To Boldly Go…
Sept 15, 2020 | By Ben Colón-Emeric TD ‘22
If you wanted to build the perfect future, what would you do? When the world was brought to a screeching halt by COVID-19, there was talk of dramatic change, institutional upheaval. But how does dramatic change come about? How can we rethink the systems that shape our lives? Imagine for a moment that you have infinite resources and total control over public policy. No longer must you decide if you’re going to trust your mother to cut your hair: the decisions you make can shape anything from world governance, to education, to the direction of scientific research. What future do you choose to build, and how do you get there? I, like many people, would be heavily influenced by the genre that has focused on the future for the better part of one-and-a-half centuries: science fiction.
I once had a debate with my dad over what constituted science fiction. We were on vacation in Switzerland, riding a train through Geneva on an overcast day. As we argued familiar topics like “Star Trek” vs “Star Wars,” we realized that there are two subcategories of science fiction going back to the beginning of the genre: parable and adventure story. Frankenstein, for example, is a parable: it creates a fantastical scientific advancement––the ability to create life––and shows the dangers that lie therein. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, on the other hand, is an adventure story. It creates an extremely advanced piece of technology––the submarine Nautilus ––and uses it to send characters on wild adventures. My dad and I realized that I like parables and he likes adventure stories. The argument ended when we arrived at our destination: CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider. Our discussion suddenly felt a lot less abstract.
Science fiction is essentially a thought experiment for society. The author takes an existing innovation or idea about human development and examines its ultimate result in an imagined future. When the Industrial Revolution hit Europe, science became the driving force of societal change; there was a pervasive idea that the future would look substantially different from the present. At the same time, science fiction emerged to imagine what this different future would look like. Now we are in another time of dramatic upheaval, our future once again strongly tied to the efficacy of our science as we look forward to a period of social change. Maybe the best way to examine our future is once again science fiction.
So, channeling all the worldbuilding skill of the science fiction writers, I will try to imagine the best possible future. Who is in charge in my perfect future? James Madison famously stated that “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Surely a perfect future has perfect inhabitants! How can people become perfectly law-abiding, requiring no government? In a truly perfect future, there are no laws, because it would never occur to anyone to do anything reprehensible. If this sounds familiar, it is because it echoes the goals of the Party in 1984. They created the language of Newspeak to destroy all inconvenient thought, with the eventual aim of creating a perfectly obedient population. Newspeak functions under the principle that removing ideas from language will remove the people’s ability to conceive of them; a revolution is impossible if the idea of overthrowing an established order cannot be expressed in language. My dream of perfect people populating a perfect future was lovely, but when I tried to explain how they got there my utopia became a dystopia at the first hurdle. So, I conclude there must be a leader in my utopia. And indeed, I am aware of no anarchist utopias in the science fiction canon––even Plato crowned a philosopher king for his Republic.
The competing interests of nations are another problem in today’s world. Maybe I should remove them from tomorrow’s. A well-run super-government would do the trick, something like the United Federation of Planets from Star Trek. This governing body kept the galaxy in order with the enforcement of Starfleet, a set of vessels patrolling space and resolving all conflicts. Of course, Star Trek isn’t the only sci-fi series with a massive galactic government. In the Star Wars prequels, we see the Republic destroyed from the inside by intrigue, political maneuvering, and a massive clone army. Star Trek understood the tenuous nature of its political system: countless episodes placed the crew of the Enterprise in moral dilemmas where the mandates of the Federation conflicted with their desire to help people. If my utopia is based on a system where people are forced to reconcile opposing interests, the result will be nasty internal politics and moral dilemmas. This utopia is sounding more like the real world by the second.
My thought experiment wasn’t a failure––I successfully demonstrated the difficulty of imagining a perfect future––but the entire exercise left me demoralized. The best works of science fiction, like great feats of science, inspire us to engage with the future by kindling the imagination. CERN was created to examine minute intricacies of the universe––not because doing so would help deal with hunger, climate change, or other problems facing mankind, but because learning about the universe is thrilling. The discovery of the Higgs-boson has not impacted my life in any material way, but I left CERN feeling both fulfilled and inspired by the incredibile optimism on display. I marvelled at the mysterious subatomic world and the colossal machines built to learn its secrets with the same sense of wonder I feel at the beauty of the natural world. This sense of wonder is part of what makes life worth living. Furthermore, we need that imaginative optimism to create a better future. If we are to be the kind of people who cure diseases and solve hunger we must also be the kind of people who wonder what our reality is made of. And I think science fiction writers understand this better than anyone.
In science fiction, whether the author is critiquing modern society or telling a fun adventure story, the first act is always to create a new world. “Star Wars” became a cultural phenomenon because it captured imaginations with droids, spaceships, and lightsabers. “Star Trek” dazzled audiences with its transporters and food synthesizers––everyone wanted to be able to walk the dramatically lit bridge of the starship Enterprise and gaze out into a galaxy open for exploration. Both “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” had philosophical elements, but the philosophy was built on the fantastic science-fiction elements: wonder was a necessary foundation for social critique. Yet while imagination can serve as the fuel for an important message, it is also a worthy end. “Back to the Future II” imagined the (then) far off year of 2015, where Marty McFly was amazed by shoes that tighten themselves, self-drying clothes, and a giant holographic advertisement for a new “Jaws” movie. When I watch “Back to the Future II” from 2020, I don’t scoff at the creators for being so unrealistic in their expectations of technological advancement––I enjoy seeing the imagined future because it is refreshingly different from the present.
Faced with the pressing urgency of innumerable problems in our world, it can seem pointless or even unethical to dedicate vast resources to answering questions about subatomic particles. Likewise, in a time when we need to think up new social paradigms and enact institutional change, it can seem like a waste of brainpower to imagine a future that isn’t easily attainable. But this is a shortsighted view. After the U.S. spent millions getting a man on the moon, they were able to use what they had learned along the way to build satellites that forecast weather patterns, allowing scientists to predict hurricanes and save lives. More importantly, the moon landing was never justified in utilitarian terms: it was a worthy achievement in and of itself, a realization of our fullest human capacity. The future societies imagined by science fiction are predicated on the idea that we are capable of progressing to a better version of ourselves. Embracing that belief is the bridge between imagining a perfect future and creating one in real life.
