“I have shown how the ideas of progression and of the indefinite perfectibility of the human race belong to democratic ages. Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure. Here then is the wildest range open to the genius of poets, which allows them to remove their performances to a sufficient distance from the eye. Democracy shuts the past against the poet, but opens the future before him.”...Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“...it no longer seemed so important whether the world was Adam Smith or Karl Marx. Neither made very much sense under the new circumstances.”... Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

INTRODUCTION: "DREAM NOT OF TODAY, MR PICARD"

I grew up frightened. Nuclear war and concentration camps were my childhood monsters. It might sound overblown today, but dread and anxiety were very real. Looming disaster was a constant motif. I was born in 1972, a child of the Cold War and of the oil shock. Perpetual economic crisis and the Warsaw Pact's missiles cast a long shadow over our heads. Even in my sheltered enclave of Paris, the threat of war, nuclear or otherwise, was palpable. It was like a background hum, never quite so strident but nonetheless perceptible. Some were more aware of it than others. Kids certainly took it to heart.

The year I turned nine, my grandfather had taken it upon himself to tell me all about his arrest by the Gestapo and his time at Buchenwald. Needless to say that did not help. The particulars of the story are what one would expect, torture, the cattle car, hunger, cold, forced labor, death. It was a lot to take in.

In my overactive and somewhat precocious mind, I reached the sobering conclusion that neither my parents nor my family, nor even France and its mighty atomic arsenal, could ever protect me from mutually assured destruction. They were as powerless as I was against the rolling thunder of the world. And I was right. Without a shred of a doubt.

These are the things you do not want to be right about at eight or nine.

You can easily understand why the Death Star was not my thing. It hit too close to home. Star Wars was too dangerous, and had too many villains.

Star Trek, on the other hand, was different. I first saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture in Paris, at the age of eight. And if you had given me the choice, I would have jumped at the chance to live in the world of Star Trek. Watching the Star Trek movie was like being let, as a kid, into a gigantic space laboratory where adults were doing very cool and important things. In a sense, the Enterprise crew’s leisurely and rational, technobabble-soaked demeanor made their lives and their work more approachable. In Star Trek, science and reason triumphed over danger. Their world was definitely better equipped for harmony than ours.

Star Trek presented my terrified eight-year old self with the mind-blowing idea that in the...