Do you think Humanity will ever achieve the acomplishments depicted in the Star Trek franchise?

djf021 · August 2016

From solving societal problems like war, hunger, or greed, to achieving technological advancements and expansion like traveling to distant star systems, to medical advancements like being able to cure advanced cancers, do you believe we'll ever get there, even partly?

I think we're closer to achieving a peaceful planet than we've ever been, but we still have a LONG way to go. I have high hopes we'll eventually break the light barrier and get to other stars. I have the most faith in our ability to achieve greater medical advancements.

What do you think about these or any other issues we see Humanity having mostly resolved in the shows?

captainoblivous · August 2016

Who says we're not going to be the mirror universe?

We won't get there, but maybe our children will.

zebulongiles · August 2016

I believe it's possible.

farmallm · August 2016

We are no where near it. We been the same for ages. $, power, corruption, division of groups is the driving force.

vengefuldjinn · August 2016

farmallm wrote: »

We are no where near it. We been the same for ages. $, power, corruption, division of groups is the driving force.

This sadly

captainchaos66 · August 2016

^^^^ What they said. Despite some politicians claiming the world is more peaceful than its ever been, I believe we are on the verge of a major paradigm shift, and not to the good.
While the middle part of the 20th century saw huge leaps in technology, it also saw huge leaps in solving at least SOME societal issues of the time. Yet as we are half way through the second decade of the 21st century, things have been creeping backwards.
We see commercials about how great technology is, and robots doing surgery, and robots doing this, and people with access to vast amounts of information at their fingertips. Yet, those robotic surgeons seem to be reserved for the lucky few. All that vast information is being ignored by the masses in favor of " pokemon" or the latest trend of popculture.
We here politicos talk about " wealth inequality", yet they are millionaires. How does one become a millionaire on a senators salary of $180k a year? Our supposed leaders are the most corrupt, manipulative, irrational, liars that humanity has to offer.
We are on verge of a paradigm shift: If humanity lets go of the ancient hatreds that seem to be embedded in our DNA. If society stops pointing out what others have and don't have, if we stop yelling at each other over words, and if we stop trying to convince everyone to THINK exactly the same way, then MAYBE,, just MAYBE humanity will survive to reach the stars. The way things are going not I'd be surprised if humanity survives in it's current form another 20 years.
Is that a cynical, negative way of looking at things? Sure. Perhaps my views are tainted by the fact that I watch what is going on around me, and I have a tendency to see things from history's points of view. Right now I see the quote " Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." Right now, Rome is about to burn.

HAVE A NICE DAY!

farmallm · August 2016

Other big issue is the Media. They are actually creating and making it a mess. Used to on the news they told facts. And many cases said we will tell more once they get information. Now they spend hours talking about thoughts, opinions, and "talk show" over it. By the time the real information comes out. Its been already been smeared in mud and most people don't care. Cause the got fed by the Media Feeding Machine.

djf021 · August 2016

captainchaos66 wrote: »

Perhaps my views are tainted by the fact that I watch what is going on around me, and I have a tendency to see things from history's points of view. Right now I see the quote " Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." Right now, Rome is about to burn.

HAVE A NICE DAY!

Well your name is, afterall, CaptainChaos!

marcusdkane · August 2016

Q: DO YOU THINK HUMANITY WILL EVER ACHIEVE THE ACOMPLISHMENTS DEPICTED IN THE STAR TREK FRANCHISE?

A: Eventually...

jonsills · August 2016

I'm old enough to tell you that your historical perspective is flawed. Of course, given that the Cold War has been over for twenty-six years now, there are a lot of people who don't remember living under the constant certainty that nuclear annihilation wasn't a matter of "if", but "when". The concept of the USSR simply fading into history was inconceivable; the most hopeful futures people could think of involved either the Cold War continuing in perpetuity, or Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium (which eventually collapsed and was supplanted by the Empire of Man).

I tell you, from a perspective of both reading history and having lived through better than half a century of it, that this world has never been better. Yes, we have a looong way to go before we're founding the United Federation of Planets, and we have to fight nearly constantly to keep the progress we've made - but we've made progress that our ancestors could scarcely have imagined. (Just look at the number of you who feel comfortable dismissing Uhura in TOS as "a token telephone operator", not even realizing the advances implied by a black female officer of a space exploration corps, with an important function that wasn't just cleaning up after the white menfolks. Ask Whoopi Goldberg, or Mae Jemison, for an explanation of just what that meant. Or try to imagine the response of a general of the wars of the 19th century, when confronted with the idea that "peace" might actually mean no fighting for years at a time.)

The only question is whether we can achieve a post-scarcity society, and if we can ever find a way around the lightspeed limit. Either one requires our understanding of physics to be incorrect on a fundamental level, or the discovery of something that extends said understanding greatly (for instance, if Alcubierre-White theory is correct, and we can find some way of mass-producing exotic matter, there might be a way to fool Einstein). On those, all I can say is that I hope we can find a way to get there...

garaks31 · August 2016

we will be there after one or two big disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence!

iconians · August 2016

No. Star Trek is science fiction. It's something to believe in, something to aspire to. But it's not achievable. There are too many divisions in society. There are too many problems humanity faces that simply can't realistically to resolved within an hour like in Star Trek.

We talk about sending people to Mars while there are children starving in Africa, without access to clean drinking water. We talk about a bright, hopeful future where we go out and colonize the stars while there are people in India who still defecate out in the open, without access to working toilets.

We talk about these wonderful new clean technologies that we're developing, while other countries continue to spew pollutants into the environment because of government corruption and the all-powerful 'bottom line'.

Gene Roddenberry had some great ideas, but these were moral ideas, moral questions to be asking ourselves.

Unfortunately, in asking ourselves these moral questions proposed in Star Trek, sometimes the answer isn't pre-determined by what the script calls for. Sometimes the answer is very, very ugly.

evilmark444 · August 2016

Absolute peace is something that will never, ever happen. Only first contact with an alien race could possibly produce global peace, and only then because of the potential threat to our survival such an event would represent, even if said aliens were peaceful. Racism would disappear overnight, because we would all have aliens to hate and/or fear instead of each other. And there would be plenty of people urging world leaders to start a war humanity probably couldn't win, because they would be afraid of these beings simply because they know nothing about, and don't understand, them.

Humans are flawed. There will always be people who want what someone else has, and are willing to do horrible things to get it. There will also always be people who hate and/or fear other people because they look different or because they don't understand them. These things will never change.

farmallm · August 2016

Be our luck if an Alien did land. Someone would more likely shoot them on the spot.

That is how the whole war on Space Battleship Yamato started.

marcusdkane · August 2016

coldnapalm wrote: »

No. We are too stupid to ever reach that ideal. We will be LONG dead before we get anywhere near that level of technology. In America, we are SERIOUSLY debating if we should vote for Trump or Clinton...SERIOUSLY. The sad fact that this has not made the majority of the American people go F this and vote third party just shows how STUPID we are...and since we have the largest stockpile of nukes...the rest of the world is doomed. We have people who seem to be okay with Islamic extemist being allowed to live because we want to be all inclusive. No...just no. When a group of people believes that another portion of people should not exist...or be allowed to live on in slavery, yeah...that group can go die in hellfire like the **** did. We use to do the right thing...now we **** foot things. Not that I believe that people have a right to exist mind you...but I accept that I am an evil heartless monster. On a more personally level. We have somebody on the forum who is complaining that adding to 15 is too hard and the game should be changed to accomidate him. We have somebody comparing this FREE expansion we got to another game's expansion that they are charging 40 bucks for. We have people who do not know how the internet works being weebles in their own little corner of the forum and gleefulling aggreeing with each other while making fun of anyone who has a semblence of intelligence. We have people who complain that the Dilex is too high and their dil isn't worth anything demanding that the game give them even MORE dil...because increased amounts of resources NEVER caused inflation...oh wait, no it ALWAYS does. People are so self absorbed and only interested in their own experience that even facts and logic won't change what they THINK is an insult directed at them. Yeah...no, we will never see the likes of starfleet. Hell, I'd be surprised if we make it long enough to have a terran empire.

I agree. Nowhere near at the moment, and probably not within a Vulcan lifespan either, but eventually I think we[as a species] will get there

theraven2378 · August 2016

farmallm wrote: »

We are no where near it. We been the same for ages. $, power, corruption, division of groups is the driving force.

Not with our current attitudes as a species, it's been like that throughout human history

terranempire · August 2016

I think it will be more like Warhammer 40k or something in-between Mirror Universe.

(Edit: If we survive that long)

kitsunesnout · August 2016

terranempire#7881 wrote: »

I think it will be more like Warhammer 40k or something in-between Mirror Universe.

(Edit: If we survive that long)

Humanity turning out like in Warhammer 40K is scarily believable. Much more believable than Trek's vision I'm afraid.

Do find 40K's setting a fascinating one to read about though, very rich in lore and high-octane nightmare fuel mwuhaha!

jonsills · August 2016

Jesus, you people are depressing. No wonder dystopias sell so well - it's the kind of future you anticipate.

alexmakepeace · August 2016

jonsills wrote: »

Jesus, you people are depressing. No wonder dystopias sell so well - it's the kind of future you anticipate.

I certainly don't. To my eye, just about everything is better now than it used to be. I can walk unarmed, alone, just about wherever I choose. I can walk up to a stranger and ask for assistance with an expectation that I won't be attacked and robbed. I recently suffered a disease that would have been fatal a century ago, maybe even 50 years ago, but I'm still able to function normally. Ignorance is a fleeting thing for me, just about anything I want to know, I can look up quickly, for free. I know how to stop dangerous bleeding, or save someone whose heart has stopped. I know how diseases work, how my body works, how atoms work. I count people from all over the world as my friends: France, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Slovakia, China, Japan, South Korea. We lived together. I have other friends from other nations.

I am well aware of world hunger, but it's important to stress that it's getting better. It's still there, but it's not as widespread as it used to be, which is a remarkable achievement when our population is growing.

I see environmental degradation, often toted as evidence that humanity is just plain bad. We're getting better at it, polluting less, restoring more, and managing more efficiently.

Further, there are people whose careers are to solve these problems. I'm training to be one of them. All these things mentioned in this thread are problems, but problems can be fixed.

If it seems like we're being painfully slow, allow me to suggest that that's merely an artifact of our perspective: change seems slow to us only because we're used to doing everything so monumentally quickly. We've gone from eating other animals' leftovers to reshaping the ecosystem in ~10,000 years, which is a blink of an eye on an evolutionary timeframe. We're newborn babies building rockets and ecosystems and solving problems nature could never handle. Expect teething.

thekodanarmada · August 2016

The western culture has no ability to look beyond the next quarter. For humanity to achieve what it did in Star Trek took the canon annihilation of the planet. I do hope we can bypass that fate, but a central managing hand for this tiny biome will not happen while capitalism has the reins. And the longer it does, the more likely it will be that we will expire without atomic fanfare and by some other apathetic cause.

There will be cities underwater in just decades, and their built up pollutants washed out into the fisheries we eat from even as we abandon those cities. The terminal saltwater contamination of the Florida aquifers will consume the cities even before the waves do. Insurance companies know it's coming; just try and get reasonable costing coverage for a house on a coast.

We were not stirred to action when the Gulf of Mexico filled with oil. British Petroleum's report on the rebound is still seen as authoritative until it can be disproven. I am sad to see that the perpetrator gets to triage their victim. I have no expectation it will change.

I can hope. I do not expect it.

artan42 · August 2016

Yes we will. eventually. It'll take longer than it did in ST, but it will happen

thelunarboy · August 2016

iconians wrote: »

No. Star Trek is science fiction. It's something to believe in, something to aspire to. But it's not achievable. There are too many divisions in society. There are too many problems humanity faces that simply can't realistically to resolved within an hour like in Star Trek.

We talk about sending people to Mars while there are children starving in Africa, without access to clean drinking water. We talk about a bright, hopeful future where we go out and colonize the stars while there are people in India who still defecate out in the open, without access to working toilets.

We talk about these wonderful new clean technologies that we're developing, while other countries continue to spew pollutants into the environment because of government corruption and the all-powerful 'bottom line'.

Gene Roddenberry had some great ideas, but these were moral ideas, moral questions to be asking ourselves.

Unfortunately, in asking ourselves these moral questions proposed in Star Trek, sometimes the answer isn't pre-determined by what the script calls for. Sometimes the answer is very, very ugly.

It should be noted that while it is very easy to point the finger at space budgets and say "what a waste of money", it's also true that many of the inventions and discoveries by NASA do have positive implications... indeed, even in some of the very examples you cited.

The question then becomes not about how money is being used in research... but how humanity applies that technology once it has been discovered. Does it do so for the mutual benefit of humankind, or does it box it up... stick an inflated price tag on it and treat it as a commodity out of avarice? That's where the problem lies... and you only have to look at the amorality demonstrated by Martin Shkreli, inflating antimalarial drug prices by 5,000%, to see it at work.

nikeix · August 2016

If something "gets there" it wont' be what I would even remotely call "human". Many Star Trek characters act in ways that are completely implausible even for the best of us.

djf021 · August 2016

I prefer to have a balanced, but more positively leaning, view of the world. I haven't been around SUPER long (I'm 34), but long enough and have read enough history to believe we have definitely improved upon what was 50, 100, 200 years ago, whatever. I also don't mean to sound naive: Star Trek is fiction, yes, and I don't believe we'll be ready to begin uniting as a race (and avoid shooting an alien visitor on site) by 2063, nor do I expect we will be exploring outside our solar system by the 2150s.

But the IDEA of reaching those goals, the idea of continuing to improve hunger and poverty, the idea of continuing to unite as human brothers and sisters, the idea of using our technological advancements FOR the benefit of mankind instead of for selfish gain-I would have to say I believe in these ideas...and I believe we are capable of getting there. It's just going to take MANY generations of hard work and positive teaching to change mindsets....until the number of people who passionately believe in these principles outnumber the ones who would derail them.

Do you think Humanity will ever achieve the acomplishments depicted in the Star Trek franchise?

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