It's no secret that many of us here at Palantir are fans of the science fiction genre, in particular the "Star Trek" franchise.  Not only are we obsessed with Trek trivia and memorabilia, but every year for Halloween it's a tradition that at least one of us shows up at the office dressed up in Starfleet uniform.  Given that, you can well imagine that we were all very excited when representatives of Paramount Films recently approached us about working on the sequel to last year's hit "Star Trek" movie.

So why would the producers of the most successful science fiction franchise in history turn to an open source Web development firm? As those of you who saw last year's "Star Trek" film might remember, it featured a number of products (like Nokia phones) that the filmmakers felt would still exist more than 200 years in the future. This time around, they wanted to make sure that all of the computer interfaces used in the new film were as accurate and realistic as possible, and understanding that the future is in networked software, looked to the software platforms that are running some of today's most sophisticated Web sites and Web-enabled applications. They identified the Drupal platform as one of the few of today's software applications that not only will still be around in a couple hundred years' time, but will have evolved to the point that it will be integrated into almost every facet of future technology, including the software used to control the operations of starships like the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Because Palantir specializes in Drupal-based solutions and we're enormous Trek geeks, this assignment is a perfect fit for us. Using a sophisticated psychohistorical algorithm developed by our engineering team, Palantir will extrapolate the evolution of the Drupal platform over dozens of future versions to determine what it might look like in the mid-23rd century. This information will be then used by our in-house user experience designers as they develop interface concepts that will be used for the various computer terminals and displays throughout the Enterprise as seen in the new movie.

Needless to say, this is a very exciting project for us, and we believe that it will be tremendously helpful in planning the development of future versions of Drupal. We will be releasing all of our work back to the community, including a set of themes that represent how we think Drupal will look and work starting with version 47. Based on the preliminary work we've done so far, the good news is that it looks like Drupal's user experience will continue to improve, even beyond the vast strides made in version 7, and tremendous progress will be made toward a consistent and completely pluggable system architecture. On the downside, it looks like even in the distant future, Poll module will still be part of core, and it will still pretty much suck.

As far as the plot of the movie itself, we're unfortunately not at liberty to release any details, and we can neither confirm or deny any rumors that William Shatner will appear as an older version of Captain Kirk. What we can say, however, is that the sequel will continue in the alternate continuity established in last year's movie, meaning that any fans who think that the movies will go back to the timeline from the original TV series and feature characters like original Enterprise captain Robert T. April are surely fools.