It is a good day to die. Or to be a tourist. Your choice.

It is with great pleasure that I announce to you that the world's first Klingon tourist center is opening in Stockholm on February 3.

It's called "Visit Qo'noS," which is a good thing, given that it only contains one word in Klingon.  Otherwise you'd have to feel sorry for the receptionist, who would have to answer the phone, "Good morning," and then make noises sounding like a water buffalo being examined by a proctologist.  Klingon is a true language, invented by linguists hired by the people in charge of the Star Trek franchise; it has a real syntax, phonetic and morphological structure, and so on.  So, even if it's not exactly euphonious to human ears, it deserves recognition as one of the only complete synthetic languages (a distinction it shares with J. R. R. Tolkien's Elvish, John Quijada's Ithkuil, and only a handful of others).

And now, there's a visitor center were you can go to celebrate all things Klingon.

I don't want just to learn to speak Klingon, I want to learn to stare like Gowron.  It would be very useful in my classroom.

Apparently Klingon culture is a big thing in Scandinavia.  There's the Klingonska Akademien, based in Uppsala, which teaches classes in the language, and in fact published the world's first Klingon dictionary.  I have not heard whether they sponsor such events as Bat'leth Tournaments, wherein combatants attempt to sever their opponents' valuable body parts with a double-pointed sword.  In researching that, however, I did find out that you can buy a Bat'leth on Etsy, eBay, and Amazon, and if you don't want the real thing -- and I'm using the word "real" guardedly -- you can buy a Bat'leth letter opener from ThinkGeek.

I have to say that despite my poking fun at this Extraterrestrial Extravaganza, there's a part of me that thinks it is pretty awesome, and it's not because I'm some kind of closet Trekkie (which I'm not; I'm completely out of the closet.  I love Star Trek, especially Star Trek: The Next Generation, several episodes of which I can quote virtually in toto from memory).  But even beyond that, my appreciation for this has to do with how awesome it is that the linguists hired by the original show have created a language that is complex and rich enough to spawn a tourist center and a language academy.  C'mon, don't you think that's cool?  You can even take college courses in Klingon. I'm not making this up. The University of Texas/Austin, which has one of the most prestigious Linguistics Departments of any college I know of, has a course in Klingon and other invented languages (or conlangs, as they're called, from "constructed languages").  If you're more serious about your studies, you can attend the Klingon Language Institute, in Flourtown, Pennsylvania (motto: "qo’mey poSmoH Hol," which means "language opens worlds, or else crushes them into dust if they dare to resist").  There, you can achieve fluency, which will no doubt impress your friends, coworkers, and potential lovers ("I know that sounded like I was gargling with yogurt, but it actually means 'You are extremely hot' in Klingon.").

And if you're really into it, you can attend "qep’a’ cha’maH vaghDIch," which is the 25th Annual Klingon Language Convention, being held July 19-21 in Indianapolis.

Okay, I know I'm kind of waxing rhapsodic about this, but it's a particular fascination of mine.  For some years, I have offered an independent study class at my high school in Intro to Linguistics, and the final project for this class is to create the rudiments of a synthetic language.  I assign this project, in part, because it gets students to understand how complex language actually is; I've found that they learn more about English syntax by trying to create a synthetic one than they would from any number of English grammar classes.  They are supposed to submit, as part of the project, a lexicon of at least a hundred words, and a passage from English that has been translated into their language -- my last group translated The Very Hungry Caterpillar, an accomplishment that was far harder than it sounds and of which they were, very rightly, proud.

It's always interesting to see what happens when the reins are loosed on human creativity.  We might laugh about a Klingon Tourist Center (and better to laugh about it than directly at it -- when you laugh at Klingons, they tend to rip your arm off and beat you to death with it).  But it really is pretty cool that such a thing could happen.

I realize I am opening myself up to some serious ridicule here for saying that, but I don't care.  So, to anyone who is going to give me grief about this, I say: "Hab SoSlI' Quch." ("Your mother has a smooth forehead.")

St. Paul's Letter to the Klingons

In an investigation of wasteful government spending, Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) has publicized the fact that the Pentagon sponsored a seminar (at the cost of $100,000) called "Did Jesus Die for Klingons, Too?"

I wish I was making this up, but if you don't believe me, here's the source.  All of this rather undercuts Governor Romney's contention that we can't cut military spending without jeopardizing American national security, doesn't it?  Especially given that the folks at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) that sponsored the event hired noted astrophysicists LeVar "Geordi LaForge" Burton and Nichelle "Uhura" Nichols as keynote speakers, and had a gala "Come As Your Favorite Alien" dinner party afterwards.  One speaker, an unnamed philosophy professor who was called upon to address the topic brought up in the title of the event, concluded that Jesus only died for humans; the Klingons are on their own, sin-forgiveness-wise, not that they probably care.  I suspect that any priest who was brave enough to tell Gowron he had to say ten Hail Marys and five Our Fathers because he'd told a fib last week would soon be missing important body parts, so it's probably just as well.

It is not the overall silliness of the workshop that I want to address here, nor the bloat in the Pentagon's budget.  What I'd like to look at is the central contention of the workshop -- which is what would happen to organized religion if intelligent life were found elsewhere in the universe.

It's probably facile to say, "Nothing.  There being life elsewhere wouldn't change belief in a deity here on Earth."  But think about it; almost every major discovery that science has made in the past thousand years has had the effect of moving humanity further out of the center of the universe.  From Copernicus (the Earth isn't at the center), to Kepler (the planets don't move in idealized perfect circles), to Darwin (humans evolve just like everything else), to Mendeleev (everything is made of the same set of elements), to Watson, Crick et al. (all organisms, including humans, encode genetic material the same way), everything we've found has led to the view that we're not really very special at all.  Humans are just one more animal species, made of the same stuff and behaving the same way as other animals do, on a little spinning ball of rock around a quite ordinary star in a quite ordinary galaxy.  The recent discovery of thousands of extrasolar planets, some of them fairly earthlike in characteristics, makes it seem like even what we have here on Earth may not be all that unusual.

Now, myself, I think all of this is wicked cool.  I love it that our systems work the same way as other animals; not only does it explain so much about our behavior, it also means we're inextricably connected to the natural world.  I think any blow to our species' ego is far outweighed by the fact that these discoveries are just downright fascinating.

But think about how antithetical that view is to the basic view of Christianity and the other major religions.  The mainstream religious view -- and I realize that there are individual people, and probably sects of religions, who do not believe this -- sees humanity as something special, something unique in the history of the universe.  In fact, Christianity's central tenet is that humanity is so special that the all-powerful, omniscient deity incarnated his son as one of us. 

So, what would happen if we were to discover intelligent alien life?  My sense is that a lot of folks with a strictly religious worldview would have a hard time incorporating it.  If you remember the wonderful movie Contact, which looks at just such a situation, recall that the ultrareligious wingnut who had been harassing the main character did have exactly that reaction -- to the point that he sacrificed his own life (taking out a great many other people with him) to protect the purity of the religious message.  While this movie is (of course) fiction, I don't think that such a thing is outside of the realm of possibility.  The discovery of intelligent alien life would be, in a way, the ultimate pulling-out-of-center for the human race, and one that I think some worldviews couldn't handle.

On the whole, I think the question is an interesting one to consider.  So even if DARPA probably shouldn't have spent 100 grand to throw their big Star Trek-themed party, it's an idea worth investigating.  I would, however,  be more interested to hear what Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku have to say on the matter than LeVar Burton and Nichelle Nichols.