When Huda Helassa, 20, left her home in Tal al-Hawa, southern Gaza city, in the first hours of the war, she took a signed T-shirt from the Access Microscholarship Program, a United States-funded programme that provides English-language and cultural education to young people.
Her classmates had signed the shirt on September 15, 2023, during their final class, two years before she graduated on September 27.
“When we left our home on the first day of the war, the T-shirt was one of the first things that came to my mind,” Huda says.
She put it in her bag almost instinctively, wanting to hold on to something from a part of her life that had ended just days earlier.
[Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]
Huda and her family first moved to her grandmother’s house in Gaza City, then were displaced south, walking part of the way, and eventually reached Rafah in the south of the Palestinian territory.
In May 2024, they were displaced again, this time to Khan Younis. When they returned to Gaza in January 2025, they found their home completely burned.
“There was nothing left of the life we had there,” she says. “No belongings, no photographs, no memories we could hold onto, just the blackened walls.”
They were displaced again in April 2025, moving to Remal and then Tal al-Hawa, before moving to az-Zawayda in September and returning to Gaza in October. They are currently in Tal al-Hawa.
For Huda, the T-shirt remains a link to the life she had before the war, a period of learning, friendships and experiences that shaped her.
A few years ago, I received a call I’ll never forget. Jeanette Epps, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, Zoomed into my living room from 250 miles above Earth. During our conversation, she told me that one of the reasons she chose her career was a television show my father created in 1966.
She wasn’t alone. I’ve heard versions of that same story from countless people over the years. Engineers. Scientists. Astronauts. People who saw possibility on a television screen before they ever saw it in the real world.
They credit “Star Trek” for showing them a future they wanted to help build. That’s an extraordinary thing for a television series to accomplish. It didn’t just entertain millions of people. It gave many of them a direction.
And I don’t think that was because of the ships, the gadgets or the aliens. It was because, underneath all of it, was a profoundly human belief that we are capable of becoming something better.
There was a time when science fiction made a bet on humanity. A bet that humanity was worth rooting for. We need storytellers willing to make that bet again.
I don’t think we have an innovation problem. We have an inspiration problem.
We talk a lot about what we’re leaving the next generation. The debt. The climate. The geopolitical mess. But there’s another inheritance we don’t talk about enough: what we show them is possible.
Today, many visions of the future are dominated by collapse, dystopia and fear. Those stories can have value. But conflict doesn’t always have to come from destruction. It can come from discovery. Two minds encountering an idea neither had considered. A crew facing the unknown with curiosity instead of fear. That kind of conflict doesn’t leave you feeling like the world is ending. It leaves you feeling like it’s just beginning.
Most storytelling holds a mirror up to who we are. Our flaws, our failures, our contradictions. But there is another kind. Stories built around characters a step or two ahead of where humanity is. Not perfect. But people who have learned how to cooperate, how to lead, how to stay curious and how to put something larger than themselves first. Characters you don’t just recognize. Characters you want to become one day.
That distinction changes what a story asks of you. And what you walk away believing is possible.
This year, “Star Trek” celebrates its 60th anniversary.
That’s not a milestone you reach by accident. Franchises built on spectacle fade. Ones built on something people actually needed tend to stick around.
The engineers who built Silicon Valley, the astronauts who went to space, the scientists pushing the edges of medicine and artificial intelligence — many of them trace a line back to this show. That wasn’t the plan. Nobody set out to build an innovation pipeline out of a television series. But that’s exactly what happened. When you give people a future worth believing in, they go build it — or sometimes they get inspired to imagine other hopeful destinations and lead us toward them. That’s not nostalgia. That’s a model.
One thing my dad understood that I think gets overlooked: “Star Trek” wasn’t going out into the galaxy to find aliens that looked different. It was going out to find aliens that thought different.
Diversity of perspective is how a species grows. My father gave that idea a name: IDIC. Infinite Diversity from Infinite Combinations. It didn’t mean you had to abandon your own point of view. It meant staying open to someone else’s. Because that’s how you grow. That idea has never been more relevant. And it has never been more achievable.
For the first time in history, a creator anywhere in the world can tell a story that reaches everyone, and now it can come from anywhere. The future belongs to everyone. The stories that shape it should too.
That astronaut who called me from space didn’t just watch a television show. She saw a future worth dedicating her life to.
Every generation needed something to build toward before they ever picked up a tool. A vision. A direction. A story that made the future feel worth the work. And right now, we’re not building enough of that.
We need stories that don’t just entertain us, but also become our compass. We need the kind of storytelling that doesn’t ask what could go wrong, but asks what could go right.
Rod Roddenberry, founder of the Roddenberry Foundation and son of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and actor Majel Barrett Roddenberry, is an executive producer on current “Star Trek” television shows.
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that optimistic science fiction can do more than entertain: it can give audiences a constructive vision of the future and inspire people to pursue careers in science, engineering and space exploration. “Star Trek” is presented as an example of storytelling that made human progress feel attainable.
It contends that contemporary culture is overly saturated with collapse, dystopia and fear. Although such stories can be useful, the article suggests that narratives centered on discovery, cooperation and curiosity can encourage audiences to imagine what might go right rather than merely anticipate disaster.
The piece maintains that aspirational characters—people who have learned to cooperate, remain curious and serve purposes larger than themselves—can function as moral examples. In this view, fiction should not only reflect present flaws but also depict people and societies worth becoming.
It further argues that “Star Trek’s” emphasis on cultural and intellectual diversity remains especially relevant. The franchise’s principle of “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations” is presented as a model for learning through different perspectives, while the series’ enduring influence is cited as evidence that hopeful stories can shape real-world ambitions.[1][2]
Different views on the topic
A contrasting perspective holds that dystopian and cautionary science fiction serves an essential purpose by exposing the consequences of reckless behavior, political failure and technological overreach. Recent commentary argues that many influential works were intended as warnings or satire, not as blueprints for an attractive future.[3]
Feminist dystopian fiction offers another counterpoint: bleak speculative narratives can make systemic problems—including misogyny, violence against women, gender inequality and threats to reproductive rights—more visible. From this perspective, darkness is not simply pessimism; it can be a way to represent harms that already exist and demand attention.[4]
Critics also caution that “Star Trek’s” hopeful vision can obscure tensions within its own world. The franchise combines ideals of cooperation and equality with armed exploration, alien conflict and interventionist politics, making it both an image of peaceful progress and a vehicle for examining militarism and political failure.[2]
Consequently, the strongest science fiction may not choose between hope and warning. Utopian stories can provide direction, while dystopian stories can identify dangers and test whether an envisioned future genuinely addresses exclusion, power and conflict. Treating either mode as sufficient on its own risks producing either inspiration without scrutiny or criticism without a constructive destination.[3][4]
We’re living under a dark cloud, with a steady downpour of graft, thuggery and baloney.
There’s the raffling of presidential pardons and the attacks on reporters for doing their jobs, the clownish trade war with Canada, the bungled disaster in Iran, the petty obsessions with the ballroom and the Kennedy Center, the hogwash about a stolen election, the attacks on immigrants and the shameless presidential profiteering while working people suffer the cost of Trump’s countless broken promises.
I could go on, and I will. But rest assured, I have not forgotten about the boost I promised.
For all the affronts, nothing strikes me as more sinister than the Trump administration’s ambitious assault on the planet. Despite nearly daily headlines about the global calamity of overheated oceans, melting glaciers, stark weather transformations and species extinction, Trump keeps shoveling more coal onto a fire that will rage long after he’s dead and gone.
He’s gutted environmental protections and scientific research and dismantled clean energy initiatives. Now his administration is rolling back limits on power plant emissions, attempting to open the California coast to more oil drilling and sabotaging the state’s ambitious goals on emission controls and electric vehicle conversion.
We don’t need AI to threaten the future of humanity. We’ve got Trump.
It’s tempting to duck under the covers and wait for the nightmare to end, but the good news is that a lot of people are standing up rather than rolling over, rebelling against the ignorance and callous disregard that threatens our most precious and fragile shared inheritance.
In August, hundreds showed up to defend California’s authority to govern its own coast at a Santa Monica hearing of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, and 18,000 more people filed comments online.
The rollback of environmental safeguards is, for many, a call to arms.
“Yes, I am discouraged. … But I am not despairing,” said Bill McKibben, an author and environmental activist who is organizing a worldwide event called Sun Day for next year to promote clean energy. “We’re reacting to multiple crises, and we’re led by a pack of fools, so why would anybody not stand up?”
McKibben launched a national movement five years ago called Third Act, and tens of thousands of people 60 and older have signed on to advocate for climate action, voting rights and civic participation. Third Act now operates in about 30 states, with a robust chapter in Southern California.
Former Times reporter Zan Dubin has worked as both a volunteer and a paid communications consultant for Third Act, and I asked her what someone could expect to do if they became a member of Third Act/SoCal.
Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben is organizing a worldwide event called Sun Day next year to promote clean energy.
(Amanda Swinhart / Associated Press)
“We do it all,” Dubin said, from promoting climate-friendly candidates to running phone banks and testifying at public meetings. She said Third Act co-sponsors protests at Dodger Stadium, and she and others planned to meet at Vin Scully Avenue and Stadium Way for Sunday’s game against the San Francisco Giants. They want the Dodgers to stop doing business with Big Oil and bench their sponsorship deal with Phillips 66.
She also called out Disneyland for its exhaust-spewing Autopia attraction, along with former Times climate columnist Sammy Roth, and Disneyland responded by announcing in 2024 that it was switching to electric cars beginning in 2027.
Dubin, co-founder of National Drive Electric Week, said 170 volunteer-led events were being held nationwide over the next month to promote EVs, and she was leading one Friday in Irvine.
“Action is absolutely the antidote to despair,” Dubin said. “I find that despite the onslaught of these horrifying headlines … taking action invigorates me.”
Claremont resident Margaret Davis knows that feeling. She emailed me in 2023, prior to participating in a Third Act event, and said many retirees have time on their hands, which puts them in a powerful position.
“The climate crisis is the greatest existential threat humans have ever faced, hence we live in a time when we can make the greatest change for the better,” Davis wrote at the time.
When I called her a few days ago, Davis told me she’s now a member of Senior Stewards Acting for the Environment. She lives at Pilgrim Place — a senior community with a focus on justice, peace and environment — where residents meet regularly to study, discuss and advocate for sustainability, biodiversity and environmental causes.
“When I was in college in 1970, we had the antiwar movement and that was the first year of Earth Day,” Davis said. “At the time, I thought Earth Day was just a distraction from what was going on in the world.”
Later, she said, “I came to realize it was the biggest issue of all time.”
Climate activist Sim Bilal stands next to pumps at an oil field in Los Angeles in 2024.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Like Davis, I went to college in the ‘70s, and there’s no denying that our aggressively consumptive generation played a key role in manufacturing a crisis for our children and grandchildren. We’ve got matches in our hands and smoke on the horizon, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we’d see atonement not as a hobby, but as a duty.
As for the next generation, climate activist Sim Bilal, 24, said he too shares the sense that this is both a wickedly frightening time and a moment of opportunity.
“In the last month, we’ve gotten more young people involved,” said Bilal, executive director of Youth Climate Stewards 4 Local Action. “We usually have to reach out to them, but so many people have been wanting to get involved, and they’re so eager, and that’s been affirming for me. The policies are depressing, but the fact that people are reenergized and want to fight back is really exciting.”
Bilal said faith in politics, government and corporations is not high among his peers, but he’s trying to grow a network of young people to cultivate and support future leaders.
“A mentor told me there are two kinds of power — organized people, and organized money,” said Bilal, whose activism began when his grandmother died and he began wondering if her cancer, and global warming, were connected to the oil drilling in his South L.A. neighborhood. “We don’t have the money, but a lot of the work we do is political and civic education, demystifying power, and making people understand they have agency.”
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday ordered the formation of a panel to come up with safety regulations for the state’s artificial intelligence companies, including the development of a possible “kill switch” for AI programs that go rogue.
Newsom issued an executive order to convene “a group of world-leading experts” to provide a “guide” for the state to bolster its laws around AI security, according to statement from the governor’s office.
The panel could put consider proposals for independent third parties to write safety plans or for companies to develop an emergency shutoff.
Newsom, who is considering a 2028 run for president, two years ago vetoed a state bill that would have mandated a kill switch.
Some Democratic and Republican leaders around the country are scrambling to come up with safety proposals after employees at AI companies recently warned that the technology could create catastrophe, including ending humanity.
A researcher for AI company Anthropic said he left the company over concerns that AI companies, including OpenAI, are “gambling with our lives” as they race ahead to improve AI that could surpass human intelligence.
The researcher, Jacob Coxon, said in a social media post: “People building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
State Sen. Chris Cabaldon (D-West Sacramento), who chairs the state committee overseeing technology issues, told the Times he’ll hold hearings on artificial intelligence this fall. Those meetings were planned before the recent warnings about AI’s dangers, but will be informed by the events of the last few weeks, he said.
He said the state’s rules around AI don’t go far enough.
“We regulate your barber or your sandwich shop more than we regulate [a company] telling us that they may be ending humanity,” he said.
Any new laws could have a disproportionate effect on the global tech industry because many top AI companies are based in California.
A proposed law in 2024 by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) would have required tech firms to be able to turn off the AI models they directly control if things go awry.
Newsom, in his veto message at the time, cited concerns about stifling innovation. He also expressed concern that smaller AI models, which would have been exempt from the law, could also be dangerous.
