Xprize founder Peter Diamandis is launching a new competition to showcase the new Star Trek

As any “Star Trek” fan will tell you, the reason why this sci fi world has endured for so long is because it shows a hopeful future, with tech starring as the organizing force.

In fact, legendary XPrize founder, author, tech investor, motivational speaker and lifelong scholar Peter Diamandis recently launched a new $3.5 million Future Vision Xprize to encourage more sci-fi worlds hoping to come to our screens.

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

“‘Star Trek’ offered an optimistic view of the future, didn’t it? It was people/humanity and technology together,” Diamandis told TechCrunch. “I am grateful for everything I have achieved, because it inspired me to want to create and manifest that future.”

You find that sci-fi movies and TV shows these days are too focused on disaster.

“Every science fiction movie I saw painted this dystopian vision of the future. It was sitting, everything is fine, and it’s the result of technology. You know, killer robots, dystopian AIs. ‘Black Mirror’. ‘The Terminator’. ‘Ex Machina,'” he said. “Why do you ever want to live in that future?”

So he called his friends Rod Roddenberry, son of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, billionaire Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, legendary investor and Ark CEO Cathie Wood, and his friends at Google. All agreed to support the new XPrize Future Vision.

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

“Right now, there is a lot of uncertainty that is increasing in people’s lives. Will my children get a job? Will I get a job?” he said. The pace of change makes it difficult for people to envision their future, especially when they are inundated with “bad news about the future.”

Another reality exists, too, Diamandis said. As someone who has stood in the corner of AI and longevity you know that it has never been easy for anyone with an idea to follow through.

“The most powerful tools in the world are free and available to everyone,” he said, referring to consumer AI models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and others. “I mean, that’s really amazing, isn’t it? … We’ve made democracy and we’ve made people’s ability to solve problems.”

Take the long term, for example, the study of longevity and good health as we age.

“AI is enabling us to understand what’s going on in our 40 trillion cells,” he said. (Diamandis, along with Tony Robbins, is the founder of longevity health tech Fountain Life.) He wants to see more of this kind of future on screen.

Interestingly, while encouraging the contestants to use AI tools in their projects, Diamandis warns that an AI slop – a completely AI-written and produced submission – is unlikely to win.

“I don’t want an AI-produced script and an AI-produced film without a human,” he advises. “Your personality is very important.”

In fact, the Future Vision XPrize is made possible with the help of the 100 ZEROS initiative. That’s a partnership between Google and production company Range Media Partners. Works with filmmakers to produce stories inspired by technology using Google tools. (Google has a video production model called Veo, for example, and a video creation tool called Flow.)

Submissions open March 9, close August 15, winners announced September 25. Each applicant will submit a three-minute trailer. Diamandis expects to “overflow” YouTube with these posts, allowing anyone to view and comment. The judges, led by the Range Media team, will whittle those proposals down to a handful who receive funding to produce a 10-minute shot.

The grand prize winner will be selected from short films, receive a $2.5 million production grant to develop a feature film and a $100,000 cash prize. The winning project is expected to be submitted to crowdsourcing site Republic Film, helping it raise an additional $5 million to $10 million for its production budget.

Diamandis says members of his Abundance of CEO community he mentors have also opened their wallets. About 15 of them contributed about half of the prize money, he said.

In addition, other key backers include Andreessen Horowitz’s Ben Horowitz, Ripple founder Jed McCaleb and actor-producer Seth Green.

Diamandis hopes this will be a repeat tournament. He wants to transform fear into what he calls “an explanatory mind.” That means “having agency, when you feel like the future isn’t happening to you, that the future is happening to you,” he said.