Star Trek Communicator Badge

Los Angeles, 1997

A quick tap on the brass and silver badge—“Beam me up!”—followed by the sparkle of the USS Enterprise’s atomic fax machine. For those of us who grew up with Star Trek, the transporter’s twinkling trill is as familiar as the fizz of Alka-Seltzer®.

When the show that Gene Roddenberry originally pitched as a “Wagon Train to the stars” premiered in 1966, humans were racing to the Moon. Rocket ships—with astronauts aboard—were blasting off every few months. Kids like me (I was 12 at the time) fully expected to visit orbiting hotels (as per 2001: A Space Odyssey) and bounce around in the Moon’s 1/6 gravity. All of us would float weightless in space; a lucky few might even walk on Mars. Space would be our playground.

We didn’t get any of that.

What we did get, though, are Star Trek’s gadgets. For the past 50 years, companies like IBM, Apple, Xerox, and SpaceX have been working to manifest the technology that their young engineers saw on that show. Warp-drive and teleportation remain elusive; but communicators, PADDs, and talking computers are here. Even Amazon’s drone delivery is a Flintstones-level nod to the Enterprise replicator.

I’ve been a Star Trek fan since the beginning. But the truth is, I’m not much of a gadget guy. I just replaced my old flip phone—with a newer old flip phone. What my young heart desired from that famous starship was not materialistic: It was a sense of community, and the possibility of far-flung adventures. I wanted to emulate the self-confidence of Kirk, the humanistic curiosity of Picard, the cool logic of Spock, the nobility of Worf.

Even as a grownup, the fantasy stuck. When I bought this handsome communicator badge at the Paramount Pictures gift shop, I imagined it would confer upon me a kind of knighthood; that by wearing it I’d elevate my personal rank to Starfleet level, and be recognized by kindred spirits as a farsighted member of a pan-galactic cuddle puddle.

I guess it kind of works, if you wear it to Comic-Con on a well-tailored blue Starfleet jersey. On an REI fleece vest at Peet’s coffee, not so much.