Star Trek an optimistic view of the future? I don't think so.

[LadyLeigh]

As a long time Trekkie I always wonder why people quote Star Trek as being an optimistic vision of the future, in contrast to other science fiction franchises. I cannot say I agree.

If anything, what Star Trek suggests is that while technology and space travel causes the problems that existed on the small distance scales of individual planets to fade away, those very same problems re-emerge on the new relevant distance scale, the scale of a single galaxy, to a much more intense degree.

What Star Trek suggests is that while it becomes increasingly possible to create small pockets of "paradise" (Risa, Earth, the holodecks), the galaxy as a whole is basically one big war for territory and ever scarce resources that flames on in various degrees of intensity. And that space travel tends to cause the faction struggles within a single species to somewhat fade away, but in return replaces them by struggles of different species with each other.

While I enjoy watching Star Trek on TV, I don't think I would like to live in that world.

I would rate Star Trek as rather pessimistic: The suggestion that scarcity can never be overcome, regardless of how technology progresses.

[DCKit]

1. If we were to mine the asteroid belt for metals......

The trouble with Star Trek is that they were always mining/looking for rare, imaginary substances that don't (or aren't known) to exist.

[tjwash]

8. The "dune" type allegory of a precious single resource ran in the background.

The OS quickly touched on how dilithium crystals were only found on one planet,and even then it was in the background. Without those there was no warp drive, no quicker than light space travel, no economy, and everyone in the galaxy was basically stuck to sub-light travel. I was always disappointed Roddenberry never made that the focus of some episodes, to show how a precious resource absolutely vital to the economy, much like gold in past eras and oil is today molds a society, and still, even in the future would cause wars for resources and economic domination.

[Javaman]

10. See now there is a great opportunity for a new show..

a much darker, more allegorical show based on the federations need for dilithium crystals.

the dirty little secret that the federation likes to hide from the people and the little known group of rebels on said planet fighting to keep their own resources.

[Motown_Johnny]

33. I think they should do a "Mirror" series

that takes place in the alternate universe



(Think Spock with a goatee and the entire Federation acting like Klingons)

[Motown_Johnny]

32. in TNG there was an episode like that

where one planet thought it had a plague (long since cured) while the other planet provided the "medicine" which was really just a narcotic.




Oh, and there were plenty of warp capable races in TOS. Also humans developed warp travel without dilithium crystals. There was also an episode where a woman was wearing "common stones" as jewelry which turned out to be uncut dilithium crystals (I think it was Helena of Troyus but would need to look it up).



Lastly, in "Chapter house Dune" the sandworms were transplanted to another planet so that spice could be produced there. It was much easier than anyone had thought since you didn't need a desert planet, the worms would turn a normal planet into a desert in the natural course of events. Spice turns out to be less precious after that (and how did they ever find the planet with the spice without spice?).

[MindPilot]

2. We come in peace...shoot to kill.

It always seemed a little bit of a double-standard to me. There was supposedly no prejudice, yet they always spoke of the Romulans as being a warlike race. There was a "no intervention" policy, but invariably the Federation intervened. And for Earthlings to have eschewed violence, and awful lot of shit got blown up.

That said, however, I loves me some Star Trek.

[Javaman]

11. Star Trekin' across the universe! nt

[DRoseDARs]

34. Boldly going forward... ('cause we can't find reverse)! n/t

[MindPilot]

39. It's life , Jim, but not as we know it... n/t

[Pab Sungenis]

3. There's one real reason for that.

Narrative necessity.

Without conflict of some kind, there is no drama. When you come down to it, you still need conflict to move the story. Otherwise things get boring.

What makes Star Trek optimistic is the underlying message that, on the whole, we can solve our problems. Things will never be perfect, but they can be nearly so.

[trotsky]

6. I figured that was pretty obvious

but meh, whatcha gonna do.

[Pab Sungenis]

16. It actually isn't that obvious.

I wrote for and pitched to DS9 in its early days, and they actually had to explain this fact in their writers' notes. Too many budding "Star Trek" writers forgot the need for conflict even in Utopia.

[ikri]

26. Same goes for

Their dodgy computers, explosive consoles and a whole host of other minor issues that you'd think a competent engineer could have overcome by the 23rd century (has no one heard of seat belts, emergency power isolation switches for holodecks?).

If it weren't for the high failure rate of their equipment half the Next Generation stories would have lasted all of 5 minutes

[okieinpain]

28. seat belts. oh lordy.. lol. n/t.

[MindPilot]

38. Somehow through all that the artificial gravity stays on...

Complete power failure, life support systems failing, no propulsion, but nobody is floating around.

[Ian David]

4. Also, when you die and go to heaven, there will be extra copies of your soul already there...

... one for every time you used the transporter beam.

The only person who would enjoy that is James T. Kirk.

[LanternWaste]

5. My major problem with the show when I watched it

My major problem with the show when I watched it was that it was simply over-moralizing and preaching to excess.

I'd thought at the time that I could get the same amount of pontification and admonishment from a televangelist in a purple tuxedo without the low-credibility trappings of women wearing high heels into combat situations.

[exboyfil]

7. I tend to agree - How many times was Earth threatened

with destruction and was only saved by the heroic actions of a single ship or even a single individual? It is like having a series of Spanish Armada disasters in a little over 200 years of series continuity. Also it sure sees, given all the bad stuff out their, that Earth defenses are pretty pathetic (kind of like all our aircraft carriers out patrolling the sea lanes and leaving the U.S. unprotected). I cite the example when the Borg cube came into the Solar System and was only intercepted by two ships that were quickly destroyed.

The Doomsday Machine
V'Ger
Whale Probe
Shizon
Nero
Borg - The Best of Both Worlds
Borg - First Contact
Borg - Dark Frontier (Voyager)
The Guardians
The Founders
Q
Screwing around with time travel

Not to mention border skirmishes with the Klingons, Romulans, Lizard guys, etc

[ixion]

9. I think that the point is not that the universe changes

it's the humans evolve into something more enlightened and less barbaric, albeit not completely.

[deutsey]

13. Yeah, I think the original show in the '60s was hopeful in that it basically said

Yes, everything may be screwed up now up with war, racism, social upheaval, but the show implicitly assured viewers that we survived and even learned to work together (the Enterprise's international/interracial crew, for example).

That view, of course, was undermined by that Next Generation movie that said much of human civilization had been wiped out with nuclear war.

I also remember a critique of the Star Trek franchise in a lefty magazine a while back that saw the Federation as an imperialistic power.

[Pab Sungenis]

17. That actually dates back to the first season of the Original Series.

Spock specifically mentions the Third World War, and there's also the Eugenics Wars to take into consideration.

The idea was that mankind may take itself to the brink, but in the end it survives.

[deutsey]

27. Huh...I didn't know that.

I knew about the wars that Kahn was involved in.

I love Star Trek, but was never on the Trekkie or Trekker (whichever's the proper nomenclature) level. :hi:

[ixion]

24. Yeah, for a 'federation' they certainly had imperial qualities....

I always had mixed feelings about that as well.

The other thing about 'Next Generation': There were often implications that if you weren't in Star Fleet, you weren't squat.

[FailureToCommunicate]

12. Roddenberry always tried to say 'peace is the way' Phasers on "stun"

not "kill" And: 'We can learn more about this new species alive then from autopsies'

I know Roddenberry always tried to do that in his scripts cause he told me so in person.

He may not have always succeeded in that - sometime plot conflict needs got the upper hand- and the show also evolved over seasons - but he made the effort.


(Edited to add: Roddenberry had served as a B17 pilot, commercial pilot, and a police sergeant before creating the series, so he knew a thing or two about conflict and weapons)

[Javaman]

14. Don't taz me bro!

Stun guns are now all the rage.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

15. Most of the galaxy's problems can be resolved by reversing the polarity

of stuff. Oh and antimatter. Can't forget that.

[Pab Sungenis]

18. Doctor Who was the one who saved the universe by reversing the polarity

of the neutron flow. Not Star Trek.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

21. It seems to me like there is quite a bit

of polarity reversal on Star trek as well:

http://ufies.org/txt/startrek.html

Top 10 Things I Hate About Star Trek

8. Reversing the Polarity.
For cripes sake Giordi, stop reversing the polarity of everything! It might work once in a while, but usually it just screws things up. I have it on good authority that the technicians at Starbase 12 HATE that. Every time the Enterprise comes in for its 10,000 hour checkup, they've gotta go through the whole damned ship fixing stuff. "What happened to the toilet in Stateroom 3?" "Well, the plumbing backed up, and Giordi thought he could fix it by reversing the polarity."

http://www.stowiki.org/Ability:_Reverse_Shield_Polarity

Reverse Shield Polarity icon (Klingon).png

Reverse Shield Polarity creates an "immunity" against energy based weapons over a period of time by converting the incoming energy damage into shield regeneration.

The energy weapon immunity is very helpful when being attacked from all sides. However, the extremely long cooldown coupled with the relatively short duration only makes it useful for emergency situations.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReversePolarity

Star Trek: The Original Series

In the episode "That Which Survives", Spock orders Scotty to reverse the polarity of a "magnetic probe". Scotty's incredulous, "reverse polarity?!" qualifies as the Trope Namer.
In the episode "Obsession", Spock once did this by "cross-circuiting to B". Same thing.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Geordi could make the Enterprise do anything by "routing (some piece of Techno Babble) through the main deflector array".
Wesley Crusher is famous for reversing the polarity on every damn thing.

In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Drone", Janeway and Seven of Nine thought they could fry a Borg tractor beam by reversing the polarity of Voyager's phaser banks; it looked on-screen like it was about to work, and instead their own phaser array was knocked out.
In Star Trek: Enterprise, used almost word for word by Malcolm Reed in the episode "Harbinger", when he reversed the polarity on the plasma coils to knock out an alien.

[okieinpain]

29. now that is awesome. love that. i've seen one of spock

leaning on a buick rivera that says " you maybe cool, but you're not spock leaning on a rivera cool". lol.

[Butch350]

19. W.G.A.R.A. ?!

[TheKentuckian]

20. Optimistic? Sure. Utopian? Not at all.

Utopian is the claim I've seen and with the amount of war, interstellar criminals, and various problems utopia seems pretty far away from Star Trek.

Of course mileage on perfection really varies. One person's utopia is another's evolutionary advancement with plenty more to do.

[n2doc]

22. ST-TOS was optimistic. But it got much darker as time went by

By the time they were doing Voyager and DS9, they really had a brutal view of the universe, mirroring the world today.

[area51]

23. Trek mirror universe

Ironically, I think the U.S. has de-evolved into the Trek mirror universe, as they were obsessed with running multiple wars, and all their resources went into the military, just like this country.

[AngkorWot]

25. Star Trek is a poorly written sci-fi show

with occasionally ham-fisted, transparent episodes about current social issues.

[Motown_Johnny]

30. Earth is a paradise in the Star Trek universe, that is their focus

plus there are hundreds of planets in the Federation and for the most part there is no war. Only along some boarders are there military actions, and then within the neighboring territories there is again peace (if you don't count the Klingons who like it that way).


Only DS9 even remotely resembles what you suggest and that is because it is near a boarder which is where the trouble is.

The Enterprise had to go looking for trouble and as often as not violence doesn't solve the problem.


I am not only a Star Trek fan but also a sci-fi nut in general. I disagree with your view on the subject and would love for you to suggest some vision of the future that is less optimistic. Asimov's Foundation is the only one I can think of.

[Downtown Hound]

31. Star Trek has never been about the future, it's about the present

In Star Trek, Earth is a paradise, showing what we could become. The rest of the galaxy is meant to show what we currently are, with all the alien species representing an aspect of ourselves.

[Liberal_in_LA]

37. +1

[LeftinOH]

35. According to the Trek timeline, the first contact will occur 50 years from now. n/t

[white_wolf]

36. The way our goverment is looking I think we are closer to the Imperial era of Star Wars.