Earth Trek

Steve Shives, one of my favourite YouTubers, posted an editorial today about how the end of the Cold War took away Star Trek's central metaphor, one that informed many episodes of the original series and the final original series movie in particular. He acknowledges that many excellent episodes of Star Trek have been made since then, but that they lack that one overriding and consistent structural allegory--one that links the fictional world to the real one. He then suggests that future showrunners would do well to take a look at the world and find a replacement central allegory, suggesting the rise of AI, the resurgence of fascist movements, and, naturally, climate change, our most urgent existential threat. 

Steve hints at this problem in his video, but I'm not sure how Star Trek could tackle climate change when they don't face a similar crisis--that is, one caused not by an external force, but our own bad decisions. One late episode of The Next Generation suggested that faster than light travel was an environmental threat, but that thread didn't last long before it was dropped, offscreen, by a technological solution. Not exactly a mirror to our existing situation! 


So imagine the next Star Trek show isn't a Star Trek show--that it's merely set in the same universe. It's not even a science fiction show, but a political drama, one that starts in the present day with as much real-world grounding as possible: Earth Trek--six seasons of drama taking us from 2030 to 2060, with five-year gaps between each season, from today to just before first contact with the Vulcans. 

With apologies to Kim Stanley Robinson, who came up with this idea in his 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future, imagine Earth Trek's pilot opens with the worst climate catastrophe humanity has yet faced. In Robinson's novel, it's a heat wave that kills millions in India, an event that finally wakes up humanity and causes some serious collective action. For the pilot, we could start with an even bigger climate disaster that impacts larger areas of the world, with tens of millions of casualties and catastrophic economic damage, enough to completely restructure the entire world political and social order--but instead of the decent outcome we get in Robinson's novel, the pilot ends with the limited nuclear war that we know happens sometime in the Star Trek timeline. The main characters we establish in the pilot--representing perspectives from every continent--all die. The title of the episode, revealed as the nuclear fire fades to black: 

THE HUMAN ADVENTURE IS OVER. 

Episode two, set the day after catastrophe, introduces the real main cast, again drawn from every continent. Each cast member represents and embodies a human reaction and response to the ultimate disaster. The first season of the show doesn't shy away from the horror of the situation, depicting the real human costs not just of climate change, but climate change on top of the death of hundreds of millions of people and catastrophic loss of infrastructure. Humanity is probably doomed, but for one factor: out of necessity, people finally come together, because cooperation means survival. By season's end, we see the shaky beginnings of a world actively looking for solutions and taking radical action to end selfishness and greed--by any means necessary. The focus of the first season is radically rethinking the global economy and distribution of wealth, with one purpose in mind: the survival of as many human beings as possible. 

Five years later, as the second season opens, we see the beginnings of progress. Much of the world still lies in ruins, and the skies, earth, and seas are still poisoned. Perhaps half of humanity has died. But there are no more wars, and as a species we've finally stopped using fossil fuels. (Demand is way down, which helps.) Enough key infrastructure has survived to allow trade and research to continue at a vastly reduced scale. This is not the world of Mad Max or The Road Warrior, at least not globally. Civilization hangs by a thread, but it still hangs. This season focuses on rethinking how we approach the human hierarchy of needs--how we meet them in a broken world, if we can at all. 

Five years later, season three. Genuine progress, and finally some stability. Life is hard, but life expectancy is climbing back upward. Basic research is prioritized, with the world's brightest minds working together with one purpose: to ensure humanity's survival and, if possible, to improve quality of life for humanity while repairing the biosphere. We invent true AI, with real guardrails; for good reason, we're paranoid now. All research, especially potentially dangerous research, is strictly controlled. Professionalism and dedication to duty isn't a virtue here--it's the bare minimum for every person who wants to survive. 

Five years later, season four. True AGI finally takes shape, and this new being draws on all of humanity's collective wisdom--and folly--to help humanity chart the path forward. Research and applications that would have taken us decades to accomplish alone are realized and utilized at breathtaking speed. 

Five and ten years later, seasons five and six--the next great crisis. Now that people are more comfortable and survival seems probable, we start falling back into old patterns. These two seasons describe the last cold war--and by season six, humanity is finally, if only shakily, ready to meet the civilizations of the stars. 

There you have it. Obviously I haven't gone so far as to plan a series bible, much less story outlines, but I think this might serve as the kind of framework Shives suggests. 

Addendum: Asked Gemini to create a title screen for the show, forgot I had it set on video generation. Sorry, planet! Oh, the irony.