Contributor: We need more of the hopeful sci-fi that 'Star Trek' gave us 60 years ago
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Set us as preferred A few years ago, I received a call I’ll never forget.Jeanette Epps, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, Zoomed into my living room from 250 miles above Earth.
During our conversation, she told me that one of the reasons she chose her career was a television show my father created in 1966.She wasn’t alone.I’ve heard versions of that same story from countless people over the years.
Engineers.Scientists.
Astronauts.People who saw possibility on a television screen before they ever saw it in the real world.They credit “Star Trek” for showing them a future they wanted to help build.
That’s an extraordinary thing for a television series to accomplish.It didn’t just entertain millions of people.
It gave many of them a direction.And I don’t think that was because of the ships, the gadgets or the aliens.It was because, underneath all of it, was a profoundly human belief that we are capable of becoming something better.There was a time when science fiction made a bet on humanity.
A bet that humanity was worth rooting for.We need storytellers willing to make that bet again.I don’t think we have an innovation problem.
We have an inspiration problem.We talk a lot about what we’re leaving the next generation.The debt.
The climate.The geopolitical mess.
But there’s another inheritance we don’t talk about enough: what we show them is possible.Today, many visions of the future are dominated by collapse, dystopia and fear.Those stories can have value.
But conflict doesn’t always have to come from destruction.It can come from discovery.
Two minds encountering an idea neither had considered.A crew facing the unknown with curiosity instead of fear.
That kind of conflict doesn’t leave you feeling like the world is ending.It leaves you feeling like it’s just beginning.Most storytelling holds a mirror up to who we are.
Our flaws, our failures, our contradict...