. And even after you accept the fact that the Earth is a sphere, it is still possible to think of people \u201clooking down\u201d at us from up there even though they couldn\u2019t possibly have the entire planet in view; like satellites, they can always move to another point in their orbit.<\/p>\n

But of course, the universe doesn\u2019t stop at the edge of our planet\u2019s atmosphere; the world as a whole is much bigger than that. So anyone observing the activity between planets, to say nothing of different star systems, would have to be looking at us from much, much further back \u2014 especially if they were doing so from a vantage point outside this universe altogether. And I can\u2019t help thinking that we\u2019d look pretty small to them, from there.<\/p>\n

I know, I know, I\u2019m being much too literalistic here. But that\u2019s part of the fun of encountering old idioms in new contexts.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finally caught up with the bonus features on the Blu-Ray editions of the last few Star Trek movies this week, and one sentence kind of jumped out at me. It comes courtesy of Michael Fincke, an astronaut who appears on the Star Trek: First Contact (1996) disc via the featurette \u2018Greetings from the International […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nLooking down from the heavens, at the heavens.<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I finally caught up with the bonus features on the Blu-Ray editions of the last few Star Trek movies this week, and one sentence kind of jumped out at me.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2009\/11\/looking-down-from-the-heavens-at-the-heavens.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Looking down from the heavens, at the heavens.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I finally caught up with the bonus features on the Blu-Ray editions of the last few Star Trek movies this week, and one sentence kind of jumped out at me.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2009\/11\/looking-down-from-the-heavens-at-the-heavens.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"FilmChat\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-11-14T18:17:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/_MwnH1kpbPRM\/Sv9sfKI8zlI\/AAAAAAAADM0\/AsNAe7HySjQ\/s400\/Edward_Michael_Fincke.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Peter T. 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