Star Trek is turning 60 – and the vision it promised feels more distant than ever | Dave Schilling
‘Star Trek posited that life on Earth might be bad now, but fear not, the good guys would win in the end. Humanity would overcome itself.’ Illustration: Fortunate Joaquin/The GuardianView image in fullscreen‘Star Trek posited that life on Earth might be bad now, but fear not, the good guys would win in the end. While you were out playing hopscotch with little Jimmy and Susie, I was locked in my room mainlining episodes of Star Trek or the weird, sanitized version of Aliens that aired on broadcast TV.
- ▪‘Star Trek posited that life on Earth might be bad now, but fear not, the good guys would win in the end.
- ▪Humanity would overcome itself.’ Illustration: Fortunate Joaquin/The GuardianView image in fullscreen‘Star Trek posited that life on Earth might be bad now, but fear not, the good guys would win in the end.
- ▪While you were out playing hopscotch with little Jimmy and Susie, I was locked in my room mainlining episodes of Star Trek or the weird, sanitized version of Aliens that aired on broadcast TV.
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Record
| Original publisher | The Guardian — US |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/20/star-trek-air-force-weapons |
| Publication time | Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:00:15 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-20T11:08:46.857Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-20T11:08:46.857Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | -OnnctLYJ5c4 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
‘Star Trek posited that life on Earth might be bad now, but fear not, the good guys would win in the end. Humanity would overcome itself.’ Illustration: Fortunate Joaquin/The GuardianView image in fullscreen‘Star Trek posited that life on Earth might be bad now, but fear not, the good guys would win in the end. Humanity would overcome itself.’ Illustration: Fortunate Joaquin/The GuardianOpinionStar TrekStar Trek is turning 60 – and the vision it promised feels more distant than everDave SchillingThe US’s deployment of weaponry in space marks the latest backward step from the show’s optimistic conception of the futureSun 20 Sep 2026 07.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 20 Sep 2026 07.01 EDTShareWho among us doesn’t dream of space in their youth?OK, maybe some of us. Like the ones with lives.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — US.
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