History is full of impossibilities come alive: the abolition of slavery; the civil rights laws of the ‘60s.

These transformations follow the same six-step arc, from first story to eventual tipping point.

The next impossible may well be a return from isolation, coming home to each other using these same six steps.

I’m 18, home on winter break from my first semester at McGill University, and excited to finally see Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. After an exhausting finals week, I really need a film that reawakens my heart and brings back the laughter, and, luckily, this one does both.

One scene has stuck with me through the years, and here’s how I remember it: the beloved crew of the Enterprise travels back to 1980s San Francisco, where chief engineer Scotty sits down at a desktop computer, clears his throat, and says, Computer? When nothing happens, McCoy hands him the mouse and Scotty lifts it to his lips like it’s a microphone: Hello, computer. The audience around me, myself included, bursts into laughter, because of course you can’t talk to a computer; that’s the stuff of science fiction, impossible.

Today, I talk to my computer every day… and it talks back.

Impossibilities Come Alive

History is filled with impossibilities that come to life. In 1903, the New York Times looked at humanity’s failed attempts to build a flying machine and declared it might take from one million to 10 million years, only to see the Wright brothers lift off 69 days later. Then in 1920, the Times wrote that rocket pioneer Robert Goddard seemed to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools (responding to his suggestion that a rocket could fly through space). Forty-nine years later, as Apollo 11 raced toward the moon, the paper printed its retraction: The Times regrets the error.

These impossibilities-turned-real happened, at least in part, because of profit: money invested, confident more money would be returned. But the impossible has also happened without profit, even at its expense, at times when our deepest human needs were going unmet.

If the slave trade is gone… beggars we’ll all become, warned a popular verse in 1790s........

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