Star Trek Is Still an Audacious Idea

Star Trek has an almost unreasonable amount of faith in us.

And by us, I mean human beings. The same species that developed the ability to communicate instantly with people almost anywhere on the planet and then discovered an astonishing number of ways to misunderstand each other while doing it.

Star Trek looked at all of this potential and apparently thought, Yes. These people seem capable of building an enlightened interstellar society.

Bold choice.

I've been thinking about that as Star Trek turns sixty, because familiarity has made the whole thing seem considerably less audacious than it actually is. We know the ships. We know the uniforms. We know the transporter sound. We know that an admiral arriving unexpectedly should concern everyone and that any sentence beginning with "We've detected an unusual energy reading" is probably going to ruin somebody's afternoon.

We've spent sixty years getting comfortable in this future, which makes it easy to focus on the parts we'd really like to have. Warp drive would be nice. Transporters would certainly make travel easier, although I have watched enough Star Trek to have some questions about quality control. And I remain completely supportive of whatever miraculous engineering advancement will finally allow me to tell my wall that I would like coffee and have coffee appear.

But the more I think about it, the less interesting the technology becomes, because if you take all of that away, something much stranger is sitting underneath it.

Star Trek imagines that humanity gets better at being human.

That is some science fiction.

Not perfect, because Star Trek has never asked us to believe that. Future humans make terrible decisions with reassuring regularity. Captains get things wrong. Admirals arrive with plans that should make everyone immediately hide the prefix codes. Scientists conduct experiments that clearly needed one additional person in the room saying, "Perhaps we should not." Occasionally two Starfleet officers travel very fast, become salamanders, have babies, and everyone goes back to work.

We are apparently still going to be us, and I think that's what makes the rest of Star Trek's idea so interesting.

Humanity doesn't reach the stars because everyone finally becomes the same. We don't leave behind every disagreement, identity, culture, flaw, or complicated thing that makes people people. Instead, Star Trek keeps imagining that all of those differences can occupy the same future.

And it was doing that from the beginning.

In 1966, Uhura sat on the bridge of the Enterprise. A Black woman wasn't somewhere safely outside the action while everyone else went exploring. She was part of the crew taking humanity into the future. Then in 1995, Voyager put Kathryn Janeway in the captain's chair and didn't build the premise of the show around explaining why a woman was allowed to sit there. She was the captain. She had a crew to get home.

What strikes me about those moments now isn't that Star Trek imagined a future where race or gender disappeared. It didn't. Uhura didn't have to stop being a Black woman to belong on the Enterprise, and Janeway didn't have to become less of a woman to command Voyager. Their identities weren't obstacles the future required them to overcome.

They belonged because there was room for them.

And once you start thinking about Star Trek that way, the question gets bigger. How much room can there be?

That's where Trek has kept pushing. It bumps against the cultural and societal boundaries of whatever present happens to be watching it and asks us to look a little farther ahead. Its crews have increasingly included people of different races, genders, cultures, identities, backgrounds and ways of experiencing the world. Eventually the question stretches beyond humanity entirely, because Star Trek asks us to imagine extending dignity, empathy and respect across species.

That's when this gets really interesting to me.

A Vulcan doesn't have to become more human to have value. A Klingon doesn't have to stop being Klingon to earn respect. Data shouldn't have to prove that being different makes his existence worthy of protection. Star Trek isn't imagining a future where we've solved difference by eliminating it. It's asking what happens when we finally get better at living with it.

And apparently that is much harder than building a starship.

Look at the stories Trek keeps telling. Kirk begins his encounter with the Gorn captain seeing a monster responsible for slaughtering people at a Federation outpost, only to have his certainty complicated when he's finally in a position to destroy him. Picard finds himself defending Data's right to determine his own existence when Starfleet wants to treat him as property. Janeway discovers what Federation principles actually cost when she's seventy thousand light-years from home and nobody is there to acknowledge her for keeping them.

I don't love those stories because someone eventually delivers the correct answer. I love them because Star Trek keeps finding ways to make its principles inconvenient. That's a distinction I think about a lot.

It's easy to believe in understanding when everyone agrees with you. It's easy to celebrate difference when that difference asks nothing of you. Empathy sounds wonderful right up until we're asked to extend it to someone whose experience, choices, beliefs, or way of moving through the world makes absolutely no sense to us. That's when we find out whether those principles were actually values or just things we liked saying about ourselves.

And Star Trek hasn't always passed its own test.

I think that's worth saying on its sixtieth anniversary, because loving something doesn't require pretending it has always gotten everything right. There are episodes whose conclusions don't sit as comfortably with me now as they once did. There are stories that reached for something progressive and didn't get all the way there. Sometimes Trek pushed the culture around it forward, and sometimes the culture moved and Star Trek had some catching up to do.

The more I think about that, though, the more it feels like part of the story rather than an exception to it. Star Trek has had to grow into its own future too.

The boundaries it challenged in 1966 weren't identical to the ones it challenged in 1995, and neither represents the end of the conversation. The future kept requiring more room, more experiences and more stories that asked audiences to consider someone they might not have been asked to consider before. Sometimes Star Trek led us there. Sometimes we pulled Star Trek along with us.

There's something wonderfully human about that. For a franchise built around an imagined future, Trek has always been made by people living firmly in the present. Of course they brought their blind spots with them. We can look back sixty years later and see places where they didn't go far enough, just as somebody sixty years from now may look at things we consider enlightened today and wonder what on Earth took us so long.

I really hope they do, because that would mean they kept going.

And somewhere in thinking about all of this, I've realized that I may have been looking for Star Trek's optimism in the wrong place.

I always thought the optimistic part was the destination. Humanity survives. We reach the stars. Poverty and hunger no longer drive our lives. We encounter people wildly different from ourselves and somehow build something together. It's a beautiful destination, and I'd very much like us to get there.

But maybe the more interesting thing is what Star Trek assumes about us along the way.

It assumes we're capable of changing.

Not all at once and not always gracefully. We can know more tomorrow than we know today. We can meet someone who complicates what we thought we understood. We can discover that a belief we've carried for years needs another look without treating that discovery as failure. We can ask another question because maybe we don't know as much as we thought we did.

That's when this enormous science-fiction idea suddenly becomes much more personal for me.

I'm not going to invent warp drive. I feel reasonably confident making that prediction. I'm probably not going to negotiate peace with the Klingon Empire either, and discovering a previously unknown form of sentient life would really complicate my Tuesday.

But I do get opportunities to decide what kind of future I'm helping build. They're just much smaller than the ones Starfleet gets.

I can help make a space accessible because everyone should be able to enter it. I can teach someone that the world is bigger than the part of it they can see. I can notice when somebody isn't being heard and make room for their voice. I can listen when someone tells me about a life different from my own and accept that they may understand something I don't. And when I get something wrong, which I will, I can do something differently because now I know better.

None of that is particularly cinematic. There is no captain's log recording my personal growth for posterity, which is probably for the best, and nobody is playing the Star Trek theme while I reconsider an assumption.

There may, unfortunately, be a meeting.

But sitting here thinking about it, maybe that's how you get from us to them.

Maybe a future where people are accepted, respected and allowed to belong begins long before anybody invents warp drive. Maybe it's built in millions of ordinary moments when someone decides that another person gets to have room too.

And suddenly I'm back where I started.

Star Trek has an almost unreasonable amount of faith in us.

For sixty years, it has asked us to believe in warp drive, transporters, strange new worlds, new civilizations, artificial life and species scattered across a galaxy bigger than I can properly comprehend. I've spent most of my life happily accepting all of that as the science fiction part.

Now I'm not so sure, because maybe Star Trek's most audacious idea was us all along.

Not some perfected humanity with all the rough edges polished away. Not people who finally agree about everything, stop making mistakes, or reach some magical point where nobody has anything left to learn.

Us unfinished.

Us with different identities, cultures, histories, bodies, beliefs and experiences. Us capable of discovering that we were wrong without being permanently trapped by who we were when we got it wrong. Us curious enough to believe there may still be something another person can teach us.

Maybe Star Trek's future doesn't require us to stop being different. Maybe it asks us to get better at being different together.

I like that future considerably more than one where we all somehow become the same. I also like that it doesn't require me to wait around for somebody to invent the Enterprise before I can participate in it.

For sixty years, Star Trek has been betting that who we are right now doesn't have to be the final version of us. Considering our track record, that's a remarkable amount of faith to put in humanity.

And maybe that's the most audacious Star Trek idea of all. That we can still become more than we are now.

Remember…

✨Be Kind. Do More Good. We Got This.

💫Until next time, lovelies, keep jibber jabbering about the stories and things that move you.