Moonbase Alpha
“They look like fine kids.”
“They are. Our finest achievement.”
“Whose are they?”
“Sandra’s and Paul’s. Yes, the children are our future. And as the situation improves, of course, there will be more...”
~Koenig, speaking to a future version of Victor Bergman on an alternate-timeline Earth
When an unknown energy being of some kind comes upon Alpha, it inhabits the body of technician Anton Zoref, turning him into a ravenous energy collector, seeking out heat for his body to absorb, wherever he can find it. He winds up in the base Solarium – a natural choice, since it is basically a tanning salon, offering the Alphans an abundance of ultraviolet energy.[1]
An unusual phenomenon in space spurs a series of bizarre events on Alpha – objects moving, ghostly apparitions in dreams – as well as more mundane, petty incidents such as frayed tempers. One such incident occurs in the Recreation Center, where Alphans congregate off-duty for relaxation and conversation – and game-playing. Carl Renton and George Crato engage in such a game, a computer-based
game of chance. When Carl unaccountably wins 17 times in a row, a fight breaks out.[2]
Alpha wanders into range of Vega, where a powerful and mysterious woman, Zamara, takes an interest in the passing humans and begins a series of experiments that includes prompting selected Alphans to rage and violence. This turns out to be harder than she expects, and so she seeks out some inspiration in Alpha’s library – a lounge area where a vast collection of literary and music works from Earth can be found in small disk form. After sampling some classical music, she locates Shakespeare – Othello – which prompts her to consider jealousy as a way to inspire human rage.[3]
As the moon is suddenly pulled off course by an unknown force, Paul Morrow interrupts Koenig in the base gymnasium – where he and Luke Ferro, one of Alpha’s aerospace engineers, are having a friendly Kendo match.[4]
Several dozen off-duty Alphans, including Sandra Benes, Alan Carter, Helena Russell and Cmdr. Koenig, gather in a large room to hear a concert by a young man playing an electric sitar, which sounds very New Age and other-worldly.[5]
As the moon approaches a new planet they name Ariel, mysterious cylinders travel from the planet and land on the lunar surface. When they open, they begin gushing out atmosphere – Earth-like atmosphere. The moon’s spin increases equally mysteriously, boosting the gravity to Earth-normal. The message is clear: the inhabitants of Ariel, whoever they are, are giving the Alphans a reason to stay where they are.
Now that they can live on the surface of their own world, the Alphans set up a makeshift resort, covering the area outside the base with seats for sunbathing, side tables to hold their drinks, and a badminton net for sport.[6]
For reasons unknown, the moon finds itself returning to Earth, where another version of the moon is already there in orbit, and the planet is empty, apart from the alternate Alphans from the other moon. Investigating, Koenig encounters another version of Victor Bergman, who explains that his Alphans have resettled the Earth in a small valley, establishing a human community where they have built homes, married, and begun raising a new generation of children – the life they had been seeking all along.[7]
A rec center... a solarium... a library... a gymnasium... concerts... sports. They all remind us that Moonbase Alpha is, first and foremost, a reflection of human community.
On the one hand, they are a community like no other in human history – separated, probably permanently, from their homeworld – yet they have an advantage no one back on Earth experiences: circumstances have recreated, for them, the human past. They are, paradoxically, in many ways living as our distant ancestors lived.
Separating Myth from Fact
When 1999 first came on the air, I was a young teenager, and there were a lot of assumptions entrenched in the public consciousness about the nature of human beings, and our prehistoric selves in particular. These included:
· Human beings are inherently violent and competitive – we were (and still are, at heart) “killer apes”
· We were aimless, wandering nomads, living a brutish existence
· Females were considered trophies to be fought over, property to be possessed
· We were disorganized and combative, with no meaningful social framework
Popular culture and the media reinforced these stereotypes – even Space: 1999 itself, in the episode “Full Circle”, in which Koenig and Russell revert to their Stone Age selves. Even 2001: A Space Odyssey bought into the “killer ape” theory, which was formulated in the early 20th century based on the discovery of caches of femurs stashed as “clubs” in African caves - “armories” for early humans, a resource for tribal warfare. This was disproved in the 1990s (more on that below, in “War Games”).
Most of the cultural myths about the real nature of human community have been dispelled as our knowledge has moved forward, but it is all too human to cling to the impressions of our youth. I made it my project a few years ago to dig into these myths and present the most current knowledge in a book, Chasing the Enterprise: Achieving Star Trek’s Vision of the Human Future.
The reality is that the nature of human community is much more positive than previous generations have supposed, since we achieved a full awareness of our primate heritage. We were superb survivors, strongly cooperative and cohesive; women, not men, were the sexual selectors in the human mating dance, and participated in hunting; we distributed our resources well, and were actually, for the most part, strong and healthy.
Here’s an example. Professor Robert Sapolsky, who studies paleoanthropology and has written extensively about the deep human past, addresses the outdated belief that paleolithic humans were at the mercy of the environment, scratching for the bare necessities of subsistence:
“People went and looked at [hunter gatherers] closely and discovered these people were not starving; these people were having a very comfortable existence in lots of ways. If you’re going to be in the developing world, you would
much rather be a hunter-gatherer than an agriculturalist or a nomadic pastoralist; you have a much better diet, far more variety, far more resistance to famine, because you’re eating three hundred different plant species instead of the six or seven things you’re cultivating; you have far less work – agriculturalists work like maniacs, hunter-gatherers work three, four hours a day for their calories and spend the rest of their time doing whatever they do; it’s a much easier lifestyle.”
Some of those arguments are presented below; some will appear in later chapters. And the overall argument here is that Breakaway restored, to some degree, these early conditions of human community – which the Alphans embraced. That’s an important lesson in the nature of our community.
Cooperation, not competition
The American biologist/naturalist Edward O. Wilson notes that human beings are part of one of the smallest clubs in the kingdom of life. We are a eusocial species – one with the nearly-unique trait of sacrificing some measure of personal reproductive potential in order to facilitate the greater goal of group survival.[8]
Wilson notes, with some fascination and astonishment, that only 20 such species have been discovered thus far. And with the exception of a crustacean or two and a mole-rat, all the rest besides us are… insects.
Eusociality is the highest, most sophisticated level of social organization, making a species largely impervious to the forces that might lead to extinction. Eusocial insect colonies, it is certain, will outlast Homo sapiens by hundreds of millions of years, even projecting our best possible species outcomes. What is curious is how we, upright mammals, have come to achieve this heightened state of being, which is largely the province of bugs.
Eusocial species are master cooperators. They are hyper-efficient food gatherers, rabid self-defenders, astonishingly skilled at all the components of survival. Their division of labor is brilliant, highly effective. And they take an extra evolutionary step that bolsters their group survival even more: they care for one another’s young.
The role of cooperation in the evolutionary story has been under study for some time - but it is not as well-understood as the role competition, for a simple reason: Nature provides far fewer examples of it. Among many species, it’s every creature for itself; among many, it’s just a travel buddy thing; even among mammals, many peacefully share territory, but the daily business of eating and sleeping and reproducing isn’t considered group activity. It’s far more common to see competition, aggression, fighting and fleeing and so on than it is to see the well-ordered community of an insect colony.
Here’s the thing: if we look at cooperation as the antithesis of competition, we realize something unsettling: without their magnificent cooperation, eusocial insects would be astonishingly vulnerable.
They would be individually much weaker, much more fragile, much more exposed – much less able to draw sustenance from the world. And that’s not the unsettling part…
…so would we.
An individual human being alone in the world is orders of magnitude more vulnerable than a human in a clan of humans. We are far slower than most other mammals. We are not armed with claws or fangs. We can no longer climb as we once did.
And the ingenuity we innately feel in the here-and-now? That’s a heritage from hundreds of thousands of years of ingenuity, handed to us by… the group. Without it, we would flounder in the wild.
But put human beings into eusocial groups, and… wow. One human against a leopard is cat food. Six humans against a leopard, the leopard becomes the food.
Moreover, our infant survival rate skyrockets when we bind into large families. Out in the wild, adoption is rare: most infants will die if their parents die. Among humans, that almost never happens.
And that we care for one another’s young has led us to care for one another; we have a power transcending all other eusocial species – empathy. When another of our kind hurts, we hurt; when another feels pleasure, we feel pleasure.
It is not a great leap to see that cooperation is more than just an alternative to competition – it is the next step. Having jumped species, from insect to primate, cooperation can now take Life where competition could not.
It falls to us now, to choose the one over the other.
Stronger in diversity
Another key to the success of human community is diversity.
Star Trek, of course, is constantly paraded as the pacesetter in this area – and rightly so, in context. Trek gave us a black, an Asian, a Scot and a Russian – and women! - on the bridge of a starship, and that was a big deal in the Sixties.
The thing that goes unnoticed – or, at least, very seldom remarked – is that 1999, which began filming a mere eight years after Trek premiered, did a much better job with ethnic diversity and gender parity that Trek did. On Alpha, we see as many women as men, and they are in positions of great responsibility; there are black and Asian faces everywhere. As with Trek, the person at the top is white, male, and American; but the mix of people is, by design, international – as it should be.
But there is a facet of human diversity that is more important still, in the survival equation and, more broadly, in human community. Nature has equipped us, powerfully and meaningfully, with cognitive diversity.
Anywhere we might go on Earth – in any country, city, town, province, even most neighborhoods – we may or may not find ethnic and gender diversity, but we will nonetheless see cognitive diversity: a wide range of differences in the way people think.
Some people are risk takers; others are risk-averse. Some people are comfortable taking orders; others prefer discussion and consensus. Some people seek out the new and different, while others stick with the tried-and-true. This diversity gives any human group a distinctive edge is functioning well in community, as opposed to groups of people who self-select by like-mindedness.
It’s easy to see this advantage simply by considering how dis-advantageous, even openly destructive, groups can become when everyone in the group thinks the same way. Think political parties. Religious extremists. Groups where everyone happily submits to an authoritative leader; where everyone is fearful; where everyone is resistant to change. Communities, real or abstract, that cluster together based on like-mindedness are much less likely to face survival challenges with ingenuity and resilience.
The consequences of this cognitive clustering are many. Almost every social stumble humankind has made can be traced back to this deeply destructive aberration. But as deeply as this divisive practice has sliced into human progress, its reversal can have deeper impact still. When we look around and survey our addiction to like-mindedness, admit that it is social kryptonite, and commit to the brain-building, community-building work of de-clustering our lives, our groups, and our world, the rewards are beyond enticing – they are species-changing.
The person who commits to seeking out groups that are cognitively varied is inviting debate, uncertainty, some self-doubt, and certainly some opposition – but will be rewarded with deeper perspective, more thoroughly tested convictions, stronger self-expression, more effective solutions, and a more rewarding (and far more accurate) understanding of human nature.
The group that commits to cognitive inclusion, setting aside its echo-chamber dynamic to invite differing viewpoints, new styles of thought, and opposing voices, will be rewarded with more reliable decision-making resources, a far greater range of problem-solving skills, a more viable and effective presence in the world, and a deeper and more rewarding diversity in its ranks.
This is certainly more easily said than done. In the West, cognitive clustering is the default. Most of us live in echo chambers, often inherited from our parents – and the Internet has amplified that effect, rather than pushing back against it.
It is certainly more immediately gratifying to just seek out that little dopamine hit we get when we have a beer with friends and commiserate together, nodding and agreeing with each other, than it is to sit down with those we disagree with – or even despise – and do the hard work of setting aside our emotional opposition to their viewpoint in order to see what it is that motivates them and moves them. It’s hard to believe that the eat-your-vegetables labor of cognitive de-clustering can ultimately be as rewarding as making cultural war on those who see the world, and even the human race, differently.
But those of us in the United States, our current dysfunction aside, have a model to work with – one that puts us, in our self-serving attitude, to shame.
Our Founding Founders, our Constitutional Framers, sought to instill exactly this form of social action, this same cognitively varied dynamic. The entire point of this thing we call the United States is a cognitively diverse, de-clustered forum for problem-solving and decision-making. The Constitution’s mechanics specifically enforce the kind of work-the-problem deliberation, uniting deliberators of diverse background and viewpoint in the service of building the nation and addressing its issues. In short, the Founders’ secular, intellectually unbiased style of government achieves this ideal – and provides the template we need, a framework for returning human society to its lost state of social health – diverse in body and mind, strong in problem-solving, deep in its self-understanding, and far-reaching in its perception of the possibilities of the future.
It becomes a matter of personal commitment to individual action, which in turn brings the committed into encounter with one another, not only tolerating but welcoming those who are different – entering into a growing sphere of diverse groups, each composed of strong and perceptive members, able to cope well with adversity, disagreement, the labors of consensus-building, the challenges of solving troubling problems and the satisfactions of complicated decisions faced and well-made.
It is not a trivial commitment. In the end, it is at least as serious as joining a church or a political party, and demands at least as much (if not far more). It is a lonelier path, a road less traveled.
Yet this is the path we see humankind taking in the 1999 universe. The international space coalition presented on the show stands in contrast to the Cold War space race of the real world, and the duking-it-out on the moon and Mars that we see in For All Mankind. That contrast speaks volumes; would you rather live on Alpha, or on For All Mankind’s Mars?
The social and economic order of Moonbase Alpha
An objection might rapidly surface that Alpha is a community based not on consensus, but hierarchy: it seems quasi-military, almost in a Star Trek-like way, with its use of authority, ranks, weapons, a security force, and defensive protocols. Yes, all true.
But we only hear two actual ranks spoken: Commander Koenig; Captain Carter. Beyond that, it’s Controller Paul Morrow, a description of managerial function; Doctor Russell; Professor Bergman, who is strictly an advisor, but so respected that he may as well be Koenig’s deputy.
There is no question that Koenig is the community leader – yet he is far from an autocrat, certainly no authoritarian. Though the community does not formally make important decisions by consensus, Koenig almost always seeks it out, inviting input not just from his closest advisors but from anyone who might have meaningful input.
There is cognitive diversity throughout the community, from Alan Carter’s risk-taking spirit to Tony Verdeschi’s cautiousness; from Sandra Benes’s maternal pragmatism to Paul Morrow’s quiet musical side. And Koenig listens to them all, entrusting authority to them as needed with no qualms or sense of threat to himself.
And then there’s an aspect of the Moonbase Alpha community that goes almost completely overlooked: it is utterly socialist.
Democracy aside – we've already covered the quasi-military thing – there is no money on Moonbase Alpha, though all of its inhabitants grew up in modern Western economies and drew paychecks from their respective governments until the moment of Breakaway.
Well, of course they don’t have money, it’s easy to say: they’ve been cut off from the world they came from, and now they depend utterly on what the base can produce to sustain them. All their food is hydroponic, all their power stellar and nuclear, their water recycled.
Everyone contributes to the community based on their skill sets, with a division of labor that’s optimally efficient. Their individual labor is equally rewarded, consisting of food, water, heat, and shelter.
And they own the means of production. It’s downright communist!
Star Trek, too, was accused of this heinous indulgence. A brief divergence into the following essay (which appeared in Chasing the Enterprise) will clarify why it matters.
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Star Wars, Star Trek, and Macroeconomic Theory
Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, in a conversation with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, weighed in on that most famous of geek controversies: Star Wars or Star Trek?
Though rich, powerful and at least nominally conservative, Thiel is most qualified to join this particular fray. Though he hasn’t been spotted at many West Coast Comic-Cons, he nonetheless can claim geek cred by way of his investment choices: he pals around with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Thiel himself might not pass for geek, but he loves to fund it.
The interview drew the attention of Manu Saadia, who wrote the book Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek, which we will be discussing in this book more than once. Writing for The New Yorker, Saadia took note of Thiel’s fanboy preference – Star Wars – and took note of his reason why.
“Capitalism,” he answered.
“The whole plot of Star Wars starts with Han Solo having this debt that he owes, and so the plot in Star Wars is driven by money.
“Star Trek,” on the other hand, “is the communist one.”
Put simply, Star Wars appeals to Thiel’s more libertarian sensibilities, while Star Trek evokes the horrors of a capitalism-free universe with lots of equality, no poverty, and completely egalitarian opportunity. In an essay published by the Cato Institute, he wrote that technology is often a dangerous distraction to social attention; freedom, he wrote, is a product of political thought, not technological advancement. And Star Trek seems to say the opposite.
Star Wars “is in fact much closer to home that Star Trek,” Saadia wrote in The New Yorker. “Forget the lightsabers and the Force: the essential story of the films is familiar, a techified version of a Wild West that existed only in Buffalo Bill’s travelling revue and its celluloid successors, the Westerns. In Star Wars, criminal potentates hire bounty hunters to recover debts from roguish smugglers. Robots are menial servants and sycophants rather than colleagues, and human slavery persists. Unelected tyrants and religious zealots make policy by fiat. A blaster, or a Death Star, is the only real guarantor of life and liberty. Fate and the lottery of birth reign supreme. It is a libertarian’s fever dream, a distilled expression of the idea that the greater good is best served through unfettered (and, if necessary, brutal) economic competition.
“This, rather than the liberal-democratic setting of the USS Enterprise, is the political environment in which Thiel seems to feel most comfortable…in [his Cato Institute essay] he places ‘confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual’ in opposition to ‘authentic human freedom.’ Only the strong and lucky, like Han Solo, should survive.”
On the other hand, in the Star Trek universe, “technological progress is inseparable from society and politics,” Saadia wrote. “As even quasi-fans will recall, the TV shows and films feature a machine called the replicator, which can produce any inanimate matter on demand – food, drink, warp-drive parts…The replicator solves, albeit fictionally, what John Maynard Keynes once called ‘the economic question’ – that is, the imbalance between supply and demand, and the resulting need for markets and price mechanisms to allocatescarce resources. The society of Star Trek has decided not to exact a fee for the use of the machine. Thus the replicator can be an engine both for the equal distribution of wealth and for personal enrichment. It does not bring about social change on its own. The post-scarcity world in Star Trek is the result of a political decision, not of pure technological progress.”
It’s an interesting new take on a very old debate: Star Wars as a ‘libertarian fever dream,’ Star Trek as the ultimate ‘liberal-democratic’ ideal. Yet it’s spot-on accurate as sociopolitical characterization, when we consider the feudal mythologies that inspired George Lucas and the contemporary philosophy behind Gene Roddenberry’s overt humanist manifesto.
In the Star Wars universe, life is cheap and freedom precious, because it’s in such short supply. Authoritarianism reigns, in constant tension with the rage of the oppressed, with survival-of-the-fittest as the rule – and technology is leveraged only to serve this dynamic, never to rise above it.
In the Star Trek universe, life is revered and freedom the default, in bountiful supply. Egalitarianism reigns, and the right of self-determination is the highest rule. Technology is leveraged in its service, overtly bolstering equality, rather than enabling its antithesis.
This leads us to a very interesting question: what, exactly, is the difference in these two universes, this opposing visions of human socioeconomic order?
The Star Wars-Wild West analogy might lead us astray here. It seeks to situate Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and company in a resource-sparse economy, where smugglers thrive, moisture farmers eek out a living wringing water from the air, and energy is flat-out hard to come by. Poverty is always within shouting distance, and human beings are used as beasts of labor.
Star Trek, on the other hand, shows us a society built on an energy-rich economy, where no one goes hungry, every living being is respected and nurtured by the society, and boundless accomplishment is possible.
It is easily argued that free and plentiful energy is the key difference between these two socioeconomic models.
But that argument is just as easily dismissed. In the Star Wars universe, all weapons – even swords – are energy-based; ships that are orders of magnitude more massive than the USS Enterprise roam the stars; planets can be blown to pieces. If anything, the Star Wars economy is more energy-rich than Star Trek’s.
We’re looking, then, not at technology, nor even at energy supply, to pin down the critical difference in these two economies. And Peter Thiel’s attitudes, per Saadia’s essay, underscore it:
“What is anathema to Thiel in Star Trek is the notion, drawn from Isaac Asimov’s fiction, that the market is but a temporary solution to imbalances in supply and demand, and that technology and plenty will eventually make it obsolete. Star Trek replicators are nothing but Asimov’s robots disguised as coffee machines, let loose on the world as a public good. They dissolve the need for a pricing mechanism. They represent the logical endpoint of the Industrial Revolution, when all human labor has been offloaded to machines. Star Trek and Asimov remind us that the market and all the behaviors associated with it are temporary and historically contingent. If that is so, then what Thiel thinks of human nature and motivations – that people are competitive, acquisitive, greedy – is temporary and contingent, too.”
And there we have it.
Star Wars and Star Trek are not simply two very different visions of human society. They are two very different – and competing – views of human nature.
Are human beings competitive, acquisitive, greedy? That’s an easy argument to make.
The follow-up questions are not so easy: have we always been so? And are we necessarily so?
Star Wars says Yes.
Star Trek says No.
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Of course, Moonbase Alpha lacks the energy wealth of the United Federation of Planets. There is nothing even approaching the replicator in 1999 tech. Even so, the important point made by Saadia above – that “money” and “markets” as we think of them and use them are only a “temporary and historically contingent” phenomenon in the human story – gets some validation and support from the way we see the Alphans living.
There is no “property” in the sense the word has been applied in human history: everyone has personal quarters (and couples share quarters). Those quarters are equal in size, and no one “owns” more than their own; there is no one on Alpha controlling more physical space than others. “Property” is limited to personal possessions. No one “owns” their own Eagle or moon buggy. Paul Morrow is not shown to charge admission when he plays guitar in the Recreation Center. And everyone is fine with this economic system.
It functions perfectly, and we can see it as a return to that system we enjoyed for almost 300,000 years, before the advent of civilization – before we invented agriculture, turned land, food, and women into property, and unleashed inequality on humankind.
It worked well for all those many thousands of years, and reflects the true nature of human community – one that the Alphans demonstrate as still viable, and which we could – if we so chose – revive.
[1] In “Force of Life”, Season One. The Solarium is also seen in the second season episode “The Taybor”.
[2] In the second season episode “The Lambda Factor”. The Recreation Area is also seen in “The Seance Spectre”.
[3] In the second season episode “One Moment of Humanity”.
[4] In the first season episode “The Testament of Arcadia”.
[5] In the first season episode “The Troubled Spirit”.
[6] In the first season episode “The Last Sunset”.
[7] In “Another Time, Another Place”, Season One.
[8] Some biologists contest Wilson’s assertion, noting that the other eusocial species all have reproductive and non-reproductive divisions of labor; Wilson counters that this division need not be absolute, but can be a matter of degree.
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