The Roddenberry foundation set up in honour of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry is launching a month-long campaign on Star Trek Day to inspire hope for the next 100 years.
In partnership with Paramount+ satellite company Planet and Academy Award-winning technology company OTOY, the campaign, dubbed “Boldly Go”, is part of the celebration of the legacy of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry in what would have been his centennial year.
Boldly Go
The campaign will launch at Paramount+’s red carpet event on 8 September, featuring Star Trek actors Patrick Stewart, LeVar Burton, George Takei and others. Gene’s son Rod Roddenberry, founder of the Roddenberry Foundation and president of Roddenberry Entertainment, will appear on a panel about Star Trek’s legacy. The celebration will be live-streamed for free at StarTrek.com/Day starting at 8:30 PM ET.
The “Boldly Go” campaign will appeal to Star Trek fans and people around the world to submit photos and videos describing their hopes for the next 100 years. The goal is to pay homage to Star Trek’s message that we can work together to build a better future. The Foundation will work with OTOY and well-known digital artists to combine submissions into a piece of artwork that will be made available to the public and auctioned to generate funds for non-profits, ensuring the public’s Star Trek-inspired hopes for the future have a real-world impact.
The Foundation is also partnering with satellite company Planet to engrave the campaign’s artwork onto a network of their satellites, to be launched into space in 2022and thus memorialising our collective hope for humanity’s future in a first-of-its-kind space-based art installation.
Rod Roddenberry said: “The campaign is about inspiring hope and creating an opportunity for people to participate in building a better future. We want to acknowledge and in a way, thank the fans for their role in keeping Star Trek and my dad’s legacy relevant. And we want to remind ourselves that we can make a difference, that together we can ensure that the values that fuel Star Trek, diversity, inclusion, and progress, are worthy and achievable. My dad would have loved the idea of combining philanthropy and fan participation into real-world impact. We’ll have more updates on our impact as the campaign progresses.”
“My dad was a naturally optimistic person. He loved humanity deeply. Star Trek was his medium for showing the world what he believed humanity could become. Star Trek is unique in this way, not much other SciFi is rooted in optimism. We live in a world with real challenges, and Star Trek envisioned how we can overcome some of them. It just wasn’t in my dad’s nature to channel dystopia.”
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