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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Subtle reminder that our own culture still repeats the lie that Edison “invented the lightbulb” and teaches children about how Eli Whitney inventing the cotton gin revolutionized the American textile industry without mentioning how it also created a massive boom in demand for enslaved labor. And we all tend to ignore the fact that Einstein was a serial adulterer and a monster to his first wife, or that James Watson was a racist ass. Steve Jobs was by all accounts a terrible person and died because of his belief in quackery, but his contribution to tech history will outlast those footnotes. Henry Ford was one of the worst humans on the planet, but he changed the course of the manufacturing industry forever, and he gets credit for that in spite of him being a huge piece of shit.

    The overall effects of Elon Musk’s contributions to the culture have yet to be fully litigated, but his influence on the direction of private space travel is undeniable, and is probably the one thing about him that will outlive him, especially with regard to a space-oriented future society like the Federation. To them, his idiotic and toxic antics on Twitter/X/whatever-dumb-shit-he-renames-it-to-next are probably a long-forgotten historical footnote.

    Sure, we expect the enlightened future of Star Trek to be better with its historical revisionism, but the personalities of famous innovators or self-proclaimed luminaries often fade into obscurity while the lasting consequences of their influence remains. People on Star Trek are meant to be an idealized version of what we strive for, but they are far from perfect, and the veil of history often obscures the ugly truth of how society-shifting change often comes about.

    First Contact touches on this very topic by portraying the legendary Zephram Cochrane as a philandering drunk who lets his colleague Lily Sloane do much of the hard work while he gets all the credit.

    History is messy and posterity doesn’t always get it right.