Star Trek

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"According to “Star Trek,” everything we're worried about right now will be OK. There will be other things that go wrong — a species intent on taking over the universe, arguments between factions of aliens — but these concerns are foreign enough that they're intriguing rather than scary. The show depicts its fair share of pain and suffering, but usually it's the aliens who suffer in any permanent way; when humans do, it's an aberration from the new normal that's been created. By the time the Enterprise is exploring new worlds, we've eliminated climate change, war, disease, xenophobia and sexism. On Earth, everything is as it should be. In the rest of the universe, though, these things still exist, and nearly every conflict on the series involves starship crews becoming entangled with random and calculated unfairness, cruelty and moral complication. We get Klingon in-fighting, alien merchants selling slaves, a civilization about to be decimated by its dying star. “Star Trek: The Next Generation” is especially prone to depicting easily-recognizable versions of real quandaries. The characters encounter everything from sex trafficking to territorial disputes on distant planets, and they're forced to confront moral codes that exaggerate the ironies and falsehoods of our own beliefs. Familiar dramas play out: Apartheid is displaced onto a matriarchal society in “Angel One,” and the Israel-Palestine conflict plays out with a group of alien separatists in “The High Ground.” Here lies the ethical problem with “Star Trek,” and also the thing that is so deliciously attractive about it: Every earthly dilemma has been outsourced to an alien species, and we get to be the arbiters of goodness, the agents of scientific reason. Who wouldn't want to buy into this vision of the future?"

- Star Trek

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"Season 2 of the prequel series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will deliver ten more episodic "classic" franchise stories about discovery, optimism and politics. Even for all its accolades, it couldn't avoid the "woke" label from critics angry at the new wave of Star Trek stories. While the definition of the term is as nebulous as the Delphic Expanse, its intention is easy to discern. Any show or movie with a diverse cast focused on stories of empowerment, compassion or inclusion is sure to be hit with the label. When it comes to Star Trek, however, this criticism doesn't make sense as creator Gene Roddenberry designed the series to advance his progressive political ideology about a diverse and equitable future. Star Trek: The Original Series featured the most diverse cast of principal characters at the time. It may have held that title well into the 1990s. This is because of Roddenberry's motto for the future he created: infinite diversity in infinite combinations. Even the tiny details about his future are radical political statements. Earth no longer uses money, and the driving force of society isn't about material gain. There are no longer countries, but rather a single Earth government. Gene Roddenberry was the original globalist, even though not everything in Star Trek held up. In fact, each Star Trek series has been representative of the uncorrected biases of their time. However, what makes Star Trek so progressive is that the franchise evolves to try and be better."

- Star Trek

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"The truth is that, in certain ways, Thiel’s philosophy of tech aligns well with “Star Trek.” In the Trekiverse, technological progress is inseparable from society and politics. As even quasi-fans will recall, the TV shows and films feature a machine called the replicator, which can produce any inanimate matter on demand—food, drink, warp-drive parts. (In his interview with Dowd, Thiel calls this device the “transporter,” in what can only be a swipe at nerds. Surely he knows better.) The replicator solves, albeit fictionally, what John Maynard Keynes once called “the economic question”—that is, the imbalance between supply and demand, and the resulting need for markets and price mechanisms to allocate scarce resources. The society of “Star Trek” has decided not to exact a fee for the use of the machine. Thus the replicator can be an engine both for the equal distribution of wealth and for personal enrichment. It does not bring about social change on its own. The post-scarcity world in “Star Trek” is the result of a political decision, not of pure technological progress. What is anathema to Thiel in “Star Trek” is the notion, drawn from Isaac Asimov’s fiction, that the market is but a temporary solution to imbalances in supply and demand, and that technology and plenty will eventually make it obsolete. “Star Trek” replicators are nothing but Asimov's robots disguised as coffee machines, let loose on the world as a public good. They dissolve the need for a pricing mechanism. They represent the logical endpoint of the Industrial Revolution, when all human labor has been offloaded onto machines. “Star Trek” and Asimov remind us that the market and all the behaviors associated with it are temporary and historically contingent. If that is so, then what Thiel thinks of human nature and motivations—that people are competitive, acquisitive, greedy—is temporary and contingent, too."

- Star Trek

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"I was a sucker for Star Trek when I was a kid. They were always fun to watch. What made the show lasting was it wasn't actually about technology. It was about values and relationships. Which is why it didn't matter that the special effects were kind of cheesy and bad, right? They'd land on a planet and there are all these papier-mâché boulders. [Laughs.] But it didn't matter because it was really talking about a notion of a common humanity and a confidence in our ability to solve problems. A recent movie captured the same spirit—The Martian. Not because it had a hugely complicated plot, but because it showed a bunch of different people trying to solve a problem. And employing creativity and grit and hard work, and having confidence that if it’s out there, we can figure it out. That is what I love most about America and why it continues to attract people from all around the world for all of the challenges that we face, that spirit of "Oh, we can figure this out." And what I value most about science is this notion that we can figure this out. Well, we're gonna try this—if it doesn't work, we're gonna figure out why it didn't work and then we're gonna try something else. And we will revel in our mistakes, because that is gonna teach us how to ultimately crack the code on the thing that we're trying to solve. And if we ever lose that spirit, then we're gonna lose what is essential about America and what I think is essential about being human."

- Star Trek: The Original Series

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