how star trek influence our technology

'Star Trek:' History & effect on space technology

Original Starship Enterprise Model at Air and Space Museum

Since viewers first heard the tagline, "… to boldly go where no man has gone before," "Star Trek" has represented the hope of what space — "the final frontier" — can mean for humanity in a few centuries. First airing in 1966, the show became a phenomenon, spawning spinoff TV series, movies, books and games, and influencing culture and technology.

The franchise mostly follows the adventures of crews on the USS Enterprise, although some iterations took detours on space stations or other ships. Humanity is just one of a vast number of alien species participating in a quasi-military organization called Starfleet, whose main goal is to explore the universe for scientific reasons. Starfleet is an arm of the United Federation of Planets, which has a strict rule about interfering with the development of more primitive species. This "prime directive" sounds similar to NASA's planetary protection protocols for worlds that may host microbial life.

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General franchise history and overview

"Star Trek" was created by Gene Roddenberry, a WWII veteran pilot who began writing freelance scripts while working as a police officer in Los Angeles, according to "Star Trek" fan site Memory Alpha . Famously, NBC executives did not like the first pilot. They reportedly said the show had too little action and was "too cerebral" for viewers; however, they offered the chance for a second pilot. Except for Spock (Leonard Nimoy), an alien from the planet Vulcan, the cast was completely switched out for a different crew, led by Capt. James T. Kirk (William Shatner).

"Star Trek" first aired in 1966. The series followed the adventures of the USS Enterprise on a five-year mission to "explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." Many of the episodes were allegories about issues embroiling society in the 1960s, such as race, war and peace, and the generation gap. However, the show was cancelled after only three years into the mission due to ratings concerns, according to Memory Alpha . Syndicated reruns of the series began soon after, though, and kept the series alive in the minds of fans. In fact, thousands of fans attended the first "Star Trek" convention in 1972.

The series was briefly revived as an animated series in 1973-74, and Roddenberry began developing a new series, "Star Trek: Phase II," in 1975. Those plans were changed after the success of "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Instead, the plan was expanded and became "Star Trek: The Motion Picture." Overall, the original series (or "TOS") spawned six motion pictures between 1979 and 1991 (plus a partial appearance by some members of the original crew in a 1994 film).

The franchise's newfound success eventually led to the creation of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (1987-1994), which was set many years after the original series, with a new USS Enterprise helmed by Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart). This generation of "Star Trek" tackled issues such as racism, gender and torture, according to Memory Alpha , and remains one of the most popularly cited series to this day. "TNG" also eventually moved into theaters, with four films between 1994 and 2002.

Roddenberry died in 1991. While "TNG" was still on the air, a different series, "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" (1993-1999), premiered. The show followed the exploits of a crew on a space station, rather than the traditional starship. In recent years, the show has been hailed for its then-innovative approach to cable television ; the plots of individual episodes were closely linked to each other, making it ideal for today's binge-viewing generations.

Other series followed and continue to this day. "Star Trek: Voyager" (1995-2001) followed the exploits of a crew that was stranded light-years from home, led by the franchise's first main female captain, Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew). "Enterprise" (2001-2005) was a prequel to the events of The Original Series, with Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) helming the first warp-drive-capable Enterprise. Then in 2017, "Star Trek Discovery" debuted on CBS All Access, garnering mostly positive attention for its alternate universe plots, its use of swear words and its approach to same-sex relationships. The series was renewed for a second season, which will drop in 2019. CBS is also considering making as many as four new "Star Trek" series for limited or extended runs, multiple reports said in mid-2018 .

And "Star Trek" continues on the big screen, too, courtesy of Paramount. The Original Series came back to Hollywood with a reboot of the original characters of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and the rest of the original crew. The 2009 film ("Star Trek") was a hit and has so far spawned three other films — "Star Trek: Into Darkness" (2013), "Star Trek Beyond" (2016) and an untitled film in the works for 2019.

"Star Trek" also has generated a diverse fan base, some of whom create limited episode productions for themselves. Conventions continue to attract thousands of fans who are eager to rub elbows with actors, writers and other people who worked on the various series and movies. The franchise celebrated its 50 th anniversary in 2016 and continues to live long and prosper.

Franchise impact on real-life space exploration

Perhaps the most famous example of the series' influence on real life took place in the 1970s. The United States was preparing to run test flights of the space shuttle program using a prototype vehicle called Constitution. In response, thousands of "Star Trek" fans staged a write-in campaign to the White House and NASA asking for the prototype shuttle to be named Enterprise. When Enterprise was indeed unveiled in 1976, most of the main cast of TOS was on hand. Enterprise was not designed to fly in space, however.

Decades later, space tourism company Virgin Galactic named one of its planned spacecraft VSS Enterprise, after the television show. The spacecraft, built in 2004, did several in-atmosphere tests in preparation for eventually bringing it and other prototypes into space. VSS Enterprise, however, was destroyed in 2014 during a crash that killed one pilot and severely injured another . The National Transport Safety Board later determined a unique "feathering" system — intended to slow down the spacecraft as it was in the upper atmosphere — deployed early and was the leading cause of the crash.

A few astronauts have appeared on "Star Trek" over the years, according to fan site Memory Alpha. Mae Jemison , the first African-American woman to fly in space, was on the 1993 sixth season episode of TNG's "Second Chances." She was visited on the set by Nichelle Nichols. While in space during STS-47, Jemison reportedly began shifts with Mission Control by quoting Uhura's famous line: "Hailing frequencies are open." Astronauts Mike Fincke and Terry Virts appeared on the series finale of "Enterprise" in 2005 . They portrayed 22nd-century engineers who performed maintenance in the Enterprise's engine room.

While no "Star Trek" regular actor has flown in space (yet), several of them have recorded supportive messages for NASA, such as Nichols and Wil Wheaton (TNG's Wesley Crusher). Nichols not only did a video message, but also f lew on NASA's SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) aircraft in 2015.

"Star Trek" actors have also bantered with real astronauts on Twitter, most notably early in Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield's International Space Station mission in 2012-13 when he spoke with Shatner, Nimoy, Wheaton and George Takei . (Shatner asked: "Are you tweeting from space?" to which Hadfield replied, "Yes, Standard Orbit, Captain. And we're detecting signs of life from the surface.")

After Nimoy died in February 2015, NASA sent out a tweet honoring the actor: "RIP Leonard Nimoy. So many of us at NASA were inspired by Star Trek. Boldly go …" Virts took a picture of the Vulcan hand sign in orbit ; the picture he beamed back to Earth coincidentally showed his hand over Boston, Nimoy's birthplace. But Virts said he didn't mean to do it, as when he heard the news about Nimoy's death he had only a few minutes to execute his idea before going to a pressing task on station.

Star Trek tech

Several early "Star Trek" technologies have also made their way into our everyday lives. "Communicators" are now cell phones, which connect to each other via satellite. Tricorders, which were used to gather medical information, are now available as MRIs — some of which are being developed for space. (In 2017, a medical "tricorder" received $2.6 million in prize money from the X Prize Foundation .) Crewmembers can also be seen using tablet computers on TNG, many years before they became available commercially.

However, human teleportation still eludes us, as does faster-than-light warp drive. In 2015, NASA downplayed several media reports that a "faster-than-light" propulsion system they were developing was on the verge of a breakthrough. "NASA is not working on 'warp drive' technology," officials said, adding that the research was "a small effort that has not yet shown any tangible results." Teleportation, meanwhile, has only been achieved on the quantum scale across a few miles.

List of film and TV appearances

Numerous fan-made productions and series spinoffs (such as books and comic books) have been produced; however, this list represents the "official" films and television series that have been released, according to memory Alpha. There are plans to release a fourth in the "rebooted" series of "Star Trek" films in 2019.

Television series

Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-1969)
Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-1974)
Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994)
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999)
Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001)
Enterprise (2001-2005)
Star Trek Discovery (2017-)
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
Star Trek: The Search for Spock (1984)
Star Trek: The Voyage Home (1986)
Star Trek: The Final Frontier (1989)
Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
Star Trek: Generations (1994)
Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)
Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
Star Trek (2009)
Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013)
Star Trek Beyond (2016)
Untitled Star Trek film (2019)

Additional resources

NASA: The Science of Star Trek
Memory Alpha: Star Trek Reference Website

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Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years before joining full-time. Elizabeth's reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House and Office of the Vice-President of the United States, an exclusive conversation with aspiring space tourist (and NSYNC bassist) Lance Bass, speaking several times with the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, " Why Am I Taller ?", is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, a Bachelor of Journalism from Canada's Carleton University and a Bachelor of History from Canada's Athabasca University. Elizabeth is also a post-secondary instructor in communications and science at several institutions since 2015; her experience includes developing and teaching an astronomy course at Canada's Algonquin College (with Indigenous content as well) to more than 1,000 students since 2020. Elizabeth first got interested in space after watching the movie Apollo 13 in 1996, and still wants to be an astronaut someday. Mastodon: https://qoto.org/@howellspace

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10 'Star Trek' Technologies That Actually Came True

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"Beam us up." It's one of the most iconic lines in television history. It's something often heard in the hit science fiction television series "Star Trek" and all of the television shows and movies that followed.

The transporter essentially dematerialized a human body at one point only to rematerialize it in the transporter bay on the ship. Somehow, it broke down atoms and molecules within the body -- scattered them through the vacuum of space without losing a single one from point A to point B, then voila, that person re-emerged out of thin air. Sounds pretty cool, though impossible, right? But what if there was such a device?

The truth is, you can forget about a transporter. No one has been able to realize such a concept. But that doesn't mean some of the ideas that seemed far-fetched when the show debuted in 1966 haven't become a reality. In this article, we feature the top 10 technologies from Star Trek that actually did come to fruition, listed in no particular order. Some of them may surprise you.

Transparent Aluminum (Armor)
Communicators
Tractor Beams
Universal Translator
Geordi's VISOR
Torpedo Coffins
Telepresence

10: Transparent Aluminum (Armor)

The fourth installment of the original "Star Trek" movies is perhaps the most endearing to fans. The crew returns to modern-day Earth. Kirk, Spock and the rest of the gang ditch a Klingon Bird of Prey spacecraft in the San Francisco Bay after narrowly missing the Golden Gate Bridge while flying blind in a storm. You may remember the scene -- but how many of you remember Scotty introducing transparent aluminum for the first time?

In the flick, Scotty traded the formula matrix for transparent aluminum -- a huge engineering advancement -- for sheets of plexiglass in order to build a tank to transport the two humpback whales (George and Gracie) to the Earth of their time. The claim was that you'd be able to replace six-inch (14-centimeter) thick Plexiglas with one-inch (2.5-centimeter) thick see-through aluminum.

It may sound impossible, but there is such a thing as transparent aluminum armor or aluminum oxynitride (ALON) as it's more commonly known. ALON is a ceramic material that starts out as a powder before heat and pressure turn it into a crystalline form similar to glass. Once in the crystalline form, the material is strong enough to withstand bullets. Polishing the molded ALON strengthens the material even more. The Air Force has tested the material in hopes of replacing windows and canopies in its aircraft. Transparent aluminum armor is lighter and stronger than bulletproof glass . Less weight, stronger material -- what's not to like?

9: Communicators

Whenever Captain Kirk left the safe confines of the Enterprise, he did so knowing it could be the last time he saw his ship. Danger was never far away. And when in distress and in need of help in a pinch, he could always count on Bones to come up with a miracle cure, Scotty to beam him up or Spock to give him some vital scientific information. He'd just whip out his communicator and place a call.

Fast-forward 30 years and wouldn't you know it, it seems like everyone carries a communicator. We just know them as cell phones . Actually, the communicators in "Star Trek" were more like the push-to-talk, person-to-person devices first made popular by Nextel in the mid to late '90s. The "Star Trek" communicator had a flip antenna that when opened, activated the device. The original flip cell phones are perhaps distant cousins. Whatever the case, the creators of "Star Trek" were on to something because you'd be hard-pressed to find many people without a cell phone these days.

In later incarnations of the "Star Trek" franchise, the communicators evolved to being housed in the Starfleet logo on the crewman's chest. With the tap of a finger, communication between crewmembers became even easier. Vocera Communications has a similar product that can link people on the same network inside a designated area like an office or a building by using the included software over a wireless LAN. The B2000 communication badge weighs less than two ounces and can be worn on the lapel of a coat or shirt and allows clear two-way communication. It's even designed to inhibit the growth of bacteria so it's suitable for doctors [source: Vocera ].

8: Hypospray

The creative team behind "Star Trek" found spiffy ways to spice up some activities we endure on a day-to-day basis. Take medical treatment, for example: Not many people enjoy getting a flu shot, and in "Star Trek," inoculating patients was one of Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy's primary duties. It seemed not an episode went by that Bones wasn't giving someone a shot of some sort of space vaccine . But what was more fascinating was the contraption he used.

Hypospray is a form of hypodermic injection of medication. A hypospray injection is forced under the skin (a subcutaneous injection) with high air pressure. The air pressure shoots the liquid vaccine deep enough into the skin that no needle is required. The real-world application is known as a jet injector .

Jet injectors have been in use for many years. In fact, the technology predates "Star Trek." Jet injectors were originally designed to be used in mass vaccinations. Jet injecting is safer (no needles to pass along infectious disease) and faster in administering vaccines. Similar in appearance to an automotive paint gun, jet injection systems can use a larger container for the vaccine, thus allowing medical personnel to inoculate more people quicker.

7: Tractor Beams

When NASA needs to make repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope, astronauts have to be specially trained to get out of the Space Shuttle for extravehicular activity. They also have to learn how to work within the confines of their space suits, with thick gloves on. Wouldn't it be nice to just bring the telescope inside, where repairs wouldn't be so challenging and dangerous?

In science fiction, space ships including the Starship Enterprise snatch each other up using tractor beams. In some cases, large vessels have a tractor beam strong enough to prevent smaller vessels from escaping the gravitational force. So is this science even plausible?

Yes and no. Optical tweezers are as close as you're going to get to a legitimate tractor beam on current-day Earth. Scientists have harnessed small lasers into beams capable of manipulating molecules and moving them with precision. Optical tweezers use a focused laser to trap and suspend microscopic particles in an optical trap. Scientists can use optical tweezers to trap and remove bacteria and sort cells. Optical tweezers are used primarily in studying the physical properties of DNA. While the beams used in optical tweezers aren't strong enough to dock the space shuttle to the International Space Station, it's a start in that direction.

"Set phasers to stun" -- another oft-heard command given to the Enterprise crew. The crew often relied on the stun setting of their fictitious weapon of choice known as a phaser. Armed with a phaser, Kirk and his colleagues had the ability to kill or more desirably, stun their adversaries and render them incapacitated.

Actually, stun guns have been around for some time. In fact, electricity has been used for punishment and to control livestock as far back as the 1880s. But it wasn't until 1969 when a guy named Jack Cover invented the first Taser that the stun gun was most realized. The Taser fails to kill like the phaser did, yet, it packs enough of an electrical punch to render its victim disorientated, if not completely incapacitated.

Unlike the phaser, the Taser and other stun guns must come in physical contact with the target in order to have any effect. Tasers take care of this by projecting two electrodes, connected by wires, which attach to the target's skin. Once in contact, the handheld unit transfers electricity to the target, thus having the stun effect. Stun guns with stationary electrical contact probes are somewhat less effective because while they have a similar effect on the target, you have to be much closer (within arm's length) in order to zap your target.

Something more along the lines of the phaser may be in development. Applied Energetic has developed Laser Guided Energy and Laser Induced Plasma Energy technologies that are said to transmit high-voltage bursts of energy to a target [source: Applied Energetics ]. In other words, these pulses of energy would stun the target and limit collateral damage. So a true phaser may soon be a reality.

5: Universal Translator

Imagine if no matter what country you visited, no matter what the culture, you could understand everything the indigenous people were saying. It sure would make traveling easier. Take that thought to another level like say, if you were planet hopping like the crew onboard the Enterprise. Fortunately for Captain Kirk and his peers, they had a universal translator .

The characters in "Star Trek" relied on a small device that when spoken into, would translate the words into English. Guess what? The technology exists for us in the real world. There are devices that let you speak phrases in English and it will spit back to you the same rhetoric in a specified language. The only problem is, these devices only work for certain predetermined languages.

A true universal translator like the one on the show may not be a reality, but the technology is available. Voice recognition has advanced considerably since its inception. But computers have yet to be able to learn languages. Computers would be able to theoretically gather the information much faster than a human brain, but a software program is dependent on actual data. Someone has to take the time and expense to put it together and make it available, which is probably why these systems focus on more popular languages.

4: Geordi's VISOR

When "Star Trek: The Next Generation" thrust the love of everything "Star Trek" back into popular culture, the quirky Mr. Spock and crass Bones McCoy and others were supplanted by a new cast. One of the most popular characters on the new show was engineer Geordi LaForge.

What made Geordi unique, perhaps even mysterious, was his funky eyewear. Geordi was blind, but after a surgical operation and aided through the use of a device called VISOR (Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement), Geordi could see throughout the electromagnetic spectrum. Though it may sound far-fetched, in reality, similar technology exists that may someday bring sight back to the blind.

In 2005, a team of scientists from Stanford University successfully implanted a small chip behind the retina of blind rats that enabled them to pass a vision recognition test. The science behind the implants, or bionic eyes as they're commonly referred to, works much the way Geordi's VISOR did. The patient receives the implants behind the retina, then wears a pair of glasses fitted with a video camera. Light enters the camera and is processed through a small wireless computer, which then broadcasts it as infrared LED images on the inside of the glasses. Those images are reflected back into the retina chips to stimulate photodiodes. The photodiodes replicate the lost retinal cells then change light into electrical signals which in turn send nerve pulses to the brain.

What it all means is that in theory, a person with 20/400 sight (blind), due to the loss of retinal cells from retinitis pigmentosa, can obtain 20/80 sight. It's not good enough to pass the driving test (normal vision is considered 20/20) but it's good enough to read billboards and go about your day without the aid of a seeing-eye dog.

3: Torpedo Coffins

In the second installment of the "Star Trek" movie franchise, the beloved Mr. Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, died after saving the Starship Enterprise from certain disaster. The movie culminated with the crew firing Spock's corpse out of the torpedo bay in a coffin shaped like one of the ship's weapons, the photon torpedo .

Believe it or not, you too could be laid to eternal rest in your own Federation-approved photon torpedo casket. OK, it may not technically be Federation-approved since there is no such thing as the United Federation of Planets (UFP) but the coffins are, in fact, very real.

Designed by Eternal Image, the "Star Trek" coffin was slated to be available early 2009, but is still not for sale as of this writing. The price is yet to be determined. If the fan would prefer to be cremated , the company also plans to offer a "Star Trek" urn as well.

2: Telepresence

In 1966, the idea of interacting with each other while separated by the void of space seemed as far fetched as, well the idea of being in space. That's precisely what the idea of telepresence is.

Telepresence is more than just video conferencing . The visual aspect is important and immersion is vital. In other words, the more convincing the illusion of telepresence, the more you feel like you're there.

In 2008, AT&T teamed up with Cisco in delivering the industry's first in-depth telepresence experience. The key to Cisco's TelePresence is the combination of audio, video and ambient lighting working together. These telepresence kits are designed to mirror surroundings and mimic sounds so that users on each side of the video conference will feel as though the images on the screen are in the same room with them. For instance, the people in boardroom A will see the people on the screen in boardroom B as though they are sitting across the table from them. The ambient lighting and room features are constructed to mirror each other. Sure, these telepresence kits are much more advanced than anything drummed up on "Star Trek," but perhaps that's because the show sparked our imagination so many years ago.

1: Tricorders

How many of you remember that instrument Mr. Spock used to always carry over his shoulder, especially when the crew (usually consisting of only Spock and Captain Kirk) first surveyed a new planet? That was a tricorder.

One of the more useful instruments available to "Star Trek" personnel, variations of the tricorder (medical, engineering or scientific) were used to measure everything from oxygen levels to detecting diseases. Often times the tricorder gave an initial analysis of the new environment. So, what's the real-world tie-in? NASA employs a handheld device called LOCAD, which measures for unwanted microorganisms such as E. coli, fungi and salmonella onboard the International Space Station [source: Coulter ]. Beyond that, two handheld medical devices may soon help doctors examine blood flow and check for cancer, diabetes or bacterial infection.

Scientists at Loughborough University in England use photoplethysmography technology in a handheld device that can monitor the functions of the heart. Meanwhile, researchers at Harvard Medical School have developed a small device that utilizes similar technology found in MRI machines that non-invasively inspect the body. Using nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, this device would be sensitive enough to measure samples of as few as 10 possible infectious bacteria. This kind of sensitivity (800 times more sensitive than sensing equipment currently used in medical labs) could revolutionize the way doctors diagnose disease [source: Mick ].

Lots More Information

The Enduring Lessons of “Star Trek”

By Manu Saadia

A scene from the third season of “Star Trek.”

On September 8, 1966, at 8:30 P.M. , the starship Enterprise visited Planet M-113, an arid and forlorn world far from Earth. It was the sort of mission that would become characteristic of “Star Trek”: the ship’s doctor, Leonard (Bones) McCoy, was sent to perform a medical examination of two archeologists, only to discover that one of them—Bones’s former paramour—had been replaced by a shape-shifting alien vampire that drew sustenance from the salts in human bodies. The plot, a forgettable procedural mystery with a schmear of horror, distilled the essence of the new show. On one side was M-113, which looked plucked right off a Western soundstage—glowing red skies, chaparral landscape, vaguely Meso-American ruins. Its resident alien was the last of its kind, a relic; Captain Kirk compared it to the buffalo that once roamed the Great Plains. On the other side was the Enterprise, gliding ethereally above the planet. Scores of uniformed crew members strode along its expansive and brightly lit corridors. Save for the naval ranks and insignias (captain, commander, ensign), it could have been a research laboratory or a college campus in space. If the desolate past was earthbound, the civilized future was in orbit.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of science fiction. The first uses the trappings of the future to explore the present, suggesting to its audience that the existence of starships, aliens, and (to stray into that other sci-fi franchise) lightsabres doesn’t meaningfully change the experience of the human condition. The second uses the same sorts of artifice for the opposite purpose—to imagine foreign, even utopian, futures. The original “Star Trek” series was undoubtedly of the first kind. The present saturated it. For a show that purported to “boldly go where no man has gone before,” it was remarkably at home in the familiar, if turbulent, world of the nineteen-sixties. Many of the show’s stories appeared lifted from the headlines. The episode “Balance of Terror,” for instance, meditated on the futility of the Cold War. “A Private Little War” was an unsubtle dig at America’s involvement in Vietnam. “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” offered a clumsy dramatization of slavery and racial discrimination. (That week, the aliens were painted half-white and half-black.) Indeed, the show’s only unfamiliar core character was the enigmatic science officer and second-in-command, Spock, whose devotion to logic—inherited, along with his pointy ears, from his Vulcan father—made him seem truly alien. Spock’s inner struggle embodied the conflict at the heart of the series. It pitted unchecked, anarchical emotion against stoic rationality, atavism against civilization, present against future.

Tellingly, the original series was at its best when its cast engaged in good, old-fashioned time travel. “The City on the Edge of Forever,” penned by Harlan Ellison, threw the dynamic trio of Kirk, Bones, and Spock into nineteen-thirties New York. They were familiar characters dropped into a familiar setting, tasked with a familiar, if daunting, mission: save the world. (By a series of unlucky coincidences, their arrival in New York had altered the future, leading to Nazi Germany winning the Second World War. This had to be corrected.) In the same vein, “The Voyage Home,” the riotous feature film from 1986, saw the Enterprise crew rescue humpback whales from twentieth-century San Francisco and spirit them back to the twenty-third century. The conceit of fictional future humans judging their forebears’ foibles turned the movie into a space-age “Gulliver’s Travels.” There were no orbital shootouts or alien arch-villains, just the Lilliputians’ comical incompetence, shortsightedness, and occasional flashes of nobility. The series’ famous opening invocation—“Space, the final frontier”—could sometimes seem contrived, since present-day humanity was its favorite quarry.

It is hard to overstate how much of a departure the “Star Trek” franchise’s eighties-and-nineties-straddling incarnation, “The Next Generation,” was from the original series. It retained much of the nomenclature and established codes (the inscrutable techno-scientific babble, the ship’s name, the naval ranks, the canonical alien species) but swung almost entirely toward the second, more cerebral form of science fiction. It had no anchor in the present, nor did it genuflect before America’s frontier myths. “The Next Generation” was wholesale utopia, a thought experiment on how humans would behave under terminally improved material circumstances. Civilization, and the future, had won.

And what a future! At the end of the show’s first season, the new captain, Jean-Luc Picard, laid bare his world’s parameters. In “The Neutral Zone,” a reverse-time-travel episode, cryogenically preserved twentieth-century humans awake on the Enterprise. One of them, a take-charge Wall Street tycoon, is particularly eager to reclaim his stock portfolio and his status as master of the universe. “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things,” Picard tells him—and us, the audience—sternly. “We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.”

Picard and his crew did so with the help of an extraordinary machine, the replicator. It is nothing more than a background prop, the unassuming gadget that dispenses the captain’s favorite drink (“Tea, Earl Grey, hot”). Yet, unlike the show’s other striking technologies—the virtual-reality holodecks and the faster-than-light warp engines—the replicator has fundamentally changed the moral calculus of being human. It stands as a metaphor for the distant endpoint of the Industrial Revolution. You simply ask for something, anything (food, clothing, medicine, instruments), and it automatically produces it, on the spot, with a whizzing special effect. With such a tool, what is the benefit of owning objects or accumulating wealth? What becomes of life’s meaning when machines have abolished the necessity to work? To its own weighty interrogations, “The Next Generation” offered a simple yet powerful answer: humans, once unburdened from material need, would be truly free to devote themselves to higher pursuits, like knowledge, justice, and mutual understanding.

The drawback of such a utopian premise was that it did away with most of the interpersonal conflicts that are the bread and butter of episodic television dramas, including the original series. Picard and his crew were all human carbon copies of Spock—even-keeled, rational, and almost impossibly ethical. (Spock himself says so of Picard in “Unification,” the one “Next Generation” episode in which he appears.) That left little room for identification. You could aspire to be more like Picard, the very model of compassion and culture, but you could never truly understand his moral universe. He was nothing like us twenty-first-century humans. He was too alien.

Even accounting for the inevitable ups and downs of a seven-year run, “The Next Generation” was unique in its breadth and quality. Relieved from the conventions of scripted television by an outlandish premise, it could grapple with highly abstract topics. The best among the hundred and seventy-eight episodes—and there are many—are rigorous, self-contained philosophical treatises. You need only watch “The Measure of a Man” to be persuaded of the show’s ambition. In it, Data, the android and valiant lieutenant commander, fights an eager scientist who wants to study him—in other words, take him apart. Can a machine endowed with sentience be considered a living being? Can it enjoy the rights and protections afforded to humans? Can it be a citizen? Such musings are far from idle, and may turn into practical concerns much sooner than the twenty-fourth century.

In “Darmok,” Picard must attempt to communicate with a species whose language relies on allegory rather than grammar, and is thus unintelligible to the show’s other great behind-the-scenes technology, the universal translator. Rather than speaking of “failure,” for instance, the aliens say, “Shaka, when the walls fell,” apparently alluding to some tragic hero. The episode’s dialogue becomes disorienting, almost Beckettian in its absurdity, but after much wrangling and misunderstanding Picard succeeds in establishing a fleeting bond. He does this by recounting the epic of Gilgamesh to his alien counterpart. The oldest recorded human story, a tale of loss and brotherly love, serves as a bridge between two otherwise irreconcilable cultures. Whenever it could, “The Next Generation” eschewed the brawling and braggadocio of the original series. Both shows were deeply committed to the same humanistic values of reason and tolerance, but the more evolved humans of “The Next Generation” practiced what they preached.

“Star Trek: The Next Generation” has precious little to tell us about our present selves. Or, rather, it tells us who we are not, and who we might become someday. This is not the type of science fiction that we are accustomed to consuming, or that TV and film producers are accustomed to making. To wit, if the news is any indication, the upcoming “Star Trek” television reboot, “Discovery,” goes back to the original formula. It is set in the same time period as the nineteen-sixties series. Like one of the many programmed “Star Wars” prequels (starting with “Rogue One,” this December), it will dredge the recesses of the “Star Trek” universe for fun and profit. There will be no replicators, and certainly no utopia. The protagonists will be closer to us—perhaps more enlightened, but still beholden to darker impulses. And so, on the cusp of its golden years, “Star Trek” swings back toward the present and the familiar. Live long and prosper, indeed.

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By Richard Brody

By Alan Burdick

By Amanda Petrusich

It’s a wonderful world — and universe — out there.

Come explore with us!

Science News Explores

Star trek technology becomes more science than fiction.

New devices are catching up to the tech found in the long-running sci-fi series

The TV show Star Trek brought together a diverse crew to explore outer space. It also inspired generations of scientists.

I’m a doctor — and an inventor

Basil Harris is an emergency room doctor in Philadelphia, Pa., who grew up watching Star Trek . The show was notable not just for its gadgets, he says. He also liked how it depicted people working together to solve problems. They didn’t always get along. McCoy, for example, was a cranky physician who often quarreled with crew members. But he was part of the team. If one crew member was captured or endangered, the rest collaborated on a rescue.

“They had a nice harmony,” Harris says. “It was an optimistic view of the future. How could you not like it?”

As a child, he could relate. He enjoyed working with his siblings on their own inventions. They created gadgets using whatever they could find to make it so. They once built a cotton candy machine using parts from a lawn mower and the largest pot from their mother’s cupboard. It worked, he says, but the cotton candy wasn’t great.

Much to the horror of his parents, “We were always taking things apart and putting them together in different ways,” he recalls. They considered it mischief. But “we were trying to create something new.”

As an adult, Harris is tinkering with his siblings again. But they’re not making cotton candy. They’re building a tricorder like the one McCoy used to diagnose illnesses on Star Trek. They began the project after Harris learned about the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize. This contest will award $10 million to the team that builds the best tricorder. (It is sponsored by Qualcomm, a telecommunications company.)

Harris convinced his brothers to help him enter. “I told them, ‘It can’t be that hard! We’ll bang it out in a couple weekends.’” So far, they’ve now been working on it for three years. And the team has expanded beyond Harris and his brothers. His other siblings and three children help out, too. They have installed circuit boards in the devices and tested the plastic cases.

More than 300 teams entered the Star Trek- inspired XPrize competition. The field was narrowed down in 2014 to seven finalists, including Harris’ team. “We never thought we’d get this far,” he says. The final winner will be announced in early 2017.

To win, a team’s device must be capable of collecting data on a patient’s health. Those data include measurements such as blood pressure, temperature and breathing rate. The device has to accurately diagnose 12 diseases or health conditions. These include diabetes, pneumonia and urinary tract infections. It also must be able to tell if a patient has none of those conditions. And it has to weigh no more than 2.3 kilograms (5 pounds).

Harris isn’t only excited because of his appreciation for Star Trek — or even the possibility of a $10 million prize . As a physician in the emergency room, he often sees patients who would have benefited from having troublesome symptoms identified early. He says a tricorder may help future patients in big ways by doing just that.

It might allow patients to immediately learn what’s wrong with their health. In fact, he notes, “Someone could use this in their home to come up with answers before they go to the doctor.” And that might help them to “live long and prosper,” as Star Trek ’s Spock was known to say.

Don’t leave spacedock without one

The tricorder may be on the horizon, but another Star Trek -inspired device is already here — the tractor beam. Well sort of, anyway. It’s just smaller than what appeared on the show. Much, much smaller.

The tractor beam first showed up in an episode on the first season of Star Trek . The crew had just discovered an old, quiet ship floating in space. When they detected life aboard it, they decided to investigate. To hold the other ship in place, they used a tractor beam. In another episode that season, an alien named Balok wanted to destroy the Enterprise. When the crew first encountered Balok’s ship, they couldn’t seem to get away.

“Tractor beam, Captain,” Spock explained to Captain Kirk. “Something’s grabbed us, hard.”

Balok had used a tractor beam to trap the ship. Eventually, the Enterprise’s engines proved powerful enough to break out, and the crew survived to have another adventure.

Those tractor beams on Star Trek were streams of particles called gravitons. As their name suggested, these particles used gravity to pull or trap a ship. In the real world, scientists have never observed or measured gravitons. But tractor beams do exist. They’re not quite like the ones on Star Trek . And they don’t use gravity. Instead, they use light. Most importantly, they can’t drag something as big as a spaceship.

Grier, at New York University, led the development of the first one. His team’s invention uses lasers — beams of light — to pull tiny plastic particles only about 400 nanometers in diameter. (That’s roughly one ten-thousandth of an inch, or the width of a large virus.)

In 2010, when his team first published a description of their device, Grier didn’t know what to call it.

“We didn’t want to call it a ‘tractor beam’ because that was too commercial,” he says. After all, he was doing serious science, not working in science fiction. “We tried everything we could think of without saying ‘tractor beam.’” Now, Grier embraces the term because that’s exactly what he’s built.

( Story continues below video )

Where tractor beams come from

The science behind his invention goes back more than 150 years. That’s when British physicist James Clerk Maxwell discovered that a beam of light pushes — very lightly — on the thing it hits. This force is called radiation pressure. The idea that light can nudge tiny particles is exciting to scientists. It means they can move miniscule objects around under a microscope, or in experiments, without having to physically touch them.

In 1986, Arthur Ashkin, a physicist at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., built on that idea. He showed how a focused laser beam could hold particles in place. Scientists call his invention an “optical tweezers.”

In the 1990s, Grier began running his own experiments with optical tweezers. By changing the shape of the beam of light, he was able to get it to pull, rather than push, particles.

Grier ran a lot of unsuccessful experiments. When he finally got the device to work, it moved a small plastic particle two micrometers upstream. (A micrometer, or micron, is one-millionth of a meter. Two micrometers is about one-tenth the diameter of the thinnest human hair.)

“We were pumped,” he says, even though “it went two microns in the wrong direction!” Since then, he’s been improving his methods. Now, he says, he can drag particles nearly a millimeter (0.04 inch). In theory, a scaled up tractor beam might one day draw some object to its source from up to about one kilometer (0.6 mile) away.

Grier’s technology may not drag spaceships. Still, it might prove useful in space. NASA is working with Grier to use his tractor beam technology in future missions. The tool might draw dust from a comet’s tail. The physicist sees his tractor beam as a tool that should be able to help scientists better study matter at the smallest scales.

“In the microscopic world, there are lots of secrets to be discovered,” he notes.

‘Set phasers to stun’

Grier’s beam uses lasers. So does another emerging technology that played an important role in Star Trek — laser weapons.

The first laser was created in 1960. That was six years before the first Star Trek episode appeared on televisions. Ever since, lasers have been a staple of science fiction — often used in ways beyond the reach of modern science. But science is at last catching up.

On Star Trek, characters used the lasers from handheld phasers to heat objects, stun assailants and kill enemies. The Enterprise also could fire powerful lasers to stop or destroy enemy ships.

Lasers are now almost ubiquitous — but usually not as weapons. They read data stored on a compact disc (CD) or digital video disc (DVD). Surgeons use lasers to perform precise operations, as on the eye or the spine. Lasers can even be used to remove tattoos. And millions of cat owners occupy their pets with tiny laser toys.

Some scientists, though, have been working to weaponize lasers, bringing Star Trek’ s vision closer to reality. One of those scientists is Rob Afzal, who develops laser weapons as part of Lockheed Martin’s Laser and Sensor Systems, near Seattle, Wash. This aeronautics company designs and builds new weapons for the U.S. military. The company has already built a laser defense system that can be used on land, in the air or on the sea.

Using precise, powerful lasers as weapons has long been a goal of the U.S. military. In March 2015, the company demonstrated a laser that could burn a hole through 5 centimeters (2 inches) of steel in a few seconds. That’s powerful enough to stop a truck or an incoming missile. But that’s only the beginning: The company is now developing a laser twice as powerful.

According to Lockheed calculations, the weapon system is precise enough to burst a beach ball perched on the Empire State Building — in New York City — using the beam from a laser on a bridge in San Francisco, Calif. The system uses light, lenses, mirrors and computer programs to aim and focus the beam.

Such a laser requires a lot of energy. Lockheed Martin’s system is so large it has to be mounted on the back of a truck. In order to develop handheld phasers like the ones used on Star Trek, scientists will have to figure out how to pack a lot of energy into a small space.

Afzal described the technology in a recent documentary called “Building Star Trek,” which was produced by the Smithsonian Channel. “It’s difficult to predict the future, but I would never bet against science,” he says in the film.

With Star Trek technology, resistance is futile

Not every idea on Star Trek is destined to become real. We may never teleport objects. People will never get the chance to ask the equivalent of Scotty to “beam me up.” And the speed of light is a universal speed limit, so it’s unlikely we’ll ever go any faster. But other once-fascinating gadgets have already become ordinary, such as communicators or universal translators (think smartphone). Others may join them in just a few years.

Grier says he hopes another idea from Star Trek catches on. It’s more about people than about the gadgets they use. Every character, he notes, seemed to know how their devices worked. And they knew how to fix them if they broke. In the real world, few people know how phones or laptops connect us to the world. They use technology without understanding.

“To most people, technology might as well be a miracle,” he says.

He wants that to change. Star Trek paints a future where people understand their devices. Grier hopes people learn about how their gadgets work in the real world, too. That could help them to better use those devices for good causes.

Scientists are already doing that, he notes. Yes, emerging technologies help scientists tease out the secrets of nature, says Grier. “You can develop a new way to see things,” he says. And making these futuristic-seeming tools, like tractor beams, is satisfying for a scientist. But this type of research is more than that. “You can have an influence on the real world, and make things better,” Grier says. And maybe bring a bit more of that amazing world of Star Trek into reality.

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The U.S.S. Enterprise explores the far corners of the universe in the television show Star Trek: The Next Generation . One engineer today thinks we could build an actual Enterprise in the next 20 or 30 years.

‘Star Trek’ Is Right About Almost Everything

The epic series—celebrating its 50th anniversary this year—bases its science fiction on scientific fact.

Resistance is futile.

For half a century now the Star Trek franchise has been winning new fans and inspiring real-world innovators. Over the course of 12 feature films (the 13th will be released next month) and six TV series—plus an ever-growing constellation of books, games, comics, magazines, and documentaries—it has boldly gone where no science fiction has gone before.

The secret to its success, says Andrew Fazekas , is its allegiance to science fact. Fazekas—a National Geographic writer and astronomy blogger known as the Night Sky Guy—is the author of a new book on the series’ reality-based astronomy and prescient technology. In Star Trek: The Official Guide to our Universe , he explains that unlike most sci-fi, the franchise has always rooted the innate human urge to explore in plausible science, providing “a hopeful pathway to a possible human future that’s not too distant.”

With Star Trek celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, National Geographic recently spoke with Fazekas about the real science and enduring appeal of the series.

You’re a science writer, amateur astronomer, and lifelong fan of Star Trek . This book, you say, represents a sort of Vulcan mind-meld of those passions. Tell me a bit about how and why it came together.

I’ve been an amateur astronomer—a backyard stargazer—since I was 10 years old. At the same time, I’ve always been a Star Trek fan. So I knew that I wanted to mix these two very different worlds together. But I wasn’t sure how.

Then I began to realize that in Star Trek , most of the astronomical objects and destinations have real-life counterparts. Watching the TV shows and movies, you hear names like Andromeda galaxy and Alpha Centauri —real things I’ve come across in my own travels across the night sky.

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I soon began to find many instances where I could reference the series in terms of an astronomical object. Like, if I would show someone a supernova through my telescope, I could quote the Star Trek episode in which it appeared. And I could say, “Remember in ‘All Our Yesterdays’ when the Enterprise had to rush away because the impending explosion of the star would destroy the planet?”

About 10 years ago, I began to make a casual list of all the astronomical objects that have appeared in Star Trek . And as I went through the episodes, I saw, again and again, that the writers were always talking about real-life stuff. They were always taking real science seriously.

book cover for Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe

Tell me about your methodology. I imagine it involved a lot of research and collaboration with scientists. How did you decide what to focus on and explicate?

Star Trek is a fire hose of information and trivia. It’s overwhelming. So I decided that I needed to focus on a few things. Coming from an astronomy-education background, I knew I needed to make it easy for the reader. To make it something that they’d be familiar with: a guidebook about the night sky.

So we’d start off with things in the solar system. Then we’d move on to planets outside the solar system—the exoplanets. Then I’d explain the stars—where they’re born, how they live, where they die. And finally I’d get to the grandest structures of the galaxy.

The cornerstone of this book is looking at the destinations and the true science of Star Trek . Scores of today’s scientists and engineers and physicists—as well as mathematicians, chemists, even astronauts—were inspired as children by Star Trek to pursue these fields professionally. The show captured their imaginations.

And that’s what’s so cool about Star Trek . I mean, I’m not dissing Star Wars —I like that too—but I find it to be much more fantasy-based. I liken Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings . Star Trek is more of a realistic vision.

What were the biggest surprises you encountered in the course of writing this book?

One thing is just how accurate the science really is, throughout all the different incarnations. The foundation that Star Trek is built on is scientifically sturdy. You can tell that the writers and producers took the time to get the science right.

They did that by involving real scientific consultants, whose professional opinions were incorporated into the plotlines, the filming of the scenes. And over the decades—as our technology has gotten better, as we’ve pushed the boundaries of exploration, as we’ve learned more about our universe—new knowledge has made its way into Star Trek plots and story lines.

Nowadays the canvas that all these adventures play out on is almost hyperreal. With the computer simulations we have these days, Hollywood has the ability to re-create any kind of object in space, based on whatever knowledge we have, and give us the ringside seats to the cosmos that all we space geeks wish we had.

In an episode of the original TV series, crew members find themselves encircled by a force field at the O.K. Corral. Since it first aired 50 years ago, Star Trek has relied heavily on input from actual scientists, including physicists, astrophysicists, mathematicians, and chemists.

For instance, let’s say the Enterprise is hiding out in a nebula. Well, as earthbound stargazers we’re never going to be able to see what it would be like. We have only an outside view of these beautiful, colorful star clusters. But Hollywood can now place us within that nebula. And it’s based on computer simulations that real scientists are using to understand what these clouds are, how they form, how they evolve. It’s amazing! It’s like you’re there.

Of course, there has to be artistic license taken. The whole idea of warp drive or teleportation —those were plot devices that were included by [ Star Trek creator] Gene Roddenberry . He came up with those devices 50 years ago, to move the storyline along. You can’t have your characters taking 300 or 400 years to get to one star system.

The technology in Star Trek has often proved prescient in terms of real-world innovations. Specifically, what are some of those things?

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that device that they called the PADD (Personal Access Display Device). It had no keypad; you just used your finger. Today we call it an iPad, or a tablet. Really eerie. The dream has come true! Life is imitating art.

Of course, it’s not a coincidence that an iPad and a smartphone and wrist-worn medical devices look like they do. They harken back to what we saw in Star Trek in 1966.

Then there’s voice recognition—talking to your device. It reminds me of a scene in Star Trek IV —the one with the whales—where Scotty goes to this engineering firm, and wants to talk to the computer. So he goes, “Hello, computer.” Then Bones says to him, “You’re supposed to use the mouse!” And Scotty says, “Oh, how quaint.” And then he speaks into the mouse.

Scores of today’s scientists and engineers and physicists—as well as mathematicians, chemists, even astronauts—were inspired as children by Star Trek to pursue these fields professionally. Andrew Fazekas , author, Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe

We’re already there. We can dictate. We have voice recognition. We can type a letter or an email without even touching a keyboard now.

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In the first Star Trek series, they had a quadriplegic character sitting in a big, burly machine. All you saw was his head. And he could communicate only by using this flashing light—two flashes for yes, one flash for no.

Look what we have now. Stephen Hawking is able to communicate through his computer. He can speak full sentences. He can write books! It’s not just a flashing light. So technology there has far surpassed Star Trek . And that’s supposed to be 300 years in the future! We’ve gone much farther, much faster than they envisioned back in 1966.

Conversely, which visions of the future haven’t come to pass? Are there any things—in terms of astronomy, technology, or general science—that Star Trek has really gotten wrong?

The biggie is warp drive. That may very well remain science fiction. It depends on which scientists you talk to. But right now there are scientists doing experiments in the laboratory, on very small scales, to see if this is something we might one day be able to do. Equations exist that show that this might be possible.

Still, warp drive may very well never materialize. The same thing with teleportation. Quantum teleportation—moving a particle from one system to another—does exist. And one day we may, perhaps, be able to move inanimate objects. But teleporting humans—I mean, would we ever really want to do that? You would have to literally deconstruct a living being onto a molecular level, then reconstruct it. Its DNA would be pulled apart.

I was recently asked: Are we molding our future the way we are because we’re trying to mirror and mimic Star Trek ? Or is it just happening on its own? I think it’s the former. We’re being influenced by this very popular science-fiction franchise.

I think one of the things that distinguishes Star Trek from other sci-fi is its philosophical bent—its thoughtful consideration of life, the universe, and everything. Do you think that approach is the reason why it has endured and thrived for so long, finding new audiences across half a century?

There’s definitely something there for everyone, for different kinds of fans and generations. And that thoughtfulness you mention is what touches so many people. Even folks who aren’t science geeks, per se. They like the message that Star Trek has of a hopeful future for humankind. That we’ve passed through these petty problems and difficulties we have now amongst nations and cultures and races. In the Star Trek future of humankind, we’ve gone beyond all that.

Also, this yearning and passion for exploring the unknown—for pushing the frontier. I think that’s very deeply rooted in the DNA of humans. The desire to go where no one has gone before. North America would not have been explored if we didn’t push beyond the European continent. In Star Trek , the stage is not one continent or planet; it’s the entire Milky Way galaxy—and beyond.

four Star Trek characters with photon torpedo

On an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation , the crew modifies a photon torpedo, which they'll use to mine a nebula for subatomic particles known as vertions. The astronomical objects we see in Star Trek often overlap with those in our own universe.

These are the things that really speak to people. And I think what also captures their attention, through all the incarnations of Star Trek , is how the series has always incorporated social issues of the times. The civil rights movement, for instance, was very big in the original series. Remember that iconic kiss between Uhura and Captain Kirk ? That made a lot of waves at the time. It was one of the first interracial kisses on TV.

William Shatner wrote the foreword to this book. Did you meet him or any other Star Trek stars during your research? Were you ever, um, starstruck ?

I knew right from the start that I wanted to have Shatner involved—to have him launch the book from the beginning and introduce it. Because it’s a grand, sweeping cosmic adventure that’s very much like the stories that take place in Star Trek . And who better than Captain Kirk to set the scene?

So I begged my editors: “Please get Shatner! If we need to, appeal to his roots and let him know that the author is also from Montreal, and that we went to the same university.” It seemed to work. They made it happen, the stars aligned, and Shatner was part of the book.

You can see from the intro that he wrote that he’s very much into science and science fiction. And you can tell that he wrote it. I’m very keen to thank him personally.

But no—unfortunately I haven’t yet met anyone from Star Trek in person. I’m hoping to rectify that during my book tour. I’ll have opportunities to meet up with most of the cast members of the different series at the major Star Trek convention in New York—the grand 50th anniversary gala—in early September. My dream is to have the cast members all sign my book.

Star clusters like these are perfect laboratories for examining the evolutionary path of stars. But while earthbound astronomers can only observe them from afar, Starfleet crews get to conduct their studies up close.

What effect do you want this book to have on readers? What’s the desired takeaway?

As an astronomy educator and communicator, I hope that people who aren’t familiar with the night sky but love Star Trek will take this book and understand what they’ve actually seen—the true science behind an exploding supernova, for instance.

The sky is a natural resource that we’ve really become disconnected from. People sit at their computers, in front of their devices. And that part of the future that Star Trek has shown us is coming true. But it’s detached us from nature—from the grandness of nature that is the night sky above us. And that’s the canvas that Star Trek plays out on: the heavens above.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Here are all the technologies Star Trek accurately predicted

We’ve gone some of the places they boldly went on TV.

On September 8, 1966, NBC aired the first episode of a new TV series about a starship on a five year mission of space exploration. Today, Star Trek turns 50.

The first episode told of an endangered shape-shifting, salt-sucking alien posing as a human woman to lure prey to its lair. (The creature was killed rather than added to the red list ). Half a century, 726 episodes, four spin-off series ( a fifth is on its way), and 13 movies later, we’ve yet to meet any metamorphosing salt vampires in real life.

On the other hand, a surprising number of fanciful ideas and technologies that appeared on the show over the years have come to pass in the real world. Star Trek , it seems, is one of the great augurs of 21st century living.

Some technologies, like flip-phone communicators, are the fairly predictable result of fiction inspiring fact— Star Trek is a commonly cited influence for scientists. Others, like transparent aluminum, are things even Mr. Spock couldn’t have seen coming.

Here’s a list of all the real-world tech, presaged Star Trek , we could find:

Tablet computers
Tractor beams
Tricorders (there’s also an X Prize for that)
Flip communicators ( and wearable badge communicators )
Replicators
Cloaking devices
Voice interface computers (hello Siri)
Transparent aluminum
Bluetooth headsets (Uhura had one first)
Google Glass
Portable memory (from floppy disks to USB sticks)
Focused ultrasound technology
Biometric data tracking for health and verifying identity
Automatic doors
Big screen displays
Real-time universal translators
Teleconferencing
VISOR bionic eyes for the blind
Diagnostic beds

There are a few technologies we’re still waiting for:

Warp drives/matter-antimatter power
Transporters (“Beam me up”)
A moneyless society
The Vulcan nerve pinch

Scientists, make it so.

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AIR & SPACE MAGAZINE

How star trek helped nasa dream big.

And how NASA helped Star Trek stick around.

Glen E. Swanson

On the afternoon of January 27, 1967, the three crew members of the first Apollo mission left the transfer van that took them to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. There, astronauts Roger Chaffee, Gus Grissom, and Ed White entered the command module and began a “plugs out” test (that is, with the spacecraft detached from all umbilicals and external power sources) of the launch vehicle and spacecraft designed to carry them on their mission.

At 6:31 p.m., a spark ignited in the lower equipment bay of the spacecraft. The atmosphere inside was 100 percent oxygen. The astronauts didn’t have a chance.

The evening before the fire that claimed the lives of these three men, loyal viewers had tuned in for “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” the 19th episode of a four-month-old TV show called Star Trek .

Set in the 23rd century, the groundbreaking series had attracted a loyal following of viewers who relished its serious approach to the genre of science fiction. Among the subset of fans who most valued this element of the show were some of the key people working in America’s space program, who saw the Starship Enterprise and its crew of high-minded explorers as the future embodiment of what they hoped to achieve. When the Apollo 1 tragedy occurred, people had been flying into space for less than seven years. Spaceflight was new and dangerous, and here was a show that made it feel routine. Star Trek offered hope to a nation and a space program in a moment when both had reason to doubt they would ever reach the moon, never mind the “new life and new civilizations” promised in the show’s opening-credits monologue. By 1967 NASA needed Star Trek —and, as it later turned out, Star Trek needed NASA.

Alberta Moran was the assistant to John F. Clark, then director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She was also one of the founders of the National Space Club. Composed of industry and government representatives along with educational institutions and the press, the National Space Club seeks to promote leadership in the burgeoning new field of astronautics. One way they did that was to sponsor the Goddard Memorial Dinner. Held in Washington, D.C., the annual dinner is named after American space pioneer Robert H. Goddard and recognizes persons and institutions that have made outstanding contributions to space science and technology during the previous year.

“We were at my house getting the invitation list together for the [1967] Goddard Dinner,” recalls Moran. “Penny, my oldest daughter came in and said, ‘Why don’t we invite somebody from Star Trek ?’ ”

On March 14, the day before the Goddard Dinner, Leonard Nimoy—who played the unflappable half-human, half-Vulcan science officer, Mr. Spock, who had quickly become the series’ most popular character—landed at Dulles International Airport about 30 miles west of Washington. When she went to pick up Nimoy, Moran brought Penny along with two of her daughters’ friends. The three rabid Star Trek fans got to share a car with one of the program’s newly minted stars for the roughly hour-long drive downtown.

The next morning, Nimoy’s wife Sandy joined him for a tour of the Goddard Space Flight Center. The visitors were shocked by how much of Goddard’s workforce had turned out to greet them. In a 1967 letter to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, Nimoy wrote: “This was the first real taste that I had of the NASA attitude towards Star Trek. ”

The dinner was that evening. All the top managers from NASA and its contractors were at the black tie affair. Barely six weeks after the Apollo 1 fire, the mood among everyone that evening was tempered by the realization that the moon landing would be delayed. Some even speculated that the Apollo program might be canceled altogether.

After the reception, the Nimoys found themselves seated at a table with space luminaries. In addition to astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, those seated at the dais included NASA Administrator James Webb, Robert Goddard’s widow, and the evening’s speaker: Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

After Humphrey’s speech, other guests waited patiently to share a moment with Nimoy. “They were all most cordial,” the actor wrote in the letter to Roddenberry. “All of them wanted autographs and pictures for themselves and their children.”

That evening, people looked beyond what had happened with the Apollo fire. While Nimoy shook hands and signed autographs, those attending the dinner saw not just the actor, but Mr. Spock, a representative from the future who knew that what they were doing in their century might have been painful but was necessary for them to move forward in exploring the final frontier of space. Nimoy wrote to Roddenberry: “I do not overstate the fact when I tell you that the interest in the show is so intense, that it would almost seem they feel we are a dramatization of the future of their space program, and they have completely taken us to heart…they are, in fact, proud of the show as though in some way it represents them.”

Nichelle Nichols in Stark Trek, above, and at the Kennedy Center, below

That wasn’t such a far-fetched notion. A couple of years earlier, when Roddenberry had been seeking meetings with esteemed members of the aerospace community to discuss ideas for his wild-sounding TV show, it had helped immensely that Roddenberry could talk shop. He’d flown B-17s during World War II, and had then spent about three years as a pilot for Pan American World Airways.

An example of how the aerospace industry directly influenced Star Trek appears in the classic Season Two episode “The Trouble With Tribbles,” first aired on December 29, 1967. In this episode, “Space Station K-7” is overrun by cute, furry animals who eat and breed uncontrollably. The principal elements of the space station as it appears in the episode were first depicted in a 1959 report by Douglas Aircraft that outlined the operational requirements of an extendable orbiting space station. Space Station K-7 was practically a Douglas design.

Other aerospace companies also contributed ideas. Representatives from General Electric’s aerospace division and Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory toured the Star Trek sets and answered questions from cast members. These meetings were invaluable, but Roddenberry wanted Star Trek to have the imprimatur of NASA itself.

In a 1966 memo, Roddenberry wrote that a public information specialist at NASA’s Western Operations Office in Santa Monica “was very interested in Star Trek and most anxious to provide us with all sorts of help including stock footage, valuable models, animation, technical advice, even access to some NASA labs and proving grounds.”

The Air Force’s elite Aerospace Research Pilot School invited Roddenberry and the show’s cast to visit their facilities and attend graduation exercises at Edwards Air Force Base. Roddenberry showed up. In October 1968, actor DeForest Kelley, who played cantankerous Enterprise Chief Medical Officer Leonard “Bones” McCoy, was drafted to comfort the astronauts of Apollo 7, the first crewed Apollo mission. When Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham developed colds during their 10 days in space, Kelley sent the crew a telegram reading: “I do not make house calls but under the circumstances, I am pleased to beam aboard and take care of the common cold. (Signed) Bones.”

There was even an effort to try to get astronaut Alan Shepard to appear on the show. Shepard, the first American to travel into space during his historic May 5, 1961 suborbital flight and the fifth man to walk on the moon, was asked to play a minor role in the series. Sadly, the deal never materialized.

In a March 1968 letter to James Webb, NASA’s administrator, Roddenberry expressed his appreciation for NASA’s support. “I have never received friendly and efficient cooperation anywhere near that provided by your Agency,” he wrote.

museumgoers look at studio model of Enterprise

Historic Enough for the Smithsonian

At the Goddard dinner in March 1967, while Nimoy posed for pictures and signed autographs, another individual stood nearby. Richard Preston, an administrative officer with the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, was waiting his turn to deliver an important message to Nimoy: The Smithsonian wanted a copy of the show’s pilot episode. Or rather, its second pilot episode.

Roddenberry had famously tried to sell his series to NBC executives with a 1964 pilot called “The Cage.” William Shatner wasn’t in it, and Nimoy laughs and grins as Mr. Spock—a very different imagining of the wry but sober character who in his mature incarnation would become so beloved.

NBC suits found the whole thing slow, talky, and “too cerebral.” But they took the unprecedented step of commissioning a second pilot. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” added Shatner to the cast as Enterprise Captain James T. Kirk, among other major changes. It was this revised Star Trek that NBC and later, the Smithsonian, approved.

No other show in the history of television had ever had its pilot requested by the Smithsonian. But Preston was just the messenger. The request had come from Frederick C. Durant III, a naval aviator, test pilot, and rocket engineer who in 1965 had become assistant director of astronautics for the National Air and Space Museum.

Durant’s credentials for the post were impeccable. Poor health prevented him from being deployed overseas during World War II, but he served with honor on the homefront, as a flight instructor teaching new cadets how to make carrier landings in the Great Lakes. After the war, he became an ardent promoter of spaceflight, holding posts as a consultant and engineer in various research labs and the Department of Defense. In 1953 he’d been elected president of the American Rocketry Society, one of several positions he held through which he befriended scientist and author Arthur C. Clarke and German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, among other luminaries.

An avid science fiction fan, Durant watched Star Trek with interest and soon struck up a correspondence with Roddenberry. Preston, an aide to Durant at the time, wrote to Roddenberry in 1967: “We believe the Star Trek pilot would be a valuable addition to the archives of the National Air and Space Museum. Science Fiction forms a definite segment of astronautics chronology.” On August 28, 1967, Roddenberry formally presented a 16mm color print copy of “Where No Man Has Gone Before” to S. Paul Johnston, director of the National Air and Space Museum.

Fan, Short for Fanatic

Just a few days before the Goddard Dinner, Roddenberry received word from NBC that Star Trek would be renewed for a second season. Paul L. Klein, vice president of audience measurement for NBC, wrote in the May 27, 1967 issue of TV Guide: “Star Trek is the only science-fiction show on television with a scientific basis. I was instrumental in recommending Star Trek for the NBC schedule and have been one of the show’s staunchest supporters during the agony of renewal time. Messrs. Roddenberry, Coon and the whole Star Trek staff have deserved the public’s approval, NBC’s faith in them, and, as topping to the cake, were just recently honored by the National Space Club in Washington for their scientific validity.”

When Star Trek debuted, NBC gave it the coveted time slot of 8:30 p.m. on Thursday. During the second season, the show was moved to Fridays, a less desirable slot particularly for a show beloved by high school and college students.

“We were making out fine where we were,” said Roddenberry in an August 13, 1967 interview, “but now we may lose many of the young people who’ve been watching, because Friday is the night they like to go out.”

Still, fans would not let the show die. By late 1967, when it looked like the series would not be able to secure a third season, a massive letter writing campaign helped generate a lot of attention.

“ Star Trek is the ‘in’ show with the people who work at NASA, Caltech, and the space plants,” said Roddenberry during an interview that year. Boasting that NBC received some 4,500 pro- Trek letters per week, Roddenberry went on to say that, “we get letters from curators of museums and college presidents, all of whom appreciate our serious attempt to portray what space travel will be like.”

On March 1, 1968 at 9:28 p.m. following the first-run airing of the Star Trek episode “The Omega Glory,” an NBC announcer assured viewers that the series would continue to be seen on television that fall. To announce a renewal on the air like this was unusual, but then, so was the kind of attention Star Trek engendered.

Seven days after NBC announced the third-season renewal, Roddenberry sent the following telegram to Durant at the Smithsonian:

THE HONOR THE SMITHSONIAN BESTOWED ON US HELPED GREATLY IN THE RENEWAL OF STAR TREK FOR ANOTHER SEASON. THANKS FOR ALL YOUR HELP. WE’LL DO OUR BEST TO MAINTAIN QUALITY SHOWS. OUR MOST SINCERE THANKS. WARMEST PERSONAL REGARDS

—GENE RODDENBERRY, STAR TREK

It was not a complete triumph. For its third season, Star Trek would have its budget slashed, resulting in notably diminished production value. And it would remain on Friday nights, now in an even less favorable time slot: 10 p.m. Roddenberry knew that the third season would be the last—at least for a while.

young people with Star-Trek-related protest songs

In recalling the initial lifespan of his brainchild, Roddenberry said: “[The U.S. was] just getting into space. When we made our first episode, we hadn’t even been to the moon. Then Star Trek came along and said, ‘Hey, we made it!’ It’s a program that said there is basic intelligence and goodness and decency in the human animal that will triumph over these things.”

While fans almost unanimously agree that Star Trek ’s third season saw a regrettable decline in quality, those final 24 episodes are what made the series’ run long enough for the show to live on in syndication, to be discovered by new generations of fans. It was only in syndication throughout the following decade that the show’s lasting commercial and cultural impact would become apparent. The release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979, a decade after the original series’ cancellation, would kick-start a steady stream of Trek feature films and new TV and streaming series that has continued to this day.

Leonard Nimoy, George Takei, DeForest Kelley, and James Doohan seated in a crowd

Fans Grow Up To Be Astronauts

In the fall of 1974, the Smithsonian opened a new exhibit. “Life in the Universe” premiered in the old Arts & Industries Building before taking up permanent residence in the new National Air and Space Museum that opened on the National Mall two years later. Featured in the exhibit was the original 11-foot production model of the USS Enterprise used in the filming of the television series.

As Durant explained: “Our interest in acquiring Star Trek memorabilia relates to the study of the influence of science fiction upon future technological development. We believe that consideration of science fiction is relevant to current and future accomplishments in space.”

The approval of NASA, the aerospace community, and finally, the Smithsonian Institution lent Star Trek an unlikely cachet that has helped the franchise to—to borrow a phrase—live long and prosper. After other, higher-rated television shows of the same era were forgotten, Star Trek found new life. “We were kind of the NASA connection; the NASA fantasy and the show that NASA watched,” Nimoy recalled in The Star Trek Interview Book .

Credible and inspirational both, Star Trek became a favorite among subsequent generations of astronomers and spacefarers. In 2015, Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, who hadn’t even been born when Star Trek was canceled in 1969, tweeted a photo of herself wearing a Star Trek uniform in the cupola of the International Space Station. James B. Garvin, who became chief scientist at NASA Goddard decades after Nimoy’s 1967 visit and remains one of the top minds behind the agency’s Mars Exploration Program, grew up on Trek and made a point of watching the entire Star Trek: Voyager series one summer with his kids.

When the National Air and Space Museum celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2016, the newly restored Enterprise studio model—which for years had been kept on display in the basement level of the Museum’s gift shop—was moved to a more prominent location, in the Museum’s Milestones of Flight Hall near its Independence Avenue entrance. The “five-year mission” of inspiration it set out upon in 1966 remains, as of 2021, ongoing.

Glen E. Swanson is the former historian of the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and founder o f Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly. This is his first feature story for Air&Space.

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All The Technology Star Trek Predicted Accurately

Since its debut in 1966, the "Star Trek" series has captivated audiences worldwide with its vision of the future. Its innovative and forward-thinking concepts have not only entertained but also inspired many people to pursue their interests in science and technology. The show's futuristic devices and technologies have been a source of inspiration for countless scientists and engineers who have subsequently developed real-world applications based on the show's fictional ideas.

For instance, the handheld communicators used by the characters in the show have served as a model for today's smartphones, while 3D printing technology was partly inspired by the show's replicator technology. The medical technologies featured in "Star Trek" have also had a significant impact on real-world healthcare, inspiring researchers to develop similar technologies for use in medical settings.

The influence of "Star Trek" on modern technology has been vast and far-reaching, inspiring generations of innovators to dream big and push the boundaries of what is possible. This has led to numerous technological advancements that have changed our lives for the better. Overall, the series' impact on popular culture and technology continues to be felt to this day — nearly six decades after its debut.

Communicators

The idea of handheld communication devices was first introduced in the original "Star Trek" series in the late 1960s, and it was a revolutionary concept at the time. Before then, long-distance communication required bulky and expensive equipment that was only available to the military or government agencies. However, "Star Trek" imagined a future where everyone could carry a small, portable device that could connect them with anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Today, we can see that vision has become a reality with the ubiquitous presence of smartphones. They are essentially advanced versions of the communicators featured in "Star Trek," with the added bonus of being able to access the internet, take photos, and provide GPS navigation. The versatility of smartphones has made them an essential tool in our daily lives, as we rely on them to stay in touch with family and friends, conduct business, and even entertain ourselves.

Perhaps the most significant impact of smartphones has been their ability to democratize communication. No longer is it just the wealthy or powerful who can afford to stay connected. Smartphones are now affordable and accessible to people of all socioeconomic backgrounds, making it possible for anyone to stay in touch with loved ones, access important information, or even start a business.

Overall, the concept of handheld communication devices first introduced in "Star Trek" has had a profound impact on our society, and the continued evolution of technology promises to keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

The introduction of PADDs in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" was a forward-thinking concept that predicted the development of modern-day tablets . PADDs were essentially handheld computers that allowed the crew to access information, communicate with each other, and perform a variety of tasks, all from a single device. They were small and lightweight, making them easy to carry around and use in any situation.

Today, we have tablets that are similar in design and function to PADDs. Tablets are thin, lightweight devices with large screens that can display high-quality graphics and video. They are ideal for reading books, browsing the internet, and watching movies or TV shows. They also come with a range of apps and features that allow users to perform a variety of tasks, from taking notes to playing games and even creating digital art.

The most significant benefit of tablets is their portability. They are smaller and lighter than laptops, making them easy to carry around in a bag or even your pocket. This makes them an excellent choice for people who need to access information on the go, whether for work or personal use. They also have a longer battery life than most laptops, meaning you can use them for longer periods without needing to recharge.

Overall, the concept of PADDs in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" was a visionary technology that predicted the development of modern-day tablets. Tablets have become an essential tool for many people, allowing them to access information and stay connected with the world around them, no matter where they are. With ongoing technological advancements, it's exciting to imagine what the future of portable computing might look like.

Voice-activated computers

The LCARS system featured in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" was a cutting-edge technology that allowed users to interact with the ship's computer using natural language commands. This was a revolutionary concept at the time, as most computer systems required users to input commands using a keyboard or mouse. LCARS made it possible to access information and control ship's systems quickly and efficiently, simply by speaking.

Today, we have virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa that operate on similar principles to LCARS. These virtual assistants can understand natural language commands and respond to user requests in a conversational manner. They can be used to access information, control smart home devices , and even make phone calls or send messages, all with simple voice commands.

Virtual assistants shine in their ease of use. These tools eliminate the need to type or click, which can be especially helpful for people with disabilities or those with difficulty using traditional computer interfaces. Additionally, they can be used hands-free, which makes them ideal for multitasking or when your hands are occupied.

Virtual assistants have become an essential tool for many people, both in personal and professional settings. They have made it easier to access information, automate tasks, and communicate with others. As technology continues to evolve, it's exciting to think about the possibilities of what virtual assistants might be able to do in the future. Perhaps they'll even be able to replicate the conversational abilities of the LCARS system from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" one day.

Medical tricorders

The tricorder was one of the most iconic pieces of technology featured in "Star Trek." It was a handheld device that could diagnose and treat injuries and illnesses by scanning a person's body and analyzing their health data. The device could provide detailed information about a person's vital signs, blood tests, and even DNA analysis, making it an essential tool for medical personnel in the "Star Trek" universe.

Today, medical technology has made significant advancements, and we have devices that operate similarly to the tricorder. MRI machines and CT scanners are used to scan and diagnose medical conditions, providing detailed images of the inside of the body. These machines are invaluable tools for diagnosing a range of medical conditions, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, and neurological disorders.

We also have handheld devices that can monitor vital signs like blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen saturation. These devices are portable and can be used in a variety of settings, from hospitals to homes. They can provide a preliminary diagnosis for certain conditions, making them a helpful tool for medical professionals and patients alike.

The development of medical technology has significantly improved the quality of healthcare and has revolutionized the way medical professionals diagnose and treat illnesses. While we may not yet have a tricorder that can provide a complete medical analysis with a single scan, the advancements in medical technology have made it possible to obtain vital health information quickly and accurately, ultimately leading to better patient outcomes.

3D printing — Replicators

In "Star Trek: Voyager," the replicator was a fascinating technology that allowed the crew to create food, clothing, and other objects on demand. With a simple command, the replicator would use digital designs to create physical objects, making it an essential tool for the crew as they explored the vast expanse of space. The best example of this was seen in "Extreme Risk," where Lt. Paris and Chief Engineer Torres used the replicator system to create parts for the Delta Flyer shuttle craft they were designing.

Today, we have 3D printing technology, which operates similarly to the replicator in "Star Trek" by using digital designs to create physical objects. This allows manufacturers, engineers, and even medical professionals to produce complex shapes and structures that were previously impossible to make with traditional manufacturing methods.

One of the most exciting applications of 3D printing technology is in the field of medicine. Medical professionals can use 3D printers to create replacement parts, such as bones or joints, or even to produce human organs. This has the potential to revolutionize the medical industry and save countless lives.

This technology has a wide range of applications, from creating prototypes and replacement parts to manufacturing consumer products and even food. With the ability to create custom designs quickly and inexpensively, 3D printing technology has the potential to transform various industries and improve the way we live our lives.

While we may not yet be able to create a full meal with a replicator, the 3D printing technology available today is a remarkable achievement that can potentially change the world as we know it.

Virtual reality has come a long way since "Star Trek" first introduced the concept of the holodeck in "Star Trek: The Animated Series." With the advancements in technology, we now have access to head-mounted displays, hand controllers, and even full-body tracking systems that allow us to fully immerse ourselves in virtual environments. These technologies work together to create a truly immersive experience that engages all our senses.

The most popular application of virtual reality technology is in gaming. VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive allow gamers to step into a virtual world and interact with it in ways that were previously impossible. In addition to gaming, virtual reality is also used in education to create immersive learning experiences. Students can use VR technology to explore historical sites, conduct science experiments, and even learn new languages.

Virtual reality is also being used in the field of training. For example, medical professionals can use VR technology to practice surgical procedures in a simulated environment without the risk of harming real patients. Similarly, the military can use virtual reality to train soldiers for combat situations and emergency responders can use it to simulate disaster scenarios.

Overall, virtual reality technology has revolutionized the way we experience digital content and has opened up new possibilities in gaming, education, and training. While we may not have fully functional holodecks like the ones featured in "Star Trek" just yet, virtual reality technology is certainly getting us closer to that reality.

Heads-up displays (HUDs)

Heads-up displays (HUDs) are seen throughout "Star Trek," and these devices have undergone significant advancements in the real world over the last few decades as they have become an increasingly popular component in aviation and automotive applications. HUDs allow drivers and pilots to maintain eye contact with the road or sky while the display projects important information directly into their field of view.

In aviation, HUDs have become an essential part of contemporary cockpit technology, enabling pilots to maintain situational awareness while controlling the aircraft by prominently displaying crucial data such as airspeed, altitude, and heading. By providing visual cues and warning indicators during critical flight stages, such as takeoff and landing, HUDs help pilots make split-second decisions.

HUDs have also become more common in the automotive sector, offering drivers a safer and more practical way to receive information. By projecting speed, navigational instructions, and other essential information directly onto the windshield, HUDs enable drivers to keep their eyes on the road and avoid distractions.

The use of HUDs has revolutionized how we interact with technology, making it easier and safer to access critical data. As technology continues to advance, we can expect to see HUDs incorporated into an increasing number of products and applications. For example, wearable HUDs are becoming more popular, providing users with hands-free access to important information in industries such as healthcare and logistics. As new features and applications are developed, it is clear that the future of HUD technology is bright.

Universal translator

The concept of a universal translator as depicted in "Star Trek" has been a source of inspiration for the development of real-world translation technologies like Google Translate . The universal translator was a revolutionary device that allowed the characters in "Star Trek" to communicate with alien species they encountered during their interstellar travels by translating any language instantly.

What once seemed like an unattainable idea is now a reality. Today there are several translation apps and devices that have made it possible to communicate with people from around the globe without the need for a human translator. Google Translate is one of the most popular translation tools available today, and its creation owes a lot to the universal translator from "Star Trek." This app utilizes machine learning to analyze text and provides real-time translations in over 100 languages. It can translate whole websites, documents, and even speech. Google Translate is accessible on desktops and mobile devices, making it easy to use from anywhere.

Skype Translator is another great example of real-world translation technology that allows people to have voice conversations in real-time in different languages, and iTranslate offers translations in over 100 languages and can even translate text from images. Translation technology has made significant progress, and we can now communicate with people from different parts of the world more efficiently than ever before. As technology advances, we can expect to see even more sophisticated translation tools emerge, bringing us closer to a world without language barriers.

Biometric identification

From its inception, the "Star Trek" franchise has showcased biometric identification as a critical aspect of its futuristic technology. The use of retinal scans, voice recognition, and other biometric technologies in the series has served as a catalyst for the development of real-world biometric identification systems used in various security settings such as border control, law enforcement, and consumer devices like smartphones .

Biometric identification systems rely on physical or behavioral traits unique to an individual to authenticate their identity. They provide a higher level of security than traditional identification methods like passwords or ID cards. Examples of biometric identification systems include fingerprint scanners, facial recognition technology, and iris scanners.

The most significant advantage of biometric identification systems is their accuracy. Biometric characteristics like fingerprints and iris patterns are unique to each individual and cannot be easily replicated or forged. This makes them an effective tool for preventing identity theft and other types of fraud.

Now biometric identification systems are being used in healthcare, banking, and other industries to verify identity and provide personalized services. Some hospitals use biometric identification to ensure patients receive the correct treatments and medications, while banks use it to prevent fraud and improve customer service.

Overall, these systems have revolutionized security, healthcare, banking, and other industries, providing higher accuracy and security than traditional identification methods. As technology continues to progress, the future of biometric identification looks promising, and we can expect even more innovative and exciting developments in the years to come.

Warp drive technology

Warp drive is a captivating technology in the "Star Trek" franchise. The idea of faster-than-light travel has fascinated scientists and researchers, and while a true warp drive has yet to be developed, the concept has led to new research and theories on propulsion systems.

The Alcubierre drive is one such theory. It is named after Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who proposed the drive based on the principle of warping spacetime . The theory suggests that it is possible to manipulate the curvature of spacetime to create a wave that can carry a spacecraft along with it. This would allow the spacecraft to travel faster than the speed of light relative to the rest of the universe without exceeding the speed of light in its own reference frame.

Although the Alcubierre drive is currently only theoretical, it has sparked renewed interest in faster-than-light travel. NASA has proposed a test mission to investigate the feasibility of the drive, which shows the theory's potential. Additionally, other researchers are exploring alternative propulsion systems, such as antimatter engines, wormholes, and black hole propulsion. These ideas may seem far-fetched, but they have been gaining increasing attention in the scientific community as our understanding of the laws of physics continues to evolve.

These ideas have the potential to revolutionize space travel and our understanding of the universe. As we continue to explore the boundaries of science and technology, it is exciting to think about what other incredible discoveries we may uncover in the future.

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Tech leaders share how Star Trek inspired them to pursue a career in technology

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Star Trek. The mere name spawns a vast array of imagery, as the vivid scenes from the various Star Trek series and movies have been a staple in the lives of legions of children for decades.

Plenty of adults were fans from the beginning, but the mystical allure of aliens and starships and faraway worlds also appealed to kids as they dreamt about what was possible.

Star Trek has been an inspiration to so many kids that it has led masses of them to pursue careers in tech. Even myself. I was one of those wide-eyed kids watching syndicated episodes of Star Trek on Sunday afternoons back in the 70s. Already an avid fan of The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family, Star Trek was unlike anything I’d ever seen before.

I admit, I began watching it because my older brother (who has his own tech career as a principal developer at Dell) insisted, and we only had one TV in the house. I’d sit with him on the carpet in our family room, as close to the TV as my mom would allow so that I could adjust the antenna as needed. I’d quickly lose myself in a world of teleportation, tricorders and, if I’m being completely honest, slightly racy scenes with Captain Kirk. Even though I didn’t understand everything I saw, it inspired me and encouraged me to feel comfortable in a world of new things with cool tech.

Star Trek: Picard premieres on Jan. 23, streaming every week on CBS All Access in the US and Amazon Video elsewhere in the world. You can also check out our Star Trek: Discovery viewer’s guide . (Disclosure: TechRepublic is owned by ViacomCBS.)

I reached out to many tech leaders to find out how they were inspired by Star Trek as kids, including TechRepublic’s own Jason Hiner. Read on to discover their stories.

Bill Coughlin, president and CEO of Ford Global Technologies:

“I remember seeing the original Star Trek series as a lad. It was thought-provoking and packed with action and drama. But most importantly, it conveyed an optimistic and amazing view into the future. Every week, you could go where no one has gone before and visualize how technology could transform everyone’s way of life for the better. To a boy who learned to build go-carts from old lawn mower engines, the show fed the imagination of what might be possible to invent. Maybe a human transporter might be beyond reach in my lifetime, but not speaking to a computer, wearable communicators, or universal translators in near real-time. I later became an electrical engineer, and yes, I’m still a fan. Now if I could only remember where I found those dilithium crystals.”

Jesse Robbins, CEO, Orion Labs:

“My adolescence started around the same time as The Next Generation, which I watched religiously. Hands-down my favorite episode is ‘Darmok.’ I’ve watched it at least a dozen times, because the story is so powerful: Two people stuck in a difficult situation, trying to understand how to communicate in real time. The story taught me that technology can do a lot, but sometimes it takes you only so far, and people have to go the last mile themselves. Often this means improvising and learning quickly in dangerous situations. People bridge the gap that technology leaves. I love the geekery of Star Trek, but for me technology is always mediated by people who are trying to work together. This is exactly what my team at Orion Labs works on every day.”

Jason Hiner, global editor in chief, TechRepublic:

“It took a long time for me to warm up to Star Trek. What first clicked with me was Deep Space Nine. It had this great mix of technology, spirituality, leadership, cross-cultural understanding, and a little bit of underdog spirit. It deals with dark times and big challenges, but still managed to stay positive and keep fighting. I loved that. And from there, I learned to appreciate some of those same threads in other Star Trek franchises, too.”

Don’t miss: Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All Access

Jeff Greenberg, senior technical leader, vehicle and enterprise sciences, Ford Motor Co.:

“What hooked me wasn’t the gadgetry (though I still think the Tricorder is the coolest thing). It was the constant repartee between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The man of action, the man of ideas, and the man of empathy. They were passionate about their beliefs, rarely agreed with one another but together they were greater than any of them could be individually. Even at a young age, it struck me that there was something magical going on there.”

Amir Caspi, senior research scientist, Southwest Research Institute:

“As a kid, Star Trek: The Next Generation was my first space opera. It allowed me to explore the universe and its infinite possibilities, although of course in fictional form. The storylines and characters were amazing, but my favorite aspect was the travel amongst the stars, investigating the mysteries of the universe–physics, time, space, and of course, life. Star Trek, especially TNG, really cemented my love for astronomy and scientific exploration. Now, as a professional astrophysicist, I get to do that every day, and live my own little bit of Star Trek.

“It remains my dream to experience space firsthand, even if I may never get to set foot on another planet. With advancements in commercial space access, that dream may soon become reality. If I’m truly lucky, perhaps I can even work in space, with colleagues, and be that much closer to a Star Trek reality. Some of our technology is already advancing to near Star Trek levels. We have a long ways yet to go, but I can only hope that, together, humanity can achieve the ideals of Star Trek, to live and explore amongst the stars.”

SEE: How we learned to talk to computers, and how they learned to answer back (PDF download) (TechRepublic)

Andy Lowery, CEO and founder, RealWear:

“The Star Trek series has always been an inspirational story to me. I joined the Navy as a Nuclear Reactor Operator, largely based on my passion of watching Star Trek as a teenage boy and wishing I could ‘boldly go where no man has gone before.’ Today, I am fulfilling the wish of that teenaged boy, leading a team that pioneers new discoveries and exists with a culture that represents a quintessential example of a highly diverse and super functional team. Like the Star Trek crew, each person brings unique strengths, but they are bonded by a foundational trust and inspirational leaders which extract more from the whole of the team than the sum of its parts.”

Bill Bodin, CTO, Kony:

“In 1966, the year Star Trek debuted, my family moved from Phoenix, Arizona to Titusville, Florida. I was just entering 3rd grade. My father was an IBM software engineer at NASA and my sister, ten years older than I, worked for Technicolor as a NASA photographic captioner. I was in the epicenter of the space race, and fortunate to see much more technology than most my age. I visited launch pads, went behind the scenes in the vehicle assembly building and the blockhouse. Needless to say, ‘take your kid to work day’ was incredible. And while my observations of the science at NASA shaped the rest of my life, the science fiction of Star Trek allowed me to think without limits. I credit [Gene] Roddenberry and the writers of Star Trek for providing a boundless canvas on which my future thoughts and creations would be built. And now, it’s apparent to me that Star Trek was a lot more about science than it was about fiction.”

Zeus Kerravala, founder, ZK Research:

“I was born in 1966, the year Star Trek was created. Obviously I didn’t start watching the show then, but as a young child I managed to catch it in reruns and have watched every episode of the original series dozens of times. I also watched the little known animated series in the 70s and read a number of novels in the 80s. As a youth, I couldn’t get enough Star Trek and that certainly influenced my decision to work in technology.

“What I loved about Star Trek was that it was the first science fiction show that had cool tech that was actually possible to build and could be explained by science. Many of the devices used in the show, such as video conferencing, mobile communication devices, and portable computers, have become a reality. Some of the others that haven’t become real yet are a source of great debate within Trekkie circles. For example, matter-antimatter propulsion is theoretically possible, we just haven’t figured out how to built it yet. The same can be said for food replicators and possibly transporters. Star Trek set a vision for science and technology that is still unmatched for any other TV show and the thought of ‘what’s possible’ was partially responsible for my passion for that field today.”

Jeff Jenkins, CTO and co-founder of Upskill:

“Star Trek absolutely inspired me to enter the tech field, specifically computer science. While my parents grew up with the original series, Star Trek: The Next Generation was my Star Trek growing up. It gets difficult to keep track of all the tech that this TV series predicted. Even wearable technology like smart glasses were on display, but what I found most intriguing was how ubiquitous all of that computing power was and how it seamlessly integrated into the day-to-day lives of those aboard the starship Enterprise.

Nearly every surface of the ship was festooned with adaptive touch screen interfaces (just like my iPhone today), and they all were integrated via a very cloud-like central processing core (just like all my devices today). The computer was also never more than a convenient voice command away to turn on the lights or retrieve data from the archives (Alexa anyone?).

But the most inspiring thing to this kid? Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a future where technology enabled humanity’s better angels. It freed us as a global (and multi-planetary) society to concentrate on scientific discovery, to make cultural contributions, and to focus on self-growth. I can’t think of a better or more inspiring vision for human-computer interaction.”

Ken Washington, CTO and vice president of research and advanced engineering, Ford Motor Co.:

“All I remember was wondering how warp speed worked since I knew according to Einstein, that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light without passing through an impossible infinite mass inflection point. Well, okay I also wondered how molecules reassembled in the transporter without getting jumbled up and creating random monsters on the other side. Okay, sure, I also wondered how such small guns could fire such strong laser beams of energy over and over again, and what was up with that Vulcan nerve pinch?”

Jim Buczkowski, Henry Ford Technical Fellow and director of Ford Electronics Research:

“Star Trek amazed me and convinced me I wanted to find a way to amaze others. As I reflect on my youth, I was always curious about science and creating the future. I was a dreamer yearning for, and being part of, a bold future of what ‘could be’ versus what I was told was possible. Thinking about how I could turn my dreams into reality to ‘find new ways.’ It wasn’t about being an astronaut, it was about exploring new and interesting things, ‘going where no one else has gone before,’ simply for the purpose of knowing and learning and becoming a better person.

“Today, I realize that I was just as curious about the characters and their diversity as much as the technology that enabled them to do incredible things. It was about the tension between the rational/logical (Spock) and the emotional, intuitive (Kirk) behavior. Star Trek made it ok to believe in the unbelievable, and that although logic was important, creativity and what you see in the ‘mind’s eye’ was just as important.

“Star Trek was also about a team. A group of diverse people working together, every one equally important to the outcome. A team that was dependent on each other and even in conflict, the solution was working together valuing the ideas and contributions of everyone on the team, including learning from each other. All were flawed, but when they were together, the sum was greater than each of the parts and all flaws were overcome. My parents taught me to respect others and Star Trek reinforced how that respect contributed to a unique and very diverse family and a better more fulfilling outcome. A family that always resolved their differences and conflicts by the end of an episode. The Roddenberry Rule.”

Milind Tambe, professor in engineering and computer science and industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) and fellow for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence:

“Science fiction in general and Star Trek in particular was instrumental in inspiring me to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science and more specifically in artificial intelligence. I watched reruns of the original Star Trek in India in the 80s–where I grew up–with fascination. While those were inspiring, the 1987 Star Trek: The New Generation brought along Commander Data, brought along new fascinating questions for Artificial Intelligence. The ‘Measure of a Man’ episode questioning whether a robot had rights, with the conclusion that robots indeed did, seemed so far-fetched to friends and relatives, but was quietly very inspiring to AI Ph.D. students (at Carnegie Mellon, where I was a Ph.D. student at the time, the next day there were several discussions). Many years later, when I completed my Ph.D. and began teaching AI at USC, I used Star Trek extensively in a class I had designed on ‘AI and Science Fiction’ to teach AI. And I used that episode of ‘Measure of a Man’ to teach in my class on AI and even had the writer of that episode (Melinda Snodgrass) come to my class to discuss the episode. Today, in the age of AI, these questions of robot rights don’t seem so far fetched.”

SEE: IT leader’s guide to the future of artificial intelligence (TechRepublic Premium)

Matt Grob, executive vice president of technology, Qualcomm Technologies:

“I read comics as a kid, but I have always been into all kinds of sci-fi. My name spelled backwards is even ‘borg.’ And since I started at Qualcomm, Paul Jacobs (currently the company’s executive chairman) has always called me Locutus. I was born in Switzerland, and we moved to the US when I was seven years old. One of my first memories in the US was in a hotel and Star Trek, the animated series, was on TV and I just loved it. I’ve always loved sci-fi. I love The Six Million Dollar Man, Lost in Space, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica. Star Trek’s positive vision of the future is a nice inspiration for some of the concepts we are literally bringing from science fiction to life. In particular, devices from Star Trek (e.g., communicator, tricorder, touch screens, memory cards, even replicators) are all now real–and it’s been a joy working at Qualcomm over the years and making contributions to each one.”

Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO, Cisco’s collaboration business:

“Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) was the eye-opening show for me. It showed a world in which technology was less present. Their technology faded into the background. The crew accessed the computer by voice, or by tapping a screen in hallways and asking questions. It was pervasive, and available when needed–but not obtrusive. I found that fascinating and it has guided how I think about technology today. The show was also amazingly accurate in its tech predictions. The modern iPad is almost a clone of the tablets they used and exchanged in the shows. And I really loved Commander Data, just saying.”

Scott Emmart, director of WW Customer Engineering Labs, Micron:

“I went to a Star Trek convention right after coming to Boise to go to school. Got to meet James Doohan in person and during the conversation, he asked me what I was doing. Told him I was going to school for engineering and he started chatting me up. Mind you there’s a big line behind me, but, after I told him I was going into engineering because of watching him in my earlier days, he asked me about this little noise maker I bought and it just made photon torpedo sounds or phaser sounds. So, I open it up right there in front of him and started explaining this is the clock and this is the memory chip and this is how you get the sound out. It was about 20 minutes while I held up the line talking to James Doohan. It was awesome.”

Alex Neskin, CTO and co-founder, Petcube:

“I enjoyed Star Trek a lot. It allowed your imagination to think of the unknown and what else could be discovered. These types of experiences when I was younger definitely made me want to work hard and bring magical things to life.”

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Star Trek: Picard is a mirror to our modern dystopia
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Star Trek inspires tech, careers, and hope for humanity
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Attention Trekkies: Don't miss these Star Trek photos, interviews, quotes, and trivia
Photos: A glimpse of the iconic scenes and gadgets of Star Trek
Star Trek: Discovery continues the mission of futurism and bold social commentary
We're ahead of schedule to turn Star Trek tech into reality
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How Close Are We To Bringing Star Trek Technologies to Life?

Are we boldly going...anywhere.

Live Long and Prosper

While clearly in the realm of fiction, the technologies and equipment presented in Star Trek inspired generations. Who didn't want their own Holodeck or personal communicator?

But now, real life advancements in computing and robotics have become so robust that we are anticipating the "Singularity," and NASA has actively been pursuing projects like warp ships . So, just how excited should you be about all of this work? Is the world of Star Trek really that far off?

In some respects, we have actually surpassed the gizmos producer Gene Roddenberry and the writers of the show originally thought up. Our cellphones, laptops, and tablets can stream video, images, and text. Moreover, our network of satellites means that, thanks to things like Skype, you can have an instantaneous video call with anyone anywhere on the planet.

In contrast, the crew's communicators could only do verbal reports. True, their larger computers were capable of a lot more, but as far as handheld devices go, our cell phones are a lot more than what the early creators of Star trek seemed to imagine.

Similarly, the handheld, portable tricorder from Star Trek was essential to the crew. It was able to scan and record biological data from almost anything, and (like the communicators) it could do it anytime and anywhere.

Ultimately, recent technology seems to have been pulling the device out of science fiction and turning it into reality. Take, for example, the tech developed by British company Oxford Nanopore Technologies , which aims to bring portable DNA sequencing into everyday reality. They have made significant advancements in processing the information contained within an object's genetic code, but while the early work is notable, we're not there yet. Known as the MinION, production was a disappointment to many scientists due to manufacturing delays, inaccurate results, and lack of truly significant features (but we're taking baby steps).

And what about warp drive? Well, to begin, the core idea behind this travel is not the propulsion we are familiar with. You don't accelerate at all. Instead, this method utilizes the flexibility of the fabric of space itself.

The most practical design thus far has been a ring built around a smaller craft that could expand space behind it and shrink it in the front. This essentially creates a warp bubble that would shift space-time around the craft. From the inside, it would appear as though you were racing through space, when in fact there would be no acceleration whatsoever!

But there are problems. Sean Carroll, a theoretical cosmologist famous for his popular science books, went on record saying ;

The Alcubierre warp drive is a very interesting arena for thought experiments to try to better understand general relativity and quantum field theory, but it should give you zero hope for actually building a spaceship some day. Some of the many problems are discussed on Wikipedia . In short, it requires negative energy densities, which can’t be strictly disproven but are probably unrealistic; the total amount of energy is likely to be equivalent to the mass-energy of an astrophysical body; and the gravitational fields produced would likely rip any ship to shreds. My personal estimate of the likelihood we will ever be able to build a “warp drive” is much less than 1%. And the chances it will happen in the next hundred years I would put at less than 0.01%.

And, of course, there is more. Take technology like the Holodeck. Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law says, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." But, as NASA notes , "we can't assume every magical feat could be accomplished, given sufficiently advanced technology. Holograms are images that appear to have three-dimensional structure. We can't yet imagine a way to assemble matter in the same way as the light in a hologram."

However, we do have some pretty impressive virtual reality technology that can simulate actual places and activities. Likewise, augmented reality is progressing day-by-day. So, in a sense, we are getting there.

Feats of Fancy and Imagination

While many Star Trek technologies are in the works in one way or another, we still haven't got around to making the big stuff real. Warp and ion drives, Mr. Data, fusion engines...and a whole lot of other major projects are still major engineering challenges.

In fact, even s ending signals over astronomically short distances (like to Mars) still results in lag—while they may be based on shreds of actual math, subspace communications of the Star Trek Variety are still rather impossible.

But as was noted, a number of these technologies are already in the works, and we have surpassed Star Trek in several different areas. So although we might not have Klingons and interstellar travel, we have instantaneous global communication; we have computers that we speak to, and they speak back; we have people living in space...so in some ways, we already are living in a Star Trek-esque world.

And it's that combination of real science and creative imagination that keeps us all coming back to Roddenberry's world.

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What Star Trek: Discovery Can Tell Us About Tech and Social Progress

What makes Star Trek essential for any contemporary tech user is its role in helping us understand our relationship to technology.

Star Trek: Discovery landed on TV last week, and just in the nick of time. It’s been sixteen years since the last decent Star Trek series concluded its television run. (Yes, l am forgetting Enterprise . I recommend you do the same.) Those have been very long years for those of us who built our weekly schedules, social lives, and marriages around the rhythms of Star Trek .

Sure, we had the occasional movie, but the latest crop of Star Trek films were action movies set in space — not the real Star Trek we count on to use science fiction as a mirror of our real-world dilemmas. In the absence of weekly episodes that we could count on to provoke conversations about the ethics of holographic labor or the paradoxes of time travel, my husband and I were forced to resort to talking about things like our children, or worse yet, our feelings. Ugh.

I recognize that not every marriage is as dependent on Star Trek as ours. We named our dog after a Star Trek character. We’ve dressed our kids as Star Trek’s evil Borg for Halloween. I may even have chronicled our latest family vacation in the form of a Captain’s log.

The Needs of the Many

What makes Star Trek essential not just for me, but for any contemporary tech user, is its role in helping us understand our relationship to technology. Star Trek has been famously credited with helping inspire such innovations as the communications headset, the smartphone, computing tablets, and voice-controlled computers. So it’s tempting to tune into the new series for a sneak peek at whatever might inspire a new generation of inventors: Neural implants? Biological computers? Something else?

That’s not where we need help today, though. Silicon Valley is stuffed to the brim with gadget-crazy entrepreneurs who are busy thinking of the next devices we need ( and many we don’t ). Where we really need help is in learning to live with the technologies we have. And there are lots of reasons to think Star Trek is positioned to help with that.

Just look at the biggest technology dilemmas we have today: How can we have the benefits of abundant, free information without the liabilities of fake news? How can we enable connection and community across difference without descending into flame wars and trolling ? How can we harness data to make smarter decisions and offer better products and services without losing our privacy and autonomy?

These aren’t technology challenges; they’re social, political, and economic challenges that have been created, sharpened, or amplified by technology. And when it comes to engaging with the intersection between technology and social issues, there are few cultural institutions that have had as much influence as Star Trek .

Hailing on All Frequencies

By layering a post-prejudice future on top of one in which technology is so dramatically advanced and pervasive, Star Trek invited its audience to see social and technological development as inextricably linked. It’s a linkage that had particular resonance in the geek subculture that grew up around both the original series and its 1980s-1990s successors: For a generation that was drawn to Silicon Valley long before it was seen as a path to wealth, techies were more likely to be inspired by passion than by money. With its hybrid of tech and social progress, Star Trek spoke to the tech subculture’s 60s-inflected social values and its techno-fetishism.

The Star Trek universe makes its reappearance at a moment when those twin threads of Silicon Valley culture have largely been severed. Today’s prototypical tech innovator is a startup founder looking for enough venture funding to launch the next “unicorn,” and VC firms are looking for financial returns, not social ones. Sure, there are still plenty of techno-utopians kicking around the East Bay, but the social problems that have been catalyzed by the internet attract far less attention and creativity than the financial opportunities tech offers.

Star Trek has the potential to galvanize a new wave of technologists to think critically about the technologies they deploy and the social problems they can address. That’s because in addition to depicting both technological and social progress, Star Trek has often illuminated the relationship between the two. Dig into the past few decades of scholarship on Star Trek , and you will find compelling arguments for the franchise’s value in addressing such questions as the relationship between technology and freedom; the role of gender in framing our understanding of technology’s triumph over nature; and the impact of the internet on the treatment of sexual identity in Star Trek itself.

In “Lessons From Star Trek : Examining the Social Values Embedded in Technological Programs,” John W. Hansen directly invokes Star Trek ’s value as inspiration for socially responsible technology development. Using the movies Star Trek II and III as his reference points, Hansen argues that the conflict between the heroic Federation and the belligerent Klingons usefully frames the conversation around the social ends of technology.

The Federation saw the technology as a means for creation; the Klingons saw technology as a weapon of power. We see the battle that rages between (a) the appropriate objectives of technology and (b) the exercise of personal liberty. Are these concepts related, as Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, hints, or are they virginal concepts that must retain their independence and purity?

You Will Be Assimilated

Tudor Balinisteanu extracts an equally sweeping perspective from a close reading of Star Trek: First Contact. (The best of all the Star Trek movies, obviously.) In “ The Cyborg Goddess: Social Myths of Women as Goddesses of Technologized Otherworlds ,” Balinisteanu contrasts the movie with prior Trek incarnations to tackle the franchise’s three-way dance between technology, social progress, and gender roles:

We notice through the many TV episodes and films of the Star Trek saga that a structuring axiom of its myth is the revolutionary principle; humanity’s progress is epitomized by the quest of the Federation’s flagship, the Enterprise . The evolutionist view is that humanity has evolved by adjusting to the natural environment. Having developed science, men have begun to transform nature.

Watching First Contact through a feminist lens, Balinisteanu argues that the movie’s portrayal of the villainous cyborg species, the Borg, is a departure from the series’ historical depiction of tech progress.

[t]he social organization of the Borg adapts not by conquering nature, as in enlightenment/evolutionist-based visions of progress, but by integrating it with technological culture… in First Contact this integration is perceived as a threat because it allows for the acknowledgment of a woman:nature relationship that, undermining the hierarchy of technological environments placing men in a privileged position vis-à-vis nature (and women), reclaims women’s leadership as creators of techno-culture that does not need to subordinate nature.

3-panel comic shows Kirk and Spock confessing their mutual crush and making out.

If Star Trek has often considered the relationship between technology and social progress, the franchise has also been shaped by that very interplay. P.J. Falzone offers a great case study of this dynamic in the article, “ The Final Frontier is Queer: Aberrancy, Archetype and Audience Generated Folklore in K/S Slashfiction.” For those unfamiliar with the genre, Falzone sums it up as follows:

Known by various names (Spirk, K/S, Kirk/Spock) K/S is defined as fan-generated art, stories, novels, poems, songs, or other creative media that take as their starting point an imagined romantic relationship between the two principal characters of the original Star Trek film and television series… K/S is not a unique genre, but belongs to a larger body of “slashfiction” named for the “/” or “slash” between the names of the characters that the stories queer. Slash, by definition, deals with same sex characters that in the parent narrative are avowedly or assumedly heterosexual… Not only was K/S the first manifestation of a slash narrative, it has also proven to be the most widespread and enduring because the Star Trek narrative is ongoing.

What makes K/S such a great laboratory for exploring the relationship between tech and social progress in the Trek universe is the internet’s unique role in fostering the medium. As Falzone writes:

Relegated to the odd corners of Star Trek conventions, and shunned, sometimes cruelly, by many in the broader community of Trekkers and writers of fan fiction, slash inhabited a marginal and outlaw status for many years… Then came the Internet… what Cumberland (2000) calls the “paradox of cyberspace—personal privacy in a public forum” has provided the infrastructure for K/S to expand beyond its Trekker convention and APA roots and move into a wider sphere. [Cumberland] notes that slash “is no longer a curious subset of the fan fiction phenomenon, but has become one of the mainstream forms of internet erotica.”

Birthing a massive genre of queer fiction and erotica should be evidence enough for the intimate relationship between Star Trek , technology, and social progress. (Though apparently it isn’t enough for new Spock, Zachary Quinto. Despite being an openly gay movie star and an eloquent voice for LGBTQ rights , Quinto has ranged from derogatory to dismissive when it comes to the K/S genre, clearly missing its historical relevance to the gay community.)

Still not sold? Then step back and consider that the ultimate aim of Falzone’s analysis is to argue for the relevance of K/S in queering a Star Trek universe that “through its almost forty years… has still never featured a gay character.”

All that changes with the advent of Star Trek: Discovery , which is slated to include the first openly gay character in the Star Trek TV series. (The latest Star Trek movie quietly queered the longstanding character of Sulu .) After reading Falzone’s article, it’s hard not to credit the appearance of Discovery ’s Lt. Stamets at least partially to K/S, since “the introduction of queer characters into the original Star Trek mythos through rewriting [was] a way for fans to fulfill the utopian ideals of Star Trek that the creators never did.”

The relationship between technology and freedom. The triad of gender, nature and technology. The embrace of queer identity, online, and (finally!) on screen. These are all complex subjects for a science fiction franchise to address, and yet over the course of several decades, Star Trek has tangled with each of them.

Now, with Discovery , we need Star Trek to once again pick up the gauntlet of addressing the complicated relationship between technology and social progress. We need Discovery to inspire a fresh generation of technologists to think not only about the kinds of technologies that could make a buck, but the kind of technologies that could make change. We need a Star Trek to inspire the kinds of conversations that made up so many of the early evenings in my marriage: conversations about how we want technology to function in our lives, and in our world.

But this time, those conversations needn’t be confined to the marriage bed or the family dinner table. When Star Trek: Voyager wrapped up its seventh and final season in 2001, it was before we had Facebook or YouTube or Twitter. We didn’t even have MySpace back then, for Pete’s sake. Sure, there were Usenet groups and email lists where Star Trek fans could discuss the latest episodes and ideas, but by definition those were communities largely composed of hard-core techies. Discovery is the first time we’ll have a week-by-week universe of ideas to explore, and a broadly accessible online medium in which both tech creators and tech users can discuss those ideas together.

So Discovery, please bring the ideas on: The complicated, messy, controversial explorations of what the relationship between technology and social progress could look like. My husband and I are waiting, and we’re tired of talking about our kids.

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

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5 Ways Star Trek Influenced Real-World Technology

Star Trek has influenced a lot of TV series, movies, and novels. But it has also influenced technology that society uses almost daily!

The Star Trek series is one of the most popular and influential franchises of all time, not just in science fiction but in general. It premiered in 1966 and ever since then led to the creation of multiple series, movies, many novels as well as games and other forms of media. However, Star Trek had an even more practical impact on the world as it influenced its actual technology.

Related: Books You Should Read If You Love Star Trek

Many inventions seen in Star Trek that were once considered science fiction are now part of the society and many people use them without realizing they originated from the series, in some cases many years ago. Some inventions scientists and other experts work on that are based on Star Trek aren't yet in everyday use, but others are available to many people or at the very least have been tested in practice and proved to be functioning.

Even though the Starfleet prides itself on being a peaceful organization that explores the universe and isn't out there to conquer it, that doesn't mean that every alien species the heroes come across is as friendly . Sometimes they attack, and the only viable choice is for the protagonists to defend themselves. Phasers are a good way how to achieve that in a possibly non-lethal way, as the weapon has two settings - stun and kill.

The audience mostly sees the heroes using the milder setting that knocks others out but doesn't take their lives. Even though actual phasers don't yet exist, similar technologies have existed since the 1970s, after the original Star Trek series premiered. Both tasers and stun guns work similarly, and are capable of stunning a hostile individual. It's required, however, to use them at a closer distance than the phasers.

While not everybody is unfortunate enough to have to use a taser or a stun gun to defend themselves, a lot of people own a tablet. They're lighter than computers and notebooks, so it's possible to use them when somebody's traveling. Once again, Star Trek did it first as the ships' crews used the so-called Personal Access Display Devices aka PADDs.

Related: Best Villains From The Star Trek Movies, Ranked

While small, these devices had many functions and were both practical and efficient. The design is similar as well, and while it's possible that inventing the tablets would have been a natural progression anyway, Star Trek was one of the first shows that showed that personal computers didn't have to be huge and fixed to one location.

3 The Optical Visor

In the future, people can work in Starfleet even if they're blind. That's the case of Geordi La Forge who could see thanks to his visor. While there isn't yet a device that would look exactly like Geordi's visor, another invention fulfills a similar purpose. In an experiment taking place in 2005, scientists from Stanford University managed to implant a small chip to blind rats . Afterward, the rats successfully underwent a vision recognition test.

This is relevant because the implant works similarly to the visor. As a result, a blind person with the implant could regain a 20/80 sight. So even though they wouldn't be able to get a driving license, they would be able to do everyday things without the need for an assistance, such as in the form of a companion dog. Of course, as the technology develops, it's likely it'll become even more efficient in the future.

2 Telepresence

In the increasingly more digital world, being able to communicate with people over a large distance is important. It became even more vital during the pandemic when a lot of people were working from their homes. The telepresence allows connecting people, making it even more complex and progressive than a mere video conference. The most advanced example is the Cisco's TelePresence that combines audio, video and lighting, and makes it seem like images shown on a screen are in the same room as the attendees of the call.

Related: Most Iconic Ships In The Star Trek Franchise

Of course, it's not necessary to go as far. In the original series, Captain Kirk and other Enterprise crew members regularly communicate via computers with people who are light years away from them. Services and technologies such as Skype, Zoom, and others also allow people from opposite sides of the world to call each other and talk in real time, without any delay.

1 Communicators

One of the most notable Star Trek gadgets that influenced real-life technology is the communicator. The name speaks for itself - the Starfleet members use their communicators to communicate with each other, usually on missions outside the ship but sometimes inside the ship as well, depending on the circumstances. Anybody who ever used a mobile phone can say thank you to Star Trek since it's an official fact that their invention was inspired by the series.

More specifically, Martin Cooper, the inventor of the first handheld phones in the 1970s, said that Star Trek inspired his invention. Of all the mobile phones, the flip phone is probably most similar to the communicators from Star Trek: The Original Series but all current phones have their inspiration source in the franchise.

More: Most Powerful Borg In The Star Trek Franchise

Could a telescope ever see the beginning of time? An astronomer explains

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Star Trek’s Enduring Influence on the Space Economy and Technology

For over 50 years, the Star Trek science fiction franchise has inspired generations of scientists, engineers, and innovators to pursue groundbreaking technologies that were once only imagined on screen. From flip phones to voice-activated computers, Star Trek has an uncanny track record of predicting and shaping the technological advancements that have transformed the modern world. But beyond consumer gadgets, Star Trek has also had a profound influence on humanity’s efforts to explore space and develop the space economy.

Inspiring Interest in Space Exploration

When Star Trek debuted in 1966, the Space Race between the U.S. and Soviet Union was in full swing. NASA’s Apollo program was working towards landing a man on the moon and the public imagination was captivated by the possibilities of space travel. Star Trek tapped into this zeitgeist with its vision of a future where humanity had transcended global conflict to unite in the peaceful exploration of the cosmos.

The diverse crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, working together to seek out “new life and new civilizations,” provided an inspiring model of what space exploration could look like. Actress Nichelle Nichols, who played communications officer Uhura, went on to work with NASA to recruit women and people of color into the astronaut corps in the 1970s. Numerous astronauts, from Sally Ride to Mae Jemison, have cited Star Trek as an early inspiration for their careers in space.

Star Trek presented a hopeful vision of the future where science, technology and human ingenuity could overcome any challenge. The show’s optimistic outlook resonated with the public during the turbulent 1960s and helped generate excitement and support for the real-world space program. NASA officials took notice of Star Trek’s cultural impact and sought to capitalize on it. In 1976, following a write-in campaign by fans, the first NASA space shuttle orbiter was named “Enterprise” after the iconic starship.

Over the decades, Star Trek has continued to inspire new generations to dream of exploring the final frontier. Astronauts and space entrepreneurs frequently cite the franchise as an influence, and Star Trek’s vision of a spacefaring future has become a cultural touchstone. By sparking the public’s imagination and showing what’s possible, Star Trek has played an invaluable role in building support for space exploration and helping to drive the development of the space economy.

Influencing Space Technology Development

Many of the futuristic technologies imagined on Star Trek have gone on to influence real-world space technology development:

Communicators: The flip-phone communicators used by the Enterprise crew presaged the development of real mobile phones. Motorola engineer Martin Cooper, who invented the first handheld mobile phone in 1973, directly credits Star Trek as an inspiration. The compact, wireless devices used for voice communication on the show set consumer expectations for how mobile technology should work.

Tricorders: The medical tricorders used by Enterprise doctors to quickly scan and diagnose patients inspired the development of real-world medical technologies. Scanadu developed a “Scout” device that can measure vital signs and detect health issues when held to a patient’s forehead. NASA has tested tricorder-like devices to quickly assess astronaut health on the International Space Station. The goal is to create portable, noninvasive tools to monitor and diagnose medical conditions.

Voice-activated computers: The Enterprise computer could understand and respond to voice commands, foreshadowing the development of real-world digital assistants like Siri and Alexa. Many engineers working on voice interface technologies cite Star Trek as an inspiration. The idea of being able to seamlessly interact with computers using natural language has driven decades of research and development.

Tractor beams: While tractor beams that can move physical objects are still science fiction, scientists have developed “optical tweezers” that use lasers to manipulate microscopic objects. NASA is also researching technologies that could capture orbital debris or asteroids. The concept of using beams of energy to attract or repel objects, a staple of Star Trek, is guiding work on advanced space technologies.

Replicators: Star Trek’s replicators could instantly materialize any object or food. While we don’t have this capability yet, 3D printing is a major step in this direction, “printing” physical objects from digital blueprints. Made In Space has tested 3D printers on the space station to produce spare parts and tools on demand. The long-term goal is to develop space-based manufacturing capabilities that can support exploration missions.

Universal Translators: Star Trek’s universal translator allowed seamless communication across different languages. While not instantaneous, real-time translation technologies have made significant strides. Google Translate and similar tools can translate text and speech between dozens of languages. As natural language processing improves, we’re moving closer to Star Trek’s vision of effortless cross-cultural communication.

Phasers: The phasers used by Starfleet are directed-energy weapons that can stun or vaporize targets. The U.S. military has developed ship-mounted lasers that can shoot down drones and missiles. Handheld “stun guns” like Tasers also use electricity to incapacitate people, similar to phasers on a “stun” setting. While real directed-energy weapons are still a far cry from Star Trek’s phasers, the show predicted the development of this type of weaponry.

By envisioning future technologies and showing them in use, Star Trek has inspired generations of scientists and engineers to make them a reality. The franchise serves as a shared cultural reference point, with its gadgets and concepts shaping both public expectations and the direction of research and development. Many of the people working to develop the technologies that will enable future space exploration and development grew up watching Star Trek, and the show continues to influence their work and goals.

Shaping the Future Space Economy

More broadly, Star Trek presents an idealistic vision of a “post-scarcity” economy where technology has eliminated material want, allowing humanity to focus its efforts on exploration and self-improvement rather than accumulation of wealth. While this utopian future is still far off, the show’s vision continues to shape how we imagine the trajectory of the space economy.

As space travel becomes more accessible thanks to reusable rockets and emerging space tourism, many see the economic potential in space mining, manufacturing, and colonization. Jeff Bezos, whose Blue Origin aims to enable “millions of people living and working in space,” is a huge Star Trek fan.

Other entrepreneurs see the potential for a space-based “information economy” akin to how the Enterprise crew could access information and resources on demand through voice-activated computers and replicators. Satellites provide GPS, weather monitoring, and global internet, while server farms host cloud computing. As computing power increases, a space-based information economy could efficiently allocate resources, make new scientific breakthroughs, and expand the scope of human knowledge, much like the Enterprise’s five-year mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Star Trek’s post-scarcity economy is based on the idea that technology will progress to the point where energy is virtually free and material goods can be produced abundantly at little cost. Replicators, by rearranging subatomic particles, can create any inanimate matter, eliminating scarcity. The show suggests that this will lead to the elimination of poverty and a change in humanity’s motivations. Without the need to work for money, people will be free to pursue their passions, better themselves, and work for the collective good.

While replicators that can produce anything are still in the realm of science fiction, emerging technologies like renewable energy, nuclear fusion, and advanced automation could drastically reduce the cost of energy and material goods in the future. 3D printing is already being used to manufacture an increasing variety of products on demand from digital designs. Continued breakthroughs in computing, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and energy production could bring us closer to a post-scarcity world over the coming decades and centuries.

Star Trek also imagines an interplanetary economy that is more cooperative than competitive. The United Federation of Planets operates as a post-capitalist society where member worlds collaborate and share resources rather than compete. This allows the Federation to pool its scientific knowledge, technological capabilities, and productive capacity to raise living standards for all and tackle ambitious projects like deep space exploration.

Some see parallels in the way space agencies like NASA and ESA currently collaborate on major projects like the International Space Station. Public-private partnerships are also increasingly common in the space sector, with NASA and other agencies working with companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop new capabilities. As humanity expands into the solar system and beyond, many believe international collaboration and public-private cooperation will be essential.

At the same time, Star Trek acknowledges that a purely post-scarcity economy may not be achievable and that there will always be some degree of competition and conflicting interests between different species and factions. The show features a range of different economic systems, from the capitalist Ferengi to the collectivist Borg. It explores how these societies with vastly different values and motivations interact with the Federation’s idealistic vision.

This serves as a reminder that even as we work towards a more abundant and equitable future in space, there will still be challenges and tensions to navigate. Different nations and private companies are already jockeying for position in the emerging space economy, from staking out lunar mining claims to fighting over satellite orbital slots. As humanity becomes an interplanetary species, we will need to find ways to balance competition and collaboration, idealism and pragmatism.

Ultimately, while Star Trek’s utopian future is still out of reach, its vision continues to inspire us to imagine a better tomorrow. The show’s enduring popularity and cultural impact are a testament to the power of its optimistic, humanistic worldview. As we work to develop the technologies and build the institutions that will enable the future space economy, Star Trek serves as a reminder of what we can achieve when we harness science and technology for the collective good. The show’s rallying cry to “boldly go” continues to motivate us to explore, discover, and improve ourselves and our world.

A Cultural Touchstone

Ultimately, Star Trek’s biggest influence on the space economy may be as a cultural touchstone that unites enthusiasts and innovators around a common vision for humanity’s future. From NASA’s naming of the first Space Shuttle “Enterprise” after a fan-led letter writing campaign, to the “Vulcan salute” used by the crew of the first SpaceX crewed mission, Star Trek’s language and iconography have become deeply embedded in space culture.

By presenting a future where science, rationality, and peaceful cooperation allow humanity to transcend its limits and explore the cosmos, Star Trek continues to inspire generations to pursue that future. The franchise’s enduring popularity – over 50 years since its debut – is a testament to the power of that vision. As long as we continue to dream of exploring “space, the final frontier,” Star Trek will be a guiding star for the space economy and humanity’s efforts to turn science fiction into reality.

Star Trek’s influence extends far beyond the scientific and technological realms. The franchise has also had a profound impact on popular culture and the way we envision the future. Its progressive social and political messages, groundbreaking diversity, and utopian vision have shaped attitudes and sparked important conversations about issues like race, gender, war, and environmentalism.

When Star Trek debuted in the 1960s, it broke new ground by featuring a diverse cast that included a Black woman, an Asian man, and a Russian character, all working together as equals. At a time of racial segregation and Cold War tensions, this was a radical statement. The show envisioned a future where humanity had moved beyond petty differences to unite in common cause.

Over the years, Star Trek has continued to push boundaries and challenge social norms. It featured the first interracial kiss on American television, between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura. Later series like The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine featured complex, nuanced explorations of issues like religion, addiction, disability, and LGBTQ+ rights. The franchise has always been at the forefront of social commentary in science fiction.

Many of the actors and creators involved with Star Trek have used their platforms to advocate for social justice and scientific literacy. Nichelle Nichols used her fame to recruit women and minorities into NASA. George Takei has been a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and Japanese-American history. LeVar Burton has promoted children’s literacy through his Reading Rainbow program. The cast and crew of Star Trek have consistently used the franchise’s popularity and cultural cachet to push for positive change.

Star Trek’s vision of a united Earth that has overcome war, poverty, and discrimination to venture out into the cosmos has inspired generations of fans to work towards making that dream a reality. The show’s depiction of a future where science and reason triumph over superstition and conflict has promoted critical thinking and a belief in human progress. Its message of infinite diversity in infinite combinations (IDIC) has fostered a more tolerant and accepting worldview.

The Star Trek fandom itself has become a cultural force, with millions of “Trekkies” worldwide celebrating the franchise through conventions, fan fiction, cosplay, and community activism. The fan community has been at the forefront of letter-writing campaigns, charity drives, and crowdfunding efforts to support various causes, from space exploration to social justice. The shared love of Star Trek brings people together across boundaries of age, race, nationality, and creed.

In many ways, Star Trek has become more than just a science fiction franchise – it’s a cultural movement and a vision for the future. Its influence can be seen in everything from the technology we use to the way we think about the world and our place in the universe. It has inspired countless people to pursue careers in science, engineering, and space exploration, and to work towards a better tomorrow.

As we stand on the cusp of a new era of space development, with private companies and nations racing to commercialize and colonize the final frontier, Star Trek’s lessons are more relevant than ever. Will we use our technological progress to create a more equitable and sustainable society, or will we export our conflicts and inequalities into space? Will we unite in peaceful cooperation to explore the cosmos, or will we compete for resources and dominance?

Star Trek offers a hopeful vision of a future where we choose the path of unity, progress, and discovery. It shows us that by embracing diversity, valuing science and reason, and working towards the common good, we can overcome any challenge and achieve wonders beyond our imagining. As we boldly go into an uncertain future, Star Trek will continue to light the way and inspire us to reach for the stars.

The Star Trek franchise has spawned numerous movies, spin-off series, books, comics, and games over the past five decades, each offering its own unique take on the Star Trek universe and its vision of the future. From the original series’ groundbreaking special effects and storytelling to the modern reboot films’ blockbuster action and cutting-edge visuals, Star Trek has constantly evolved to reflect the times and push the boundaries of what’s possible in science fiction.

At the same time, the core values and messages of Star Trek have remained constant. The franchise has always been about using science fiction as a lens to examine the human condition and explore pressing social, political, and philosophical questions. It has always championed diversity, inclusion, and the idea that our differences make us stronger. It has always presented a vision of the future where technology is a tool for enlightenment and progress, not just conflict and destruction.

As we look ahead to the next 50 years of Star Trek and the next 50 years of space exploration, it’s clear that the franchise’s influence will continue to be felt. A new generation of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and explorers are growing up with Star Trek’s vision of the future in their minds and hearts. They are the ones who will develop the technologies, build the starships, and chart the course for humanity’s journey to the stars.

And as we venture out into the cosmos, we will take Star Trek’s lessons and values with us. We will remember that exploration is not just about conquering new worlds, but also about understanding ourselves and our place in the universe. We will remember that diversity is a strength, and that by working together across boundaries we can achieve the impossible. We will remember that science and reason are our most powerful tools for overcoming challenges and creating a better future.

Star Trek’s vision of a united humanity exploring the cosmos in peace may still be a distant dream, but it’s a dream worth pursuing. As we continue to advance in science and technology, as we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible, we can look to Star Trek as a guiding star. Its enduring influence on our culture and imagination will continue to inspire us to boldly go where no one has gone before, and to create a future that would make Gene Roddenberry proud.

In the end, Star Trek’s greatest legacy may be its ability to inspire hope and optimism in the face of an uncertain future. In a world that can often seem divided and chaotic, Star Trek offers a vision of a better tomorrow – a tomorrow where we have overcome our differences to unite in common purpose, where we have harnessed the power of science and technology for the greater good, and where we have ventured out into the stars to explore the wonders of the universe.

That vision has endured for over 50 years, and it will continue to endure as long as we keep dreaming of a better future. As long as we keep reaching for the stars, Star Trek will be there to guide us and inspire us. And as we work to build the space economy and make science fiction into reality, we can take heart in knowing that we are part of a grand tradition that stretches back to the original Enterprise crew and beyond.

So let us boldly go, together, into the future that Star Trek has imagined for us. Let us work to create a world of peace, prosperity, and progress, where all people have the opportunity to reach their full potential and contribute to the greater good. Let us use science and technology to solve the challenges we face and unlock the secrets of the universe. And let us never stop exploring, never stop discovering, never stop dreaming of what’s possible.

That is the true spirit of Star Trek, and it’s a spirit that will continue to shape our world and our future for generations to come. As long as we hold true to those values and keep reaching for the stars, there’s no limit to what we can achieve. The final frontier awaits us, and with Star Trek as our guide, we have the power to make it our own.

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Modern Day Technology Inspired By Star Trek

The Star Trek Universe and Franchise has been quite beneficial to us in our real world by spurring a lot of ideas and inventions.

Here are some of the modern day technologies that were inspired by the fictional Star Trek Universe....

~• COMMUNICATORS

In the fictitious Star Trek universe, the crew of the Starship Enterprise use a device called the communicator to contact one another, both on and off the ship.

This handy gadget also enables crew members to contact other starships, which was rather useful when faced with different situations.

For some years now, we've been using a similar way to contact each other just like it was done in the Star Trek Universe.

The devices we use currently though are known as cell phones and they're very similar to Star Trek communicators.

Martin Cooper, who was the man associated and credited with the innovation of the first handheld cellular phone in the 1970s, had stated that his prototypes for the device were inspired by the original Star Trek technology.

~• TABLET COMPUTERS

The Personal Access Display Devices, or PADDs as they are called in Star Trek, have been in broad use since at least the twenty second century in the Star Trek universe.

The futuristic looking computer interface were used by space-faring organizations to punch in coordinates for star systems, as well as being a recreational tool aboard the ship.

As the years have passed we have seen, watched, and observed as our real-world computers developed into touchscreen devices with considerable computing power.

Take for an example, Apple’s first-generation iPad.

This first generation iPad aided in bringing the PADD device from Star Trek into reality in the year 2010 and is currently utilized by many people in their daily lives today.

~• WARP DRIVE

This technology, the Warp Drive, is an extremely beneficial technology used in Star Trek.

It works by generating a warp field to envelop a Starship in a subspace bubble to distort the spacetime continuum and propel the vessel forward at a velocity that is faster than the speed of light.

Interestingly, NASA has indicated that this completely fictional concept could actually be possible. In recent years, the scientific community has become increasingly excited about the concept of a warp propulsion system, which could provide the path to ultrafast interplanetary travel in the future.

In the Star Trek universe, phased array pulsed energy projectiles, aka phasers, are available in a wide range of sizes and styles, ranging from handheld firearms to starship-mounted weapons, which can discharge beams, slice materials, trigger explosions, and, most famously, be set to stun.

In the real world, identical and analogous possibilities have been in use since the 1970s.

Tasers and stun guns perform quite similar actions to Captain Kirk’s primary weapon, however, these energy weapons have to be activated in close range to the target to stop them in their tracks.

~• UNIVERSAL TRANSLATORS

While Captain Kirk and his crew planet hop aboard the Starship Enterprise , the crew would regularly make contact with a number of different alien races and species, emerging from a variety of strange new worlds, so the universal translator was a very essential piece of technology to decode those foreign languages when they came in contact with them.

Today, there are multiple technologies that accomplish the same thing though they have not reached Starfleet’s level of dependability yet. A lot of companies, however, are making significant progress in developing more advanced software that can translate complex sentences, especially via apps.

~• TRICORDERS

The tricorder is another important piece of equipment seen in the Star Trek universe. The multifunctional handheld device was used to sensor scan an environment or an individual and record data for analysis. In particular, Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy often used it to diagnose and help cure patients.

Here on Earth, a number of similar products have been created to mimic the capabilities of the Star Trek device. For instance, the DNA Lab by QuantuMDx can scan a patient and deliver a diagnosis in 15 minutes, while NASA employs LOCAD to measure organisms on the International Space Station.

~• Video Calls

Crewmembers aboard the Starship Enterprise are able to access special video technologies that allow one person to connect with another in a way that makes both parties feel as if they are present in the same location, even though they might in fact be separated by vast time differences and space.

Since 1966, this invention had become an increasingly common and useful communication tool in real-world scenarios. In particular, Cisco’s video call system offers an authentic experience by mirroring the surroundings of multiple users in a videoconference to make it seem like they’re all together.

~• REPLICATORS

In the Star Trek universe, the replicator has a number of functions and purposes, with some proving to be more popular than others.

Take for an example, Captain Jean-Luc Picard frequently used the replicator to order a cup of “Tea, Earl Gray, Hot,” which is then produced from the ship’s reserves.

These days, real world replicators exist in the form of 3D printers, which build three-dimensional objects from a computer-aided design model.

While they might be lacking a capability to deliver the perfect mixture, these devices have a range of practical processes in order to manufacture or generate quite complex and intricate objects.

~• TRACTOR BEAMS

The highly powered tractor beams in the Star Trek Universe are often used by starships and space stations to control and physically maneuver objects in deep space, which was particularly useful for towing ships in need of assistance to safety and pushing ships out of dangerous situations.

In real life, optical tweezers operate in a comparable fashion to the graviton beams that commonly appear in the science fiction genre, though on a much smaller scale.

Instead of hauling or transporting ships from one location to another, these scientific instruments use laser beams of light to hold and move microscopic or infinitesimal objects.

~• HOLODECKS

The Holodecks seen in Star Trek are similar to our real world Virtual Reality.

In the future of the Star Trek universe, the traditional televised entertainment apparently has gone the way of all of Earth's problems.

When the crews of the Enterprise D, Voyager, or Deep Space 9 had a desire for some rest and relaxation or recreation, they would enter the Holodeck for a fully immersive adventure.

Over the years, the Star Trek Universe has used them as a sort of plot device to get the characters outside the setting of space and into any number of shenanigans, ranging from visits from Professor Moriarity, to fights in Sherwood Forest, and famous battles of World War II.

Sometimes, any one or more episodes of a season, would feature the "malfunctioning Holodeck" trope, and the anachronistic characters would cause chaos on the ship.

This type of entertainment, where you are completely immersed in the action or participating in it, clearly finds its correspondence in virtual reality, which continues to expand as a medium for viewing and gaming. It's not hard to imagine a not so distant future with Star Trek's holodecks.

~• VOICE INTERFACE COMPUTERS

In the Star Trek universe, you could have an informal conversation or chat to a computer. Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who was the Star Trek creator's wife, was usually the one behind the voice.

In the real world, we've got Siri and Alexa, to do that for us just like Majel had done in the Star Trek Universe.

Google had at one point even code named their voice based service "Majel," in honor of Barrett-Roddenberry.

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How-To Geek

6 ways our tech is better than star trek's.

Sometimes truth is more impressive than fiction.

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Star trek is prophetic, but we can do better, our ai is more impressive now, data's processing power is weak, star trek's holodeck is better and worse than our vr, smartphones and tablets are better than communicators and padds, we have better automation, our tech doesn't blow up (as much).

Star Trek was one of my geekiest influences, and it inspired real scientists and engineers to make some of its tech a reality, but not everything in Star Trek is that impressive anymore. Some of our tech is even better.

Star Trek has been a beacon of futurism since its inception in 1966. It showcased technologies that were miraculous for the era it was born in. Fast forward to today, and we can see Star Trek's influence on our technological landscape.

Take the communicators in the original Star Trek series. These handheld devices, used by the crew of the USS Enterprise for voice communication, were a clear precursor to our modern cell phones. In fact, the creator of the first cell phone, Martin Cooper, has openly credited the Star Trek communicator as his inspiration. It's remarkable to think that a piece of sci-fi tech has transformed the way we communicate and connect with each other globally.

Similarly, the medical tricorder used by Dr. McCoy to diagnose ailments and injuries in a non-invasive manner is another Star Trek invention that's now becoming a reality. Various companies and research institutions are now working on creating real-world versions of the tricorder. For instance, the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE was a global competition that inspired teams to develop portable, wireless devices that monitor and diagnose health conditions, reminiscent of the medical tricorder.

Star Trek's voice-activated computer systems are another technological prophecy that's come to fruition. Today, we have Siri, Alexa , and Google Assistant, AI-powered virtual assistants that can perform a multitude of tasks, all activated through voice commands.

While the series has been prophetic in some ways, the reality is that our tech has not only caught up but surpassed what Star Trek envisioned in many ways.

Star Trek Next Generation Bluetooth Communicator Badge

No one is going to beam you up, but you can still order pizza with it.

Star Trek presented us with some of television's most iconic AI characters. Data, an android with a positronic brain, was the epitome of artificial intelligence. However, when you compare Data's AI to our current artificial intelligence, we're actually ahead in some ways.

OpenAI's GPT-4 , for instance, is a language model AI that can write essays, answer questions, and even generate creative content like poems and short stories. It's not confined to a physical body like Data and can process and generate information in a fraction of the time. It's also constantly learning and evolving, something that Data struggled with throughout the series.

Technologies like GPT and Google's Bard are also way better at faking human affectation, and there are numerous realistic artificial voices these days that can sound emotional, and even use contractions ! Data was also an avid artist, but machine learning systems that lack his sentience have arguably reached a higher level of artistic mastery than the beloved android.

Related: How Good Is Midjourney at AI Art? We Compared All the Models

Speaking of Data, his processing power, while impressive for the 24th century, is rather weak by today's standards. Data's creators, Dr. Noonien Soong, claimed he was capable of sixty trillion operations per second. Contrast that with our current supercomputers, which can perform quintillions of operations per second, and Data seems rather quaint.

We don't even have to look at supercomputers; an overclocked RTX 4090 can hit 100 Teraflops or 100 Trillion floating point operations per second.

Now we don't know how complex the operations are that Data's positronic brain can do, but in terms of pure speed we're way beyond that point. However, the fact that Data's brain can do what it does at around room temperature might be the most impressive thing about it.

Related: How to Stream Every 'Star Trek' TV Show in 2022

Star Trek's holodeck is an impressive piece of tech, creating fully immersive virtual environments that can simulate touch, smell, and taste. However, it's also a technology that's fraught with problems, often malfunctioning and putting crew members in danger.

Our current virtual reality technology might not be as immersive as the holodeck, but it's far safer and more reliable. With advancements in haptic feedback and VR graphics, we're inching closer to the holodeck experience without the life-threatening malfunctions.

While some folks still manage to trip or throw a VR controller into their TV screens, it's unlikely that one of the characters in a VR game will gain sentience and stalk you into reality like Dr Moriarty from the show.

Star Trek's communicators and Personal Access Display Devices (PADDs) were revolutionary to audiences in the 60s and 80s. But there's no contest when you compare them to our smartphones and tablets.

Our devices are slimmer, more powerful, and more functional than communicators and PADDs. We can browse the internet, stream videos, play games, and access many apps, all in the palm of our hands. Not to mention the superior graphics and display capabilities of our devices. That being said, there's still something undeniably sexy about LCARS .

While it might simply happen off-screen, Star Trek seems to have a suspicious lack of robots and general automation. People drive vehicles manually most of the time, and who cleans the carpet on the Enerprise D's bridge? I have two robot vacuums already, but maybe there's an organic cleaning crew on Starfleet ships?

In one episode, the Next Generation crew encounters "ExoComps", which are utility robots that can repair and maintain machinery, and this seems to blow the Chief Engineer's mind, while we're well on our way to having these types of systems already with robots like Boston Dynamics' Spot and the many, many, types of utility drones that are out there.

Now, Starfleet's technology does involve a lot of hand-waving with force fields and energy beams, which might be doing all the jobs that Roombas and factory robots would, but it does seem weird that they aren't as robotised as we're getting.

Lastly, let's not forget one of the most frequent occurrences in Star Trek - technology blowing up. Star Trek tech seems to have a penchant for pyrotechnics and extremely poor safety standards, from warp core breaches to exploding consoles. OSHA would have shut the whole thing down years ago. Some fuses would help, and what happened to seatbelts?

In contrast, our technology is far more stable. We have our fair share of glitches and bugs, but our tech seldom results in explosions. That's not to say our technology is perfect, but we've certainly come a long way in ensuring the safety and reliability of our gadgets, vehicles, and other technology.

I really, really still want replicators to be a thing, but I hope we never invent transporters !

Related: How to Stream Every 'Star Trek' Movie in 2022

Screen Rant

How star trek: discovery's trill ritual connects to ds9's dax.

The next clue in Star Trek: Discovery season 5's treasure hunt relies on a Trill ritual connected to Jadzia Dax on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 3 - "Jinaal"

The latest clue in Star Trek: Discovery leads to a Trill symbiont named Jinaal Bix, creating a link to the Progenitors' life-creating technology.
The zhian'tara ritual allows past Trill hosts to temporarily live through willing volunteers, offering insight into the nature of consciousness.
The Trill's belief in the separation of mind and body may hold keys to understanding the Progenitors' technology and the origin of sentient life.

The search for the latest clue in Star Trek: Discovery season 5's treasure hunt involves a Trill ritual first seen with Lt. Commander Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . 800 years before Star Trek: Discovery 's 32nd century, Romulan scientist Dr. Vellek (Michael Copeland) laid the clues that will ultimately lead to the life-creating technology of the Progenitors. In Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 3, "Jinaal", written by Kyle Jarrow and Lauren Wilkinson and directed by Andi Armaganian, Vellek's latest clue leads to Trill, so that's where Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and the USS Discovery crew hope to find the next piece of the puzzle.

Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 3 's clue points specifically to a 24th-century Trill symbiont host named Jinaal Bix. Fortunately, the Bix symbiont is still alive, so everything Jinaal knew lives on in Bix's current host, Kalzara Bix (Clare Coulter). The only wrinkle is that Michael Burnham, Cleveland Booker (David Ajala), and Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) must speak to the long-dead individual host Jinaal directly, and not the joined entity of Kalzara Bix. This seems impossible, but with the help of Dr. Culber volunteering as temporary host, there's a specific Trill ritual from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that can actually make that happen: zhian'tara.

Star Trek: Discovery Reminds Us DS9 Made Dax Cool Because Trills Are Weird

What is zhian'tara discovery & ds9's trill ritual explained, past trill hosts can temporarily live again..

Zhian'tara is the Trill ritual which allows the consciousness of a symbiont's past hosts to be temporarily transferred into willing volunteers. DS9 's Jadzia Dax undergoes zhian'tara in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 3, episode 25, "Facets", with the rest of DS9 's regular cast embodying all of Dax's previous hosts . While the past hosts' minds occupy living volunteers, those memories are no longer part of the symbiont, and inaccessible to the current host. Volunteers' minds are suppressed, but still aware, since Quark (Armin Shimerman) is able to break through Audrid Dax to complain, and Dr. Culber remarks on the curious nature of being present in his own body with Jinaal.

The Trill Symbiosis Commission considers the zhian'tara ritual a mandatory part of being a joined Trill, since the symbionts are venerated as keepers of Trill history. In a typical zhian'tara, like Dax's in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , the current Trill host is expected to meet and interact with their past hosts in order to better understand themselves and where they fall along the chain of individuals that make up a symbiont's lifetime. The concept of transferring consciousnesses via zhian'tara, and the fact the temporary hosts need not be Trill, has far reaching implications on the nature of consciousness and the mind's connection to the physical body in Star Trek .

Prior to "Jinaal", an aytpical zhian'tara was used in Star Trek: Discovery season 4, episode 3, "Choose to Live", to permanently transfer the consciousness of Gray Tal (Ian Alexander) from the Tal symbiont into a synthetic body.

The Trill Connection To Star Trek: Discovery's Progenitor Technology

The trill know something that other star trek cultures don't..

It's probably no accident that a Trill was on the team that the 24th-century Federation President tasked with uncovering the mysteries of the Progenitors' technology. At the end of Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 3, "Jinaal", Burnham and Culber discuss how Jinaal can possess Culber's body from a scientific perspective, and conclude that "some things are unknowable", but the Trill themselves have no such questions. It's a matter of fact in Trill culture that the mind is uncoupled from the body, and symbionts are biological storage for previous hosts' souls, while also being independently sentient. That's important when digging deep into how the origin of sentient life.

If the Progenitors' technology is capable of creating life, does it merely build the physical bodies as empty vessels awaiting the spark of life, or is Progenitor technology able to create souls from scratch, too? There must be a reason Star Trek: Discovery is using the Trill to lay the groundwork for the ultimate reveal , when similar practices exist in other Star Trek cultures, like the Vulcan ability to place one's katra with another individual. With the Progenitors behind the existence of all sentient humanoid life in Star Trek , Star Trek: Discovery may come to the conclusion that it isn't just biology that unites us, but our souls as well.

New episodes of Star Trek: Discovery stream Thursdays on Paramount+.

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