At the beginning of Star Trek Beyond, Kirk is negotiating a peace treaty between two stubborn and war-like alien races. It doesn’t go well. But while space peace would seem to be highly consequential, the whole encounter gives Kirk a serious case of the blahs.
They’re in Year three of the five-year mission and everything has begun to blur together. New lifeform after new lifeform. New planet after new planet. From a human perspective the galaxy is very nearly endless, which can be depressing for a starship captain. There will always be more aliens to meet, more space anomalies to document and more battles to fight. Surplus breeds disinterest, as each new, miraculous discovery becomes just another memory to throw on the pile. According to Kirk’s Captain’s Log, events aboard the Enterprise “have started to feel a little episodic.”
Sometimes No Man’s Sky feels like that. The novelty of naming new creatures wears off almost immediately. I’ll visit a new system and move on without even skimming the surface of each world, secure in knowing that the next warp boost will bring fresh horizons from an endless inventory. In all our excitement at the prospect of exploring 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets, we never realized that such a surplus supply would inevitably reduce their value.
Sometimes leaving an abandoned facility, a space station or a planet unexplored feels more satisfying than checking it out, like waving at a famous landmark as you zip by, too blithe to stop and gawk with the rest of the tourists. We are lost in a blur of travel, hopping from system to system until we can’t remember the last, each space station just another forgettable roadside motel. Our identity dissipates over all those vast gulfs of space, spreading thinner and thinner, as if it were our souls smearing behind rather than pulse exhaust.
In Star Trek Beyond, Kirk eventually found new meaning in his confrontation with Krall. Each of us will have to do the same with No Man’s Sky: find our own reasons. Maybe we’ll become galactic big game hunters. Or serial killers, stalking traders on forlorn, asteroid-strewn routes. Or we could take after the Ferengi, obsessing over each percentage change in the markets. Or maybe we’ll give up spacefaring altogether and settle down on some little planet somewhere. Perhaps even Earth.
