yeah, but then again, if it had really been so influential, when it showed handdeld communicators, earily similar to cell phones, why didn’t it show gangstas and teens texting so fast their thumbs are about to fly off?
And when we saw Phasors, why didn’t we hear pleas of, “Don’t Phaze me , Bro!”....?
IMHO, too many cultural icons of the 70s were embedded in the scripts for it to have been ageless, but the series was good and a good iconoclast of that period.
Interestingly enough, just this morning there was a History Channel show on, called "How William Shatner Changed the World." One of the people the show mentioned was Martin Cooper, generally acknowledged as the engineer who invented the hand held cell phone for Motorola in the early 1970s, and he stated flat out that it was Star Trek that influenced him with the original idea, as well as that of voice recognition.
Know where the original PC, the Altair got it's name? From a star system in Star Trek. Before that, computers were corporate devices, often requiring a support staff and dedicated AC units.
The ideas from the sick-bay and imaging (like MRI and Cat-Scans) might well have eventually been developed without Star Trek, but in many cases these ideas were certainly pursued far earlier than they would have been otherwise. When I was in college at SUNY @ Stony Brook, I heard stories about how the people involved in the invention and development of the MRI were devoted Science Fiction fans, and in fact, Stony Brook hosts a major Sci Fi convention on campus every year. The last year I was there, Marc Leonard was the guest of honor.
It also influenced quite a number of people to get into the sciences and career directions that they may never have gone into. For instance, the chief engineer for JPL states that it was seeing an early Mercury launch, followed up by watching Star Trek that led him into physics and engineering. Dr. Mae Jemison said that it was the character Uhuru that made her believe that a woman could actually be someone important in the crew, and the fact that she was black as well was an inspiration to her.
Interestingly enough, the original show would get all sorts of mail from scientific and medical professionals asking how they did certain things, or where they came up with the ideas: Nearly every time, the idea came from simple production requirements, or lack of funding or time. For example, DC Fontana said that the transporter came about because the model builders were behind schedule and didn't have the shuttle craft ready for the first 6 or 7 shows. So they needed an alternate way to get the crew members onto a planet! So the "transporter" was "invented."
Mark