I thought I'd write a bit about why I like Star Trek so much. After all, whenever I'm bored I just add a few more lines to this homepage, and I thought I might as well talk a bit about something that is so central to my life. Plus, "trekkies" are often misunderstood by regular people for all the wrong reasons.
I first heard of Star Trek back in middle school. When you're that young, your outlook in life is basically restricted to a monotonous routine: eat your breakfast, go to school, hang out with friends, play some sports, whatever. I still remember the very first episode I had watched; the third season episode "Booby Trap", about a booby trap (duh) that trapped an ancient Promellian battle cruiser over a millennium ago, and still manages to trap the Enterprise. The main reason this episode was so captivating was that I had never thought of life outside school before. For me, this television show had openned up a whole new world for me; the world of outer space. Instead of the same monotonous drive to school every day, I was treated to a whole new planet or civilization every week, with its own unique culture.
At the same time that the crew were exploring new worlds, they were also dealing with problems that could very well appear on Earth. Every character has their own story to tell. LaForge deals with turning his blindness, a disability, into a unique advantage; Data tries to understand humanity and become a better person; Wesley and Beverly Crusher show us the ideal mother-son relationship whereas Worf and his son are not so ideal; Picard is a perfect model for how a leader should behave, whereas Riker shows us how one can be a leader and a friend at the same time... the list goes on. There are not that many shows that show us how to be human any more; when they do come out, they become instant hits, such as Forrest Gump. I think the main reason that movie was such a hit was that it showed us how a person with a below average I.Q. can still perform wonders, even if that person is fictional.
In addition to this, once I got into Star Trek it also lead to some fascinating science. Without even knowing it, I absorbed some very advanced scientific concepts outside a normal ten-year old's vocabulary. For example, Star Trek was the show that first introduced me to "neutrinos". In fact, neutrinos are a very real scientific particle, given off during beta-minus radioactive decay. Neutrinos from our Sun are right now passing through your body at the rate of six hundred billion per square centimetre per second! But fortunately, they also interact very weakly with normal matter; a neutrino can pass through the entire planet Earth without even slowing down. Nevertheless, they are very real particles that do have a mass. Just recently, in 1997, Japanese scientists discovered that they have a mass of 0.07 +/- 0.04 eV. Star Trek introduced me to this vocabulary long before this discovery was made. In fact, I can safely say that Star Trek is what got me truly interested in science, computers, and engineering in the first place.
To wrap up my diatribe, I should note that some very prominent people are true Star Trek fans. Stephen Hawking, the world-famous physicist with ideas about gravity on par with Einstein's, is an admitted trekkie and has even appeared on a Star Trek TNG Episode. In fact, a lot of physicists and scientists are Star Trek fans; enough so that it was the subject of a very lively debate in our Engineering Science common room just today. Star Trek has been immersed into our culture; according to Lawrence Krauss, himself a trekker and author of The Physics of Star Trek , "the number of people in the United States who would not recognize the phrase 'Beam me up, Scotty' is roughly comparable to the number of people who have never heard of ketchup". So, the next time you hear the word "trekker", please have pity on us. :-)
Live long and prosper.