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Why Star Trek’s Vision of the Future is Out of Date

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The Saltex Brujo

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May 1, 2012, 5:18:48 PM5/1/12
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Why Star Trek’s Vision of the Future is Out of Date
Without a doubt, no show has done more to promote a positive vision of
the future and a limitless sense of possibility than Star Trek. It's a
series that has inspired several generations of fans, and helped to spur
the development of actual technologies we now take for granted.
So it's a crying shame that Star Trek's vision of the future is totally
incorrect. But the sooner we admit this, the faster we can embrace more
realistic futures. Here's everything that Star Trek gets wrong.
Nobody can deny that Star Trek made the world a better place. In fact,
Star Trek is famous for its portrayal of all sorts of technological
wonderments that we now possess in real life: flip phones,
teleconferencing, wireless earpieces, touch screens, tablet computers,
and more. We even have medical hydrosprays in the form of Jet
Injectors  and hand-held chemical detection  units that resemble
tricorders. And looking to the future, it's very possible that we'll
develop replicators like the ones featured in the Next Generation series
â€" what will eventually be referred to as molecular assemblers  .
So ingrained is the Roddenberry vision of the future, most people assume
it's precisely how humanity's future will play out â€" and anyone
who disagrees with it is either a spoil-sport or a complete Luddite.
It's assumed pretty much across the board that we'll eventually leave
the cradle and fly off in our spaceships in hopes of rubbing elbows with
green-blooded aliens. But there's no way the future could actually look
like Star Trek.
Instead, the future will be far different â€" and much weirder
â€" than Roddenberry and other ST writers could have ever imagined.
The challenge now is to admit that humanity is headed into a very
different kind of future. It's time to set aside Star Trek's outdated
vision of the future and focus on real possibilities.
Where are all the human GMOs?
If we're to believe the Star Trek future, humans will largely look, act,
and function just like they do today. The future, it would seem, is
still run by a bunch of run-of-the-mill meat puppets who have forsaken
the potential for human augmentation  . This is very hard to believe,
given all the recent advances in genetics, cybernetics, and the
cognitive sciences.
But it's also a lot to swallow, once you consider the necessity of
augmenting any human who wants to travel into deep space. Human
enhancement is coming, and it's going to be pretty hard to avoid it. And
as a result, the "human" of the 24th century will scarcely resemble that
of today's.
It's at this point that Trekkies will be squirming in their seats, eager
to point out that there's a very good reason for this. Owing to the
catastrophe that was the Eugenics Wars, the United Federation of Planets
banned genetic engineering. The prohibition was intended to prevent
another event like the Eugenics Wars and the rise of a despot like Khan
Noonien Singh.
Fans of the show will also be quick to point out that some augmented
humans do in fact exist in the Star Trek world. Dr. Julian Bashir of
Deep Space Nine is genetically enhanced, albeit illegally through the
intervention of his parents and on account of his learning disability.
Consequently, while this endows him with superior intelligence and
physical abilities, it also marks a serious point of embarrassment and
shame for Bashir; human enhancement is not something that's done very
regularly in this world.
Now, while all this Star Trek canon is fine and well, the fact of the
matter is that human civilization has not gone through any kind of
cataclysmic event like the Eugenics Wars, and it's highly unlikely that
we ever will. The idea that the presence of smarter, fitter, and happier
people will result in a war that causes the death of 30 million people
is a bit of a stretch.
Parental demand for "human trait selection" is steadily increasing, and
it'll only be a matter of time before families will be able to "enhance"
their offspring in this way. Moreover, if parents don't do it,
individuals will start to do it to themselves. Already today there's
growing demand for such things as performance, cognitive and mood
enhancement. It's a burgeoning grassroots trend that's only going to
increase as more effective technologies are developed and as they become
more accessible.
There's also the potential for radical life extension  . Some
experts  believe that we may be less than a hundred years away from
solving the aging problem â€" a series of medical advancements that
will lead to indefinite lifespans. In the Star Trek future, fantastic
medical technologies exist, but there's not much talk about thwarting
human aging. (Although we do see a very ancient Leonard McCoy  in the
Star Trek: The Next Generation pilot.)
Moreover â€" and this is important â€" if we're to venture out
into space, we will almost certainly have to dabble in some form of
human enhancement. Humans simply don't do well in space, mostly on
account of the awful effects of prolonged exposure to zero gravity and
cosmic rays, not to mention excessively long trips undertaken in extreme
conditions. In fact, it's this exact realization that spawned the entire
field of cybernetics in the first place. The term " cyborg  " was
coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline back in the early 1960s to
describe the potential for space-faring modified humans who had both
biological and artificial parts.
More recently, Craig Venter made the case for human enhancement  when
speaking to a group of scientists at NASA Ames. He reminded them that
NASA already does genetic selection when it picks astronauts â€" he
just wants them to get even more systematic about its process:
Inner ear changes could allow people to escape motion sickness... [You
could have genes for] bone regeneration, DNA repair from radiation, a
strong immune system, small stature, high energy utilization, a low risk
of genetic disease, smell receptors, a lack of hair, slow skin turnover,
dental decay and so on. If people are traveling in space for their whole
lives, they may want to engineer genetic traits for other purposes.
Sure, Star Trek does portray cyborgs, but mostly through the portrayal
of the ominous Borg Collective. It's a monstrous and dystopic cautionary
tale of a cybernetic future, a projection of our fears and apprehensions
as we enter into the era of human cyborgization. It's a warning rather
than an endorsement. And it's also a form of denial that we need to move
past.
More radically, there's also the possibility of rejecting corporeality
altogether. Humans may eventually choose to discard their bodies and
transfer their minds into supercomputers â€" what is referred to in
futurist parlance as " mind uploading  ." In such a "posthuman" state,
humanity's descendants may choose to live out their lives in virtual
reality environments or intensive computer simulations.
The human of the future, it would appear, will be anything but. Our
species will likely undergo a kind of speciation, with different humans
occupying various technological and environmental niches. For a more
realistic interpretation of this kind of future, be sure to check out
Greg Egan's classic novel Diaspora  which features a world of
uploaded posthumans, cyborgs, and genetically enhanced humans.
The spaceship is dead
One of the more indelible aspects of the Star Trek franchise is the use
of spaceships. They are the futuristic analog to naval ships, both in
terms of their ability to transport people to distant, unexplored lands,
and as a way to defend against external threats. Without spaceships,
there would be no Star Trek, and by consequence, no human future in
space. At least, that's the conventional thinking.
It's very unlikely, however, that space will be explored and colonized
in this way. As science fiction writer Charles Stross has noted, the
spaceship is a myth  . It's an old-fangled vision of how humans might
go about space travel that doesn't take into account the problems of
distance, time and available resources â€" and of course, new
innovations.
Instead, Stross and a number of other thinkers argue that it would be
more realistic to drop the word "ship" from discussions of interstellar
travel and instead contemplate the requirements for an "interstellar
transportation system." An indisputable reality of space travel is that
virtually nothing will await our intrepid explorers once they reach
their destination â€" and that's assuming they could survive the
journey. At best they could hope for are some rocks, sunlight, and
slushy water. All materials required to build an initial infrastructure
would have to be brought along for the ride â€" not an easy
undertaking.
What Stross proposes is a system that utilizes machine-phase
diamond-substrate nanotechnology  , mind uploading, and artificial
general intelligence  . The end result wouldn't be much like a "ship".
Rather, it would consist of a diamondoid data storage device (which
would hold the data patterns of the uninstantiated space travelers)
hanging below a light sail  . The sail itself would be energized by
lasers that are powered by huge orbiting solar power stations.
Technically speaking, there would be no biological travelers aboard
â€" just uploaded minds or some other kind of machine intelligence.
Nanotech assemblers would take care of any need for physicality. Once at
its destination, the device would come to a stop, settle on a planet,
and go about the farming of materials to build a biosphere (or some kind
of infrastructure), including a way to communicate back home.
So with my due apologies to Trekkies, no Galaxy Class Starship await
your descendants.
Hey wait a minute, what ever happened to the singularity?
One of the more surprising aspects of the Star Trek future is that a
technological Singularity  never happened. This is highly unlikely,
given the timelines provided by some futurists like Ray Kurzweil and
Hans Moravec who predict one later this century. This is made all the
more weirder by the presence of advanced machine minds in the Star Trek
universe who choose to limit their capacities and agendas based on some
rather flimsy sorts of rationalizations and convenient script-writing.
Take Lieutenant Commander Data, an android capable of over 60 trillion
operations per second (compared to 13 trillion per second for humans)
and who has a total storage capacity of over 93 million gigabytes
(humans have a capacity of about 1,024 GB). He's got an incredibly
powerful positronic brain â€" and the capacity for self-improvement
â€" so he could become much more powerful if he wanted to.
But he doesn't and he (perplexingly) chooses to limit himself and work
among his human and alien shipmates, often utilizing his great intellect
to save the day... but nothing more. At no point does Data ever consider
taking over Starfleet even though it is within his capacity to do so.
Nor does he consider re-working his brain to achieve ever-increasing
levels of intelligence (what is referred to in AI circles as recursive
self-improvement). Data, we are lead to believe, is bound by a kind of
Asimovian "ethical programming", but he has been known to kill in
situations where it has been absolutely necessary.
This doesn't jibe the latest thinking on the matter. Some AI theorists
predict a "hard takeoff" event in which a machine intelligence will
quickly advance itself to something millions of times more powerful than
the human brain. In other words, when an AGI hits human-level
intelligence, it won't just stop there or even a little above it (i.e.
Data), but rather, it will advance several orders of magnitude beyond
it.
Hence, the Singularity.
Interestingly, Star Trek did provide a small glimpse into the potential
for an uncontrollable advanced superintelligence in the SNG episode "The
Nth Degree", in which Reginald Barclay's brain is taken over by aliens
residing at the center of the Galaxy. In this episode, Barclay's
intellect gets radically enhanced, allowing him to integrate himself
with the ship's computer and take complete control of the Enterprise-D.
The ship's crew is completely helpless and unable to intervene â€"
call it a singularity-lite. It's a disturbing example of how machine
minds could run amok and seriously undermine human interests.
Science fiction author Vernor Vinge has famously said that an
ultraintelligent machine will be the last invention humans will ever
have to make. After that, it's anyone's guess as to what comes next. The
presence of Data in the Star Trek world undermines Vinge's apt
observation, as Data's presence would have resulted in an entirely new
technological paradigm for the human species.
And given that we may be only about 50 years away from a technological
singularity, it's highly unlikely that a space-faring civilization of
the 24th century would have somehow avoided it.
The final frontier isn't what you think it is
The deeper we get into the 21st Century, the more our future seems
cyberpunky than wagon-trainy. The Fermi Paradox  is shouting out to us
that space is not the final destination for an advanced species, and
that alien races don't hang out with each other at the edges of the
Alpha Quadrant.
Humanity's advancing technologies strongly indicate that its trajectory
is inwards rather than outwards. Our ongoing presence as static and
mortal flesh-and-blood creatures is in serious doubt. We stand poised to
build Dyson Spheres  and Jupiter brains  instead of spaceships and
transporters. And at the same time, the possibility of us having to
share this planet with artificially intelligent life vastly superior to
our own gets more and more real with each passing decade.
So while the future may not look like anything portrayed in Star Trek,
that doesn't mean it's going to be any less fantastic and vast. In fact,
it may introduce us to some entirely new frontiers.
Top image via  . Other images courtesy here  , here  , here  .
Contact George Dvorsky:
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May 3, 2012, 4:00:55 PM5/3/12
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unifarva hates star trek.
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