A Brief Guide to Star Trek

Similarly,
Voyager
had begun with around 8 million but concluded its seven years on air with fewer than 3.5 million tuning in to see if the ship got home or not.
Enterprise
had an even better start, surpassing
Deep Space Nine
numbers with around 12.5 million, such was the attraction of a
Star Trek
prequel. The show was cancelled, however, because those bothering with the adventures ofCaptain Archer and crew had collapsed to a low of 2.5 million. Those ‘first nights’ demonstrated one thing – a mass audience would come to new
Star Trek
as a one-off event, but only a core of dedicated fans and other open-minded casual viewers of around 3 to 4 million would stick with an ongoing TV series.
    That’s why J. J. Abrams’ dramatic back to basics reinvention of
Star Trek
in 2009 was a movie that celebrated the iconic ori -ginal triumvirate and the rest of the original
Enterprise
crew. To the mass audience, these lovingly remembered characters
were Star Trek
, and that’s why the movie was a huge success.

    There is no doubt that
Star Trek
has been influential beyond just television and movies. Nichelle Nichols tells a famous story of how she was persuaded to stick with the show when Dr Martin Luther King Jr explained how important her appearance on mainstream television was. ‘You changed the face of television for ever’, he told her, ‘you are a role model for everyone’.
Star Trek
’s racial diversity and (mostly) positive depictions of women in important roles of responsibility was part of the show’s positive view of the future.
    The technology of
Star Trek
has led to the look and feel of many of today’s gadgets, used daily by millions of people. The incredibly popular Apple iPhones and iPads bear more than a passing resemblance to
Star Trek
’s communicator and
The Next Generation
’s PADD (Personal Access Display Device). Kirk and many of the crew of the first
Enterprise
were often seen using small hand-held computing devices. Similarly, Bluetooth in-ear phones match with Uhura’s oft-mocked communication device. Five years after the show was cancelled, Ed Roberts launched the build-it-yourself Altair 8800 computer, named after a galaxy featured on
Star Trek
(and its progenitor,
Forbidden Planet
). That machine in turn inspired Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to improve upon Roberts’ innovation with their own Apple computer, launching a computing empire that led to the iPhone and iPad.
    The Original Series
featured other devices that have sincebecome reality. Tricorders – portable scanning devices that assess the local environment – don’t quite exist in that form, but many personal phones are now mini-computers, which through GPS technology can provide information on nearby shops, museums or other attractions. The medical tricorder and sick bay monitors are much closer to reality with the rapid development of medical technology, to the extent that a modern ER can be a very high-tech place. Even more extreme technology, such as tractor beams, the holodeck, warp speed and deflector shields, are seen now as less like science fiction and more realistic in the future due to advances in the understanding of quantum physics. Work in the robotics and artificial intelligence fields is moving closer to a Data-style android.
    While
Star Trek
itself was inspired by the 1960s space race between the United States and the Soviet Union – it was the reason NBC decided to go with the show – many modern scientists have in turn been inspired by
Star Trek
to go into science. One such was the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Steve Matousek, who was involved in the 1990s Mars Pathfinder mission, among others. ‘
Star Trek
gives you a way to see ahead, to look into the future’, he told Jeff Greenwald in
Future Perfect
. ‘I wanted to be an aerospace engineer because I knew that they were the ones that designed the things that went out into space.’ Of the 6,000 who worked at JPL, Matousek estimated that up to 75 per cent had been inspired by
Star Trek
. In 1996, physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote an entire book devoted to the science of
Star Trek
and its real-world impact in
The Physics of Star Trek
. The first NASA prototype space shuttle – which unfortunately never journeyed to space – had even been named
Enterprise
, thanks to fan pressure.
    While waiting for scientists to invent the future, most fans thought the only way they’d ever get to live the
Star Trek
experience would be to visit the studio sets at