Do you think star trek will still be around 150-200 years from now?

[RocksW]

Its just something I was thinking about, the fact that the enterprise is such a recognised symbol the world over and that it has such a dedicated fanbase, do you think the trek series could survive into the far (ish) future?


(I know its a TV show, but it kind of reminds me of religions surviving through the ages and whatnot... lol)

[BlobVanDam]

Within a decade there will be literally no original franchises being created ever again, so I will say that Star Trek will be rehashed continuously until the sun engulfs us all.

[Gov Kodos]

Very doubtful, it is just a TV show and a bit of fun pop fluff.

[C.E. Evans]

I do think that Star Trek will still be around in 150 years. I think it'll come and go, have periods of popularity and decline, but ultimately will be reinvented/rebooted time and time again for different generations of audiences. In 150 years, though, it'll probably be totally unrecognizable to us with perhaps only the Enterprise, Kirk, and Spock being the only things retained from the original with the rest being long-since altered or revisioned, IMO.

By then, it'll probably be transmitted on demand directly into people's brains...

[TheLobes]

Possibly. Science fiction is gaining a foothold in academics, and has become much more appreciated in literary circles. We've gone from being a culture that judges ourselves by the past, and is very backwards looking, to one that judges itself by what the future will think, and is very forwards looking. In many ways aliens have taken the place of gods and angels. Science fiction is an important artistic symptom of this change; perhaps people 200 years from now will be studying Star Trek at school!

[{ Emilia }]

If you look at how incredibly much the world/technology has changed during the last 100 (heck, 20) years I'm not really willing to hazard a guess on what things will be like in 200-300 years.

[KDoug]

It's really hard to make a guess about something like that. Our guesses about how life will be even 50 years from now are so frequently wrong. So, our guesses about what incarnations of entertainment will still be around might be even more wrong. But, I'll go ahead and guess that it won't still be around. By that time, it's likely that some other show yet to be invented will have taken its place. It may even use a form of entertainment that has yet to be invented, like the holonovels of Voyager.

[Temis the Vorta]

If Arthurian Legend has survived centuries, why wouldn't Star Trek?

Everything gets rebooted. Why do we have to have Zorro and The Lone Ranger inflicted on us? Those will probably survive centuries as well.

[Gojira]

I think it will be around in some form or another. But just imagine how many times it will have been rebooted by then!

[Maxillius]

We may actually be living it in 150 years and look back on Trek and wonder how The Great Bird came so close.

You never know...

[thumbtack]

Yes, but only TAS.

[Rageforthemachine]

Of course not everyone knows TV only has about 30 more years to go.

Seriously it depends on some factors, but I think it will. I think we tend to overestimate how different the future will be and how much we will lose touch with the past. Literature survives for centuries, some even millennium. TV and movies are a relatively new medium, but a lot of them still remain touchstones to our culture after many decades. We are close to the 100th anniversary of such thing as Birth of a Nation and Charlie Chaplin, but those are still much viewed today. I Love Lucy is still shown everyday somewhere 50 years after its birth.

The big question now is that we are producing exponentially more new information now than just a few decades ago we will have to see how this information is stored and disseminated. Will most of it go the way of the Dodo, but the real gems will be preserved? Or will we acquire so much of it that people will become overwhelmed and toss it all in favor of new stuff every generation.

Star Trek has been influential enough on so much of the culture for so long that I think it will survive especially as more time gets on and people will want to see what the 20th century thought the 22-24th centuries would look like.

[teacake]

Of course not.

[Ensign_Redshirt]

If there are TV shows which will still be remembered in 150 years, Star Trek has a reasonable chance of being among them. The question is how many people will watch it outside of intellectual/academic circles. I mean, how many "average" people are seeing Le Voyage dans la lune nowadays?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon


As for question whether Star Trek will still be "in production" in some form... uh, we don't even know what kind of media/entertainment people will have.

[Gotham Central]

I'm always amused when people suggest that because something is pop fluff it will be forgotten.

Let us remember that popular things are usually what gets remembered. We look at Shakespeare as high art today and forget that he was writing for a mass audience and was sure to make his work as scandalous as possible for the time.

Authurian legend and Greek epics were also the popular fiction of their respective historical eras.

Sherlock Holmes was popular fiction of it's day and here we are a century later and he's still remembered.

No matter what happens to comic books in our more digital future, it's almost a foregone conclusion that the likes of Superman and Batman will live on in some form in the popular imagination.