Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
The Legacy of Star Trek, 60 Years Later
No, I'm from Iowa. I only work in outer space. -- Capt Kirk.
Sixty years. That is a disturbing number.
Not because Star Trek is sixty years old, but because I remember watching the damn thing on television.
There are certain milestones in life that should never be calculated too carefully.
Star Trek premiered in 1966 as a television program about a group of people flying around the galaxy in a spaceship with blinking lights, sliding doors, talking computers, handheld communicators and a pointy-eared fellow who believed human beings were far too emotional.
At the time, much of America apparently looked at it and said:This is ridiculous.
Then America went out and spent the next sixty years building half of it.
The Television Show That Accidentally Became a Blueprint
The original Star Trek lasted only three seasons.
Its ratings weren’t particularly spectacular.
The networks weren’t even quite sure what it was.
Was it children’s television? Was it science fiction? Was it social commentary? Was it a western in outer space?
The answer, of course, was yes.
Then something strange happened. The show was cancelled. And refused to die.
Syndication introduced Star Trek to millions of people who hadn’t watched it during its original run. College students discovered it. Engineers discovered it. Scientists discovered it. Kids sitting too close to television sets discovered it.
And some of those kids grew up.
That turned out to be rather important.
Because Star Trek wasn’t simply predicting the future. It was recruiting people to build it.
The Communicator in Your Pocket
Captain Kirk carried a little device that flipped open and allowed him to talk to somebody miles away.
Absurd. Then Motorola built cellular phones.
Today almost everyone on Earth carries something dramatically more powerful than Captain Kirk’s communicator.
We call it a smartphone.
Star Trek had computers you could talk to.
Today we talk to Siri, Alexa, ChatGPT and dozens of other artificial-intelligence systems.
Star Trek had flat computer tablets called PADDs. We have iPads. Steve Jobs was watching.
Star Trek had computers storing enormous quantities of information without rooms full of spinning tape reels. We have solid-state storage devices smaller than a thumbnail holding more information than entire computer centers once contained.
Star Trek had video conferencing. We have FaceTime, Zoom and Teams.
Star Trek had doors that opened automatically when someone approached.
Supermarkets eventually figured that one out too.
The medical officers waved handheld scanners over patients and immediately learned what was wrong with them. We aren’t quite at Dr. McCoy’s tricorder yet, but portable ultrasound, wearable health monitors, medical imaging, biosensors and handheld diagnostic equipment are moving steadily in that direction.
And then there was the computer itself.
“Computer?” A question was asked.
The computer answered. For most of my life that was science fiction.
Now I do it every day.
And occasionally the computer even gives the right answer.
Progress.
But the Technology Wasn’t the Most Important Part
That is the part people sometimes miss.
Star Trek’s greatest prediction wasn’t the communicator.
It wasn’t artificial intelligence. It wasn’t space travel. It was us.
Gene Roddenberry imagined a future in which humanity had somehow managed not to destroy itself.
Think about how radical that idea was in 1966.
The United States and Soviet Union were pointing nuclear weapons at one another.
The civil-rights movement was transforming America.
Vietnam was escalating.
Racial segregation had only recently been legally dismantled.
And Star Trek calmly presented a bridge crew that included Americans, Russians, Asians, Black people, aliens and one particularly argumentative Scotsman.
Nobody aboard the Enterprise seemed terribly concerned about it.
They had more important things to worry about. Like Klingons.
Or exploding warp cores.
Or why Captain Kirk’s shirt kept getting ripped.
Lieutenant Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols, sat on the bridge as a professional officer.
George Takei’s Sulu piloted the ship.
Walter Koenig’s Chekov was Russian—in the middle of the Cold War.
Spock was literally the product of two different species.
And the point wasn’t: Look how diverse we are.
The point was: Of course we’re different. Now let’s get to work.
That distinction matters.
Even the Green People Count
Star Trek’s moral universe was surprisingly straightforward.
Humanity had finally figured out that intelligence, dignity and morality weren’t determined by skin color, nationality, religion or whether your ears happened to end in points.
Even green aliens deserved consideration.
Sometimes especially the green aliens.
Again and again, Star Trek came back to the same idea:
The unknown shouldn’t automatically be feared.
It should be explored. The different shouldn’t automatically be destroyed.
It should be understood. And technology shouldn’t merely make us more powerful.
It should make civilization better.
That’s a much harder prediction to fulfill.
We’re still working on that one.
Star Trek Created Engineers
There is another legacy that is harder to measure.
Star Trek created a generation of believers.
I was one of them. I watched the original series. I watched the movies.
I watched The Next Generation. I’ve probably watched damn near every episode of the Star Trek I consider Star Trek 10 times.
I don’t particularly care for most of the newer versions.
They seem too commercialized, too polished and occasionally too interested in reminding everyone that they’re producing television.
But perhaps that is simply what happens when you get older.
Someone twenty years from now will probably complain that the Star Trek of 2046 isn’t nearly as authentic as whatever we’re producing today.
Every generation eventually becomes the old man yelling at the replicator.
But those original shows made something seem possible.
Science was good. Engineering was exciting.
Computers weren’t mysterious machines hidden inside corporations and government laboratories.
They were tools. Space wasn’t something to fear.
It was somewhere to go. The future wasn’t automatically a wasteland.
It could actually be better than the present.
That idea influenced thousands—probably millions—of engineers, programmers, physicists, doctors, entrepreneurs and scientists.
Some of us went into technology. Some built computers. Some built networks.
Some built spacecraft. Some helped create the internet.
Some are now building artificial intelligence.
You can draw a surprisingly straight line from a kid staring at the Enterprise on a television screen to the technological world surrounding us today.
Not because Star Trek gave us engineering diagrams.
It gave us permission to imagine.
You Live in an Amazing World
People complain constantly about the modern world.
Sometimes with good reason. Wars. Politics. Social media. Economic problems. Environmental problems.
Artificial intelligence apparently coming to steal everyone’s job before lunch Tuesday.
There is plenty to complain about.
But occasionally we should look around. You are carrying a supercomputer in your pocket.
You can video-call someone almost anywhere on Earth.
You can access more accumulated human knowledge in seconds than kings and presidents could obtain in months only a few generations ago.
You can ask an artificial intelligence a question in ordinary English and receive an answer almost immediately.
A doctor can look inside your body without cutting you open.
A satellite can tell you exactly where you are standing.
Robots manufacture automobiles.
Reusable rockets land themselves.
Humans have lived continuously in orbit for decades.
And machines built by people on Earth are currently exploring other planets.
No matter how many stupid people insist everything is terrible:
You live in an amazing world.
And a surprising amount of that world looks suspiciously like something Gene Roddenberry put on NBC sixty years ago.
A Show Nobody Knew What to Do With
Perhaps that’s the funniest part of the entire story.
The network didn’t quite understand Star Trek. The ratings weren’t spectacular.
It was cancelled after three seasons.
And sixty years later there have been hundreds upon hundreds of hours of television, fourteen feature films, conventions, cruises, books, games, scientific references and generations of fans.
William Shatner is now 95.
That sentence alone should make anyone who remembers Captain Kirk’s original five-year mission reconsider how quickly time moves.
He once joked: “No, I’m from Iowa. I only work in outer space.”
Which might actually be the perfect description of Star Trek itself.
It was never really about outer space.
It was about Earth. It was about us.
The Future Roddenberry Imagined
Gene Roddenberry’s greatest idea wasn’t warp drive.
It was that humanity might grow up.
He imagined that eventually we could get past some of the tribal nonsense that consumes so much of human history.
Not because everyone would become identical. Quite the opposite.
Humans would remain humans. Vulcans would remain Vulcans.
Klingons would certainly remain Klingons. But civilization would become large enough to accommodate differences.
That’s why Star Trek has survived.
The Enterprise isn’t merely traveling through space.
It’s traveling toward the civilization we hope we might someday deserve.
Star Trek constantly asked: What happens if humanity survives?
What happens if science wins?
What happens if curiosity beats fear?
What happens if our children become smarter than we were?
What happens if technology eliminates scarcity?
What happens if we finally stop arguing about the color of somebody’s skin and start worrying about whether the Romulans have crossed the Neutral Zone?
Frankly, it sounds like progress.
Sixty Years Later
Star Trek began as a television show that many people thought was somewhere between childish fantasy and a bad programming decision.
Six decades later, we’re living inside pieces of its imagination.
We have the communicators.
We’re building the artificial intelligence.
We’re developing the medical scanners.
We’re building reusable spaceships.
We’re talking seriously about permanent settlements beyond Earth.
And perhaps most importantly, generations grew up believing science and technology could make tomorrow better than today.
I was one of them. There are millions of us.
Some became scientists, engineers, programmers, doctors, and some entrepreneurs.
Some simply became curious people who weren’t frightened by tomorrow.
That may ultimately be Star Trek’s greatest legacy.
It didn’t predict the future perfectly.
It did something much more powerful.
It convinced us that the future was worth building.
Sixty years later, we’re still working on it.
And somewhere, I suspect, Gene Roddenberry would look around at smartphones, artificial intelligence, reusable rockets and a permanently inhabited space station and say:
Not bad.
So stop being negative about the future, make it better. Yes you can… Make it so!
