Live from the Nuke Free Zone

This is a post that I’ve been meaning to make for a while now, ever since the Columbia accident in fact. Since it’s now been just over a year since the accident, and with Bush’s “space plan” finally out, I feel a need to discuss this.

When it comes to space travel, Americans in general tend to not favor it right now. I stress the words ‘right now’ for a reason; when pressed, your average Murrkan-in-the-street will shrug and say “oh sure, I’d love to go to the Moon but we need to fix so many things on Earth. Maybe when we fix them we can go.” This litany - aside from the people who actively oppose the space program as a waste of money resources and lives or think it’s all a Secret Government Plot to Oppress The Masses(tm) - is probably the most common sentiment I have ever found. It’s based on the idea that space travel is something for a Utopia to do, not a fucked-up society like ours.

I blame Star Trek. No, really. Stop snickering for a minute and I’ll explain.

First things first, we have to understand what Star Trek is in relation to the rest of Western civilization. Trek has been syndicated since the early 1970s, and is still in syndication every year at least somewhere on Earth. It spawned four successor television shows, one still in broadcast syndication, one still first-run, ten movies, an animated series, somewhere around 200 books, several different comic series, VHS and DVDs of past episodes, and a legion of several million very devoted fans who have their own movie as well.

On top of this, Star Trek parodies, knockoffs, satires and the jokes of a thousand talk-show wannabes have spread the basic concept of the show to places where it otherwise would not have gone. Everybody knows who Mr. Spock is, or Captian Kirk (complete with bad William Shatner imitation), or Picard, or Data, or Worf or… well, you get the idea.

And everybody but everybody knows the Starship Enterprise.

It’s pretty obvious that Trek has successfully planted some very deep roots into the mass consiousness. Therin lies the problem.

Y’see, Gene Roddenberry - Star Trek’s creator, for those of you not hip on your trivia - created Star Trek with a specific vision of the Earth as unified and peaceful. This was a fairly radical vision (for network television, anyway) when Trek was first created in the mid-1960s, with both the Cold War and the Vietnam War in full swing. Later producers would follow Roddenberry’s lead with Star Trek: The Next Generation and embellish on that vision. Not only peaceful, Earth (according to the Next Generation) now no longer had pollution problems, had a post-monetary economy and was basically a well-manicured garden planet.

That vision is what blinkers a lot of people. They see the crew of the Enterprise wander around getting into adventures, usually mentioning that Earth has become “perfect” in the meantime between the 20th Century and the 24th Century, and they figure that the only way that humanity gets into space will be when Earth is rendered perfect. Most people see the all-or-nothing proposition there, and don’t grasp the idea that ending war and poverty, or exploring space, or curing disease, or what have you, is a process, and that humanity is quite capable of doing more than one thing at a time. Prioritizing is of course important: Ending, for example, large-scale conflict between nation-states takes a greater short term priority because the survival of the species as a technological civilization may be at stake, while space exploration is a much more long term project. But one of the things we seem to have forgotten is that the short term and long term are not incompatible. If we focus on the short term to the exclusion of the long, we’ll end up creating a Pax Mundania; comfortable enough to live in, but helpless should something sufficiently unforseen happen, like a chunk of rock coming out of nowhere and taking out Europe, or the Yellowstone caldera popping, or the Deccan Traps… well.

I think the producers of Star Trek, focusing mainly on direct ratings and profit share, don’t really understand the level of influence their show had - and still has - on the population. They like to brag that the show has encouraged the space program over the years, but offsetting the numbers of astronauts or technicians that the show inspires are the numbers of ordinary dude-on-the-street types who look at the show and see it as a confirmation that space isn’t accessible until humanity is perfect.

Trek’s greatest sin (And its sins are many, most of them involving Hollywood standards, but that’s another topic for discussion altogether and I digress…) is that for all it talks about humanity’s destiny among the stars, it reinforces the idea that the Pax Mundania has to be emplaced before humanity can attempt to reach for that destiny.

The use of Trek as a pejoritive (”Oh stop being such a Trekkie and worry about (insert pet project here)!”) by the more space-hostile types is just icing on the cake.