Between the last Star Trek episode and the completion of The Man from Earth, the world was woven and unwoven many times.
On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon addressed the nation and announced what became known as the Nixon Shock. He suspended the dollar's convertibility into gold, effectively ending the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates that had governed the international monetary order since 1944. Under Bretton Woods, foreign currencies were fixed in relation to the U.S. dollar, whose value was expressed in gold at $35 per ounce. By the 1960s, a surplus of U.S. dollars caused by foreign aid, military spending, and foreign investment threatened the system. The United States did not have enough gold to cover the volume of dollars in circulation.
Nixon's decision was intended as a ploy to force surplus countries like Germany and Japan to revalue their currencies. Instead, because the dollar was the lynchpin of the system, it brought the entire architecture down. By March 1973, the major currencies were floating against each other, and the modern era of international finance had begun.
The collapse of Bretton Woods prompted a fundamental rethink about what would give stability to the international monetary system. The new thinking was that stability would come less from fixed exchange rates and more from domestic policies directed toward domestic stability—orderly growth with low inflation. This was a profound shift. National governments were now free to pursue their own monetary policies, but the global system was now subject to the whims of currency markets and speculative capital flows.
Then came the oil shocks. In October 1973, during the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Egyptian and Syrian forces attacked Israel. When the United States and the Netherlands resupplied the Israeli military, Arab members of OPEC imposed an oil embargo. The price of oil doubled, then quadrupled. A second oil shock followed in 1979, triggered by the Iranian Revolution. The Shah fled, Ayatollah Khomeini took control, and Iranian oil output collapsed. In the United States, gasoline lines stretched for blocks.
By the late 1970s, inflation had become entrenched in the American psyche and economy. In August 1979, President Carter appointed Paul Volcker as Fed chairman. Volcker raised interest rates aggressively. The policy worked—inflation fell—but it came at a cost: recession, unemployment, bankruptcies, and a deep restructuring of global finance.
This was the moment the world changed shape. The era of cheap energy, stable exchange rates, and Keynesian demand management came to an end. In its place: floating currencies, deregulated markets, and a new financial architecture that would eventually produce the 2008 crisis.
Then the Soviet Union collapsed. In December 1991, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords, declaring the Soviet Union dissolved. Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day. The bipolar world that had defined Bixby's adult life—the world that gave Star Trek its Klingons and its Cold War allegories—collapsed into something new and uncertain.
In August 1998, Russia defaulted on its sovereign debt. Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund with positions so large that its collapse threatened the entire financial system, lost its equity in weeks. The Federal Reserve organized a rescue. The interbank market seized. The world held its breath.
Bixby died in April 1998. He did not live to see the crisis. But he had finished the screenplay. The witness had spoken.
