A wonderful topic has come to my attention over on trekweb.com but since it is so hard to navigate around that forum I would like to pose the same question here as the member over on trekweb did.
This was his question:
I love Star Trek. I've loved Star Trek for like 30 years. For the first time, however, I've been wondering if Star Trek actually is the dinosaur that people have accused it of being. Usually when people talk about that, they are talking about the moral core or something. I actually vigorously support "Roddenberrianism" or whatever. Also, Trek's storytelling is going to hold up. As an exploration of humanity's future, however, I worry that technology's advances over the past 30 years have made Trek's future exceedingly unlikely.
In the 60s, Trek was utterly visionary except for one thing...thinking it was going to take us 200 years to get there. Sure, we don't have transporters or warp drive...but most everything else in our current lives either does MORE or the same as just about every other piece of tech on Trek. My smartphone does WAY more than a communicator does. Of course, the don't require satellites, but you get what I mean.
Beyond that, however, it seems almost impossible to me that humans are going to look and think the same for the next 300 years. Biologically, it seems like we're getting very close to nanites, etc. Beyond that, the idea that we're not going to incorporate technology into our bodies seems remote. Frankly, it seems likely to me that we'll figure out how to digitize brain information and once that happens, the nature of humanity will change forever. Brains will be hard drives, death will be optional, and people will be able to delete or add information (or access it via cloud-like remote storage) as easily as we currently use wikipedia. Kind of like that Matrix stuff where the learned skills instantly. I think it's possible that stuff will happen in 50 years or less. We might truly be the last generation of "normal" humans that haven't been modified in some fashion.
I wonder if, for that reason, Trek hasn't become hopelessly naive about what humans will be like in 200 and 300 years. One could argue that WWIII and the rules against genetic engineering would extend to mechanical stuff, too, but I just don't see it. Enhanced eyes, enhanced limbs and hearts...I just don't see that stuff not happening. And soon.
Am I crazy?
I love Trek. I do. But it was always an attempt to predict the future. One wonders if it might not be better to create a show just like Trek (humans exploring space and adopting Roddenberrian principles, etc), but maybe try to do what Spielberg did with Minority Report and get a bunch of nerd scientists in a room and brainstorm what the next generation of tech is going to look like and how it'll impact our society.
