Right now, it’s just that shows like “Walking Dead.” Nothing against Walking Dead, but Walking Dead and shows like that have gotten so much viewership that everybody just piles on. Hollywood is just very imitative, and when they see success over there, they just keep shoveling more and more and more of that out to the audience because the audience is eating it up. But, eventually, you get to a saturation point, and then it’s like, “Enough already. I don’t want to watch another zombie piece.” Then somebody offers you something completely different, and the audience will flood over there.

What gives me hope is shows like “Schitt’s Creek” — a strange example to bring up right now — which I’ve just started recently getting into because I was like, “What’s all the hoopla about?”  I’ve been watching it. It’s a show that has a tremendous amount of heart to it, and it is an optimistic show. It is a show about love, in a lot of ways, and people go to it and people want that. You can down a list. There’s a lot of great shows on television that are not science fiction pieces that are about heart and are about love and are about very positive human values. There is an audience for that.

So I do believe that science fiction can tap into that audience. It might be a tough sell in Hollywood at the moment, because everybody says, “Yeah, but people want more zombies.” Again, it’ll just take one of those shows or features to take off where suddenly everybody wants in on it.

Yeah. I think it’d be very easy to look at Battlestar Galactica and say, “Oh, that’s a dystopian show. How could you be any more dystopian? Most humans are dead, and not just one world but a dozen worlds are basically destroyed.” But that, to me, is not a dystopian show because they don’t give up. They decide that they’re going to save our civilization, we’re going to go somewhere else, and we’re going to start it all over again. Do you consider that a dystopian show?

I never did. People said that to me all the time, “It’s such a dark show.” Well, dark things do happen in the show. Terrible things happen in the show. But I thought it was a very idealistic show. There are people struggling and, like you said, they never gave up. They were trapped in the night, and they were always looking for the light. That was why I felt at the end they had to have a happy ending. There were people that were wondering if the show was going to blow everything up at the end and everyone was going to die some horrible death. I was like, “No, that’s not what this show is about.”

There’s one question I know I have to ask, because it’s come up when I’ve had this conversation with people. The tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who’s a science fiction fan, has said, “I’m a capitalist. ‘Star Wars’ is the capitalist show. ‘Star Trek’ is the communist one. There’s no money in ‘Star Trek,’ because you have the transporter machine that can make anything you need. The whole plot of ‘Star Wars’ starts with Han Solo having his debt that he owed, so the plot of ‘Star Wars’ is driven by money.” Do you agree with this characterization — that ‘Star Trek’ is the communist show?

Moore: He’s… not wrong. But I can tell you that those of us who worked at “Star Trek” completely dismissed that aspect of the show. Even those of us in the writer’s room would go, “What does this mean, there’s no money? How does this work? How does any of this function without money?”

In the original series, Kirk would say things like, “Scotty, I’m docking your pay for the next month,” and they had credits and they had bar tabs. There was some currency. There was some way that people were compensated for things, and “mining rights” meant something. It was only in the later incarnations when Gene, who I only worked with briefly when I came aboard. Gene had kind of bought into his own press release that he was a visionary, and he just decided that in the 24th century, there was no money and people “work to better ourselves,” I think Picard says at one point.

All of us on the show just went, “I don’t know what that means, so let’s just ignore it as best we can.” In fact, we even made fun of it once. In “Deep Space Nine,” there was an episode called “In the Cards.” There’s a conversation between Jake and Nog. Jake says, “You need to get some latinum because we humans don’t have any money.” Nog’s like, “Yeah, how does that work?” “We work to better ourselves,” says Jake. And Nog says, “Yeah, what does that mean exactly?” Jake pauses and he just looks at him, he says, “It means we don’t have money.” It’s the only explanation.

Apparently, I think NBC is going to try to… not remake “Battlestar Galactica,” but create a new story within the mythology. I don’t know if that means a reimagining, or whatever. But you really couldn’t remake the show in anything that looked like the version you did. There’s so much 9/11, early 2000s, and Iraq War really infused in the DNA of that show. It would have to be a lot different today, right?

Yeah, and I’ve heard that, too, and they reached out to me and gave me a heads-up ahead of time. They said, “Yeah, we’re not rebooting it or reimagining it. It’s going to be some story that takes place within the mythology of what you established.” Okay, whatever that means, it’s fine.

But our show was intentionally supposed to be a show of that moment. It did speak to things that were happening in the world then: 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, liberty versus security. There were a lot of very current things that we were dealing with in the show. So I think if you’re going to do any version of “Battlestar Galactica” now, it should speak to now. It should not try to go back. You’d have to have a different kind of show.

Just to say, I don’t have a problem with them doing it. I didn’t create the show. Glen Larson created the original Battlestar, and then I came in and gave my spin on it. So I’m not going to be the guy that says, “You can’t touch mine even though I touched his.” So whatever they want to do, they’re perfectly welcome to give it a try.

I think you and I are about the same age, and I’m very familiar with the original Battlestar, which came on the air when there was an absolute desert of that kind of content on television. There wasn’t much. You basically had to watch old “Star Trek” episodes from the ’60s. There just wasn’t a lot. So something like the original Battlestar Galactica, with its movie production values, was pretty amazing.

Oh, it was huge. “Space: 1999” was the only other thing that was on there in syndication. But I remember when I used to always look forward to the TV Guide season preview edition that would come out every year. And “Battlestar Galactica” was on the cover, and that’s how I learned about it. It was very exciting. You’re coming right off “Star Wars,” and it seemed to presage a renaissance of science fiction’s return to television in a big way. It had state-of-the-art visual effects and the whole thing.

It was a bit of a shock when it turned out to just be “Battlestar Galactica.” There were good things in the show, but it was not what you were hoping or what I was hoping it was going to be with respect to a science-fiction renaissance.

That said, if you would’ve looked at all my notebooks from school at that age, you would’ve seen nothing but me drawing Vipers over all of them. Different 3D versions of Vipers. Obviously, they held up.

Oh, yeah. The designs were great. The Galactica itself was a great design. The Vipers were a great design. There was a lot of good design work in it. The Cylon Raiders didn’t photograph very well — they were just kind of weird saucers with little ridges on them that just didn’t look good on camera. But there was a lot of good stuff in that show.

We’ve talked about the lack of optimist films, but there are some. “The Martian” is an optimistic film, and so is “Gravity,” even. And I would consider “Interstellar” a fundamentally optimistic film. So it can be done, right? It can be done. Hopefully, “For All Mankind” will be part of that. Is that something you would want to do more of, whatever your next projects might be like?