The future was better when Star Trek: The Next Generation was making it. The show went off the air twenty years ago this week and has definitely dated, as science fiction shows always do. The special effects look hilariously crude now. The acting veers from the ridiculously high (Patrick Stewart doing Shakespeare in space) to guys walking around in makeup (Michael Dorn < target="_blank">as Worf). But what dates the show most is its optimism: It was the last pop-culture show that believed, beyond any doubt, that human beings were good and that, liberated by infinite technological progress, we would encounter an infinitely wonderful universe.

Our current emotions about the future are decidedly mixed, partly because we are so much more immersed in technology than we were in 1994. Here is a quote from Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, about the glorious future technology is bringing into our lives, from Steven Levy's :

Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with knowledge of the world. Right now you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it could be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk into, or you can have computers that pay attention to what's going on around them and suggest useful information.

Google co-founder Larry Page adds:

Somebody introduces themselves to you, and your watch goes to your web page... Or if you met this person two years ago, this is what they said to you... Eventually you'll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.

That's not a conspiracy theorist babbling outside the toilets in a public library about how Google's going to put a chip in your brain. That's Larry Page. And he's made Google, and Google Books, and Street View, and self-driving cars. The single most important technologist alive believes the future is brain implants. Literally, I've had nightmares since reading that passage.

The future, as found in Star Trek: TNG, was the stuff of sweeter dreams. There has never been anything as hopeful about the nature of technology as the phrase "Heisenberg compensator." That's the device in Star Trek that allows for transporters to work. The original writers were familiar with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which states that an observer can precisely know either the position of a particle or its momentum but not both. The Heisenberg uncertainly principle means that transporters like the ones in Star Trek are physically impossible, at least in terms of the physics that we understand. But that didn't stop Roddenberry and friends. They just assumed that human beings would figure out some way to "compensate" for the physical laws.

The final episode of TNG brought the show to a nice round conclusion, ending where it began, on the question of humanity's potential. Q, the omnipotent alien, tests humanity, to find out if we are more than a "dangerous, savage child race." As in the first episode, humanity, represented by Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Enterprise, passes with flying colors. "We are what we are and we're doing the best we can" is Picard's answer to Q's various accusations.

It is worth noting, however, that Star Trek: TNG asked the question of whether humanity was valuable at all. In the original series, there was little doubt that the humans were the best species in the universe. Just about everybody else with a spaceship was either a savage or a psychopath. That's why they called space "the final frontier." It was a way of recreating the swashbuckling history of early explorers. TNG had a greater stake in inclusiveness, and was more hopeful about its place in the future. It believed that almost everyone in the universe, not just on earth, could get along. Even Klingons could work with the Federation.

Even the Star Trek series that followed TNG — Deep Space Nine and Voyager — were much more profoundly ambivalent about the technologically enabled future. Deep Space Nine ended in genocide, and the premise of Voyager was that warp 9-plus speed didn't matter when considered against the vastness of the universe. The TNG movies, too, were full of anxieties: the war against the Borg in First Contact, the fight between organic and synthetic versions of the same species in Insurrection. The true inheritor of Star Trek, of course, was the series Battlestar Galactica, in which humans are literally chased across the universe by evil robots, as they search for the original earth. It couldn't get more technophobic.

In 1994, technology was a part of our lives, but it did not dominate us completely. So it was possible for Star Trek: TNG to imagine a world in which we, as people, stayed much the same, but the worlds in which we traveled expanded infinitely outward. Technology for the past twenty years has relentlessly driven inward. This is true in pop culture as much as in real life. William Gibson's concept of cyberspace, the fantasies of Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash — these are not "brave new worlds," they are transformations of consciousness, changes in the nature of the soul.

In the final confrontation with Q, Picard is faced with the pleasures of limitless outward expansion: "For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence." Even then, the idea that technology would unleash the possibilities of humanity was sweetly naive, but you could almost bring yourself to believe it. It already seems like a hope from a dead history, long forgotten.

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Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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