Moving -- And World-building -- In the Future
Star Trek has an entire universe beyond Starfleet still to explore
The World of STAR TREK—
Or should that be the Universe of STAR TREK?
No. World is correct. World in the sense of a self-contained reality, an alternate to this reality. A universe to match is implied.
— David Gerrold, “The World of Star Trek”
So I’ve been in the middle of moving lately.
It’s not been a distant move — just about 30 minutes closer to the District of Columbia.
Despite that, I’ve been consumed in recent weeks by packing — and now unpacking — moving boxes, changing basic utility services and all the mundane minutae of moving from Point A, to Point B.
And throughout this experience — ordeal? — my mind and imagination keeps drifting off to the world of Star Trek. And especially how much more effortless a simple move like mine surely must be by the 24th or 25th centuries.
Certainly technology like the transporter would make things easier.
But there would be more than that, too.
The Federation’s no-money, post-scarcity economy would remove layers of financially interested gatekeepers, probably allowing for a much faster and trouble-free transfer of a given home from one occupant, to the next.
My mental meanderings didn’t stop there.
I started to really wonder what day-to-day life would be like in that world of Star Trek.
We’ve already seen what it’s like aboard starships, ad nauseum.
Rather, how does an “average” person experience life on Earth, or Tellar Prime, or Betazed — or any of the other hundreds of worlds we’ve only heard of, or barely glimpsed?
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We’ve rarely caught sight of what life on Earth looks like in Star Trek, and then usually, only in the form of some alternate universe or timeline.
(The creole restaurant in New Orleans owned by Ben Sisko’s [Avery Brooks] dad [Brock Peters] is the rare exception, and probably one of the largest looks that we’ve gotten at civilian life in the Federation.)
It struck me that there’s way more of this universe that we haven’t seen than that we have.
From the space-station-bound Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, to the prequel series Star Trek: Enterprise, and more, as a franchise Star Trek hasn’t been afraid to take us in unexpected directions before.
Why not offer up a more planetside, civilian-based spin-off?
Star Trek need not be all about starships, Starfleet and space battles to tell interesting and compelling stories.
A Star Trek series all about the daily lives of average folks in the future could be wildly captivating.
This could be world-building at its finest.
Don’t believe me?
What else is that most venerable genre of television — the soap opera — if not all about the daily lives of its characters?
Such a series need not even be a soap opera in the conventional sense.
Looking over at our neighbors in the Battlestar Galactica franchise, I still hold that the much more planet-bound prequel, Caprica, could have found its footing and been much more successful.
Whatever ultimate form such a series might look like in Star Trek would be less important than this: Even after nearly 60 years there’s still an entire universe out there that we haven’t met yet.
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