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$1.5 Billion Star Trek Theme Park Coming To Jordan
MikeChino writes "King Abdullah of Jordan (who was once an extra in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager) has given the green light to a $1.5 billion Star Trek theme park that will boldly take Jordan where no Gulf state has gone before. While the theme park will not be powered by dilithium crystals, it will utilize green technology in order to lower its carbon footprint — all of its electricity will be generated by renewable sources." Just a few weeks ago Sheikh Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Ahyan carved his name in the desert so it could be seen from space. It looks like Sci-fi has finally made it to the Middle East. I can't wait for them to discover Firefly.
....aaaand the nerds finally get a Mecca to call their own.
Scotty is dead Jim
On the one hand, this is pretty cool, and the general values of Stark Trek (of which free thought and egalitarianism are pretty high on the list) are good things to promote in areas like Jordan. However, the fact that the monarch is already a Trekkie and yet is country is like what it is today doesn't speak highly of how much influence it has really had on him. (Jordan is not nearly as badly off as say Syria, but it is by no means a functioning democracy with human rights. Far from it.) Moreover, the people who go to this will almost certainly be outside tourists, whether Westerners, or rich people from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. So this will probably do very little to directly benefit Jordanians, who have a lot of problems. Again, Jordan's problems aren't nearly as severe as many other countries in the region, the literacy rate is the second highest out of it and its immediate neighbors http://www.indexmundi.com/jordan/literacy.html but there's still a decent chunk of around 10% who can't read. And there's severe unemployment- this project might help with that, but it is tough to tell.
The fact that they are making the park green is noteworthy. Unlike many of the oil states in the region, Jordan's total oil reserve is comparatively small, but they do have a lot of oil shale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_in_Jordan which becomes more valuable as people run out of oil. So it isn't completely clear why Jordan would want to promote green tech other than actual ideology (well and self-interest for when everyone else's oil runs out and they still want their stuff to not be insanely expensive. But that's surprisingly far-sighed in the circumstances). It should be interesting to see where this goes in the next few years.
...Arabs were more partial to Frank Herbert.
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That kind of money could buy how many new seasons of Firefly? Wow, what a thought! And more seriously, I don't think it would be a bad idea for rich sheiks who don't know what to do with their money to invest in something cultural and immortal like a smart scifi show. It would generate a whole lot of good will and visibility than some vanity theme park or a sign visible from space.
Most of the Jordanian population lives in the west, close to the Jordan river - not in the east. It is about a thousand miles from Amman (the capital) or Aqaba (the one port and the location of the park) to the Persian Gulf.
I think this is stimulus spending. Abdullah doesn't want to have the problems of his neighbors to the north (Syria) and south-west (Egypt).
With luck and really good security, they might be able to get a lot of tourists from Israel.
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In Jordan, for political reasons, the transporter is just called a porter.
Dilithium crystals(radan) do not power anything, it's a regulator for the matter/anti-matter reaction. It's like saying the valves in a nuclear reactor power cities.
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Lesson learned - always find time to cast the Crown Prince to be on your show, you never know when it'll pay off: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmut6FJ1d4M Now we know what ??? is in step 3: wait for extra to become wealthy king.
The previous king was often the only voice of reason on matters pertaining to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He was the only one to criticize both sides when they deserved it. The current king was not the crown prince, but the previous king changed his choice of successor at the last minute. Thankfully, king Abdullah has continued his father's tradition.
King Abdullah did things in his youth that he probably would not have done were he the crown prince. Things like appearing as an extra in a Star Trek: TNG episode. I believe that makes him the only monarch on the planet ever to appear in a Star Trek episode. Clearly, he is more of a Star Trek fan than I thought, and good for him.
While I'd generally agree with some of that (SW ships definitely have the speed advantage), most of the figures cited there are silly. They have the heavy laser gun on a troop transport (a shuttle, basically) putting out enough energy to wipe out all life on the planet in a single shot... Makes the death star kind of redundant, don't it? Their scales are so far off that a single hit from any SW laser or turbolaser should completely incinerates whatever ship it hits if the shields are down, when there's tons and tons of canonical evidence to the contrary (damage is caused, but not as much as the numbers you link to indicate).
I suspect the reason for this is because when Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda were coming up with these figures, they probably consulted real-life figures and theory and extrapolated, while the author of Star Wars Episode II Incredible Cross-Sections probably just made up stuff that sounded good.
That's not a knock against Star Wars, it reflects a different focus. Star Wars was never about the tech.
Might get more Muslim visitors that way.
Here's what he looked like in the episode