I grew up frightened. Nuclear war and concentration camps were my childhood monsters. It might sound overblown today, but dread and anxiety were very real. Looming disaster was a constant motif. I was born in 1972, a child of the Cold War and of the oil shock. Perpetual economic crisis and the Warsaw Pact’s missiles cast long shadows over our heads. Even in my sheltered enclave of Paris, the threat of war, nuclear or otherwise, was palpable. It was like a background hum, never quite strident but nonetheless perceptible. Some were more aware of it than others. Kids certainly took it to heart.
The year I turned nine, my grandfather took it upon himself to tell me all about his arrest by the Gestapo and his time at Buchenwald. Needless to say, that did not help. The particulars of the story are what one would expect: torture, the cattle car, hunger, cold, forced labor, death. It was a lot to take in.
In my overactive and somewhat precocious mind, I reached the sobering conclusion that neither my parents nor my relatives, nor even France and its mighty atomic arsenal, could ever protect me from mutually assured destruction. They were as powerless as I was against the rolling thunder of the world. And I was right.
These are the things you do not want to be right about at eight or nine.
You can easily understand why the Death Star was not my thing. It hit too close to home. Star Wars was too dangerous and had too many villains.
Star Trek, on the other hand, was different. I first saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture in Paris, at the age of eight. And if you had given me the choice, I would have jumped at the chance to live in the world of Star Trek. Watching the Star Trek movie was like being let into a gigantic space laboratory where adults were doing very cool and important things. In a sense, the Enterprise crew’s leisurely yet rational technobabble-soaked demeanor made their lives and their work more approachable. In Star Trek, science and reason triumphed over danger. Their world was definitely better equipped for harmony than ours.
Star Trek presented my terrified eight-year-old self with the mind-blowing idea that in the future things would get better. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was my starting point, the moment in time when my mind finally awakened to the possibilities of the world, that there was something, a future maybe, to look forward to.
More than anything else from my childhood, this is what has stuck with me my entire life. When my wife and I got married, we convinced the befuddled judge to say, “Live long and prosper.” To this day, the greatest sense of wonder I experience from Star Trek comes not from the starships and the stars, new life and new civilizations, but from its depiction of an uncompromisingly humanist, galaxy-spanning utopian society.
Which means that one huge question has haunted me since I was a boy. Is Star Trek possible? How likely is it to happen?
I committed very early on to live by the precepts of Star Trek, in the faint hope of hastening its coming somehow. That commitment was easy, as Star Trek blended effortlessly with the kind of secular Judaism passed on to me by my parents. Learn as much as humanly possible, solve problems for others, fight injustice wherever and whenever you can, try to be a mensch. Heal the world—Tikkun olam, as we say in Hebrew.
The task proved much more daunting and complicated than I ever could have envisioned. For one, like many before me I failed miserably at inventing faster-than-light engines. Yet I remain convinced that a better world is indeed within our grasp and that Star Trek gives us a road map for our shared future. Indeed, some of it is already happening right now, among us, in real life.
Manu Saadia is the author of "Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek." Read about author appearances and more at Inkshares.
