Star Trek History Takes A Drastic Turn In 2024
Since Star Trek mostly takes place in the 23rd and 24th centuries, most of the world we see (including cashless societies where nobody has to work if they don’t want to) is very unfamiliar to us. However, the year 2024 is weirdly important to the canonical lore of Star Trek, and now that we’ve arrived at the fated year, it looks like this franchise’s writers were downright prophetic.
According to Star Trek, 2024 is a year that brings us terrorism as politics, civil unrest, accelerating climate change, and even the seeds of World War III.
Star Trek Predicted The State Of Affairs For 2024
Relative to some of the more dystopian events that happen in Star Trek in 2024, one of the ones described in The Next Generation episode “The High Ground” has frequently made fans cheer. In an offhand comment, the android Data casually mentions 2024 as the year that Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland become a united nation.
Depending on your politics, that may be worth cheering for, but Data throws out how this became a prominent historical example of terrorism being an effective political tool…a dark declaration that served as an early warning of how weird this year would get in Star Trek history.
Deep Space Nine Predicts Europe’s Civil Unrest
Beyond that episode, most of what we know about the year 2024 in this franchise comes from the two-part Deep Space Nine episode “Past Tense” as well as the second season of Picard. Politically, Europe is starting to regress by this time, thanks to ongoing political strife and the subsequent civil protests.
Meanwhile, climate change is getting out of control, and audiences watching Picard discover somewhat depressingly that the only way humanity got climate change out of control was by studying a sentient microorganism that one of Picard’s ancestors found on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
America’s Homeless Crisis
Magic space solutions that aren’t fully explained are par for the course for Star Trek, but it was Deep Space Nine’s two-part episode “Past Tense” that provided a 2024 that looks most like our own. In these episodes, we see that homelessness has gotten so bad in America that the government’s response is to simply throw all of its displaced citizens into Sanctuary Cities where they can be out of sight and out of mind.
This blows the time-traveling Dr. Bashir’s mind, and he can barely process how the government is “causing people to suffer” simply because they “have forgotten how to care.”
In Trek’s 2024, World War III Looms
The good news about those Sanctuary Cities is that a time-traveling Commander Sisko helped make the world aware of how they had become violent ghettoes, sparking a public outcry for social reform. The bad news is that such reforms were ultimately pointless.
In Star Trek history, World War III breaks out only two years later, which really showcases how bizarre Picard’s second season really was. Picard leaves his friend Rios in 2024 only for that man to raise his new family during a global war and die in a bar fight; insanely, both Picard and its title character treat this as a happy ending for poor Rios.
What Will Star Trek Predict Next?
Given how bad Star Trek has made 2024 seem, we’re just over here hoping that real life doesn’t mirror this fictional franchise. After all, Trek showed us that this was a year dominated by apocalyptic climate change, rising fascism, and governments forcing violence and death on the most vulnerable. That doesn’t sound anything like our own world, does it?
Yeah. If anyone needs us, we’re going to be over here repeatedly saying, “computer, end program” until the pain goes away.
