Who among us doesn’t dream of space in their youth?
OK, maybe some of us. Like the ones with lives. While you were out playing hopscotch with little Jimmy and Susie, I was locked in my room mainlining episodes of Star Trek or the weird, sanitized version of Aliens that aired on broadcast TV. Fantastical science-fiction adventure seemed to offer more than playground games and actual human connection. Spaceships over relationships.
Star Trek, celebrating its 60th anniversary this month, offered a utopian vision of the future. Highly competent scientists traveling the galaxy solving moral and ethical quandaries with grace and intelligence. It was a vision of Earth that had overcome greed and selfishness to pursue a more peaceful world Kirk and Spock. Picard and Data. These were characters that were ethical, witty and heroic. Better that than little Jimmy burning ants with a magnifying glass.
The Alien franchise, on the other hand, was the complete opposite. In the second film, Aliens, which coincidentally is turning 40 this year, the characters are mostly brain-dead killing-machine soldiers and venal corporate stooges. This one sounds a bit more familiar, doesn’t it? The entire known universe is controlled by a diabolical company whose only aim is profit at the expense of the average person. Both Star Trek and the Alien films offered the requisite thrills and whiz-bang action to titillate a young boy like myself back in the 1990s, but they were also diametrically opposed visions of what the world might look like when I became an adult. Would it be along the lines of a lush beige carpet and colorful pajamas or a soaking wet murder machine covered in KY Jelly grinding the working class into the ground? It took a few decades, but I think I found my answer.
The US air force announced on Monday that it had deployed weapons into space, thumbing its nose at the unwritten rule that space is for peace, not for war. The US rationale is, well, everyone else is doing it! Officials point to the increased militarization of space, including a 2024 Biden administration report claiming Russia was developing the capability to detonate nuclear weapons in space to disable or destroy orbiting satellites, which are crucial pieces of global infrastructure.
The air force secretary, Troy Meink, referred to the deployment as “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action”. He wouldn’t say what they were, what they could actually do, or even what they look like. Which is always so comforting when futuristic space guns are involved. Is it a giant laser beam? Missiles? A claw that can grab satellites out of the sky? A large hammer? A Trump-shaped robot gollum that could swallow the International Space Station with the ease and gusto of the real person chowing down on a Big Mac? My imagination, stoked by years of sci-fi television, is running rampant. At the very least, I hope it has a series of blinking lights all over it. And an off-switch.
Back in the 1980s, when Star Trek was at its creative peak, the idea of weaponizing space was considered such a joke that President Reagan struggled to amass a consensus around his Strategic Defense Initiative (derisively nicknamed “Star Wars”), which would have created a US orbiting missile deterrent. But now, Donald Trump is making fantasy space battles a key element of his rapidly deteriorating legacy. The US space force, his absurd brainchild, presented new uniforms that look like they were leftover from a Paul Verhoeven movie. If one wants to conquer a lifeless galaxy full of dirt, rocks and little else, one must be wearing the shiniest black boots possible. Also a hat.
The space force uniforms are certainly lightyears away from the ones on Star Trek, where everyone wears bright colors that immediately make the viewer think they’ve accidentally stumbled onto a rather unique discotheque. The Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry, made sure that the phaser weapons depicted on the show had a non-lethal stun setting. I think if anyone proposed a non-lethal weapon for the US space force, they’d be A) fired immediately and B) called woke to their face (and on Fox News in front of millions of people).
Looking back six decades at the world Star Trek was born in, there was optimism in the world, mixed in with the chaos of political assassinations, riots, a war in Vietnam, and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. The idea of going to space and landing Apollo 11 on the Moon was inspiring to a world that needed more cheering up than Ed Sheeran trying to find an opening act for his tour. Star Trek posited that life on Earth might be bad now, but fear not, the good guys would win in the end. Humanity would overcome itself.
Countless modern scientific achievements – cellphones, tablets, the internet, medical advancements – can be attributed to Star Trek beaming ideas of benevolent futurism into homes around the globe for 60 years. But did society actually learn anything from Star Trek? The Federation and the Klingons made peace in the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, but could their real-world analogues – the United States and Russia – be any further apart? Of course, if you know anything about the future-history depicted on Star Trek, you know utopia doesn’t occur until after a global nuclear holocaust, in case you want to be even more depressed today.
Star Trek’s impact is immense, especially for a TV show that only lasted for three years and often deployed styrofoam rocks, wobbly models, and dodgy rubber aliens in its design. That impact is a testament to the writing, acting, and film technique that grabbed millions of people and changed their lives. But I’ve never been more pessimistic about humanity achieving the beautiful dream of Gene Roddenberry. With every fascist-looking spacesuit or space laser, I feel like we’re progressing backwards, step by step. Given the proliferation of pandemics, climate change, species extinction, and contaminated food supplies, I’m more apt to wake up expecting to have an HR Giger-inspired genetic abomination gnawing at my face. At least my years staring at my TV screen alone prepared me for what’s to come.
