The first script for what would become Star Trek was written in November 1964. Five television series, eleven feature films and nearly fifty years later and Trek may well be the most influential creation in the history of entertainment, and especially where science and technology are concerned.

Eugene "Rod" Roddenberry Jr. is the only child of Trek creator Eugene Roddenberry Sr. and Majel Barrett Roddenberry. Rod has a new documentary called Trek Nation, it's the result of ten years of work and the subject of an interview I conducted with him back in July: http://www.acm.org/pubs/cie/roddenberry.html

I'll say this right up front: if you are a fan of science, technology and/or Trek , you are going to love Trek Nation since it's one of the most inspiring, authentic and heartfelt films to come along in a while.

Infinite diversity in infinite combinations. The film highlights a philosophy of keeping an open mind, of considering all the possibilities and moving forward, a philosophy that is at the heart of Star Trek and also of the entertainment and technology industries. Rod discovered an old recording of his father in which he said "reality is incredibly larger, infinitely more exciting than the flesh-and-blood vehicle we travel in". Fast-forward to today and by definition, the digital world is beyond our fingertips and it is incredibly larger and we are making it infinitely more exciting, freeing our minds from the limitations of flesh and blood.

Think about the inspirational power of Trek and the influence it has had on us as individuals. Early evidence of this power is provided in the film in the form of rare footage from the very first Star Trek convention. It was held in New York in 1972, 250 people were expected to show up and 3000 did. How many other cancelled shows had conventions spontaneously sprouting up several years later, conventions that have since expanded worldwide and are still going strong several decades later?

How many scientists and engineers have been influenced by Star Trek? How many technologies? There's footage from another early convention, footage of a young man who built his own communicator device. This was the 1970s and so he certainly didn't download the specs from the Internet, he looked at a lot of film clips then planned it and built it as best he could in order to create a functional model. This young engineer didn't build his communicator for profit motive but rather for pure passion, a common reaction to the message of Trek, then and now. Further, in a recording from the same era, Gene relates how he commonly received technical diagrams from teenagers. These schematics showed how to hold antimatter within a magnetic containment field and were so advanced that Gene had to "take it to our scientific advisors at Caltech to understand it".

Think about the inspirational power of Trek and the influence it has had on our culture as a whole. The film relates how when the time came for NASA to name their first, experimental space shuttle they planned to call it the Constitution. With the original Trek television series long off the air and the first film still in development, was the world's first reusable spacecraft named Constitution? Columbia? Challenger? Discovery? Atlantis? No. Thanks to a massive letter-writing campaign, the first space shuttle was named Enterprise. This is not art imitating life, this is art changing life.

Now of course, we cannot consider the impact and influence of Star Trek without also considering its epic rival, Star Wars. In a sitdown interview at the Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas admitted to Rod that he was a Star Trek fan and even attended conventions back before he did Star Wars. Seizing the moment, Rod asked a very important engineering and technology question, one which many of us have pondered: who would win if the Enterprise faced off against the Millennium Falcon? Lucas said that "it's an intellectual exercise, you can have any outcome you want". This is most certainly true and I for one would never point out the relative odds of, say, hand-operated laser cannons from a freighter going up against integrated phaser banks from a battleship.

Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane is an avid Trekker, to the point of where he had the honor of posthumously inducting Gene Roddenberry into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 2010. When speaking with Rod, MacFarlane offered the view from 40,000 feet, saying that Star Trek is "a model for us to shoot for, this is what we should be working towards".

Science fiction is a blend of ideas and emotions and Trek Nation ably shows the power of Gene Roddenberry's ideas as well as the emotional impact they have had on us all.

TREK NATION premieres this Wednesday, November 30th at 8PM ET/PT on the Science Channel.
http://science.discovery.com/tv/trek-nation/about-trek-nation.html