What an Episode of the Original Star Trek Taught Me

Have you ever seen the Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever"? If you haven't:

Commander McCoy accidentally makes himself delirious, beams down to a nearby planet, goes through a portal back in time to the 1930s, and changes history by saving a woman. This causes the Starship Enterprise to cease existing.

So Captain Kirk and others who followed McCoy to the planet are stranded and have to go through the portal to save McCoy, stop him from changing history, and bring back the Starship Enterprise and their buddies left on board.

They arrive a few days before McCoy and while there Kirk falls in love with a social worker, Edith Keeler. But Spock discovers that in order to repair history she will have to be killed in an auto accident.

Furthermore, if she lives, she will lead a pacifist movement that makes the President of the U.S. delay entering WWII. This will allow the Nazis time to be the first to make the atomic bomb and take control of the world.

So Kirk has to make a decision: let McCoy save Edith and change the course of history forever or stop McCoy and save the world from dictatorship.

Do you ever wonder if history would have turned out the same way if even one thing had been changed? If one person had lived or died? If one event had or had not taken place?

History is really mysterious in that way, because you never know if one minor incident in the whole thousands of years of history could have had huge effects we never even thought of.

I've realized that the Internet is the same way. It has allowed us to do business and live life like we never have before.

Without it, where would we be? I'll tell you where I'd be. I'd be where many people are right now: suffering through a job I don't want (if I didn't get laid off), with people I don't like, with hardly any time to do what I really want to do. And sleepless nights, tossing and turning and worrying about finances.

I think I've always known that working a job wouldn't be the right thing for me. As a child whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I couldn't really give them an answer.

I knew they expected something like "a doctor" or "an accountant". But I wanted to be "someone with the time and money to do what I want, when I want".

For me, the Internet couldn't have come at a better time. Fresh out of college during hard economic times with prices for this or that going up...it's enough to make me want to go back to school just so I can delay having to deal with the "real" world. :)

The Internet provides the best way for the average person to actually live life, not just go through it or be a slave to it. You can live life the way you want to without having to worry about how you're going to pay the bills next month. Or where your next paycheck is coming from....unless you're lucky enough to inherit a fortune or win the lottery.

But most of us aren't that lucky, so why let what the Internet can do for us go to waste? You only have a chance to live this life once.

And unlike Kirk's situation, it's an easy choice for most of us to make.

Seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I know I am.