
‘Star Trek’ Failed to Reckon with Our Greatest Threat: Climate Change - makerofspoons
https://catapult.co/stories/star-trek-failed-to-reckon-with-our-greatest-threat-climate-change-parenting-children
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qubex
This is a stunningly bad piece of writing, wherein the author ‘criticises’
pieces of work for not foreseeing what came later. _Star Trek_ was written by
writers in the 1960s and addresses issues that were prevalent in the 1960s;
_Star Trek: The Next Generation_ is similarly focussed on the late 1980s and
early 1990s.

We’ve already caught up with some of the events that formed the supposed
historical backdrop of both series (the supposed Eugenics Wars of the 1990s)
and they didn’t happen. There’s occasional mentions of Leningrad which
strongly suggest that history was expected to play out somewhat differently in
other ways, too (either no fall of the USSR or at the very least no renaming
of cities).

So what? They’re products of the era that they were written in. Relax.

P.S. _Discovery_ isn’t really Star Trek anymore — perhaps the Pike spin-off
series will revert to the original. The inherent stupidity of running a
starship on mushrooms and darting around the galaxy following pathways of a
giant fungal network that somehow evolved to violate the laws of physics is
just... demented. Stop trying to impose any logic upon it.

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blacksqr
World War III brought industrial activity down to almost nothing, handily
ending the threat of global warming.

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qubex
That kind of misses the whole “tipping point” aspect of climate change,
wherein crossing a certain threshold is an (essentially) irreversible act.

One could argue that any realistic scenario for WWIII would (unfortunately)
involve a broad thermonuclear exchange, and therefore a probable “nuclear
winter” scenario, but that global chilling is temporary and the climatic
system would revert to its warming trend shortly thereafter (after at most
half a decade or so).

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blacksqr
Shortly after WWIII humanity made contact with an alien race, and initiated
technology-sharing agreements that one can confidently assume included non-
carbon-based energy generation, as well as environmental remediation
techniques.

