San Francisco is a nice place to live, has some great restaurants,
a cosmopolitan lifestyle, and is in easy driving distance of Silicon Valley
and wine country. What is less well known is that San Francisco is a temporal
singularity in the space-time continuum. This has been obvious to anyone
who has been watching the Star Trek series and its spinoffs and movies.
The theory has never been demonstrated in the laboratory, you understand,
but empirical evidence abounds. In particular, whenever you travel back
in time, wherever you are in the universe, there is a high degree
of probability that you will end up in San Francisco. This probability
increases exponentially if the episode you are in is a two-parter. To
wit:
- Deep Space Nine ("Past Tense" parts 1&2): Captain Benjamin
Sisko is transported back in time to 2024, where the Bell Riots are
about to take place in Sanctuary District A, in San Francisco.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation ("Time's Arrow" parts 1&2):
The crew finds a mysterious alien temporal gateway that takes them back
to turn-of-the-century San Francisco, where they meet Samuel Clemens
and recover Data's head.
- Voyager: ("Future's End", parts 1&2): A spatial rift
caused by a battle with a 29th Century timeship causes Voyager, a ship
in the Delta Quadrant to be transported back to San Francisco
in the year 1996, in the Alpha Quadrant.
- The Original Series: ("The City on the Edge of Forever"): Kirk,
McCoy and Spock leap through an ancient time portal to...well I guess
they never actually name the city (/msg me if you know). But I bet it's
S.F.
- Star Trek IV (the movie): Kirk takes a Bird-of-Prey back in time,
landing in San Francisco to recover a whale in order to save the future
from a mysterious, giant alien ship that wants to communicate with the
now-extinct whales of the Earth (this is the plot, really).
There are probably others. Of course in that last one Kirk and his pals
just go to Earth and then choose to land in San Francisco, but
it is significant that they took a whale from there. Maybe they needed
a whale from San Francisco.
In fact, the most compelling explanation for the temporal singularity
hypothesis is that the whales around San Francisco are in charge of maintaining
some kind of giant underwater temporal transmitter array, possibly using
the Golden Gate Bridge as an antenna. The alien ship that shows up in
the movie is most likely from the Temporal Transmitter Home Office, and
has finally made the trip out to find out why the slackers running Earth
station have let the transmitter fall into disrepair. In light of this,
we can make sense of the final whale-to-alien conversation in the last
scenes of Star Trek IV (alien/whale speech is transliterated):
Alien ship: wrruuhhmp. weeeehee. Woooowooo. ("Who's
the asshole that turned off the array? Where is everybody?")
Whale: ooowwooooh. mrooooeeee. ("Transmission sergeant
Gracie sir. Sorry, but apparently we became extinct. I had to hitch a
ride into the future just to get here.")
Alien ship: ooohhheeemmm wooorrooeeek. ("OK, I want
that array up and running inside of three days. Couldn't you have trained
the humans to take care of it?")
Whale: eewwwrrrrk. mmmmmbmboo eeek. ("I'm afraid they're
a bit thick, sir.")
The huge amounts of energy needed to run the array and the resultant
disruptions in the fabric of space-time could also be affecting the weather,
explaining why it can be overcast and drizzly in San Francisco while
the rest of the Bay Area and Marin county is 15 degrees warmer and bathed
in sunlight all the time.
Note: I'm not a diehard trekkie, just a fan of STTNG (though I've seen
all the above episodes), so be gentle when /msging me with additions and
corrections. If you haven't seen the eps, or especially the abysmal ending of IV, then this is all going to be profoundly unfunny...