Will There Ever Be A Star Trek?
Entry posted by caldrail
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Back in the sixties Gene Roddenberry sold an idea to a film studio for a tv series about 'A wagon train to the stars'. It was one of those simple and cheap concepts that studios loved at that time, and they weren't expecting anything more intellectually challenging than Lost In Space. Instead of Bonanza with ray guns, they got spikey ears, emotionless women, and a plot you actually needed to think about. That was quite a shock for the time.
Now of course the original Star Trek is a much loved classic, however excrutiating Captain Kirks love life was or the persistent discovery of american civilisation on every second planet they visited. It still gets shown on tv today. Star Trek Next Generation had a real act to follow, and they all but trumped it. Deep Space Nine was slightly more of a star trek space opera, but by Voyager, things were getting a little tired, with every episode showing Captain Janeway staring in wonder at yet another example of Life as we never thought possible.
Which brings me to an important point. This concept of life everywhere in incredibly diverse and unexpected forms is fiction. There's no reason to believe its possible other than optimism. After all, life on Earth evolved through a series of fortuitous circumstances that appear extremely rare in the universe.We have a stable sun, our planet is orbiting at just the right distance, with a moon that prevents our world becoming tidally locked, with an iron core that provides a protective magnetic field around us, and so forth. A typical class M planet then. There's a lot of those in Star Trek.
Is Star Trek possible? A world government as the core of a federation of alien worlds, harmonious, progressive, advancing. And totally impossible, for no other reason than nature designed mankind to squabble. Sometimes you meet people you just can't get on with. The same unfortunately would be true of alien technological societies, which in Star Trek are all conveniently humanoid and roughly comparable in capability (apart from the Q, but these all powerful tricksters are little more than embodiements - is that the right word? - of mythological concepts, thus showing that our imaginations haven't really changed since the middle ages).
In technological terms we only have a short window to achieve this progress, assuming that there is a way of travelling the vast distances between stars without the restriction of physical laws. We are consuming our planets resources and at some point, it really will become impossible to go anywhere else.
On the other hand, Star Trek is all about optimism for the future, so having reduced trekkies around the world to uncontrollable rage or utter despair at the likely failure of their religion, lets all hope it can happen. Or better still, actually try to make it so, rather than squabbling and spending all our efforts in knocking each other down. Somehow, I think we'll still be fighting outside starport cantinas and dropping litter on distant worlds come what may.
Star Trek Moment of the Week
Wandering about the local beauty spots I passed a pair of single mums pushing their little infant-transporters (which I presume contained their offspring - I dread to look) and they casually gave their opinion of me to each other as I passed.
"He's on a different planet"
"Yeah"
Cool. DS (Remember her?) once described me as Mr Spock, but now I'm actually walking the surface of another world. I could have told them that. I've been calling Swindon an alien world since I started this blog. However, lets not get angry. Remember the Prime Directive of Non-Interference? Go in peace, alien mothers. Please.
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