In 1995 Star Trek Predicted the San Francisco Homeless Crisis With Uncanny Accuracy
SFGate – Someone on Reddit posted a screen grab from an old episode of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” depicting a San Francisco street in 2024, and people can’t believe it wasn’t photographed in a South of Market alley yesterday.
The image from the prescient 1995 two-part “Deep Space Nine” episode “Past Tense” shows a homeless encampment pouring into a street. Tents and large cardboard boxes share space on the asphalt with oil drum fires as a couple dozen street people mill about.
In “Past Tense,” Commander Sisko, Dr. Bashir, and Jadzia Dax beam down from the Defiant to Earth, but due to an accident, materialize in San Francisco in the year 2024. Two of them are marched to a “Sanctuary District,” a walled-off ghetto that the city has built to contain the poor, sick and mentally disabled. Subsequent events create a butterfly effect in the timeline that the Defiant crew must counter in order to return to the ship.
The similarity of a fictional dystopian San Francisco in 2024 to the real San Francisco of today was not missed by the Reddit crowd, which was inspired to post more than 175 comments.
“They were not really too far off the mark,” wrote one commenter.
“Yeah, don’t remove any of it, but just shove the tents and s— to the sidewalk, and you’ve got a picture of SoMa here,” another replied.
I’m a huge Star Trek guy but I missed this because DS9 is a blind spot for me. I just didn’t watch it. It seemed like an odd choice for a franchise that is supposed to be about exploring the deepest reaches of the unchartered galaxy to be set in a space station. It just sounded like an adventure set in a Greyhound terminal so I gave it a pass. And even though this “Past Tense” just sounds like a rehash of “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the best episode ever from Star Trek: The Original Series when Kirk, Spock and McCoy travel back to the Great Depression and change history so they have to set it right, you still have to give credit where credit is due. The DS9 producers got the future right. This is San Francisco right now:
It’s eerily the same, minus a couple of barrel fires. Tragically so. It’s stuff like this that is what makes great science fiction. Being able to predict a future with uncanny preciseness. The way Jules Verne came up with the first idea for a submarine and one of the first motion pictures ever was about a rocketship going to the moon. Unfortunately Star Trek, a show that Gene Roddenberry created during the height of the Cold War and civil unrest, mostly predicted a future of peace and racial harmony. But the only things the franchise has really nailed with dead balls accuracy is that we all carry around communicators, and we haven’t figured out jack shit about how to keep “the poor, sick and mentally disabled” from living in squalor on city streets.
If anything, it’s worse than they predicted in 1995. In the same way Detroit is even more of an abandoned hellscape than the original Robocop portrayed it. Or the way our culture is dumber than Mike Judge predicted it would be in Idiocracy. It’s enough to make you wish there was more actual fiction in your science fiction, because all too often the facts turn out to be pretty grim.