Why are there humans on Star Trek if it takes place in the future?
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Star Trek gets it all wrong — and so does every other space-fi movie.
Yoda once said:
Fear is the path to the Dark Side.
Fear leads to anger.
Anger leads to hate.
Hate leads to suffering.
In the years following 9/11, many Americans were filled with fear and anger. And many crossed over to the Dark Side into hate. That hatred manifested in myriad ways spanning the gamut from racist cartoons all the way up to — no kidding — calling for nuking the entire Middle East. That’s like Evil Emperor-level Dark Side.
Anyway, at that time, an anonymous hater came up with this totally not-funny riddle/joke:
Riddle: “Why aren’t there any Arabs on Star Trek?”
Punchline: “Because it takes place in the future.”
Just in case one or two of you missed the “joke,” it’s implying that Arabs will be wiped out at some point in the future and thus not be represented on the show.
But I’m not here today to discuss racism and hate. There’s a much, much deeper irony built into this riddle. While our puny cerebellums are fearfully squabbling over our selfish interests, a collaborative of neo cortexes is planning our collective evolution — or some might say extinction!
We humans as a race should be pondering a more serious riddle:
“Why are there any humans AT ALL on Star Trek if it takes place in the future?”
Invasion of the meat people?
Indulge me for a minute here. My ADHD mind has a tendency to wander sometimes.
Here’s the train of thought that prompted me to write this article:
- I was looking for a movie to watch and was checking out the trailer for “Battle: Los Angeles” — a movie about a space alien invasion — and the dialog says, “The first thing you do when you colonize is wipe out the indigenous people. We are being colonized.”
- That led me to think about humans colonizing space.
- That, in turn, prompted me to think about the difficulties that space travel poses to what are essentially conscious bags of meat.
- From there I started thinking about Star Trek and the fact that the human race somehow figured out how to create gravity on a spaceship that’s not spinning.
- Then I was thinking about all the sci-fi flicks and how science goes out the window when it comes to human spaceflight in the movies.
And then it dawned on me:
Perhaps Hollywood has been getting it all wrong all along. Is a spaceship full of meat bags really a reflection of reality?
Personally, I don’t believe we’ll ever see human beings leaving our solar system, and here’s why:
There are a host of challenges to sending human beings into interstellar space. There are obvious effects like the consequences of microgravity on the human musculoskeletal system and the damaging effects of cosmic radiation.
And there are not-so-obvious challenges such as human reproduction. And then there are completely unknown and unimagined risks which I’m sure are plentiful when you go star hopping.
In an attempt to wish away the challenges of interstellar travel, some futurists have gone so far as to propose the idea of creating genetically engineered humans that are more adapted to the requirements of living in space.
Well, while ethicists are chewing on that one (we’ll check in on you in 90 years and see how you’re doing) some futurists are on a wholly different heading.
Meatless space travel
Some futurists are claiming that consciousness need not be confined to these bags of meat we’re all trapped in. And if that’s the case then perhaps we can send consciousness into space without sending meat people into space.
One scenario for meatless space colonization is that we develop realistic telepresence and assert our consciousness remotely. In other words, we create robots with sensors and feed the sights and sounds and feelings of faraway places remotely and directly into our brains (or at least via VR).
Three words: Ain’t, gonna, happen.
Telepresence might be fine for piloting drones on your homeworld, but the delay created by space-time I think would pretty much rule out using telepresence for human space exploration. The latency would be maddening.
Here are a few other feasible scenarios:
The telepresence scenario
So, let’s fantasize, for a moment, that we eventually tap into some kind of subspace communication channel that violates all known laws of physics. And let’s say we could use it to control robots at great distances in real-time and actually feel present in outer space.
It would still look nothing like Star Trek. Instead of the human crew, you’d have a ship full of robots, drones, droids, and probes. Using subspace communications, human characters in the movie can access any one of these tools at any moment while sitting at home in their PJs back here on Earth. (That might actually make a good sci-fi flick, come to think of it.)
The robot overlords scenario
Another argument for there never being humans in interstellar space, is that given the exponential acceleration of the evolution of technology, within a half-century, we could develop computers that far exceed the intelligence of the entire human race. In essence, we’ll seem as intelligent to them as lab rats seem to us, today.
Our robot overlords won’t have to worry about the limits of their biology because they won’t have any biology.
It might be more accurate to use the pronoun “it” rather than “they,” as it will inevitably become one giant, conscious network of glorious computation with no essential biological components.
For this scenario, imagine a starship with no humans. Rather the ship itself is alive and conscious. However, without at least a few humans in the cast, this idea would make for a boring movie.
The mind upload scenario
A third scenario is that we somehow achieve what’s referred to as “substrate independence” and are able to upload our consciousness to a computer, leaving our bodies behind. Who knows what or how we’d even be thinking then. Our puny minds would just be relegated to billions of tiny points of view in a vast, super-intelligent machine.
Again, think Starship Enterprise with no crew, just a bunch of us on a server someplace safe oohing and ahhing as our starships traipse around the universe.
We’re pretty much stuck here
Human beings have been on the moon. Maybe someday a few of us might set foot on Mars. But if the space program of the present day is any indication of the future, it’s pretty obvious to me that artificially intelligent probes will be the pioneers of interstellar travel.
And who knows, perhaps one day there will arise machine consciousness.
But one thing I’m pretty sure won’t ever happen is that a starship full of meat people will be rocketing across the galaxy colonizing distant star systems. I think we’ll be stuck here cheering for intelligent robots while they go have all the fun.
I suspect that if consciousness does spread throughout the galaxy, it will be something as unlike human consciousness as cockroach consciousness is to us.
And if there are other races from other worlds beating us to the punch, we won’t find any evidence of little green meat-men sending us greetings or grays coming in peace. It will be something unlike anything Hollywood has yet imagined.
So the punchline to the riddle, “Why are there humans on Star Trek at all if it takes place in the future?” is because Hollywood and the public at large are just totally clueless about the future.
There’s gotta be a movie in there somewhere.
