Star Trek as a franchise has spanned nearly six decades, so one would assume that attitudes about society and representation would have changed over time. Certainly, female costumes have acquired far more fabric as the years have marched onward, and ideologically, we’ve seen a great number of changes. However, I want to use today’s column to discuss one in particular as it strikes me as an interesting alteration, and that is the differences in how Trek has defined what it is to be human. We essentially see the franchise tackle the same premise—downloading one’s psyche into an android body—repeatedly. Star Trek: The Original Series addresses the idea in the episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” in which we meet Christine Chapel’s former fiancé, Roger Korby. Star Trek: The Next Generation touches on it in the episode “Inheritance” with Juliana Soong, and Star Trek: Picard makes it a major plot point in the series.

What I find most interesting about this process is that each of these episodes or series represents different points on a continuum. In “What Are Little Girls Made Of?,” Kirk ends the episode by informing his interlocutor and the viewer that Roger Korby was never present during the events of the episode. He does so because Korby had downloaded his consciousness into a new android body that he’d constructed using ancient technology from the Old Ones who had inhabited Exo III long before Korby suffered his fatal injuries there.

In “Inheritance,” Data discovers that Juliana Soong is an android replica of Noonien Soong’s wife, complete with her memories and opinions. Only, unlike Korby, she is blissfully unaware of this fact. When she collapses after jumping down to a transport site on Atrea, Data not only discovers her android nature but also a message in the form of a holographic representation of his father begging him not to reveal to her that she’s an android. In fact, she’s been programmed to shut down in the event that she becomes aware of her status as an android because Noonien Soong, who built her after his wife’s death, doesn’t want anything to take her humanity from her. In the Picard series, when Picard dies, Altan Soong transfers everything that makes Picard Picard into yet again an android body, and everyone simply accepts that Picard has remained himself.

If we look at the episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” as the initial understanding of humanity—humans must be flesh and blood in order to be human—and Picard as the end point, we’re seeing almost a shift toward a similar sort of transhumanism that we see in intellectual property like Altered Carbon. It’s an expanded idea of what makes us unique, with a focus on intangibles over the tangible, and I wonder if some of the easy acceptance there has been facilitated by a technological shift from using solid, tangible media to digital media. If we say goodbye to VHS tapes and DVDs, and embrace cloud storage for all of our needs, it’s far easier to accept a similar concept with respect to ourselves. Why can’t we then conceive of storing our very selves in the cloud? None of this is new ground, as there are multiple examples of properties that explore this concept from Ghost in the Shell to Transmetropolitan with more or less approbation, depending on the writer and the genre.

What makes Picard stand out more than its peers is that the show never expects us as viewers to worry about whether Picard is still himself. The show accepts that he is, so we are expected to do so. That’s a huge leap from “What Are Little Girls Made Of?,” and definitely a step beyond the idea in “Inheritance” that Juliana loses her humanity as soon as she is faced with a body full of circuitry.

The jump is an interesting one that possibly reflects the trend in which Trek wants us to go. I’m certainly not making the argument that Trek is a transhumanist franchise as even Picard is careful to reinforce that Picard’s experience will be rare. However, as technology changes our society and our views, that gets reflected in Trek, which has also been known to influence the development of technology. I don’t know that we’ll see Star Trek: Prodigy or Star Trek: Strange New Worlds pick up this same plot trope in the near future, but I have to admit, I’m looking forward to seeing what the franchise does with it next.