Why Elon Musk has misunderstood the point of Star Trek

Living in the United States right now is experiencing a series of strange juxtapositions. I prepare to respond if construction workers in my area are arrested by government agents; I need to think about what I would like to eat for dinner. I tell my partner to go get some vegetables from the grocer; I’m afraid he might be arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on his way home. I’m supposed to do science, write about how exciting the universe is; I spend part of my day reading about children held in detention camps. NASA funding has survived an attempted cut; NASA decimated its workforce in 2025, and they probably won’t come back.

The week this column is published, NASA could launch an astronaut on a trip around the Moon – humanity’s first in decades. This is a stage of the Artemis mission, which will ultimately send humans to the Moon. In the long term, Artemis is widely seen as a stepping stone toward placing humans on Mars. At a SpaceX event with Pete Hegseth, head of the US Department of Defense (which the administration wants you to call the War Department), Elon Musk touted sending humans to other planets as an important part of getting us into the world. Star Trek universe. We are supposed to be excited and think that all these missions are bringing us closer to the space utopia.

What a delicious idea. If only it were true. Inasmuch as Hiking As a fan at the conventions, I can tell you that not only do these men not understand the franchise, but they have never really seen it. Otherwise, they would know that in the Hiking universe, the 2020s were a terrible time in human history. The Bell Riots, set in a fictional year of 2024, involve an uprising of poor and marginalized people against an authoritarian government that rules a society characterized by extreme wealth inequality. In Hikingthe world must survive another world war in which soldiers are given a drug to enable them to participate in atrocities.

The similarities between reality and 30-year-old fiction are striking. In the Hiking In this scenario, the men who tell us about their militarized and corporate plans for space are the bad guys, not the ones who will lead us to utopia. Not only those who cite Hiking today, they misunderstand their place in the story, but they also do not understand what Hiking it’s really about. Space travel is the setting, but it’s not the heart of the franchise’s story, which is about humanity improving itself by cooperating with each other, considering difficult philosophical questions, and imagining a socialist-inspired socioeconomic system — where everyone’s needs are taken care of.

Will going to Mars do that for us? There is another timeline in which going to Mars is perhaps part of our journey toward appreciating “infinite diversity in infinite combinations”, which forms the basis of the Vulcan alien species’ worldview. We have already sent several successful uncrewed missions to Mars and learned so many amazing things: that Mars once had the conditions necessary for life to form, that liquid water might still be found somewhere on the planet, and that Mars has terribly unpredictable weather, in part because of its rather thin atmosphere.

Another lesson our remote explorations of Mars have taught us is that it is cold, dry and, by human standards, a horrible place to live. So even in the event that sending a crewed mission to Mars emerges from a united and peaceful humanity, we should still consider the reality that Mars is trying to kill us. We can’t breathe in it, and even if we could change the chemical composition of the atmosphere, the dirt would still be dangerous. If you’re like me, when you’re in a dusty room you have a little allergic reaction, full of sneezing. That’s a piece of cake compared to what Mars dirt would do to the human body. It contains just enough silica to cause serious damage to human lungs, causing an illness similar to the black lung disease that miners often suffer from.

You might be thinking, “Well, it’s not like we plan on inhaling dirt!” » But Mars has huge dust storms that constantly kick up dirt. Any astronaut on the surface can expect to have them all over their suit, at all times. It will be difficult to keep dust out of habitats. The resources required to make building a colony on Mars viable are enormous. It would literally be a big job to launch them off the Earth’s surface and out of our planet’s gravitational pull.

I think trying to colonize Mars is probably a really bad idea. And that’s okay, because we already have a pretty awesome planet: Earth. We don’t really take care of it, but that could change. For me, what is it Star Trek that’s all. This is not the promise of a high-tech future where we escape our world, but rather a future where we learn to respect the incredible spaceship that is our home planet.

What I read
I loved the one by Fara Dabhoiwala What is freedom of expression? The story of a dangerous idea.

What I watch
I love Gina Yashere and Kerrice Brooks in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

What I’m working on
Figuring out how to get through the day while the US government attacks its own people.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of The disordered cosmos and the next book At the edge of space-time: particles, poetry and the boogie of the cosmic dream