Another Movie Guide

How Star Trek Fiction Became Everyday Reality

Who could have guessed, watching the Starship Enterprise first set out in the 60s, that its five year mission would span four decades and bring Earth so much of the technology that today we take for granted?

At a time when even a landline house phone was still seen by many as a luxury, families entered the fictional world of Star Trek, watching in awe as Captain James T. Kirk spoke to his crew via a handheld communicator. Forty years on, with satellite navigation a given, billions of us own mobile technology. Already considering flip-top cell phones pretty outmoded, we attach Bluetooth devices, with no thought of Lt Uhura opening the hailing frequencies through an elaborate earpiece. Nor do we take a second glance at the handheld PDA, the modern day development from Kirk’s daily captain’s log. The touch screen technology of Star Trek is rapidly becoming second-nature to us: not only do we use it on our mobile phones and other hand-held devices, we tap screens at the airport, the station, the library, the supermarket – and as we enter and leave these buildings, we pass through doors that magically glide open before us, not stopping to consider their link with Star Trek fiction.

The icing on the cake is our ability to see people at the same time that we’re speaking to them. In the original Star Trek series, the crew on the Enterprise bridge can be seen engaging in serious audio-visual communication with the outside, strange new worlds. Modern technology has developed this concept of video-conferencing on a huge scale, making it a crucial element in business and political communications, whilst also providing us with the more humble webcam. Even with Captain Kirk at its helm, the bold Starship Enterprise could also have been blindly going where no man had gone before – it had no windows. Without the giant viewscreen on the bridge, Kirk and his crew would have been unable to see where they were heading. It’s strangely ironic to think that today’s modern society can view Star Trek DVDs via their flatscreen TV.

In medical science we can find further links. Picture Dr “Bones” McCoy valiantly saving the day, diagnosing diseases by scanning the body with his trusty tricorder device, surely the forerunner of today’s MRI and CAT scan procedures. And in the same way that “Bones” used his hypospray to painlessly pass medicine through the skin, modern day product design has brought us the Jet Injector.

Tricorder technology was also favoured by the Enterprise crew when it came to checking out the safety of new civilizations. Today, many emergency response teams use chemical detection equipment to help identify a threat, while police officers have Taser guns at their disposal, a weapon designed to stun – not unlike Star Trek’s hand-held phaser, which could also be set to kill. When there are problems with language barriers, the universal translator comes into its own: in today’s world the US army uses the Phraselator in Iraq for translating speech. Some websites, including Google, also adopt this technology and the first mobile phones with speech translation are coming onto the market – the next generation of the hand-held communicator.

Some of Star Trek’s fictional creations have not quite made it into reality yet, but give them time. Building on the tricorder and MRI/CAT scan concept, a company based in San Diego is developing a small portable device that can detect illnesses when it touches the skin. Meanwhile, the US Air Force Research Laboratory is working on a portable non-lethal deterrent weapon that uses a laser system to temporarily blind the enemy. It’s name? The Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response (PHASR) gun.

In today’s fast-pace modern society, we all have days when we wish Scotty would just beam us up. Nobody’s managed to turn the transporter into reality yet, but who knows? Maybe, quietly tucked away in a windowless laboratory somewhere in our new civilization, someone’s working on it!

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