Surprisingly when I go back to Enterprise, I like the theme now. I find it very moving. So that made me ponder on why. My exposure to Star Trek started with the original series. I was a suburban "latch key kid" and in the 19070s, the show still lived in syndication. I'd come home, do my homework (sometimes) and then it was time for Star Trek.
Let me tell you a bit about the early 1970s for those who weren't there. This country was about space exploration in a huge way and we were all excited about it. The Apollo missions had just finished, we had our first space station in orbit, we had managed an orbital rendezvous with the Soviets, we were about to put our first landers on Mars and there was planning on the first of the fleet of "space trucks" to ferry people into orbit. The prototype of these reusable space ships was to be named the Constitution but a huge write-in campaign (no small feat pre-internet) to the then President, Gerald Ford convinced him to direct NASA to change the name...to the Enterprise. While she was never launched, she was the first shuttle to ever fly.
Space exploration was proceeding at a breakneck pace and to a young boy, the future that Gene Roddenberry proposed looked undeniable. If anything, his timeline was looking conservative. Surveyor 1 had preceded humans to the moon by three years so we figured with Viking touching down in 1976 that humans would be on the surface of Mars sometime before the end of the decade.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the value of exploration as a propaganda tool evaporated. Cynicism replaced pride in the US and the public just kind of lost interest in space exploration. The plans for the rockets we were going to build to replace the shuttle fleet got scrapped, the shuttles got retired and it really started to look like the shortsighted among us would allow the human race to go extinct at the bottom of the Earth's gravity well.
...and then the Curiosity landed like a BOSS! We have a new generation of people who have not seen the like and they are excited to be exploring a whole different planet. Bobak Ferdowski is now a rock star and it's very possible we might make it off of this pale blue dot before our species dies out. It's easy to look at some reality TV, read the newspapers and come to the conclusion that maybe, we deserve to end here. If this is the best we can do, we might be best left as a bad example for the next civilization that comes along.
but here is the thing to understand. The stakes are higher than that. We aren't in it for the fans of "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo." This is about Shakespeare and Mozart and the Beatles and Ansel Adams and Martin Luther King and the millions of books and songs and images and thoughts of those yet to be born.
So, what the hell does that have to do with the Enterprise theme?
When I first heard that song, I was still coasting from my childhood, this future was a given in my mind. It was going to happen. Now, I see the USA as possibly the most scientifically illiterate developed nation in the world. We spend our money saving the bacon of rich bankers but people squabble over the .4 cents on a dollar that it takes to fund NASA. I'm starting to realize that exploring the galaxy in ships capable of faster than light travel has a lot of question marks associated with the prospect. I also see the excitement and the sense of pride from putting a robot on the surface of Mars, I see discussion of a space station built at L2 and I realize that we still have time to turn this around before we reach a tipping point on the natural resources of the Earth. That future is still in play.
So for the first time for me, I'm no longer certain we will continue the very human tradition of exploration...but I have faith.
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