To be fair, Star Trek wasn't a result of perpetual progression. There was an apocalypse first.
It's also important to note how a lot of the whole neoliberal ideals of perpetual progress and the end of history have some roots in classist sentiment and the necessity of moral luck. The political pendulum is always going to swing and the solution to a better world is to lift everybody up. We are not free until we're all free.
A WW3 so destructive it apparently killed all organized religion, killed capitalism, and left English as the only language regularly used around the globe
I might be wrong but I seem to recall universal translation is pretty recent, like post first encounter with the vulcans, and by that point it seems we mostly spoke English
Well the reason for English is the context of it's a show meant for English speaking watchers.
Technically they could be speaking whatever language that became dominate, but it is accurate to say there is a dominate "Human" language that the Federation speaks. By natural extrapolation of English being the dominate language today for most international interactions, it's a natural assumption.
I think that was invented for aliens. In one of the reboots, the translator is shown doing a relatively primitive live translation of an alien speaking, implying that it was new tech in Kirk's time.
We also know that Picard is French, but speaks English with a British accent. The cannon explanation for that is that French died out as a regularly spoken language, and British English spread into Europe.
I'm not sure how the original series handles the translator; I've only seen a handful of episodes. I'm sure it's mostly just used to explain how they can speak with all these different aliens without issue
Eh, it all made sense in the good old days when the Eugenics Wars were part of the cold war, Cochrane gave the Vulkans warp drive and WW3 rendered Earth effectively lifeless while Earths colonies watched in horror.
Starfleet speaks "federation standard" which seems to just be English, but never fully specified in canon. Although I would imagine English in 200+ years is going to be a wee different, at least conversational English. I propose an English language reform. Modify vowel sounds by modifying the vowel character instead of suffixing words with an E. End the GIF debate by eliminating soft Gs. Find a better purpose for the letter C than being either a K or an S in disguise. Get rid of "ph". Make the same combination of vowels make the same sounds in each and every word.
Though they're actually wrong about their history, and the "war" was a global mass delusion that involved dancing in front of their primitive Communicators.
Now let's not pretend that the horrors of the Age of Technology didn't exist during that time period. There was definitely really messed up shit going on that made the Imperium look great by comparison in many places.
Yeah, the elites were only able to delude themselves into thinking society was progressing because what it was really doing was marginalizing those that didn't subscribe to their values.
Yeah, any plan that involves an apocalypse first will not end with a eutopia. If the pandemic taught me anything it is people do not rise to the occasion.
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u/AshleytheTaguel Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
To be fair, Star Trek wasn't a result of perpetual progression. There was an apocalypse first.
It's also important to note how a lot of the whole neoliberal ideals of perpetual progress and the end of history have some roots in classist sentiment and the necessity of moral luck. The political pendulum is always going to swing and the solution to a better world is to lift everybody up. We are not free until we're all free.