I can’t believe there was once a time when we imagined what the future would look like, and it looked pretty good. Growing up with the likes of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Battlestar Galactica, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Matrix, and hell, even WALL-E, made it pretty d𝔍ifficult to see our growing reliance on technology as a positive thing. And real life didn’t help much either. No matter where you look, technology is increasingly being developed with capital in mind, not our own happiness and comfort.
So it’s understandable why sci-fi is a reflection of this reality. Gone are the dreams of flying cars and replicating food; we’re too busy grappling with space capitalism and android racism. And in fairness, we probably shouldn’t be messing about with synthetic life when we haven’t learned tౠo respect organics yet. We’re not ready for Commander Data, we’d have too many Ex Machina scenarios play out.
We can’t even escape our problems in space anymore. Back in 1969, my dad’s primary school huddled around a TV to watch the moon landing. I mean, yeah, it was a dick measuring contest with the USSR, but it felt like a celebration of h🎶umanity. Fast forward six decades later, and the dick measuring contest only has a handful of contestants - divorced billionaires. CEOs who look and act like sci-fi villains, and openly want to privatise space travel, gating it off to the elite while we burn on the planet they ruined.
But it wasn’t always like this. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Trek is a near timeless gem, but certainly not because of its visuals and often dodgy approach to sensitive subjects in its earlier series. No, it’s timeless because it’s unapologetically optimistic about the future, and shows us that another way is possible. It shows us that we don’t have to keep making the same mistakes, and we should be motivated by a desire for knowledge - exploration for exploration's sake. And perhaps most importantly, kindness for kindness’ sake. In this timeline, humanity invented technology to get rid of hunger and poverty. People don’t work because they need money, they work because they find it fulfilling.
Sometimes it feels like we’re losing this shameless love of humanity. Whether it's looking down on poor people for buying a nice TV, or telling anyone who asks for more to be grateful for what they have, we need to find this compassion that can only be found in utopian sci-fi. We need to take the genre back from this individualistic capitalist ideology, and make it about solving our problems again. We should be allowed to dream about a world where people don&𝓀rsquo;t just survive - they thrive.
One thing that’s great about both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine series of Star Trek is how you don&rsq🐼uo;t really see phasers that often. Even the latter, which isn’t opposed to using violence for a good cause, often solves its problems with word﷽s and understanding. Which isn’t bad going when it’s set right next to a planet that’s just fought off its oppressors. Deadly technology is (usually) only used for just causes. And most of the time, their tech is used to elevate their humanity.
One episode that always comes to mind when I think about how technology makes Star Trek’s characters good rather than corrupt is The Visitor. Here, the episode opens with Captain Sisko dying in an accident right in front of his son, Jake. We watch Jake grow up, only for his father to occasionally reappear for mere minutes at a time, having not aged a day. Jake then dedicates his life to finding a way to save Sisko, even at his own expense. In the end, he uses what he learned to end his life in a way that will allow his father to go back in time to the original accident that started this chain of events, giving him a chance to avoid it. He does, and the timeline is erased, so Sisko lives. He now lives with the knowledge that his son - who now gets to live a noꦉrmal life in this timeline - would sacrifice his life for his. In a lesser story, Jake would have sought vengeance against those responsible for the accident that caused his father’s death.
The Visitor encapsulates all that is 🥀great with utopian sci-fi. With every want fulfilled by technology, it shows what we would be capable of if motivated not by survival, but by love and curiosity. Some complain that Deep Space Nine is too much of a sitcom, but that’s the point. It represents how we are more than parts in a machine, we’re people.
This is taken quite literally 💃in The Next Generations, with the Borg serving as the antithesis of Picard’s love of art and discovery. But in m✅odern Sci-Fi, it seems less like we view the Borg as an opponent to take down, and more like an inevitability. Hell, maybe we’re already there.
Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that Star Trek’s space communism (look, that’s what it is in everything but name), feels completely outside the realm of possibility now. In Mass Effect, humanity discovers all sorts of differen🍸t cultures - and they’re all following the exact s🐠ame economic structure as us.
The film Ad Astra takes it a step further, making the whole idea of venturing off into space to be a hopeless endeavour. The kind of romantic view of the galaxy that makes Picard so iconic makes Tommy Lee Jones's character the antagonist here. He wastes his life obsessed with the possibility of encountering other intelligent lifeforms that he abandons his family, and humanity as a whole. There’s nothing admirable about boldly going where no one has gone before - it’s pure ego. Oh, and to rub salt in the wound, it turns out there are no other lifeforms out there, so it was all for nothing. At least we have a Subway on the moon, thoug🎀h.
Of course, we still need these negative depictions of the future in sci-fi. The bleak depiction of space capitalism in Ad Astra serves as a good reminder of what we absolutely should not do in real life, and Ex Machina holds up a mirror to what’s happening in tech now, and how we have the absolute worst people in charge. ꦚThe Matrix shows us, among other things, that maybe forcing people to live a life you assign for them without giving them any agency might be a bad thing. These are issues we’re still 𒊎grappling with now, so it’s only right that we’re shown what the natural conclusion of these ideologies would be.
But it’s a genre that already has so many good instalments, that when a sci-fi pastiche like Mass Effect comes around, this is basically all it draws upon. It was already late to the party when it started delving into the “do robots deserve rights” debate (the answer is very obviously yes). The ending was so easy for us to decide because we’ve already thought about the whole ‘hooking organics up to technology against their will’ thing before, and we reckon it’s a bad shout. One of my favourite moments in the trilogy is the first time you enter the Citadel, because Shepard and crꦉew are full of such wide-eyed optimism at what can happen when all of these different cultures come together. It was the most unique thing Mass Effect brought to the table at a time when co-existence amongst ourselves felt out of the question, let alone with a bunch of aliens.
Instead of scaring the shit out of us for once, let’s use the advancements made in tech, and the overall changes in society since Star Trek’s glory days to dream up a new utopia. Make it fit for the modern world. Sci-fi should once again pioneer this more optimistic view of the future, where the likes of Elonꦚ Musk have been booted out of the steering 🃏wheel for good.
In the 1960s, sci-fi offered an escape from the constant fear of the Cold War, giving us a glimpse at a world with less violence, no poverty, and equality for everyone from all walks of life. ಞNow, with racism, transphobia and all forms of bigotry all far too prevalent, and the rich billing themselves as the solution to the problems of the world, it’s time we took the reins back, and unapologetically show that a better world is possible. And it’s a world that won’t be written by chuds and billionaires.