Star Trek Tech That Exists Today 207
Esther Schindler writes "When Star Trek hit the air waves, talking computers were just a pipe dream. While teleportation remains elusive, several once-fictional technologies are changing the way people live and work. Here are some ways in which we're approaching the gizmos that Star Trek demonstrated. Speech recognition? Check. Holodeck? Sort of. Replicator? Workin' on it."
iPhone (Score:4, Informative)
What about the white iPhone 4 [mrericsir.com]?
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Now I'm more interested in getting a version of the bot holding it!
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Aha! Proof that Androids rely on iPhone to get stuff done!
Re:iPhone (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:iPhone (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds more like they are ebook readers in the book.
And anyway, you shouldn't assume all tablets are iPads. They could very well have been Samsung tablets.
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Not really... (Score:3)
Most of the example are not really very much like Star Trek "tech" at all... And what's that Space Shuttle looking thing? Made out of powdered American cheese?
Re:Not really... (Score:5, Interesting)
But they leave off the ones that have actually been realized. Communicators the size of a lapel pin were wild conjecture at the time of the original series. Automatic doors were a new idea. I'm sure there are other examples of 'Star Trek Tech' that we completely and utterly take for granted today.
Re:Not really... (Score:5, Informative)
But they leave off the ones that have actually been realized. Communicators the size of a lapel pin were wild conjecture at the time of the original series.
And these actually exist in real life. One of the hospitals in my home city uses a Vocera [vocera.com]communication system. You press your lapel button, say the name of the person you want to talk to, and it opens a fucking communication channel between the two of you.
People overlook the simple things. I thought the most impressive part of Iron Man was the AI. "Holy fuck, his computer is telling a joke when it's not helping him design a suborbital flight suit." "Now it's bringing up the files on everyone he's flying past?"
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And these actually exist in real life
I see. So if you're in a building you can tap it and chat with someone on a spaceship in orbit, using no other infrastructure, even if they're not geosychronously over you. Cool.
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Actually, I could probably whip up something that would let you do that with a small add-on. I've built satellite communicators before.
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Ok, I can play this game. Spaceship is 500' in diameter, and the entire surface can be used as an electronically steerable phased array.
There, done. you can talk to the spaceship anywhere below geo that has line of sight.*
*I don't feel like doing the actual gain/diffraction calculations. Suffice to say that there is a diameter for which the above statements are true.
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Star Trek communicators work even when the spaceship is on the other side of the planet, or at least you never hear anybody say "we have to wait 20 minutes until we have line of sight."
Furthermore the reliability and range of the communicator can be dynamically adjusted so that the away team's mission always treads the fine line between "completely routine and tedious" and "everybody dies".
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I thought the most impressive part of Iron Man was the AI.
Perhaps, but I thought it was much less far-fetched than those staples of sci-fi, the extraordinarily compact energy source and propulsion system, both of apparently unlimited power, which give off nearly no waste heat.
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I thought the same thing with Dr. Octopus. "Never mind his fusion flameball thing or whatever the fuck it is, he could get billions off the patents in the manipulator arms and the power source that he's running THOSE with. Hell, each of those is Nobel material on its own."
I know, shh, they're comic books.
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All the pictures seem to show something much larger than that in them.
they've got this big things hanging around their necks.
The reality is very little has been realized. Speech recognition is still hit and miss and it also doesn't quite function like it does in the show. In the show they could be having a conversation and then access the computer. the magic in the show was that they could use the word computer without the computer going "what what what?" every 10 seconds.
Perhaps if you analyzed voice stres
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Re:Not really... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, I played Tomb Raider, and I can definitely tell you the ancient Egyptians had automatic waist-height axes. Slap some doors on them, and you have automatic doors!
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IMO powered door != automatic door.
Making a powered door is pretty easy once you have a usable power source.
Making an automatic door that is both safe and convenient is somewhat harder. Detecting a person is there is easy enough with current tech, determining whether they actually want the door opened is harder. Doors that open whenever someone walks past are annoying in most situations and if people have to press a button to operate the door then there isn't really much advantage over a manual door in most
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Mostly used in grocery stores in the USA.
Replaced by infrared / infrasound sensors in the 80s/90s because those had less wear and tear issues. The rubber mats of the sensor pads could be gouged / torn by careless or malicious shoppers. Or just heavy loads.
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But they leave off the ones that have actually been realized. Communicators the size of a lapel pin were wild conjecture at the time of the original series. Automatic doors were a new idea. I'm sure there are other examples of 'Star Trek Tech' that we completely and utterly take for granted today.
I hate these articles, someone makes one every year and they always stretch what we have to try and fit star trek. Yes, we have cellphones and bluetooth and ipads, so we're doing pretty good at catching up.
I'm more interested in what we have that star trek didn't have. Tiny wireless cameras? We have that, star trek didn't, and how useful would that be instead of "Data what do you see? Data? Hello? Someone? Are you guys getting killed over there?"
Or GPS? They had no idea where people were.
Wi
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Or GPS? They had no idea where people were.
They had the capability to pinpoint the away team with an accuracy sufficient to teleport them back to the ship from anywhere on the planet without leaving any bits behind or inadvertently picking up bits of other bystanders or objects.
Wireless heartrate monitors? We have that, they didn't.... well, I think the medical bay had something they would use, so the doctor could monitor you if you were very sick, but how useful would it be on away missions to check heartrate to tell when someone's nervous or scared? So many more uses they didn't touch.
Doctor McCoy had a little device that looked like a car cigarette lighter that could diagnose virtually any disease non invasively.
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That was an ability of a ship to accurately scan the planet surface and locate objects of interest.
When you mention GPS to me, my first thought is the ability of surface or air unit to accurately calculate it's own grid position with minimal input from outside sources.
T
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No I didn't.
I also didn't know that salmon are marsupials and that the sun is made of bronze.
Stupid, huh?
Teleportation remains elusive (Score:2)
No shit
Re:Teleportation remains elusive (Score:5, Funny)
Teleportation remains elusive
That's really neither here nor there
Re:Teleportation remains elusive (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed.
When I was a kid I used to fantasize about a future where the would be teleportation booths on every street corner.
You'd walk in, pop some coins in the slot, dial your destination then whoooooooo.....
I live in the UK so the teleportation booths would be run by BT, Vodafone, O2 or possibly Virgin. I imagine that you could get an off-peak tariff to be able to teleport anywhere in the world after 6pm.
Trouble is, your head would arrive at the intended destination but your limbless and bloody torso would arrive somewhere in Cairo and your assorted arms and legs would be buffered indefinitely, only to ve lost for all time once they reboot their server.
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Re:Teleportation remains elusive (Score:4, Insightful)
Once we are able to?
We would need to record the quantum state (spin, polarization, momentum, position) of every particle of matter in the thing being 'teleported' and then reproduce that state at the other end.
As we all know from Quantum Mechanics 101, it is impossible to to measure the state of a particle without affecting it (the Uncertainty principle).
Teleportation experiments to date have involved the reproduction of state between a particle pair (quantum entanglement). This is an impressive feat but the amount of information need to convey the particle states of say, a bacterium, and encode and transmit it to some notional receiver would take more time than the universe has existed for.
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As we all know from Quantum Mechanics 101, it is impossible to to measure the state of a particle without affecting it (the Uncertainty principle).
This, however, does not preclude his argument. Your entire state is constantly being effected by interactions that reduce the quantum uncertainties of your constituent parts to actual certainty. The interactions, contrary to pop-sci, do not require a "mind" or an "observer" to take place. A scanner involved in creating a digital representation of your state is no different than a flash bulb on a camera. The camera flash also changes your state, but nobody is saying that the picture isnt a picture of you or
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Ha ha ha! Nice try but no cigar!
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The camera flash also changes your state, but nobody is saying that the picture isnt a picture of you or that you are meaningfully different since the moment the light hit you.
Oh really, then why do Native Americans traditionally hate having their picture taken because they believe it steals their soul? Maybe they were on to something... :)
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Only if you buy into the generally unsupported assertion by Roger Penrose that quantum state and uncertainty is a fundamental component of consciousness. If you use Occam's Razor to prefer the idea that consciousness arises from neuronal complexity, which is more consistent with comparisons of levels of consciousness in
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Well, one thing's for sure: build one and we'd know right away whether "souls" exist. Copying the state of running software by copying the hardware it's running on just seems wonky to me, though.
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Well, one thing's for sure: build one and we'd know right away whether "souls" exist. Copying the state of running software by copying the hardware it's running on just seems wonky to me, though.
No we really wouldn't know whether "souls" exist, though. That's the terrifying thing about the teleporter idea.
Billy is terrified of stepping into the teleporter, as he realises that he will be killed, and only a perfect copy of him, with all his memories will be created at the other side, which is cold comfort to him; but all his friends and family emerge from teleporters saying "Really, I was scared too, it's perfectly safe. You have nothing to fear"- etc. Except in reality, they all died, and they are p
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We would need to record the quantum state (spin, polarization, momentum, position) of every particle of matter in the thing being 'teleported' and then reproduce that state at the other end.
Really? I've heard this many times, but I don't buy it. For example why is it not sufficient to simply record that the muscle tissue has a water molecule at location x, why do you need the full quantum state of that. As long as you get the muscle tissue in the right place does it actually matter that it's quantum state perfect? Hell even if you got the molecules in slightly the wrong place as long as there was intelligence in the re-constructor so that it built functioning muscle tissue would it really eve
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Most quantum theorists?
I hate to be a bore but could you provide a citation for that
What was the TV show about this? (Score:2)
Re:What was the TV show about this? (Score:5, Informative)
No, really, I think that's it.
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Food Cubes (Score:2)
Chicken Pot Noodle.
There's no chicken in it.
It's textured soy protein.
Much like food cubes.
'Scuse me, I think I hear a fly screaming...
It goes both ways. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Can someone mod this guy up? Not sure why he has negative karma... I don't see anything in his posting history to suggest he's a troll.
If it makes you feel better, you can mod me down while you mod him up.
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Turbolifts are only very superficially like elevators.
They are more similar, I believe, to escalators in that they are always ready to board. When a person gets on a turbo lift and the door closes behind them, another person can board the turbo lift immediately afterward, and they can move in the same direction, or another one. They do not need to wait for the lift that the previous person took to arrive.
Turbo lifts are like an elevato
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They factored that into the show. Why do you think getting from say the bridge to deck 10 would take 10 seconds in one episode, and half a minute on another?
It's like it bumps your lift's priority down and moves slower if it detects an engaging conversation going on, when the occupants aren't standing awkwardly in silence.
Pipe Dream (Score:5, Insightful)
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Where did he say that?
Turn in your Troll Card now.
Nice link (Score:2)
Good to see a deep link to a non-commercial (at least, non-ad-revenue-based) website. The list provided was interesting, too; it covered some topics I didn't expect (3D printers as replicators? OK, sort of..), and skipped some of the worn out ones (ion drives, flip phones that look a bit like TOS communicators).
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Except gold-pressed latinum, and dilithium crystals.
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The plot must have its devices.
(Still bugs me, though.. if gold-pressed latinum is so special, why couldn't you just replicate gold, replicate 'latinum', replicate a press, and have at it?)
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I thought the latinum was the part that couldn't be replicated, and the gold was just to make it look nice or something.
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Don't know about air - but Latinum is pretty volatile if exposed to Ferengi.
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DS9 suggested that Latinum is a heavy metal which has a liquid phase at room temperature and pressure, which is reactive enough to be metabolized and thus cause heavy metal poisoning, but non-reactive enough to be stored in a stomach for tens of years....
nothing like a holodeck (Score:5, Informative)
Look, until we can whip matter up to our exact specifications, we can't rightly say anything we're doing is remotely similar to a "holodeck".
Sorry but fancy images on a 2D or pseudo-3D screen aren't what they're hopping about in TNG/DS9.
Re:nothing like a holodeck (Score:5, Insightful)
What we're missing is force fields. I think that's how holodecks are supposed to work - holograms bordered by force fields.
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What we're missing is force fields. I think that's how holodecks are supposed to work - holograms bordered by force fields.
It's supposed to be a "mix" of force fields, holographs, and actual energy to matter conversion, IIRC. Perhaps holographs/force fields to simulate distance and open spaces, with actual matter for the close up stuff. So a holographic person is like computer controlled meat-puppet.
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I don't think they ever moved anything out of the holodeck, and when it lost power everything vanished. If there was actual energy to mater conversion, wouldn't the meat-puppets stay behind/could be moved out of the holodeck?
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We don't even need force fields, just programmable matter. Check out Utility Fog [wikipedia.org].
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Look, until we can whip matter up to our exact specifications, we can't rightly say anything we're doing is remotely similar to a "holodeck".
A RealDoll and a 65" flatpanel? Close enough.
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if i remember the Star trek explanation in i think it was the Moriarty episode correctly it used a mix of forcefields holograms replicators and transporter technology. My bet is every one had something different projected at them and when moving used telaporters when they got to close to a wall, person or other such obsitcal.
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So the only alternative is generation of near infinite spaces. (as much as the ships energy allows) Honestly, outside of some bastardization of self-correcting closed timelike curves bent over themselves and some sort of "bridge" in to it, essentially creating a little closed off universe which can be constructed with some sort of turbo-replicator
We have single displays today that can present different images to different sets of eyeballs. We have also played with projecting images directly onto the cornea. Lets assume starfleet has access to a much more mature version of the same technology. The computer now has full control over what you see.
As far as movement is concerned people have solved this problem with conveyor belt floors... as you get closer to the edge the edge moves back. In the startrek universe you can always use intertial dampen
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If I recall the TNG Technical Manual properly, it was a combination of several technologies. Some kind of forcefields/tractor beams to provide the "treadmill" effect you talk of and to move matter around (that stuff that you touch and interact with), holograms (for scenery that you don't touch), and replicators (for making the simulacra that you touch, and any food that you meat eat in there).
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Sorry, no. The holodecks aren't that advanced really, not compared to warp drive, teleportation, or especially the Guardian or Forever. The main thing they depend on is force fields, which, although fantastical, don't require FTL speeds like warp drive does and don't require you to figure out the quantum properties of all the atoms in your body like teleportation does, and doesn't involve time travel like the GoF.
The way the holodeck works is pretty simple: holograms (like we already have in some ways) ar
Personal Waste Transporters (Score:5, Funny)
The Star Trek trek that I thought was the most futuristic was the Personal Waste Transporters that would automatically beam out solid, liquid, and gaseous human waste, plus dirt, oil, etc.; which eliminated the need for toilets, showers, etc. from Star Ships and Away Missions.
Strange that in Star Trek, they could beam away all of the bad stuff from their bodies, but would still need to eat and drink in traditional fashion.
Prior to the Waste Transporters, I don't want to even think about how rough Klingon toilet paper would have been, Vulcan deodorant which requires mental discipline to ignore orders, or the poor quality of a Ferengi tampons that fall apart.
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Strange that in Star Trek, they could beam away all of the bad stuff from their bodies, but would still need to eat and drink in traditional fashion.
Naah it was full of anachronisms where they loved to play musical instruments by hand to each other, I think there must be dozens of plays put on by the crew... Food is "fun" for the crew and cooking is even better... think Neelix on Voyager, much as we all try to block him from our memories.
Also about 90% of the holodeck episodes that were not about basically holopr0n involved travel into the past. That goofy car restoration project toward the end of voyager.
It was a generally backward thinking, backward
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The Star Trek trek that I thought was the most futuristic was the Personal Waste Transporters that would automatically beam out solid, liquid, and gaseous human waste, plus dirt, oil, etc.; which eliminated the need for toilets, showers, etc. from Star Ships and Away Missions.
I don't think that's quite right. They just never showed bathroom use. Their Replicators would turn their waste (bio and non-bio) into whatever they wanted "via converting mass to energy to mass."
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Eh? TNG onwards had sonic showers, and there was a door to the bathroom right off the bridge of the Enterprise D.
Then again, Trek regressed in many ways. I mean, given how crews get thrown about and how panels explode, you'd think they
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The whole panel exploding thing was always pretty stupid. There's no reason to have that much power running through a console that's only there to provide a user interface. How much power is running through your keyboard, mouse, or LCD monitor on your desk? I was disappointed they kept that silliness up in several TNG episodes.
I must have missed the bathroom on the bridge though, and I've been watching TNG episodes fairly regularly lately on Netflix. Where was that? It'd be nice if they had occasionall
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I think that's incorrect. Whenever the ship accelerates or decelerates or gets hit by a photon torpedo or something, there's going to be a force applied to the ship, and to the things and people inside. Sure, if the ship isn't moving, there's zero-g, but the ship moves around a lot, changing its speed. And because of the enormous acceleration this ship must be capable of in order to get anywhere in a decent amount of time, it has to be far, far beyond the g-forces the human body can withstand (the humans
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In case you haven't noticed, people tend to enjoy eating and drinking in a traditional fashion. No amount of future technology will change that.
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More important: (Score:5, Funny)
More important:
Tribbles
Romulan Ale and synthehol
Green skinned orion womens
Space Hippies
Hand held Hypo sprays full of tranquilizers (There are non-hand held ones available since the 70s)
Pesky GD "son of a chief medical officer" ensigns
Skin tight leotards as a women's businesswear. Microskirts as traditional women's businesswear.
Holodecks full of amorous versions of your female coworkers "I am the goddess of love" or whatever that line was.
Now that I think of it, you keep all that dilithium stuff and just provide the leotards and mini skirts.
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Skin tight leotards as a women's businesswear.
On the west coast, yoga pants are considered business casual. There's probably a reason for that, but I don't care because... because yoga pants.
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Re:More important: (Score:5, Funny)
I live on the west coast, and let me tell you - most of the women who wear yoga pants around here really have no business wearing yoga pants.
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Holodecks full of amorous versions of your female coworkers "I am the goddess of love" or whatever that line was.
NO! HELL NO! You CLEARLY don't work where I do.
They missed the obvious (Score:2)
Automatic sliding doors.
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*whoosh*
Say, did a door just automatically open?
Some less obvious things (Score:3)
How about instantly (text or voice) searching almost the entire corpus of human knowledge, from a hand sized device that you carry in your pocket. Instance access to the entire world's knowledge. Up to the moment sports, stock, weather, news, etc. And while we can complain about Wikipedia, it is generally very useful. Or try searching for a disease, or drug.
Instant video from around the globe.
Video chat in real time with anyone anywhere. Voice texts back and forth. Email. Twitter.
Star Trek failed to forsee Facebook Stalkers(tm).
Turn by turn navigation. (New to the iPhone!)
Tablets -- those are real now, and better than they were on Star Trek.
How about a 32 GB tiny SD card or USB sticks instead of those painted blocks of wood handed around on Star Trek? They called them "tapes". I don't think they could have really appreciated how much storage we have in something so tiny you can lose it in your pocket or fit inside a thimble.
Some of us have set up voice controlled home automation. Or more commonly home automation without voice control. It's not especially exotic technology. It is relatively affordable, but was but a dream in the 1960's. And remotes? They're everywhere.
On demand and streaming video? TiVos? Stream Netflix to your phone? eBooks?
The list goes on. It's not all things realized or envisioned in Star Trek. But the things we commonly have today, like a Raspberry Pi for $35 are things that were totally science fiction back in the 1960's, and some of it even in the 1980's. Even when ST:TNG was made, a $35 Raspberry Pi or an Android Phone or a 32 GB micro-SD card for $20 would have been much more than amazing.
When I was a kid, we had to use punched cards. And it was uphill both ways! Get off my lawn!
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You have some inaccuracies and red herrings here.
ST:TNG did foresee instant searching of the entire corpus of human knowledge. Didn't you notice all the times they just ask the computer to compile some list of a bunch of obscure facts (like "ships lost in this sector") and narrow it by various parameters? They show the ship's computer having all kinds of data many times on the show. The old series of course didn't do quite as well here, but I thought I remember some similar things with them asking the co
Missing from the Article: (Score:5, Interesting)
Communicators: DUH! Motorola even named the first Flip-phone the "Star Tac" -- how did the author miss this OBVIOUS one?
Bluetooth headsets: See those chrome things coming out of everyone's ears on TOS?
3.5" Floppies: Pretty much the EXACT same form factor, and painted as brightly as the "rainbow assortment" of disks I used to buy a Staples. They were called Tapes in TOS, but they fed into a slot and appeared to work exactly the same way.
A Space Vehicle named Enterprise : ok, this one is reaching a bit since that Shuttle never went into space, and this is a case of life imitating art, but still.... it's worth noting.
iPads -- tablets: TNG had the PADD, which tied into the LCARS system. Even before then Kirk in TOS was seen holding some kind of electronic clipboard, although it was never really shown on camera as the tech didn't exist back then to even fake a tablet, but the idea was clearly getting there.
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Communicators: DUH! Motorola even named the first Flip-phone the "Star Tac" -- how did the author miss this OBVIOUS one?
Actually, Motorola used the "*TAC" designation for about a decade before the StarTAC, including on flip phones (starting with the MicroTAC, and including the TeleTAC, etc). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_MicroTAC [wikipedia.org] http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://baber.com/baber/gifs/cellphone/motorola/teletac_dpc500.jpg&imgrefurl=http://baber.com/baber/cellular/teletac.htm&h=300&w=131&sz=16&tbnid=0MUDh7QvJLlC1M:&tbnh=90&tbnw=39&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dmotorola%2BteleTAC%26tbm%3Dis [google.com]
The article summarized (Score:2)
Here's what amount to basically the entire article in far fewer words:
Tablets with Rounded Corners (Score:2)
see subject [youtube.com]
Outside of computing, not much. (Score:5, Insightful)
Outside of computing, not much Star Trek technology works. Antigravity? We have no clue. Fusion or better power sources? Still struggling. Transporter? No clue.
In the 1960s, the previous 50 years had led to enormous gains at the high-power end of engineering. Aviation had gone from the Wright Brothers to the Saturn V. Power generation had gone from local steam plants to mammoth dams and nuclear reactors. Ships had gone from coal to nuclear power. The 1964 World's Fair had a General Electric nuclear fusion exhibit with actual brief bursts of fusion. It was generally expected that such progress would continue in the next 50 years.
It didn't.
Recognition is not Comprehension (Score:2)