House of Eratosthenes

I remember starting to have some real reservations about the Star Trek franchise, as President Clinton was about to be sworn in and I could start to see what was happening to the country. Everything had to be sanitized, watered down, made harmless, and this adventure/comedy show was offering a naive picture of where it was all going to lead. (The “Who’s Better, Kirk or Picard” debate was, at the time, gathering a lot of attention.) We’d cure all these problems, get past the crude paradigm of trying to make money…heh. From this new age of enlightenment, we’d conquer the stars and begin to discover exotic new races of strange beings who wore funny rubber masks and spoke perfect English. It was a continuum of human progress, the very portrait of the unconstrained vision — the continuum would start with the United Nations, which had so captured the enthusiasm and imagination of millions back in the late 1960’s when the first show started; and it would culminate hundreds of years later with some mirroring of all the dizzying technology we saw. One smooth upward slope.

Star Trek offered a connection, an appealing one to the weak of mind, between our liberals and the basic, noble human attribute of curiosity. Star Trek was P.R. for modern liberalism. It had become hardcore liberalism; maybe it always had been.

Well, the NASA decision puts the light on the Big Reveal: President Obama’s ideology is not Star Trek. Far from it.

Perhaps it is most precise to say, the fringe lunatic modern-liberalism that is making all the decisions right now, possesses all of the naivete of Star Trek, all of the puffed-up self-importance, but with none of the ambition, desire or drive to embolden the human spirit, to venture outward, to break out of old frontiers and challenge new ones.

It is the Anti-Star-Trek.

It seeks to remain ignorant of the new, to cower and hide, to test out strange, flawed old ideas that have already failed. To meekly not go where just about everyone’s already been.

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- House of Eratosthenes | 04/16/2010 @ 07:57
I remember watching Star Trek (particularly the Next Generation series) while younger and scoffing at the idea that human beings would ever work without money or some other tangible reward, as suggested by the premise. What was really funny is that this premise persisted in saying that the United Federation of Planets did not have any internal currency or other unit of exchange; but other species (such as the Ferrengi) did have currency (“credits,” or latinum, which I gathered to be some precious metal like gold)…and this contradiction was completely lost on the series writers.

Another thing which struck me early on, and again this was particularly the case in NextGen. Does anyone remember the series premier – “Encounter at Farpoint?” The Enterprise-D was on its maiden voyage, and it runs into Q, who proceeds to put the crew on trial for being members of a “savage, child-race.” Does anyone remember an observation Q made during the trial?

He said, “You spent centuries fighting among yourselves on Earth, and then you made peace. Then you traveled out among the stars, where you found NEW enemies to fight! The Klingons. The Romulans. It was the same OLD story, all over again.”

That struck me right there. I was sitting there on my couch, and I thought, “You know, Q is right. If humanity was finally able to settle its differences and have this wonderful world peace, why didn’t those same peacemaking methods work when we ran into other civilizations from other parts of the galaxy?”

Think about it. The Federation was built on the idea that we could settle differences through diplomacy, not war, and eventually achieve unity by finding common ground? Right? Am I wrong? Someone correct me if I am. At any rate, the Federation found, early on, that making peace with some other races in this way proved elusive. In short, it seems that some of them simply were more interested in conquest than in peaceful co-existence. More interested in furthering the interests of their own species than in accomodating anyone else and making concessions for the sake of peace. Oh, sure…the Federation (which was started on Earth, by human beings) found plenty of friends out in the cosmos, but there were also others who regarded this wonderful utopian coalition as a rival or an enemy.

And even when peace was finally made with the Klingons, for instance, the Federation still had enemies, some of which didn’t really appear until later series: The Cardassians. The Dominion. The Borg. The Kazon. It was always somebody. In fact, having an antagonist is probably a big part of what made the show interesting to watch in the first place. Who wants to watch a TV show about everyone getting along and never having any problems?

And why do those observations suddenly sound so familiar? Could it be that all the premises of the Federation are, in short, a crock of shit, and that the Star Trek universe seen on TV will never come into being, no matter how far technology takes us?
- cylarz | 04/16/2010 @ 11:56
We’ll get pretty much anywhere we want to go. Looking at it scientifically, I must say I’m wary of the supra-light travel. And I note, with interest, that if I look at it religiously I come to the same conclusion I reach when I look at it scientifically. If I were God, what would I do? Either pick out one spot to develop this thing called “life,” or if I’m going to make a bunch of them, space them out so far apart that the laws of physics make it impossible they’ll ever meet each other.

So that part seems credible to me. What I find to be a crock of bullshit is that we do these things after we have solved other problems, and unfortunately this is central to Star Trek theory. We solve disease, we solve starvation, oh great now we can start exploring stars. That is not the way it’s happened. The way it’s happened in the past is necessity is the mother of invention. My family is starving because I’m competing with this asshole over here transporting goods, so let’s see if there’s a passage I can use that is a shortcut — wham, lookee what new continent I discovered. Contentment is the enemy of progress, is my point.

Now there are instances in which you have to solve Problem A before you can even begin to look at Problem B. But achieving some sort of stillness and equilibrium in human affairs, that doesn’t enter into it; it’s more like, you have to come up with a way to send digital signals down a wire, before you can set up network peers to recognize a 32-bit IP address and respond to it, you have to iron the bugs out of that before you can implement an effective back-off algorithm and abandon token-ring. Like that. So their theory is valid enough to enjoy a best-case scenario and suffer from a worst-case scenario…

The irony is, Star Trek is really a worst-case scenario for their own theory. There’s no money, we’re all just trying to explore the galaxy to better ourselves? Okay, so that poor welder guy who spends his entire CAREER mounting the cross beams on Deck 23, Sector 359 of this new “starship” has to believe when he’s all done, the wise people in charge of the Federation are going to send the fruits of his labor someplace…oh, really wise. That’s what gives him the same sense of purpose that “money” gives his counterpart in these crude, present times.

I think the money thing was a real yes-man moment for Rick Berman. Someone should have thrown a big net over him and beat him right there. That one decision really screwed the pooch on the whole thing.
- mkfreeberg | 04/16/2010 @ 12:16
Morgan, you remind me of those people I’ve run across who insist that we have to “solve problems on Earth” like hunger….first, BEFORE we can start exploring the cosmos. My response has always been, “What if the solution to world hunger is, in fact, ‘out there,’ found among conditions that simply do not exist on Earth? Hydrogen, for instance…found in abundance in space but does not occur naturally in a pure form anywhere on Earth. I concluded by letter by naming some inventions that have benefited us all, which came about as a direct result of the space program.

I remember having precisely this exchange with some left-wing idiot years ago, on the letters-to-the-editor page of my hometown newspaper. He wrote in again and said, “I know there are many cold hearts out there, who can look into the eyes of a starving child and tell them there is no money for food (because it was all spent on the space program.)” I left the guy have the last word after deciding that the local community had already heard enough of our squabbling, but deep-down…well I won’t even tell you what I felt like doing to the guy. I’m so sick and tired of this hamhanded idea that you don’t care about poor people, just because you don’t want to see taxpayer money spent on handouts. Geesh, Madison and other Founders said the same thing I did. Are they lacking in compassion too?

And Morgan, I’m not even so sure about the “we’ll get where we want to go” part. If the entire world is turned into a big socialist paradise, where is the innovation and technological progress to get to other star systems, going to come from? Geez, did the Soviet Union invent anything besides the AK-47 assault rifle?
- cylarz | 04/16/2010 @ 12:29

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