Whatever Happened to the Final Frontier?

When I was a bairn in the nineteen seventies I was captivated by two scrapbooks my Dad kept. These contained newspaper clippings about the moon landings and the drama of the Apollo missions. Dad was fascinated by space travel, brought up as he was with radio serials like ‘Journey Into Space’ and comics such as ‘The Eagle’, which featured ‘Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future’. His interest obviously rubbed off on me.

Adding fuel to this fire in my imagination were TV shows like Star Trek the original series, or just ‘Star Trek’ as it was known back then. Despite the frequent gruesome death of any crew member wearing a red shirt (avoid a career where the job description contains the phrase ‘cannon fodder’) and Captain Kirk’s regular sexual conquests (he must have had the twenty-third century version of Tinder on his communicator) the show was actually pretty utopian. It presented a Humanity that had conquered its baser nature and now travelled into the ‘Final Frontier’ in peace – though admittedly in a massive starship with multiple phaser banks and photon torpedo launchers. Nevertheless, the future seemed bright, enhanced by advanced technology and despite frequent conflict (without which the show would have been pretty dull) people all strove to do the right thing.

Then there were all those fifties sci-fi films that were a staple of Saturday morning television back when there were only 3 TV channels. Movies such as ‘Robinson Crusoe on Mars’, ‘Forbidden Planet’ and ‘Earth versus the Flying Saucers’ all excited and inspired my young mind. Epics such as ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ suggested that our destiny was to all become migrants, leaving mother Earth behind and maybe, just maybe, finding meaning out there in the great vastness of the universe.

As a young boy I took that vision of the future on board and looked forward to the time when jet packs, flying cars and robot butlers would be commonplace. For my younger self the future was a thing of wonder, a shiny toy to be consumed by his imagination. I eagerly anticipated growing up into a time of holidays on the Moon, eating a pill that was a three course meal and planet Earth joining the Galactic Federation. As I got older, perhaps I would marry an alien or become a cyborg and live long enough to witness Humanity’s expansion outwards into the galaxy.

Instead, I find myself in a world where peace-loving Starfleet has morphed into Donald Trump’s Space Force, ready to zap first and ask questions later. We fear the advent of the robot/automation as they are more likely to take your job rather than fetch your slippers! We seem to be one bout of austerity away from foodbanks filled with Soylent Green. Those giant sci-fi computers with flashing lights and lots of switches never had to deal with spam or foreign princes seeking your bank account details. Instead of technology making us better, we’ve made technology more mundane, used more for sending cat memes to your phone than brave colonists to Rigel-7.

So what happened to my bright, shiny future? Well, two things. The first was the eighties, and a social re-alignment that represented a break with the post-war consensus where living standards had seemed to be on an ever-upward trajectory. There’s no such thing as society, Thatcher said, and to be honest we kind of needed society if we were to undertake that giant leap to becoming an interplanetary civilisation. There was a shift away from centralised state planning (that was implicit in many of those sci-fi visions) to a world where the markets ran things and short-term profit was the greatest good.

The second thing was that my sci-fi view of the future was just a story. It wasn’t real and was never likely to come to pass. By the time I was reading about the moon landings the Apollo project had already been cancelled and manned space exploration has been limited to Earth orbit ever since. For all the bold rhetoric, the race to the Moon was just war by other means, a sub-plot in the broader tale of the Cold War. Technological advance is also a lot harder than we think. Nuclear fusion, artificial intelligence and human-like robots all feel just as far off now as they seemed back in the seventies.

Nevertheless, when I imagine what it’s like to be a child today, facing problems like climate change, species loss and resource depletion well, these new generations have my sympathy. True, we did live with the threat of nuclear war, but this seemed to be like a preventable disaster if we could just get our act together, be nice to each other and enjoy a big group hug. Our cultural vision of the future was still quite positive, buoyed by the technological progress that had put a man on the moon and a fridge/freezer in your kitchen. Now, many doubt that the moon landings even happened (Capricorn One anyone?), although fridge/freezer scepticism is still quite low.

If my future didn’t come to pass, at least it was inspiring and exciting. More so than a future where multiple interlocking problems seem intractable and beyond our ability to even see where a solution will come from; a future where you’ll have to fight the other ragged survivors of climate change for the last tin of beans in the watery ruins of civilisation!

It’s strange to look forward and feel nostalgia for what might have been – perhaps the Danes have a word for that. For the adult me, the future isn’t what it used to be, but perhaps growing up is all about relinquishing childish dreams and accepting the limitations of reality. Sometimes though, at night, when I close my eyes, let go of the day’s troubles and drift off to sleep, I can hear the sound of warp engines firing up, ready to take me off, once more, into that Final Frontier.