Star Trek And The Journey From Science Fiction To Pseudoscience

Fans of Star Trek live in a Golden Age where old and new series are readily available. As one hardcore Trekkie points out, the franchise is a reminder of the similarities and differences between pseudoscience and science fiction.

By Carlos Orsi

-Essay-

For my Trekkie part, I’m still a fan of the old ones: I still remember the disappointment when a Brazilian TV channel stopped airing the original series, and then there was a wait (sometimes years) until someone else decided to show it.

Living deep in São Paulo, Brazil in the 1990s, it was also torturous for me when “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” premiered on a station whose signal was very bad in my city.

I don’t remember when I saw the original cast for the first time, but I remember that when Star Trek made the transition to the cinema in 1979, in Robert Wise’s film, the protagonists James Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Montgomery Scott (James Doohan) and the Starship Enterprise were already old acquaintances.

And I was only eight years old. Nowadays, given the scarcity of time and attention that are the hallmarks of the contemporary world, I limit myself to following spinoffs Picard and Strange New Worlds and reviewing films made for cinema,

from time to time.

So, when a cinema close to my house decided to show the 40th anniversary of The Wrath of Khan (originally released in 1982), I rushed to secure a ticket. And there in the middle of the film, I had a small epiphany: the Star Trek Universe is pseudoscientific!

This realization does not necessarily represent a problem: contrary to what many imagine, science fiction exists to make you think and have fun, not to prepare for a national test).

Yet in a franchise that has always made a lot of effort to maintain an aura of scientific bona fides (Isaac Asimov was a consultant on the first film, and the book The Physics of Star Trek has a preface by Stephen Hawking!), the finding was a bit of a shock.

And what made me jump out of the chair?

The description of Project Genesis, the “McGuffin” (being that the “treasure” or “object of desire”) around which the films The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock revolve. I’d certainly heard and read the same description dozens of times, watching the movie or the adaptations of the script for literature and comics, but it was only now, in 2022, that the implications, shall we say, clicked.

The project is defined, on the screen of the cinema, by the character Dr. Carol Markus (portrayed by actress Bibi Besch) as: “A process by which molecular structure is rearranged at the subatomic level, in life-giving matter of equal mass.”

Project Genesis

This talk implies some kind of fundamental distinction, at the subatomic level, between “ordinary” matter and “life-giving” matter. That is vitalism – the doctrine where there is some essential difference between any molecule and a molecule that is part of the body of a living being – a pseudo-scientific belief.

To be fair, both, the film’s original screenplay and the novelization by the great science fiction writer Vonda McIntyre, heroically try to escape this implication. In the script (available online), we read that Genesis is:

“A process by which the molecular structure of any type of matter can be restructured – transformed –into anything else of equal mass.”