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 England. This trade was considered just too profitable to end until, after a 20-year struggle, Britain abolished it in 1807 (and abolished slavery itself 26 years later).
Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever! declared Alabama governor George Wallace in 1963, defending a system that kept Black workers in the lowest-paying jobs, to the benefit of white business owners (a system its defenders said would be economically disastrous to undo). But by 1965, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had become law.
How did these impossibilities happen?
The Impossible in Six Steps
Step 1: Story
It begins with a story. In a well-known study, people gave more to help one named, pictured child (whose face told a story) than they did to help millions described by statistics (Small et al., 2007)… because stories pull us in so completely that their messages slip right past our defenses (Green & Brock, 2000). Consider this: On December 1, 1955, a seamstress took a seat on a Montgomery bus and refused to give it up when the driver ordered her to move for a white passenger. Rosa Parks’s small act of defiance led to her arrest, imprisonment, and conviction.
Step 2: Hidden Majority
Stories like this land on a hidden majority, the many people who privately share the same sentiment but stay silent because they’re certain they’re alone (Prentice & Miller, 1993). In Montgomery, nearly every Black rider had their own tale of bus-system injustice, and now they were hearing it echoed in Rosa Parks’s.
Step 3: Small Circle
A hidden majority doesn’t rise at once, because acting alone is frightening. Instead, change begins in a small, close circle, where people give each other the courage to step forward (Centola, 2010). On the night of Parks’s arrest, one small circle, the Women’s Political Council, led by professor Jo Ann Robinson, decided to act, staying up all night running off leaflets: Don’t ride the bus on Monday. They were hoping 60 percent of Black riders would stay off; nearly all of them did.
Step 4: Social Proof
From here, other circles see the first one doing something brave, and they believe they can be brave too (researchers call this social proof) (Cialdini, 2009; Suh et al., 2017). As reporters spread images of the tens of thousands of people walking miles to get to work in Montgomery, new circles sprang into action in Tallahassee, Birmingham, Atlanta, and Greensboro, and soon one city’s circle had become a web stretching across the South.
Step 5: Persistence
Now comes the long, messy middle, when established systems push back, and the only path forward is patience and persistence. White leaders in the South answered with what they called massive resistance, beating Freedom Riders, leaving protestors and organizers bloody at bus stations, but the circles keep meeting and organizing.
Step 6: Tipping Point
Finally, the promise hidden in sociologist Damon Centola’s research arrives: when those willing to stand up publicly grow and reach about a quarter of the entire group, then the whole group comes to a tipping point and suddenly flips (Centola et al., 2018). In May 1963, Birmingham police turned fire hoses and attack dogs on marching children, and images broadcast into living rooms across the country moved more and more Americans to stand against segregation. Within two years, the impossible had become law.
The Next Impossible: Belonging
The impossible I care deeply about is rebuilding cultures of belonging. For two million years, we lived in villages of 30 to 150 people, sharing work, meals, songs, and sorrows, and our minds became wired for that kind of connection. But today we arrive in a world emptied of this shared life, greeted by two busy parents struggling to do alone what a whole village once shared, and later we’re told to go out and make it on our own… and we all feel the cost in our isolation and exhaustion.
The same process, six steps, can carry us back to a world of belonging. Stories, like that of a six-year-old boy told by his new family to stop grieving the deaths of his mother and brother, and, in sharp contrast, of a young girl held for weeks by her fellow villagers after her father dies, can touch a hidden majority who believe they must carry loneliness and exhaustion all on their own.
These stories can also spark change, beginning in small circles of five to 12 people who feel inspired to rekindle belonging: they start gathering each week for Sunday dinner, three unhurried hours woven with stillness and compassion… and then let their growing care for each other spill out into everyday life, one shared ride, one casserole at a time.
Soon, these circles become visible, and social proof takes hold: one circle emboldens another, and, with persistence, we can reach a tipping point where (much like the original crew of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek IV) we make The Voyage Home… to each other, because belonging and connection are not only our deepest needs; they are our sweetest ending.
