Is Space Really the Final Frontier?

The opening line to Star Trek seems a good place to start as we consider our future.  The hopes and humanity depicted by Gene Rodenberry in his 1960s classic, and the franchise that followed is inspiring.  In his model of the Federation he shows the alpha life forms of a whole variety of planets working together for the greater good, but! 

For a story to be interesting it needs to have characters in conflict, for without some form of conflict where is the interest?  Just like the old westerns, there are the good guys, bad guys, and a reason for them to be at odds with each other.  Star Trek followed this classic format just like all great stories.  But life does not usually mirror art, so I have to wonder will we arrive at a point in our humanity where we emulate the grandness of the Federation?  Where we are always the good guys and the distinction between good and evil is simple and clear-cut.

There are those who see a unified earth with a benevolent central government seeking what is best for all humankind.  They are the same people who thought European nationalism led to the conflicts of the great world wars.  At the same time, there are those who look at the darker nature of humankind and see the almost unlimited power such an organization would have as being incredibly dangerous to the rights of an individual.  Those who argue for a strong world government are the same progressive visionaries who set out to create that organization, and thus end what they viewed as a central cause of war, namely the nationalism that led to empire building in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  After the first World War and then again after the second they created first with the League of Nations and then with the United Nations, a building block to end the rush to war, but something has gone awry. 

War has not ended, and at least for me, it is still next to impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys here on our little planet.  The good guys and bad guys are all a matter of perspective.  Didn’t the Klingons view themselves as the good guys, ultimately siding with the Federation as they battled those other bad guys the Romulans?

We see in the liberal-progressive movement the supposedly grand ideas about the better nature of mankind, but also a deep intolerance to anyone who doesn’t buy into those ideas.  (It is almost as if all the liberals suffer from the same human failings as those wayward conservatives.)  At the heart of the approach is how a government is responsible for the making life great for those who can’t make their own lives great.  It is, in a funny kind of way, interesting the historical definition of liberal has been altered to reflect the current intolerance to competing approaches to government.

In all the discussion of bigger government what I never see is an answer on how large it will need to be to overcome the human frailties of intolerance, self-interest, racism, and greed.  Nor do I see any discussion (other than tax the rich) on where the funds for this endeavor will really come from.  By the way, how much did it cost the Federation to create its fleet of starships to defend the empire?  Who actually bore the cost of that endeavor?  In the telling of Star Trek, I don’t think Gene actually laid out the financial structure that made money obsolete, but certainly not all planets were created equal from a natural resource standpoint, were they?  Were all those other “unnamed” members of the Federation expected to ante up the same amount as Earth, after all, we got to be in charge and only a few of them got to serve on the Federation starships?  Obviously, they had their own vessels but you never see them called to save the outposts near the neutral zone, do you? 

In looking at the society we’ve become -- I wonder if we are taking our ideas of society from the fictional stories we’ve grown up watching.  When we take our ideas of social utopia from fiction I wonder how much of human nature we are willing to ignore before it all comes crashing down from the reality of that nature?  After all, Karl Marx saw a worker’s paradise in the form of Communism, but the reality of the Soviet Union presented a far bleaker life for almost everyone not at the top of the political food chain.