Those who foresee an important role for human enhancement and other advanced technologies are sometimes accused of “predicting a Star Trek future” or “having watched too much Star Trek”. Nothing could be further from the truth! Star Trek, from our point of view, while perhaps not bad storytelling, is definitely bad futurism — a confused and implausible view of the 23rd and 24th centuries, not compared to other sci-fi shows, but compared to what you could come up with as an informed armchair futurist not writing for TV.
This post will list some ways in which the picture of the future suggested by Star Trek may be misleading. It will focus on general trends, not on individual messed-up technologies like inertial dampeners and universal translators and Heisenberg compensators. You could have a field day criticizing those, too, but many such field days have no doubt been had by others. (Please forgive any errors of fictional fact; I’ve watched the show enough to be familiar with the main features of the setting, but I’ve never been a devoted Trekkie, and my interest here is in discussing the future of our own not-so-fictional world.)
In Star Trek’s universe:
- Aliens exist. They’re common enough that in just one corner of the galaxy, dozens of intelligent species interact, sort of like our nation-states. But in reality, as we’ve known ever since Fermi asked his famous question “where are they”, intelligent life outside Earth must be somewhere between very rare and nonexistent. Yes, that’s a controversial view which deserves its own post one day, but it’s hard to believe anything else once you’ve built up an intuition for large numbers. Other habitable planets than Earth have existed for billions of years; the average Earthlike planet is older than Earth. That means some other civilization should have popped up in the neighborhood hundreds of millions of years ago — enough time to invent a bicycle and ride it to Alpha Centauri. Galactic and even intergalactic distances are small compared to the distance attainable on these time scales by light or optimized interstellar craft. In far less time still, exponential growth lets a civilization blossom into something encompassing many star systems. And yet we see no sign of any alien intelligence, anywhere. They haven’t taken apart the stars for raw materials, or switched them off to conserve energy. They haven’t sent any humanitarian missions, or unleashed berserker robots to suppress potential competitors. The simplest explanation is they’re not out there — apparently setting up a technological civilization from nothing requires one or more hard steps, perhaps starting with abiogenesis.
- Almost everyone lives on planets. Star Trek, like most of our thinking about the future, is shamelessly planetocentric. This is just a habit we will eventually get over. There is nothing that makes other planets a particularly good place to colonize compared to environments we could construct ourselves if we had anything close to Trek-level technology. In the long run, civilizations will find it more efficient to expand into outer space, where there is a lot more room. Our asteroid belt, if made into space settlements, could house thousands of times the population of Earth’s surface. These settlements could rotate for artificial gravity, would have unobstructed solar energy 24 hours a day, would make launches into space cheap, and would be less vulnerable to various disasters.
- Humans are unenhanced. It looks like the next few centuries, probably even decades, will bring advanced genetic engineering, life extension, brain-computer interfaces, mind uploading, and other forms of augmentation. Some of these technologies exist in Star Trek, but they’re only used much by the Borg, a race that’s portrayed as evil, scary, numerous, and fairly stupid. However, these technologies certainly aren’t intrinsically horrible; they can be used to great effect for good as well as evil ends. Extending lifespans is a good idea simply for humanitarian reasons. The same is true of technologies meant to limit or even abolish suffering, as well as those meant to expand opportunities for positive well-being. Even qualities like wisdom, kindness, and dignity are not above being tweaked and emulated. The capability to scan brains and transfer them to other substrates would, among other consequences, allow arbitrary copying of human capital constrained only by available hardware. If we could amplify intelligence beyond human defaults, that would have enormous ramifications; for just one thing, it would greatly speed up scientific progress. It’s hard to see how all governments would not only fail to capitalize on all this, but would also be able to prevent most dissenting groups and individuals from doing so.
- Economic growth is underemphasized. We’re always finding better ways to do stuff and adding to our stocks of capital, so economies tend to grow by a few percent each year nowadays, and this is a trend that has been accelerating on long timescales — growth was much slower before the industrial revolution and especially before agriculture. As so often, you will find enlightenment by taking out your pocket calculator. At a constant 3% per year, the economy grows by a factor of 7000 in 300 years and a factor of 140,000 in 400 years. At 5% per year, it’s 2.3 million and 300 million, respectively. Lesson: it’s easy to underestimate exponential growth. Artificial general intelligence or molecular nanotechnology, both of which I’ll return to later, would increase the growth rate to something far, far beyond those. Now, it’s true that you can’t blindly assume trends will continue. Trek’s universe, though, certainly doesn’t seem lacking in technological toys that could be put to good economic use, and these people have advanced aliens around to trade with and get ideas from. And yet, although I can’t back this up with anything rigorous, to me, the world in the newer series doesn’t seem that much richer than the world in the older series; the older civilizations don’t seem that much richer than the younger civilizations; and the Earth of Trek doesn’t seem richer than Earth-2007 by nearly a large enough factor.
- Artificial general intelligence exists, but has not revolutionized society. This is the biggest of all these points. To me, it makes many of the others irrelevant; I hold the opinion that human-level AI, if invented, will blow everything else out of the water. An artificial mind will have a different set of strengths and weaknesses than a human, so if one of them can perform human tasks on a starship, it’s already going to be superhuman in many fields — not just at the genius end of the human scale, but with capabilities far surpassing those we could imagine in any human. Star Trek probably has some silly excuse why Data can’t make copies of himself, but a real AI could create new transhuman capital at a rate limited only by the cost of computer hardware. (Come to think of it, I recall them copying the hologram doctor guy, but I don’t think much came of it.) Superhuman AI would also accelerate scientific and technological progress; imagine the fruits of a century of research compressed into a year, or a day. But although those consequences are relatively easy to think about, they aren’t even the main point of what futurists are calling the technological singularity — they aren’t necessarily what makes the event of superhuman AI entering the stage so sudden and discontinuous. A key insight is that one field of research an AI would accelerate is the field of AI itself. It could design smarter versions of itself that could in turn design even smarter versions. An AI that started out close to human intelligence would thus catapult itself quickly to whatever extremes of cognitive ability could be achieved given the hardware it had access to. That matters, because something that’s much smarter than you can pick out a state of the universe that very closely optimizes its goals, and who knows what those goals and the smartest ways to reach them will look like? This gives the singularity a much-discussed element of unpredictability. With some exceptions, it’s impossible to predict how something much smarter than you will behave, leaving the honest science fiction writer just plain screwed.
- Advanced nanotechnology exists, but has not revolutionized society. Star Trek’s world has nanorobots, or “nanites” as they call them, suggesting self-replicating assemblers of the kind theorized by Eric Drexler, not just the technology with nanoscale features that the word “nanotechnology” has come to mean. There’s controversy about whether Drexler’s proposals would work, but if they did, they would amount to far more than just a toy you could pull out at a time that’s convenient and then go back to ignoring. Nowadays, it’s supposed that molecular nanotechnology would be based not on roaming assemblers but on desktop nanofactories that could produce a range of products from simple feedstock, including but not limited to more nanofactories (with a doubling time perhaps less than a day!), computers cheap and powerful enough that you could start considering brute-forcing AI, large amounts of consumer goods, large amounts of conventional weapons, large amounts of nuclear weapons, and weapons with entirely novel properties. War would look different and probably much less stable. Humanity would gain not just one but a whole new menu of ways to screw itself over. But there’s an upside, too, in that we could end ancient curses like poverty — some have predicted a post-scarcity economy — and, through nanomedicine, various diseases and other limitations of the human body.
- Posthumans behave unreasonably. If you could do just about anything you wanted to, if you had all the time in the world to think about who and what you wanted to be, would you really end up just sitting around being enigmatic and half-heartedly harassing mortals, like the Q Continuum? Probably not — nor would most other people, of whatever species. If posthuman civilizations were here, and were indifferent to our plight, and had any preferences on the physical universe’s makeup at all, no matter how weak, they’d have turned those preferences into reality long ago, probably wiping out humanity in the process. If they believed in anything we’d think of as good ethics, they could do a lot better than letting history run its natural, cruel, risky course. Goal systems can be thought of that fall in neither of those categories. It’s hard, however, to think of any that would lead to behavior stable over subjective eons, meddlesome enough to be noticeable, nonsensical enough to give off an air of mystery, and yet restrained enough to leave the basic setting intact.
- AI is anthropomorphic. The human mind occupies a very specific corner in the space of intelligent programs. It got that way because it was designed incrementally by natural selection in a very specific environment, under various biological constraints like the slow serial speed of neurons. Designing an AI is hard; designing an AI that resembles the human mind is much harder still. Yet Data does resemble a human — just a human whose emotional state is always set to “neutral”. He tends to misunderstand human emotion and social interaction, in the way that humans lacking experience with these things might misunderstand them, even though there’s no reason why, to a general intelligence, they should be mysterious. Going overboard on significant digits is stupid computer behavior, and stereotypical human nerd behavior, but there is no reason why an AI should make mistakes typical of either stupid computers or stereotypical human nerds. And real AIs would not come neatly packaged as androids so we can interact with them the way we would with a human individual without upsetting our intuitions too much. They would be massively copyable, mergeable, tweakable, expandable, decomposable, upgradable, and most probably not confined to any single robot body.
- Ideas have changed too little. In Star Trek’s society, as far as I know, there is no taboo of ours that has become universally accepted. Yes, the mores of Star Trek’s society are such that we consider them progressive, but progressives as little as 100 years ago would be shocked if they could see what sort of things we consider normal. It’d be unlikely if there were nothing in future customs to shock us. There don’t seem to be any genuinely new ideas on how to have society work, either. I’m thinking along the lines of prediction markets, or even just blogs. Like with many other points, I don’t blame the writers for this; it is in predicting the future of ideas that futurism runs into its hardest limits. But a future with no weird ideas is still deeply unrealistic, and that’s worth keeping in mind.
- The world remains balanced too precariously between utopia and disaster. If the world needs saving every couple decades, why is it still around in the 24th century? In the real universe, there won’t be any Picards to miraculously save the day, with everyone knowing that, though dramatic tension requires difficulties, the ending will be happy. We will have to defeat existential disasters at a more systematic, institutional level, and by more comfortable margins. Behind every story of extraordinary heroism, there is a less exciting and more interesting story about the larger failures that made heroism necessary in the first place.
Well said! I’ve always loved star trek, but at the same time found myself frustrated with how short sighted it often is. Other things which always bugged me were.
1) Aliens aren’t even as alien as dolphins, practically a sister species compared to anything we’d find in space.
2) Evolution is magic in star trek. Things don’t evolve by natural selection, it always happens on an individual level. Someone has magic rainbow wishes for a while and then, bam, they’re suddenly a new species made out of energy. Evolution doesn’t care a whit about the individual, but people with technology do. But in the exact opposite world we see here, evolution acts on an individual level and trying to change oneself through technology will create a monster. Or something involving becoming more like Neelix. Which is pretty much the same thing.
I’m going to come across as an enormous geek, but here goes. In Star Trek enhancement technologies do exist, they are illegal however. This was due to the Eugenics wars in their universes late 20th century. The episodes ‘Space Seed’(I think)and the movie Star Trek 2 discuss that.
There was an episode of Deep Space 9 where the Doctor on board, Julian Bashir, faced the loss of his job and possibly life imprisonment due to his parents enhancing his genome because he was intellectualy disabled as a small child.
I forget how it was resolved however, but I do remember my opinion of the federation dropping drastically, even though I wasn’t a transhumanist at that point.
It just struck me how much Star Trek is like a world where transhumanist technologies are developed, but regulation is led by the hardline bioconservatives
Star trek is dying. That whole way of looking at the here and now, and the future, that whole ambiance of theatric drama, hell, Hollywood itself is dying. We have been witnesses, looking in through a glass wall, into a theater with a bunch of attractive, styled, painfully stereotypical actors in tights were making easy to score points in unimaginative, predictable, one-hour episodes.
Grab star trek and make it a Augmented Reality game, or a stereoscopic 360 degree 24/7/365 customizable MMORPG experience and it disintegrates as a wedding cake in a river. The whole series is based on flatscreen depiction. It’s like those faberge eggs: miniature, useless, fragile and kitsch.
Unfortunately, the average transhumanist is so far removed from the common gene pool of lower education, stressed out daily life of the early 21st century we are effectively as lonely as a naked Bill Gates in Medieval Europe. More than 75% of the audience that watches TV worldwide is categorically incapable of grasping the subtle nuances and soaring speculative marvels that is Star Trek. Babylon or BGS was becoming to esoteric for them so they welcomed a return to horses and sixshooters as in Serenity.
We are screwed. We will muddle on with these people in tow, crash into a singularity. “They” will go jehova’s witness, revolt or slice their wrists when things start getting interesting for “us”.
Hint: only old people (30+) truly care about Star Trek. I grew up with delicious interactive fiction, not the television, so I have no vested emotional interest in Star Trek or Star Wars.
“Babylon or BGS was becoming to esoteric for them so they welcomed a return to horses and sixshooters as in Serenity.”
And there are things so esoteric for you that Babylon and BGS are primitive.
“We are screwed. We will muddle on with these people in tow, crash into a singularity. “They” will go jehova’s witness, revolt or slice their wrists when things start getting interesting for “us”.”
This statement is bullshit. Surrounded by intelligence, everyone’s needs will be met simultaneously. The notion of “improvement” that pisses off some segment of society is a byproduct of insufficient intelligence.
JEmerson: both good points.
Michael H: I see, thanks. I still say it’s unrealistic for the suppression of these technologies to be so thorough (and not just among humans).
I agree with Michael A’s comment rather than Dagon’s, but that’s assuming a reasonably quick and safe transition. If not, I’m not sure what would happen, but certainly it’s dangerous to get too high on the idea that everyone else is a sheep…
Science fiction is supposed to express ideas and concepts that are recognizable to readers today. If you wrote 23rd century sci-fi with the ideas expressed above, you’d end up with a story that would take place in picoseconds involving some state of consciousness and technology that no one today could relate to without reading several thousand pages explaining the way the world has evolved.
[quote]only old people (30+) truly care about Star Trek.[/quote]
bull…I’m 23 and I love Startrek. It’a grate TV show and you have to watch it like one. In the time when Gene Roddenberry was creating the basic concept there were no ideas of mind uploads or zillion times smarter then human AI. And all those next shows had to be written ON the basis os the original concept. It’s all there is to…
Star Trek was, and is a parable about TODAY’s problems and issues. The original series dealt with themes of racial harmony, “cold war in space” and a fear of the “dehumanizing” effects of automation because those were the issues on people’s minds. Later, The Next Generation dealt more explicitly with multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, the concept of non-interference, and the responsible use of power because those were the issues that mattered to people in the 80′s and early 90′s. Star Trek tends to confuse shallow, narrow-minded techno-fetishists who treat it strictly as a futurist primer, when it’s really a dramatic adventure show about the contemporary world and timeless moral issues.
I did distinguish between bad storytelling and bad futurism. What I’m saying is “Star Trek sucks when taken as a vision of the future”, not “Star Trek sucks as a TV show because you have to take it as a vision of the future”. I can enjoy sci-fi that’s bad futurism in the same way that I can enjoy fantasy; that doesn’t mean I can’t point out that it *is* bad futurism, for the sake of prediction rather than TV criticism. Using the Borg (implicitly or explicitly) as an argument against cybernetic implants should become just as disreputable as using orcs as an argument against racial equality. People have a tendency to absorb all these assumptions they see with their own eyes every week. They may realize Trek isn’t meant as a prediction, but then they start framing predictions as “like Star Trek except X is different”. Star Trek isn’t a natural kind, it’s a jumble of inconsistent plot elements, and there’s no way people should get away with saying “like in Star Trek” or call a future with transhuman technologies a “Star Trek future”.
“People have a tendency to absorb all these assumptions they see with their own eyes every week”
That sounds like a whopper of an assumption right there. What are you basing that assertion on? I’m starting to wonder if you’re issue isn’t so much with Star Trek as it is with the imaginary straw man audience you assume is taking Trek literally.
“I’m starting to wonder if you’re issue isn’t so much with Star Trek as it is with the imaginary straw man audience you assume is taking Trek literally”
It seems plausible that people accept the information that is presented to them regularly. At least some people. Lets stop picking apart the authors comments and just accept the article as it was intended please. Sheesh, you gotta watch yerself with these trekkies…
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“Lets stop picking apart the authors comments”
Hey, don’t say that! Picking stuff apart is good critical thinking and may lead to interesting discussions.
I guess I’m basing my assertion on casual observation… again, every time someone says “like in Star Trek”, that suggests to me they assume things that are “like in Star Trek” in one way are also “like in Star Trek” in other ways. Sure, people don’t literally lift their view of the future from Star Trek, but it happens in degrees. Just having the concepts on your mind will often cause you to make automatic inferences that aren’t right. When I first encountered predictions of transhuman technology possibly happening in decades, that seemed intuitively wrong to me, and I think part of the reason was the science fiction I’d seen was all more conservative than that.
Dagon’s comment about an us vs. them wasn’t so bad. Why not have one side of humanity racing into C24, whatever it will bring, and the other choosing an Amish-like lifestyle? To not use tech beyond a certain point, say, 2001, or not at all. After all, they survive on C18 tech.
As for ST, it’s doomed. Their notebooks are hopelessly dated, their culture should have been overrun by the Borg. There’s no internet, no evolution, no fucking gays. On a spaceship, everything is scarce, unless you have drexler-nano. According to a Dutch historian, culture is in the game. Let’s say this is true: where on Earth (should’ve been called Water) is ST culture? What’s their game?
Doomed, because it’s so limited. It’s a greenhouseplant. No writer ever copied it for his/her own novel/game. It’s a meme which is trying desperately to survive and hopelessly failing. Not bad futurism, bad storytelling will do.
A good article. However, it’s virtually impossible for me to take it seriously on account of reasons 1, 4 and 5. Also 2, about which your comments regarding the show are as flawed as how you think they’re not applicable to the real future.
Good discussion. Pardon my having come to it a bit late. I concur, for the most part with the original post, of course. As Damien Broderick points-out, the ST universe has to have some continuity with “our” world, so as to be intelligible to hang various “space opera” stories on (and I don’t intend the use of “space opera” just then to be particularly pejorative, btw). But the points in the post are all, of course, essentially correct. Being an Eisenhower baby (born March 1958), I well recall seeing the original ST in prime time first-run, and then, of course, in endless re-runs. Like Serling’s *Twilight Zone* and the original *Outer Limits* from the late 50′s and early 60′s, ST dealt with socially (socio-*politically*) relevant themes (at least occasionally—admittedly not all the time), and did so with reasonably good writing/plotting and directing-&-acting.
It is, of course, disturbing to me that our culture is still stupidly-religious. One must bear in mind that the federal government is funding the schools to an inordinate degree, and is obviously getting what it and the power-elite want, a dumbed-down population, easily manipulated (indeed, almost brainwashed) by media increasingly mearly tools for corporate propaganda and (would-be) mind (certainly memetic) control. The posters here, and transhumanists and singularitarians generally, are the exception(s), who have NOT been completely dumbed-down by the education system.
Friendly Synthetic General Intelligence will, of course, be a planetary cosmic tipping-point (or, I suppose, one might say, inflection point). Core friendliness is the key, and we’re fortunate to have such brilliant minds as Ben Goertzel and Eliezer Yudkowsky working on the fundamental algorithms and protocols to instantiate it.
The internet–not even dealt with in the ST series–by and large is a boon, but we can only hope that it help elevate the Zeitgeist and nudge it in a more transhumanist direction. Speaking of Zeitgeist, see http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com: Pretty good film.
Writing too fast: should’ve been merely…old Eisenhower baby can’t spell anymore worth a hoot
Al, btw: I’m curious: How & Why do you disagree with points 1, 2, 4 and 5?
Michael A: Surrounded by BENEVOLENT intelligence…THAT’S the key (as you, dear young colleague, well know). But that depends on WHO develops the AGI(s) first. A neo-con, military AGI would, lamentably, be a rather different story. And it’s not (YET, anyway) a sure-thing that THAT scenario won’t start to develop over the next 10-15 yrs. The two countweights to that sort of horrific potential are, of course, SIAI, and the likelihood of IA developing in tandem (and ultimately more benignly–despite the possibility of a Harlen Ellisonesque “Soldier” scenario) along with AGI. If IA is more transhumanist/consumerist oriented, as I surmise is fairly likely, then Friendly AGI may co-evolve in conjunction with such IA. We need to try to nudge things all the more in that direction.
I only hope the Fukayamas and (Leon) Kasses of the world get hip (don’t hold your breath on that one, though)
(Like Esfandiary, I was “launched” half-a-century prematurely!)
Interestingly enough, Star Trek is what got me into transhumanism before I even knew what it was. It was the absurd abandonment of technologies and discovers that happened on a weekly basses that started it. I began to ask, “Since Star Trek is just a TV show, and can’t be realistic in following through with the discoveries of previous episodes, then what would a “realistic Star Trek” look like?”
In various episodes, we’ve seen transporter tricks to reverse aging, clone people down to every memory, and hold people in stasis for years. In real life, all of those things would be perused and not simply be abandoned. Same for uploading into android bodies and acquiring telekinesis and telepathy.
I still like the Utopian vision of Star Trek, and I’ve been searching for a more transhumanist take on the same thing. The closest I’ve found is Ian M. Banks’ Culture novels. They have AGIs that are both super-intelligent and friendly, immortality, biological enhancements( mostly for pleasure), and a scarcity free lifestyle. What is lacking is VR, mind uploading, and cyborgs, but compared to Star Trek the Culture novels are a lot more forward thinking.
I got into transhumanism via Dragonball Z so I must admit that a lack of sentimentality over Star Trek makes it much easier for me to discard it.
Okay, I’m probably not saying anything that hasn’t already been said, I realize, but I can’t let that stop me right?
The point isn’t whether star trek is an accurate representation of the future, the point is that it’s IMPORTANT because it has shaped how we think of the future.
Saying, “Like in Star Trek” is like saying, “Like Tolkien.” (Now there is something that annoy me.) A large amount of the most successful or interesting books in the fantasy genre will have some sort of comment made by someone saying likening the work to Tolkein’s Lord of the rings trilogy.
Most of these books have almost nothing in common with LOTR except for the fact that they are fantasy and that a large number of them follow the monomyth (which Tolkein so didn’t invent).
The fact is that when the general populace thinks “fantasy” they think Tolkein (and if you don’t, you’re probably not among the general populace when it comes to literature). In the same way, when people think “what’s the future gonna be like?” they think star trek. Not because it’s particularly accurate of the field but because it’s the most well known.
And let’s face it, Star Trek is IMPORTANT. Not as a “This is what the future will be like” but as “This is where we are now. This is what we can accomplish.” Star Trek has influenced the direction we are heading. It has influenced how we design our cars and how we design our robots. It has influenced how we relate to new technology and how we relate to new people.
Star Trek influenced rthe making of the Mars Rover and it *definitely* influenced the making of Repliee Q1Expo.
You’re right. Star Trek isn’t futurism. It’s Presentism. It’s the way we as a general populace think about space exploration, robotics, politics, religion, genetics, etc.
Star Trek is NOW.
*grins* and as much as we geeks hate it, we’re stuck with it.
For now.
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1) You are problaly right, either they are hiding from us really well or they have not come to be yet. I’d put my money on the latter and that sucks for the aliens as we will probably colonize their planet before they can develop.
2) Most people live on planets in Star Trek because it is cheaper, no need for air systems, plants, food, etc. And the energy to go from planet to ship is cheap (transporter) that it isn’t too difficult. Plus tons of people live on space stations (deep space 9) and on the ships.
3) This is true and I’m sure they give a bogus reason why they don’t. Computer enhanced human intelligence is most likely the future but it really is hard to predict and not exactly that great for telling stories for people of today.
4) Can’t really understand this one, they really don’t have a capitalist economy, most is run through the government. They can do whatever they want and make whatever they want in the holodeck and on the replicators.
5) Nothing is more powerful than the ship’s computer (like running an AI smarter than Data AND operating the ship or when the Doctor ran the entire Voyager ship “Computer, fire at their weapon’s array!”). But you are over hyping AI. AI will always be limited by the programmers and even with hundreds of people working on it the AI will never be able to compete with a human. The easiest way would be to reverse engineer a human brain and at that point you might as well just make a new one and plug in a computer to it (back to the human enchantments topic).
6) Not one for nanotech hype either. Why do you need little metal objects when you can pretty much do everything with organic material? Need a new leg? Grow one. Need food? Replicate it. Seems like a more expensive way of doing things in the Star Trek world (and probably in ours as well).
7) Makes no sense, neither in Star Trek nor what you are saying. Since nothing like Q really does exist, and never will, not much to discuss.
9) Like you said it is hard to predict ideas and culture. I do find the lack of superstars odd (Only ever once in a while do you hear them talk about an old jazz singer, or classical, or some alien songs). I would have to think that in such a society art and culture would run rampant at amazing speeds. But such a fast moving culture may be too much for an audience for a 1 hour show (and for writers).
Yes, there are obviously some out of proportion things in Star Trek (like the wavering levels of the AIs). But out of all the scifi shows I have watched in my years I would say that Star Trek is probably the one that will be closest to coming true. This is somewhat because so many people enjoyed it and are working towards making it come true (how many scientists talk about Star Trek as their motivation?) and somewhat because it was willing to push all the limitations to the max. It took science and exaggerated it hoping one day that the physics and technology will catch up. And it might one day.
In the novelisation of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” which Gene Roddenberry wrote himself, he establishes that an increasing (and sizeable) portion of 23rd century human society was becoming telepathically linked into a group-consciousness. Presumably, this was with the aid of post-human technology.
According to Kirk, however, the increased intelligence of enhanced “New Human” officers ground human exploration of the galaxy to a halt, as “these superbly intelligent and flexible minds being sent out by Starfleet could not help but be seduced eventually by the higher philosophies, aspirations, and consciousness levels being encountered.”
Kirk’s class at the academy was the first class selected on the basis of lower mental abilities, and Kirk’s crew was the first in Starfleet to return intact from its historic five year voyage, sending shockwaves throughout the Federation.
Kirk even calls himself a primitive human being compared to the rest of human society. Oh, and had a transmitter chip from Starfleet directly embedded in his brain.
A bit offtopic, but this clears up many inconsistencies in the franchise and puts other things into perspective. Commander Kang’s line to Kirk for instance, “your Starfleet, quite a remarkable instrument,” suggests an awe at the level of disparity between the lives and abilities of different individual Humans, by way of contrast with Klingon society, which as we know is more or less uniformly focussed on combat.
24th century Federation citizens seem to lead traditional, technology-less lifestyles, because the show is about Starfleet officers, many of whom were definitely raised in extremely traditional (by 24th century standards) households (eg. Picard). Or have chosen to self-inclict Starfleet’s harsh, draconian ordinances to be allowed to explore space.
Other technology-lacking humans (the Maquis and the American Indian settlers) live in the Demiliterized Zone at the very edge of human civilization. By contrast, All matter of post-human technologies (and their accompanying vices) are probably available on worlds like Earth and New Sydney. We just never see them.
The novel also established that mind control technology was discovered in the 21st century, but is heavily frowned upon. Genetic engineering is presumably frowned upon because of the Eugenics wars. So there is, in fact, extensive use of enhancing technologies within the Trek universe that’s rarely mentioned.
IMO, all the evidence suggests that the Star Trek TV series isn’t bad futurism per se, just bad writing and worse delivery.
Your blather about economic growth is total rubbish.
How is it with all of this talk about technology you can’t figure out that planned obsolescence is going on? We had planes that could do 400+ mph in World War II but we are supposed to get excited because automobile companies keep redesigning crap that rolls along the ground at less than 130 mph.
So how much do Americans and the World lose on the depreciation of automobiles every year? Has the entire economics profession forgotten to do that computation every year for the last 50? What are PhDs for? Failing to figure out the obvious?
But buying more of the junk is economic growth. Now we have the planned obsolescence of computers and computer software. We are supposed to buy more powerful hardware because the software is more bloated and inefficient. YEAH RIGHT!
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Watch the Deep Spce Nine episode House of Quark.
Double-entry accounting is 700 years old. How hard can it be?
So why hasn’t it been mandatory in our high schools for the last 50 years? Why is Shakespeare more important than accounting? Shakespeare was mentioned often in Star Trek. But since they didn’t have money why should they have accounitng?
But House of Quark showed how important it was.