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Star Trek Tech That Exists Today
Esther Schindler writes "When Star Trek hit the air waves, talking computers were just a pipe dream. While teleportation remains elusive, several once-fictional technologies are changing the way people live and work. Here are some ways in which we're approaching the gizmos that Star Trek demonstrated. Speech recognition? Check. Holodeck? Sort of. Replicator? Workin' on it."
What about the white iPhone 4?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Most of the example are not really very much like Star Trek "tech" at all... And what's that Space Shuttle looking thing? Made out of powdered American cheese?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
No shit
There was a TV show about technology from star trek that is around today, cell phones, medical equipment, etc... Shatner did some of the narration, but I never knew the name of it and never spent more than a cursory look on google/imdb for it. What was this show? Where/when was it aired? Thanks.
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
Chicken Pot Noodle.
There's no chicken in it.
It's textured soy protein.
Much like food cubes.
'Scuse me, I think I hear a fly screaming...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
This article made me think of all the technology that came before Star Trek. I'm not an old timer, but you had sliding doors and turbolifts (A.K.A. elevators) back before the sixties didn't you?
If by "pipe dream" you mean computers were synthesizing speech five years before Star Trek came out, then sure.
Good to see a deep link to a non-commercial (at least, non-ad-revenue-based) website. The list provided was interesting, too; it covered some topics I didn't expect (3D printers as replicators? OK, sort of..), and skipped some of the worn out ones (ion drives, flip phones that look a bit like TOS communicators).
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Look, until we can whip matter up to our exact specifications, we can't rightly say anything we're doing is remotely similar to a "holodeck".
Sorry but fancy images on a 2D or pseudo-3D screen aren't what they're hopping about in TNG/DS9.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
The Star Trek trek that I thought was the most futuristic was the Personal Waste Transporters that would automatically beam out solid, liquid, and gaseous human waste, plus dirt, oil, etc.; which eliminated the need for toilets, showers, etc. from Star Ships and Away Missions.
Strange that in Star Trek, they could beam away all of the bad stuff from their bodies, but would still need to eat and drink in traditional fashion.
Prior to the Waste Transporters, I don't want to even think about how rough Klingon toilet paper would have been, Vulcan deodorant which requires mental discipline to ignore orders, or the poor quality of a Ferengi tampons that fall apart.
More important:
Tribbles
Romulan Ale and synthehol
Green skinned orion womens
Space Hippies
Hand held Hypo sprays full of tranquilizers (There are non-hand held ones available since the 70s)
Pesky GD "son of a chief medical officer" ensigns
Skin tight leotards as a women's businesswear. Microskirts as traditional women's businesswear.
Holodecks full of amorous versions of your female coworkers "I am the goddess of love" or whatever that line was.
Now that I think of it, you keep all that dilithium stuff and just provide the leotards and mini skirts.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Automatic sliding doors.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
One of the Best ST Techs to see the "Day Light" hehehehe.
The combination of the Internet and mobile devices have worked to bring us some things Star Trek could not have forseen very well.
How about instantly (text or voice) searching almost the entire corpus of human knowledge, from a hand sized device that you carry in your pocket. Instance access to the entire world's knowledge. Up to the moment sports, stock, weather, news, etc. And while we can complain about Wikipedia, it is generally very useful. Or try searching for a disease, or drug.
Instant video from around the globe.
Video chat in real time with anyone anywhere. Voice texts back and forth. Email. Twitter.
Star Trek failed to forsee Facebook Stalkers(tm).
Turn by turn navigation. (New to the iPhone!)
Tablets -- those are real now, and better than they were on Star Trek.
How about a 32 GB tiny SD card or USB sticks instead of those painted blocks of wood handed around on Star Trek? They called them "tapes". I don't think they could have really appreciated how much storage we have in something so tiny you can lose it in your pocket or fit inside a thimble.
Some of us have set up voice controlled home automation. Or more commonly home automation without voice control. It's not especially exotic technology. It is relatively affordable, but was but a dream in the 1960's. And remotes? They're everywhere.
On demand and streaming video? TiVos? Stream Netflix to your phone? eBooks?
The list goes on. It's not all things realized or envisioned in Star Trek. But the things we commonly have today, like a Raspberry Pi for $35 are things that were totally science fiction back in the 1960's, and some of it even in the 1980's. Even when ST:TNG was made, a $35 Raspberry Pi or an Android Phone or a 32 GB micro-SD card for $20 would have been much more than amazing.
When I was a kid, we had to use punched cards. And it was uphill both ways! Get off my lawn!
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I've read a few attempts at comparing star trek with real life technology and this is the most shallow information poor attempt I have ever seen.
When are we going to get a device that lets us live an entire life in 25 minutes? That's some cool tech.
Communicators: DUH! Motorola even named the first Flip-phone the "Star Tac" -- how did the author miss this OBVIOUS one?
Bluetooth headsets: See those chrome things coming out of everyone's ears on TOS?
3.5" Floppies: Pretty much the EXACT same form factor, and painted as brightly as the "rainbow assortment" of disks I used to buy a Staples. They were called Tapes in TOS, but they fed into a slot and appeared to work exactly the same way.
A Space Vehicle named Enterprise : ok, this one is reaching a bit since that Shuttle never went into space, and this is a case of life imitating art, but still.... it's worth noting.
iPads -- tablets: TNG had the PADD, which tied into the LCARS system. Even before then Kirk in TOS was seen holding some kind of electronic clipboard, although it was never really shown on camera as the tech didn't exist back then to even fake a tablet, but the idea was clearly getting there.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Check!
Portable, hand held, distributed computing as opposed to a single, central large ship's computer.
Wireless data communication. TNG had tablets, but they had to hand deliver their reports and even leave the tablet there.
Having instant access to a massive global computer network, wirelessly and at anytime and anywhere (reasonably speaking, for most people) is something that seems to have been missed by a lot of sci-fi, not just ST.
If we knew then what we know today, when Kirk called up to get the results of some ships scan or analysis, or the coordinates of some energy source, Scotty would have told him that he could bloody well look it up himself and Bones would say that famous line, "Damn it, Jim. I'm a Doctor, not your secretary."
Here's what amount to basically the entire article in far fewer words:
The first time I ever saw a digital (albeit a mechanical one) was on star trek.
No, they weren't. If by "talking" you mean assembling sounds that sound like speech, well, just how ignorant of the history of technology are you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis
Plenty of computerized speech tech by the late '60s.
If by "talking" you mean sentient AI, well, we still don't have that. Speech recognition? Not in any practical sense. It's just algorithms, not some sort of emergent property that actually "recognizes" speech.
Look, we're not going to get the physical tech of Star Trek, it's just sci-fi daydreams. There is no actual physics basis for the materials and energy sources. Yes antimatter. Fine. Now go find some, and store it, and do what they pretend to do on Star Trek. Not gonna happen, eh? Because it's a fairy tale.
But processing information, that we're getting good at. It doesn't require a lot of energy or magical materials.
Eye am musing goggles on lines peach wreck cog ignition soft wear.
see subject
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Outside of computing, not much Star Trek technology works. Antigravity? We have no clue. Fusion or better power sources? Still struggling. Transporter? No clue.
In the 1960s, the previous 50 years had led to enormous gains at the high-power end of engineering. Aviation had gone from the Wright Brothers to the Saturn V. Power generation had gone from local steam plants to mammoth dams and nuclear reactors. Ships had gone from coal to nuclear power. The 1964 World's Fair had a General Electric nuclear fusion exhibit with actual brief bursts of fusion. It was generally expected that such progress would continue in the next 50 years.
It didn't.
can't wait till you can actually do all that , the boneheads at hollystupid gonna take a serious flipppin bird
"I teleported home one night with Ron and Sid and Meg,
Ron stole Meggie's heart away, and I got Sidney's leg."
The Language abilities of Star Trek computers are extremely advanced compared to today's latest and greatest. Of course most of the things in this article are only inklings, on their way but nowhere near what Star Trek showed. But I find many people are fooled by the usefulness of Siri et al. into thinking that real language processing and synthesis is only N years away. Talking with Siri is like using an old text adventure game: you put in words, it filters those and matches them to a small set of commands, and if that fails it returns an error dressed up as a polite English phrase. The biggest advancement is speech recognition and speech synthesis, which are indeed very good at this point. But this only deals with the physical forms of words at the level of phonetics. All higher linguistic levels (phonology, morphophonology, morphology, morpho-syntax, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) are woefully closed off to the electronic brains we use today. With our current language technologies, we are only about half a step above text.
Esoteric reference.
Desktop speech recognition is really advancing along with cell phone speech recognition. I can control most of my PC by voice using tazti speech recognition software. And it's fun too. "Computer.. open Slashdot"