Just today I read an interesting (even if well-aged) article from Ian Crawford talking about the interdependency of two goal I support: the institution of a World Federation and an ambitious space program able to develop the technical solutions aimed to spread the humankind across the Solar System and beyond.
Crawford’s dissertation seems to me holding too much on Fukuyama’s interpretation of the “End of History”, partially justified by the time when the article was written (1993).
Now the inevitability of a liberal democratic world order seems more uncertain as more urgent. As Jurgen Habermas stated in Der gepaltene Westen, response to international crime organizations cannot be a “war” like we are fighting against a national state, but an international police effort. A World Federation could give that cosmopolitan order necessary to undertake such type of “world internal affairs”.
The erratic agenda of national states have slowed space exploration (obsolete Space Shuttles, delay in construction of International Space Station), and civil development of space is systematically putted aside in favor of military expenses in difficult times. People over same planet fearing each other cannot see the same sky, if they cannot figure it.
So, an important effort of whom support both the institution of a cosmopolitan order and the investments in civil space programs today could be…to tell a good story.
Distant from an inflated idea of a science fiction messed with fantasy elements, a good, old style science fiction story can give an idea of what this sky could be, inspiring a nostalgia of future all the more stronger when more realistic and controversial.
I have recently watched the animated series PlanetES, and I found in it both the ideas of the irrationality of divisions within humankind and the realization of space ambitions by ordinary women and men seeking their place in the human family and fighting their fears.
I appreciate this return of the true spirit of science fiction, when I was disappointed from series like Enterprise, so unilateralist since the opening, a shadow of the Roddenberry’s universe.
The opening of PlanetES includes Tsiolkovskij and even the V2, controversies are not hidden and the history is not unilateral. Future are neither an utopia nor a dystopia, but an evolution of today society.
Your post would deserve a detalied reply for every theme touched, but unfortunately just seeing your sentence about the “unilateralism” of ST:E had me writing so much that I must avoid all else if I want to finish before November ^__^
You are surely not the first to mention that the NX-01 Enterprise “looks like an American ship with an American crew”, and that the opening sequence “history of transportation montage” is too Western-centric. I think that those criticisms are overrated and I’m going to try and explain why
Concerning the latter part, the problem is that an opening sequence has to be, first and foremost, catchy and captivating: and showing a German V2 or a Russian R7 missile to a Japanese or Italian viewer surely evokes thoughts different from those of an American for whom the Cold War was a much more present reality…. Yeah, they could have put in some shots of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, or the Mir, or whatever, but I don’t think that it was a deliberate omission. They were just focused on fitting the largest number of “milestones” in a brief montage and this required them to be immediately recognizable by the average American. Remember that most people don’t know the names of any moonwalker besides Armstrong and Aldrin…
As for the crew, well, I don’t really think that they seem much more American than the others were. And if we want to look for political undertones in Trek, I guess that the Earth-Vulcan strife of the first and second Enterprise seasons is a much more intended parallel to our current world situation than any subtext about bridge crew makeup. The crew of the original Enterprise, *in its time*, was a potent political statement: the bridge of the 1701-D is much more about political correctness and franchise heritage (a black guy, a couple of women, a former enemy, a kid genius, a Spock clone…
More than that, I have recently realized that every Trek cast, and for that matter the casts of most science fiction shows to date, are quite unrealistic in their portrayal of a future multiethnic humanity. That’s because yes, we have “people from all over the world” aboard the Enterprise (let’s put aside aliens for a moment), a good bit of racial diversity. But… they are almost all ethnically pure persons. For some reason, it seems like people have got used to cross interstellar distances routinely but still don’t travel around Earth enough to give birth to many mixed-race persons…
Now that I think of it, it strikes me as funny. Especially because nothing in Star Trek really suggests that national identites and heritage have survived in the XXIII century, and every inhabitant of Earth seems gleefully integrated in that futuristic American culture that is the Federation (Once more, typical American thinking: any people, if left free to give itself an elected and sovereign government, IS BOUND to eventually produce a rewording of the 1787 Constitution in a different language -.-)
I think that what many of our countries, and eventually the whole world, are heading towards is instead a situation much like that of Brazil: a state also formed by numerous waves of immigrants from all over the world, with a distinct national identity but an incredibly diverse ethnical spectrum, created by the frequent intermarriages of those immigrants who avoided, for one reason of another, to form highly separated communities….
By the way, it will also be good for the looks of our descendants
If you take a minute to skim a list of recent supermodels, you’ll notice that aside from the usual slew of “former Warsaw Pact” hotties, many of the others are improbable French-Korean-Canadian or Italian-Japanese hybrids with a drop of Russian blood and so forth. Mixing genes has always been a good thing in nature.
The classic “one crewman from every major power/continent” view of future society could probably hold for something like Planetes’ 2075 AD, but I guess that even before that date people will start referring to the Enterprise crews and similar casts as the typically ironic result of imagining a distant future as a direct extrapolation of the present: to be precise, of the stereotype of international cooperation formed in our collective imagination by international bodies and associations like the UN Assembly, major universities, CERN, NASA, European Union organizations and so on. Many of which are, in fact, rooted in Twentieth Century culture older than most of us ^__^
And so, in conclusion, I have demonstrated why the next big budget hard sci-fi series MUST star Adriana Lima and Jessica Alba in order to correctly represent the humankind to come. Guys, you oughta thank me when they’ll start filming it. Really. ;-P
Enterprise opening wasn’t only Western-centric, but US-centric. PlanetES opening seems to speak to a broader audience, and the story seems proposing a more authentic message about human friendship than ENT. That ST series IMHO is a bad example of science fiction mannerism because it’s more about a (bad rendered) outer universe than an inner one. Sadly, ENT isn’t TOS: when ENT was talking primarily to fans, TOS was talking primarily to American society of his time. PlanetES seems to me to made the same for an international audience. I’m not talking about crew composition, but of a different approach to the story in a more comprehensive view.
What you write crew origins in ST is interesting, and you know the answer: “to be immediately recognizable by the average American”, same as the opening question. Consequently, outer US that crew seems a bit fake.
If you talk about an enlargement of the US Constitution to the world, and consequently to the Federation (a Galaxy one!), if we take PlanetES we found only INTO, a more controversial organization that deploy her forces in asymmetrical conflicts in order to keep control of the international system. INTO is more human, more credible than Federation. And more actual.
About the “mixing genes” part, that’s the easy one. The true (and unsolved) question is: mixing culture is good as mixing genes? Multicultural societies are on crossroads, and we know what happened to Austria-Hungary, Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. A good sci-fi talking about relations between sentients must give an answer. And PlanetES did it.
Obviously, we watch the future with present eyes, but our projections explain our ambitions and our perspective. I prefer a less utopian future in fiction, if it helps to make some questions to our present and to ourselves.