What’s A Starcraft?

Starcraft is a video game?  Who knew?  With a name like Starcraft, it could be a video game about battles in space but could just as easily by the name of the latest model of cigarette boat used for boat racing between islands in the Caribbean.  Of course, if Starcraft were a cigarette boat, there’d be stories about folks trying to back into their garages with the boat on the trailer who wind up damaging the garage door because their aim was bad and they wind up damaging the garage door and poking a hole in the boat somehow.  How would someone poke a hole in a cigarette boat and damage the garage door at the same time?  The same way that many individuals are able to cause damage in unusual ways.

Instead, there’s the original Starcraft game and the newer Starcraft II.  Just as with many of the old master “hard” science-fiction novels from people like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Gordon Dickinson (among others), science fiction based video games are inherently optimistic.   The optimism comes with the belief that somehow, someway, with all the problems on Earth today, humans will be able muddle on out into the stars to a point where aliens will be discovered and the battles among the stars will begin.  

In today’s Earth, it often seems that everything is conspiring against the idea of humans reaching further out into the stars.  Maybe it’s how humans are still working to solve the problems on our own planet.  Or maybe it’s that the internal combustion engine is still the most common means of locomotion.  At some point, humans will need to find what can only be called currently a “miracle” engine that will allow propulsion beyond the pull of the Sun and out of the Solar system as humans now know it.  Whether it is the “warp” drive of Star Trek fame or something else, it has not yet been invented.  Then will come the science of astrogation (as Mr. Heinlein termed it), the science that will allow humans to move from planet to planet then from star system to star system.

Humans will adapt to space travel and unfortunately, space battle soon enough.  As long as humans manage to achieve the travel amongst the stars, it will be a necessary evolution of humanity.  At that point, it will be a far distance from the time when someone might have thought Starcraft was a boat style and brand of boat that could damage a garage door while the owner was backing a trailer into his garage.