Why Elon Musk got the point of Star Trek wrong

Living in the US right now means experiencing a series of strange interconnections. I am preparing how to respond if construction workers are stopped at my house by government agents; I have to think about what to have for dinner. I tell my husband to pick up some vegetables from the grocer; I’m worried he’ll be stopped by US 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 the day reading about children held in detention camps. NASA funding survives cutback attempt; NASA decimated its workforce in 2025 and is unlikely to return.

In the week this column is published, NASA may launch an astronaut for a trip around the moon—humanity’s first in decades. This is the phase of the Artemis mission that will eventually bring humans to the moon. In the long term, Artemis is widely seen as a stepping stone towards putting humans on Mars. At a SpaceX event with Pete Hegseth, head US Department of Defense (which the administration wishes you to call the War Department), Elon Musk has proposed sending humans to other planets as an important part of getting there Star Trek universe. We should be excited and think that all these missions bring us one step closer to the utopia of space craft.

What an adorable idea. If it were true. As a Trekking a fan who attends conventions, I can tell you that these men not only don’t understand the franchise, they’ve never really seen it. Otherwise they would know that in Trekking in space, the 1920s was a terrible era in human history. Set in the fictional year 2024, the Bell Riots involve the uprising of the poor and dispossessed against an authoritarian government that runs a society of extreme wealth inequality. IN Trekkingthe world must survive another world war in which soldiers are drugged to participate in atrocities.

The similarities between reality and the 30-year-old fiction are striking. IN Trekking In the script, the men who tell us about their militarized, corporate plans for space are the villains, not the ones who get us to utopia. Not just those who quote Trekking today we misunderstand their place in the narrative, but they also don’t understand what Trekking is really about. Space travel is the setting, but it’s not the heart of the franchise’s story, which is about humanity improving itself through cooperation, grappling with tough philosophical questions, and envisioning a socialist-inspired socioeconomic system—where everyone’s needs are taken care of.

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IN Star Trek In the script, the men who tell us about their militarized, corporate plans are bad
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Will a trip to Mars do it for us? There is an alternate timeline where a possible trip to Mars is part of our journey to appreciate the “infinite variety in infinite combinations” that is the basis for the Vulcan alien species worldview. We’ve already successfully sent several unmanned missions to Mars, and we’ve learned so many amazing things—that Mars once had the conditions for life to form, and liquid water may still exist somewhere on the planet, and that Mars has terribly unpredictable weather, partly because of its relatively thin atmosphere.

Another lesson our distant explorations of Mars have taught us is that it is a cold, dry, and, by human standards, terrible place to live. So even in a scenario where sending a manned mission to Mars came from a united and peaceful humanity, we would still have to reckon with the reality that Mars is trying to kill us. We can’t breathe there, 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 bit of an allergic reaction full of sneezing. That’s a poem compared to what Martian dirt would do to a human body. It has enough silica in it to cause serious damage to the human lungs and cause a disease similar to the black lung disease that miners often get.

You might be thinking, “Well, it’s not like we’re planning on inhaling dirt!” But Mars has huge dust storms that are constantly kicking up debris. Any astronaut on the surface can expect to have it over their suit at all times. It will be difficult to keep the dust out of the habitat. The resources required to survive the construction of a settlement on Mars are enormous. Getting them off the Earth’s surface and out of our planet’s gravitational pull would literally be a heavy lift.

I think trying to colonize Mars is probably a terrible idea. And that’s okay, because we already have a pretty awesome planet: Earth. We don’t care too much about it, but that can change. For me it is Star Trek is all about. Not the promise of a hi-tech future where we escape our world, but rather one where we learn to respect the incredible spaceship that is our home planet.

What am I reading?
I loved Fara Dabhoiwala’s What is freedom of speech? The history of a dangerous idea.

What am I watching?
I love Gina Yasher and Kerrice Brooks Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

What I’m working on
Figure out how to survive the day while the US government attacks its own population.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire. She is an author A disordered universe and an upcoming book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Boogie Dream

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