Rio hosts 14th official ‘Star Trek’ convention

What did "Star Trek" ever do for you? Oh, it just helped inspire the inventor of the cell phone, plus there's an X-Prize for a real-life "Tricorder" coming soon, and our president, as a kid, crushed on Nichelle Nichols.

Today is a good day to study these and other positive consequences of "Star Trek," America's most utopian-hopeful space series (launched by producer Lucille Ball), because on Thursday-Sunday, the Rio will host the 14th official "Star Trek" convention in Las Vegas ($30-$150).

Among stars trekking to the convention are William Shatner, Sir Patrick Stewart, Kate Mulgrew, Joan Collins, George Takei, Walter Koenig, LeVar Burton, Karl Urban, Jeri Ryan, Brent Spiner, Marina Sirtis, Michael Dorn, Jonathan Frakes, plus Adam Nimoy and tributes to the late Leonard Nimoy and Grace Lee Whitney.

So what things did "Star Trek" help influence into existence?

Here's Gary Berman. He co-founder Creation Entertainment in 1971, and is still co-CEO of Creation, producer of this convention.

"We know the guy who invented cell phones (Martin Cooper) was influenced by the original series of 'Star Trek,'" he said.

"They were using iPads in 'Star Trek: The Next Generation,'" a generation before iPads were invented for the consumer market, he said.

"We know the first Apple computer went to Gene Roddenberry as a gift," he said.

(Apple sent Roddenberry an early production Macintosh 128 in gratitude.)

When President Obama met Leonard Nimoy, he gave him a Vulcan hand signal.

"He had a crush on Nichelle ("Lieutenant Uhura") Nichols growing up, and he invited Nichelle to the White House. There's a great photo of them together. That's pretty damn cool," Berman said.

Need your mind blown? Nichols, 82, and a pioneer in race relations, announced Wednesday that on Sept. 15, NASA will fly her to the Stratospheric Observatory for the Infrared Astronomy, to study the sky.

"More power to her," Berman said with the kind of gusto reserved for a victorious captain of a spaceship equipped with a giant flat-screen TV for video calls on the bridge.

"She worked for them for many years to try to influence women and minorities to take part in the space program," Berman said. "She really played an active interinterest in making space travel more palatable to the general public."

(He wasn't sure if she will be the first "Star Trek" cast member on a NASA trip.)

OK, what else?

In the "Star Trek" universe, doctors use a medical "tricorder" to scan the living to determine overall health and specific diseases.

In real life, the X-Prize organization is in the final stages of awarding $10 million in prizes to inventors who devised "Star Trek"-inspired medical tricorders, weighing less than five pounds, capable of diagnosing, possibly, a dozen illnesses from HIV and osteoporosis to melanoma, whooping cough, mono, shingles, and hypertension. (http://tricorder.xprize.org)

But the craziest thing of all is that whole beam-me-up transporter from the "Star Trek" series.

Guess what.

In 2014, in an announcement titled "Unconditional quantum teleportation between distant solid-state quantum bits" in the Science journal, physicists in the Netherlands reported moving quantum information between two bits, 10 feet apart, without altering an electron's spin state, according to the New York Times.

I'll take two transporters, please, on layaway.

And since consumer goods in "Star Trek" can be whipped up out of a particle "replicator," "Star Trek" championed a post-consumer universe. (Uh, hello, 3D printer predecessors?)

"We know some of the influences" of "Star Trek" on science and great people, Berman said, "but we don't know all of them."

Berman said progress of human rights has made him feel like 2015 is the first year Roddenberry's vision of a good universe seems on track in our society.

"There's still wars. There's still hunger. But we seem to be making progress in social areas I know he stood for," Berman said.

By the way, Roddenberry was a humanist who said people in the future would be too smart to be religious. He actively kept religions out of the show and movies.

"Some of the later 'Star Treks' where he was ill or when he had passed, started to introduce religion into 'Star Trek,' But I know he was against that," Berman said.

The "Star Trek" influence Berman is looking forward to next are medical diagnostics that tell people what diseases they're on track to getting, and then eradicating those diseases.

Also, since this is the first year where we might get our first state-sanctioned LGBTQ marriage at the convention (due to the Supreme Court ruling known as "love wins"), Berman expects "Star Trek" to catch up to the one human right it has not fully explored.

"There should have been gay characters on 'Star Trek.' I think that was an area Roddenberry missed where he could have made more TV history," Berman said when I asked him about the issue.

"I'm sure had he lived long enough, and been more involved in the other series, that would have happened. I'm quite sure whoever does the next series, which is hopefully on the horizon, will do that."

Berman said Roddenberry was good at heart.

"He was one of our mentors" in supporting Creation Entertainment, Berman said. "He helped us out when we were kids. He was extremely gracious."

His convention, probably the most iconic of any fictional universe, gives fans a place to be together:

"You can close the doors on the outside world for four or five days, and celebrate what he stood for."

Live long and prosper.

Contact Doug Elfman at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman. Find him on Twitter: @VegasAnonymous.