Steven D. Greydanus writes about the important contribution Star Trek made to American or world culture.
“Star Trek as a whole promoted techno-optimism and wound up instilling countless fans with a love of science, space and technology, not to mention inspiring a number of real-world inventions — but Spock in particular helped make being a scientist, along with being smart and calmly rational, cool for countless Americans.”
It should probably be noted that “techno-optimism” was pretty common in the days of Star Trek. High tech dystopias didn’t become fashionable until later.