Xprize founder Peter Diamandis has launched a new competition to showcase the new Star Trek

As any Star Trek fan will tell you, the reason this sci-fi universe has lasted so long is that it shows an optimistic future, where technology plays a starring role as a force for good.

In fact, renowned XPrize founder, author, technology investor, motivational speaker and longevity expert Peter Diamandis has just launched a new $3.5 million Future Vision Xprize to encourage more optimistic sci-fi worlds to come to our screens.

He credits his entire brilliant career to watching “Star Trek” as a child growing up.

“Star Trek presented a hopeful vision of the future, didn’t it? It was a collaboration between humans, humanity and technology,” Diamandis told TechCrunch. “I really give him credit for everything I’ve achieved since then, because he motivated me to want to move forward and create and manifest that future.”

He finds that science fiction movies and TV shows these days focus largely on disaster.

“Every sci-fi movie I watched painted this dystopian vision of the future,” he said. “It was always, everything goes wrong, and that’s a result of technology. You know, killer robots, dystopian AI. It’s Black Mirror. It’s Terminator. It’s X-Machina.” “Why do you want to live in this future?”

So he called up his friends Rod Roddenberry, son of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, billionaire Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, famed investor and Ark CEO Cathie Wood, and his Google buddies. They all agreed to sponsor the new XPrize Future Vision.

It’s a competition to encourage filmmakers to tell more stories about how good things will be in the technological future. Diamandis believes that if we see it, we will build it.

“Right now, there’s a lot of increased uncertainty in people’s lives. Will my kids get a job? Will I get a job?” He said. The speed of change makes it difficult for people to envision their future, especially when they are burdened by “negative stories about tomorrow.”

Diamandis says there is another truth as well. As someone who has stood on the corner of artificial intelligence and longevity, he knows that it’s never been easier for someone with an idea to pursue it.

“The most powerful tools on the planet are free and available to everyone,” he said, referring to consumer AI models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and others. “I mean, that’s honestly unbelievable, right?… We’ve democratized people’s ability to solve problems.”

Take longevity, for example, the study of living longer and healthier as we age.

“AI enables us to understand what is happening in our 40 trillion human cells,” he said. (Diamandis, along with Tony Robbins, is a co-founder of the longevity health technology company Fountain Life.) He wants to see more of that kind of future on screen.

Interestingly, while he encourages contestants to use AI tools in their projects, Diamandis warns that AI — that is, submissions written and produced entirely by AI — probably won’t win.

“I don’t want an AI-generated script and an AI-generated movie without a human,” he advises. “The humanity in it all is really important.”

In fact, the Future Vision XPrize is being conducted with the help of the 100 ZEROS Initiative. This is a partnership between Google and production company Range Media Partners. She works with filmmakers to produce technology-inspired stories using Google tools. (Google has a video creation model called Veo, for example, and a video creation tool called Flow.)

Applications will open on March 9, close on August 15, and winners will be announced on September 25. Each applicant will submit a three-minute trailer. Diamandis expects to “flood” YouTube with these posts, allowing anyone to watch and comment. Judges, led by the Range Media team, will divide those entries into a small group that will receive funding to produce a 10-minute short film.

The grand prize winner will be selected from among the short films, and will receive US$2.5 million in production funding to develop a feature film and a cash prize of US$100,000. The winning project is also expected to be featured on crowdsourcing site Republic Film, to help it raise an additional $5 million to $10 million for its production budget.

Diamandis says members of his community of Abundance CEOs who he mentors have opened their wallets, too. He said that about 15 of them contributed nearly half of the prize money.

Additionally, other major donors include Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz, Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb, and actor-producer Seth Green.

Diamandis hopes this will become a recurring contest. He wants to turn dread into what he calls an “exponential mindset.” This means “having agency, where you feel that the future is not happening to you, but the future is happening to you,” he said.