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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.
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?
I think you're looking for "How William Shatner Changed the World", hosted by William Shatner.
No, really, I think that's it.
If by "pipe dream" you mean computers were synthesizing speech five years before Star Trek came out, then sure.
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
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.
Teleportation remains elusive
That's really neither here nor there
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.
Once we are able to?
We would need to record the quantum state (spin, polarization, momentum, position) of every particle of matter in the thing being 'teleported' and then reproduce that state at the other end.
As we all know from Quantum Mechanics 101, it is impossible to to measure the state of a particle without affecting it (the Uncertainty principle).
Teleportation experiments to date have involved the reproduction of state between a particle pair (quantum entanglement). This is an impressive feat but the amount of information need to convey the particle states of say, a bacterium, and encode and transmit it to some notional receiver would take more time than the universe has existed for.
Indeed.
When I was a kid I used to fantasize about a future where the would be teleportation booths on every street corner.
You'd walk in, pop some coins in the slot, dial your destination then whoooooooo.....
I live in the UK so the teleportation booths would be run by BT, Vodafone, O2 or possibly Virgin. I imagine that you could get an off-peak tariff to be able to teleport anywhere in the world after 6pm.
Trouble is, your head would arrive at the intended destination but your limbless and bloody torso would arrive somewhere in Cairo and your assorted arms and legs would be buffered indefinitely, only to ve lost for all time once they reboot their server.
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.
Well, one thing's for sure: build one and we'd know right away whether "souls" exist. Copying the state of running software by copying the hardware it's running on just seems wonky to me, though.
No we really wouldn't know whether "souls" exist, though. That's the terrifying thing about the teleporter idea.
Billy is terrified of stepping into the teleporter, as he realises that he will be killed, and only a perfect copy of him, with all his memories will be created at the other side, which is cold comfort to him; but all his friends and family emerge from teleporters saying "Really, I was scared too, it's perfectly safe. You have nothing to fear"- etc. Except in reality, they all died, and they are perfect clones with cloned memories that are doing the reassuring. This is the problem. If a teleporter actually kills the person that enters it, and they don't experience a continuity of consciousness with the copy that emerges, then no-one will ever know (even the person who entered) - as the only person it really made any difference to is dead. It would remain a philosophical question whether that were actually true and it's quite frightening to imagine how quickly that issue could be dismissed or not even considered by a majority of the population.
I heard one theoretical solution to transferring consciousness to a copy would be to replace parts of the persons body and brain very gradually, just as cells and tissues are replaced naturally during a person's life. That might only work to make a local copy though and again there is no way at all of proving whether it works or not (other than doing it to yourself, and even then you will only know if it does work - if it doesn't - you die).
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But once you do that part, there's a problem. Once you've gradually, and without risking causality, turned someone into software, he's going to want to do things like fax himself to mars to pilot a rover. And now we're back to sticky philosophy.