I am sure a lot has been written about this by actual academics, but I was thinking / day dreaming the other day and thought about it quite a bit. Sadly I my words here are not as eloquent as those I imagined.
I started off thinking about Science Fiction, and that so many people dismiss it as rubbish as it is so far fetched, unrealistic and irrelevant. But think about it. Star Trek - we may not yet have phasers but it looks like we may soon have a form of cloaking device, something we have had in part in stelth technology for some time. The medical team had ray's that sealed wounds, much like microlasers can do, and they used spray devices to inject you with drugs - these are now available. And lets not forget Star Wars - NASA has given the ISS their own droid modled on the one that Luke Skywalker spars with while training.
But then Star Trek, and most Science Fiction, also had a different side - that of social experimentation. A series of what if questions that range from FireFly's apparently benevolent faciest state vs the good old boys in the wilds (so like the old westerns, with central government so far away) to the Star Wars UN/Senate that falls in a Hitler-esque take over, with the Jedi - Chivalric Knigts come Samurai Warriors battle - a failing war that turns into a classic WWII style of story with plucky underdogs, small places helping out, gurilla war, at all that.
But also, what are the ethics of inter-species relationships? What sort of thinking goes on in the alien mind? What sort of governments work, and what are the issues?
Even sexuality - in our world, where gender identity is so key, and our sexuality a major issue - with the tendancy to gender neutral, to anonymise ourselves into genderless individuals, what is the outcome? ST:NG #117 "The Outcast" shows the J'naii; an androgynous species that views the expression of any sort of male or female gender, and especially sexual liaisons, as a sexual perversion. According to their official doctrine, the J'naii had evolved beyond gender and thus viewed the idea of male/female sexuality as primitive. When one has a relationship with the male Riker, she is taken for reprogramming and then apologies to him for its behavior when it thought it was female.
How are these sort of stories different from the ancient tales, the ones telling us of the Gods and Goddesses of Ancent Greece and Rome - the ones that those civilizations modeled themselves on and took their lessons from? Or the older ones that celebrated the Winter Solstice - the shortest day, and yet the time that the days started getting longer, heralding spring - that taught basic nature lore, that explained the migration patterns of animals, how to search for them, and the basic man management that the elders needed to practice for the good of the community. And these stories grew, and became Lore, and Law - and religion.
This may seem like a tangent (hence the colour change), but there was a study done (I read of it in the new scientist) where 4 monkeys were kept in a cage that had all the normal things, plus a ladder just under a bunch of bannana. The down side was that when a monkey climbed the ladder to get the fruit, the whole cage was sprayed with water. Soon the monkeys learned that climbing the ladder = everyone wet. So they attacked any one who tried to climb the ladder - smart, see, to stop them all getting wet.
The keepers then replaced the monkeys one by one, and when the new monkey tried to climb the ladder, they got punished - they had never been sprayed, but they learned a new lesson: Climb = punished. Eventually the banana's were removed. And none of the monkeys were the same as the original ones, that had got wet, but still the Law was in place: Do not Climb the Ladder! We punish those who climb the ladder!
So, back to stories. You can quickly see that theory/concept in so many of our ancient tales, teaching us to think, teaching us what to do, and what not to do. But not all of them are relevant in the 21st Century.
Links to writings about Star Trek:
The science of Star Trek
by D.A.Batchelor / T
he Faciest Ideology of Star Trek: Militarism, Collectivism & Atheism
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Hand Scanner
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"Trek" science shows its human side
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Medical Ethics through the Star Trek Lens
(this is the cached version of a pdf.
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