“An ancestor of mine maintained that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” -Mr. Spock, Star Trek

The power and beauty of fiction is that it allows us to speak about the best and worst of humanity — including our hopes and fears — that we couldn’t talk about otherwise. Have a listen to Summer Fiction’s song, By The Sea,

while you consider a specific type of fiction: science-fiction.

While many people out there simply don’t enjoy (or “get”) sci-fi, as our understanding of the fundamental laws and history of the Universe have improved, so has our ability to harness that understanding to bring about new technologies. Classic authors like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs used the genre to look at how humanity might respond amidst the adversities we’d face when confronted with the exploration of new frontiers, while Godzilla — and today, Black Mirror — bring to life our fears about technology creating a dystopian world that takes away important aspects of being human itself.

Image credit: Black Mirror, Season 1 Episode 2.

But Star Trek was something different and entirely new when it came along. A combination of factors gave us a new vision for what our future might be like, and simultaneously brought us, if not a utopia, a vastly improved future where we not only retained our humanity, but where the very best aspects of what it means to be human enabled us to create a fictional civilization that gave us every reason to hope for something grander than we’d ever be able to achieve in a single lifetime.

Image credit: Star Trek fan art, via https://nasimali.wordpress.com/2014/12/17/film-star-trek-should-not-follow-guardians-of-the-galaxy/.

Star Trek brought us into a world where its inhabitants came in not only different races, religions, and countries of origin, but also from different species and planets-of-origin. No one was treated any differently for any of these traits, but rather was judged exactly as all of us would hope to be judged: by our characters, capabilities, intentions and actions. For those of us who’ve ever felt different from “normal” in some way — which should be all of us, if we’re being honest with ourselves — there was always a character who embodied that, starting with Leonard Nimoy’s “Mr. Spock.”