Be the change you want to see. Challenge22.com

I want to see a world that is like Star Trek, and this is one of the stepping stones imo. And the Gene Roddenberry foundation thinks so too: https://www.livekindly.co/star-trek-foundation-grants-vegan-startup-250k-for-converting-1-6-million-to-plant-based-diet/

The difference between Gene Roddenberry and Seth is the america they portray in the show. Gene portrays a noble and moral america that could be. Seth portrays america as it is.

OOps sorry. Killed that one and moved it over here. http://videosift.com/video/Star-Trek-THE-PILOT-Gene-Roddenberry-Biopic-1

Gene Roddenberry was kind of a bad ass.

I think I've figured it out - they're trying to power the world with green energy by putting copper coil onto Gene Roddenberry's casket and each time it slows down they make another one of these Star Trek movies?

This is Star Trek via name only. I'm disgusted.

I'm thinking you probably don't understand Star Trek. The TNG movies were no work of art, but they were still decent Star Trek movies. Now none of the Star Trek movies, not even the first 6 (with the exception of the Motion Picture, and arguably The Voyage Home) truly represent what Star Trek is with relation to their respective TV shows, as they choose to focus more on space action and conflict, but all of them stuck with the core premise that Gene Roddenberry laid out: To explore the human condition and show how mankind can better itself.
The TNG movies certainly could have done better, and while First Contact was pretty darn good (especially if you consider how it relates to the Borg "trilogy") I've come to see Generations and even Insurrection in a more forgiving light. Heck, as painful as it is to admit, even Nemesis had a lot of potential, judging by the scenes that were cut. (But that's being REALLY generous.)
However, none of the new movies come anywhere near what the old movies were. Yes, Star Trek 2009 was actually a better movie than several of the previous movies, but otherwise, all of them, even what I'm seeing in this new trailer, lack the vision laid down by Roddenberry. And also, it's very hard to appreciate a Star Trek movie that doesn't have its core points laid down in a TV show, as it really is best suited for the TV medium. Without that character and setting development, you can really only get by with nostalgia and action.

Now some of the fan works, on the other hand, seem to do their source material better justice. I avoided them for quite some time, but after hearing about some of the good ones, I've started to look into them and have been pleasantly surprised. They are certainly rough around the edges, but they do seem to stick to Roddenberry's vision a lot better. Heck, that Axanar thing looks pretty compelling, if they ever get to complete it.

Yeah, sign me up for the "this looks awful" train.

Right now, there is one thing that might make me want to see this and that's the fact that Simon Pegg wrote it.

Because Simon Pegg is awesome and he actually cares about this.

But I can picture the scene now...

INT: PARAMOUNT EXEC's office
SIMON PEGG: "I've just finished the screenplay for the new Star Trek movie"
PARAMOUNT EXEC flicks through script, obviously not reading it

PARAMOUNT EXEC: "Great.. great! great work, Si (can I call you Si?) Now can we add some ninjas and dirt bikes?"

SIMON PEGG: "er, that's not really what it's about. And please don't call me Si."

PARAMOUNT EXEC: "Thanks Si! So we'll have those ninjas and dirt bikes in the next draft. Also good news, you'll never guess who we got to direct it."

SIMON PEGG: "I was thinking maybe Duncan Jones. He did some great sci-fi with Moon."

PARAMOUNT EXEC: "nah, he's off making an extended blizzard cgi sequence! No, even better, we got Justin Lin!"

SIMON PEGG: "The guy from Fast & Furious? Why? why would you...."

SIMON PEGG breaks down crying

PARAMOUNT EXEC laughs maniacally

CUT TO : Ext GENE RODDENBERRY's grave

GENE RODDENBERRYs corpse spins out of grave

Off topic, but speak of the devil and he shall appear.
Apparently a trove of 200 floppy disks owned my Gene Roddenberry have turned up, and been deciphered (they were made on a proprietary OS made just for Gene, apparently) and 'there may be surprises in store on this, the 50'th anniversary of the original Star Trek' is all that's been said about it so far....
http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/04/200-floppy-disks-belonging-to-star-treks-creator-have-been-recovered-and-could-offer-some-surprises/

And here we are again.
THIS is the reason why we can't have nice things.
Instead of agreeing that certain things are wrong and need to be changed, we argue about who got it worst. Instead of acknowledging that we have a lot work to do until we become the nice people Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek wants us to be, we fight about shitty details. We'd rather point fingers than making a change from within ourselves.
Any change for the better in any society comes from within. It's a painfully slow process and it requires more patience and blood than humanly bearable. We, as a society, need to suffer greatly before we learn our painful lesson. We always pay a price much too high. We pay in human suffering. We pay in blood. All the time.
What doesn't help is antagonizing each other. Apparently, we can't help it.

#i'mjustsayingi'mamisanthrope

Not insulting, but this is communism that works!

Communism is not a dirty word, and in small towns and states it works well, promotes a sence of community, you are there for your fellow man and everyone shares freely of their labors.

Where it falls apart is disabled, sick, those that dont want to work partake in the free benefits causing anger, jealousy and split in other community members.

Thats why the old saying about communism works great on paper but will eventually fall apart in ptactice. Without a tyrant to keep it in check.

By the way Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek the entire Earth was communism and had eliminated capitalism in the future :-)

And disagreement is cool with me, I often disagree with people who like musicals but I can do so without being a jerk about it, I'm just not into them. An active imagination is often considered a sign of intelligence and higher thinking. I'm pretty sure creative minds like Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, just to name a few, are not lacking in the intelligence or comprehension departments. Gene Roddenberry could be responsible for god knows how many people going into the sciences, inspired to make the future, he imagined a reality.
Lincoln was great movie and I'd be all for seeing a movie based on the 47 Ronin that was more historically accurate, but that doesn't mean I can't also enjoy movies like Pacific Rim. As for 300, the movie was actually based on Frank Miller's graphic novel, which I doubt was ever intended to be a factual account of the event anyhow. Movies like this one are, for better or worse a product of market forces and the society we live in.

Gene Roddenberry LIED to me!

Gene Roddenberry and L.Ron Hubbard were secret lovers.

Quite well done. I've usually excused the capricious way in which the "prime directive" ended up being a placeholder for "I need the heroes to be conflicted about resolving a major issue by doing something trivial so there's dramatic tension", but he really nails them to the wall.

The real problem is that after Gene Roddenberry died, you had that awful, awful travesty known as Star Trek: Voyager, where following the Prime Directive always meant doing something hideously awful.

The other series got sketchy about it at times, but ST:Voy is really the issue here.

I was really impressed with this. This really puts the ethics embedded in star trek that I really enjoyed under the microscope.

One of the difficulties of lifting the underlying ethics out of the series is that the series itself spans its creation over an incredible period of time; I'm not sure Gene Roddenberry was thinking 30 years ahead when he first came up with it =P. Also, Gene died shortly into the 4th season of start trek TNG...he wasn't around to be really involved with deep space 9, voyager, or enterprise. This is reflected in TOS vs. TNG; in TOS, the goal was to, "explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." TOS was about adventure; they had the people fly out to find a new world, fly down 'n meet 'em, and then get in all kinds of trouble. They seemed to focus on meeting civilizations that were approximately as technologically advanced as starfleet's. In TNG, the stated mission is the same, but the show has a much stronger anthropological sentiment to it. They actually fly down to places where they would be considered gods (and occasionally are, when they screw up).

From the anthropological perspective, the prime directive really does make a lot of sense...to a point. Suppose that you do come across some relatively underdeveloped civilization, and you have the chance to immediately save a lot of citizens of that civilization. Your direct interference with that civilization will indeed mess up your experiments concerning the study of how civilizations develop, so it's something that you generally want to avoid. Trying to save a civilization from one problem necessarily induces another problem. By solving a civilization's problem, their behavior may change to become reliant, and therefor dependent, upon you. Then, what are the ethics of *not* stopping your mission to explore out new civilizations? What are the ethics of *not* creating a supply line to suit the needs of your newly dependent civilization? Should you try to make that civilization self-sufficient to solve their own problems, what are the ethics of giving them technology without the social infrastructure for them to be able to deal with that technology? Finally, after all that, suppose that you give a new civilization new technology and a new social infrastructure to be able to deal with that technology responsibly; you've just committed a much more interesting and philosophical upset, and you've essentially wiped out an entire culture, and replaced it with another. From an anthropological standpoint, that's complete disaster.

That said, there are still times when it's a much bigger disaster to let things fall their course. Suppose a natural disaster is about to occur in which an entire planet will be destroyed. In this case, by not intervening, the entire culture and population will be eradicated, which is completely unacceptable from both anthropological and humanitarian standpoints. What do you do? In one episode of TNG (I can't remember which one), the solution was to transport the entire civilization to their holodecks, and transfer them to a new planet, all the while they believe that they are migrating to some new location on their homeworld. They preserved both the life and the culture, and satisfied both standpoints, which is a great and rare solution.

This video illustrates this caveat and many others by showing that the prime directive should *not* be considered a dogma that should be followed by every anthropologist blindly, but rather should be a rule of thumb. In a tough spot, it'll get you the best outcome most of the time. At other times, advanced levels of thought are necessary in order to fish out the actual best solution. For someone to break this rule of thumb very frequently might raise some eyebrows about what they are doing, as is the case seen in the clip where the senior officer was putting Picard in the hotseat about breaking the directive on 9 separate occasions in a short span of time.

The fact of the matter, though, is that it is *not* treated as a dogma in the series; it *is* treated as a rule of thumb. The fact that Picard broke it on 9 occasions in a short span of time truly shows this. In several other clips that was shown in this video, they actually *did* end up breaking the prime directive.

I believe that the person who created this video was just upset that he was never issued a starfleet academy textbook on the prime directive which spells out every detail and nuance of the directive =P. Of course they don't go into high levels of detail on it; the mass wouldn't be interested, or would just take a course on ethics & philosophy instead. Instead of going into high detail, they did as entertainers do, and just presented the rule in its most frustrating (and therefore interesting) fashion, by showing all of the situations when it makes us violate our own compulsion to follow our own set of moral standards. I believe that the prime directive in the series does come close to that which the author of the clip wants, but is merely stifled in its presentation by drama and intrigue.