Gene Was Right

Those of you who haven't been living on Mars the last four decades or so may be familiar with this little cultural current called "Star Trek," a universe based on the ideas of its creator, Gene Roddenberry. You might also recall that Roddenberry believed that a united humanity was destined to find its way to the stars, boldly going where no man had gone before. Trek is as much a philosophy of life as it is a sci-fi property, and please indulge me while I get up on my soapbox and say how much I think that the obverse of what Roddenberry said has been proven true in the last few decades.

The truth is that we haven't united as a species, and we are as riven today as a planetary civilization as we ever have been. And our cause — to become a multplanetary species, to break out of this cradle we call home — has suffered accordingly.

Everything we sink into the military, creating bombs and killing machines… it’s all money, time, and effort that produces nothing of lasting value. It gives us the illusion of safety, but it’s all just that. An illusion. Something worthy of Talos IV. The only thing that barely makes it truly valuable is the research that comes out of the military-industrial complex, and even at that, there is so much of it that is wasted.

Imagine what all that mililtary funding could do in the hands of those whose objectives are pure science, or sustained research and development into fossil fuel alternatives, health care, or space applications. Not that there wouldn’t be waste in that, too, but at least there would be less of it, because the aims would be what would benefit all of us in the long run.

We’re forced into making better spears, rather than better lives, because so many of us hate each other. We hate this tribe or that, and we fear this group or the other. We stockpile weapons we can never use, to rot away and disintegrate into radioactive dust. All that energy, all that effort, condemned to reinventing better and more efficient ways to kill off the human race.

Are our fears legitimate? Yes, they are, and that’s the tragedy of it. We have legitimate fears, and we haven’t resolved them because we haven’t resolved the problems leading to the threats that cause them.

So long as we waste our lives in the futile technological pursuit of absolute safety, it will always elude our grasp. So long as we keep our eyes low to the ground, looking out for threats and keeping what is ours, the stars will be forever beyond our reach.

As each generation is born and prospers, it needs to ask the fundamental questions of war and peace and seek to pursue what is genuine and to avoid what is futile.

It has been said before, and now it is again: If not us, who? If not now, when?