If you’re a child of the 70s and 80s, and The Jetsons was one of your favorite cartoons, and you thought Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was the best Star Trek ever (probably because that was the only one you had seen at the time), you might be like me. I really believed that we would have invented some hard core science fiction gadgets by now.
Sure, we have versions of some Star Trek gadgets like the iPad that mimics Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Personal Access Display Device, cell phones created from the communicator and stun guns spawned from the phasers (go humans!), but I really thought we would have invented a fully functioning transporter or lived in Jetson bubble houses and flew bubble cars by now. If I were a genius (and I’m not close) and a billionaire (can anyone spare a dime so I can pay a genius billionaire inventor?), I’d focus on the following five Star Trek technologies and make them a reality. Please note that some of these might actually defy the laws of physics. Quantum physics aside, this is about imaginative childhood wishes being made so.
Holodeck:
We have the capability of virtual reality, but nothing compares to the holodeck. If you’re like most people and strapped for cash, vacations are few and not extravagant. The holodeck can virtually transport you to a beach in Belize, a blues club in Memphis, a café in Paris, or anywhere in the world or the galaxy!
Downside: the holodeck could be infected by a computer virus and send you to Antarctica or Hoth. Brrrrrr.
Image by Konrad Summers, via Flickr
Transporter:
Piggyback the holodeck with the transporter. If you can pretend to enjoy a luxurious vacation in Bora Bora, then the transporter can physically send you there. In pieces. And then reassemble them on the other side. No baggage fees!
Downside: Spaceballs anyone? If you missed this classic Mel Brooks parody, President Skroob (Mel Brooks) tried to transport and ended up with his head on backwards.
Replicator:
This food dispenser would make so many lives so much easier! How awesome would it be to just push a button and your beverage or meal automatically appears before your eyes? It would save so much time: no grocery shopping, no preparation, no clean-up, and no whiny kids or significant others saying they don’t want meatloaf but want steak instead. Well, push a button and voila! Problem solved.
Downside: the food itself is replicated to imitate real food. Everything might taste like chicken, and not free-range chicken.
Collar of obedience:
This just made me laugh for a minute and is more of a joke idea. I honestly missed this gadget and discovered it scrolling through the Star Trek database. I’m sure a lot of couples would like this for their other half, but I’d like this for my dog. My pug never listens to me, and when he does, he just looks at me with disdain. The collar would not embarrass the pooch like the Cone of Shame. It would be fashionable.
Downside: The original “disciplinary” collar constricts the neck if the wearer is disobedient and causes pain. I’m voting for a tiny electric shock, like a bark collar. No animals were harmed or thought of being harmed in the imaginative process of this article.
Image by Purple Slog via Flickr via CBS Studios Inc.
Warp drive:
Space travel. That’s it.
Downside: Your spaceship might explode if it malfunctions.
Most likely, four out of the five Star Trek technologies will remain science fiction, but a girl can dream about a world where we make it so.
I think part of it is that we’re going a different direction. Star Trek doesn’t appear to have social media or an internet. At the time it didn’t seem like an oddity, but now it’s almost inconceivable. Instead of doing flying cars and spaceships we decided to make HD movies and tiny computers.
Do they ever explain how the replicator works? I assumed they got the atoms/molecules to make the food by recycling atoms/molecules from the latrines…
From Wikipedia: A replicator works by rearranging subatomic particles, which are abundant everywhere in the universe, to form molecules and arrange those molecules to form the object. For example, to create a pork chop, the replicator would first form atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc., then arrange them into amino acids, proteins, and cells, and assemble the particles into the form of a pork chop.
This process requires the destructive conversion of bulk matter into energy and its subsequent reformation into a pre-scanned matter pattern. In principle, this is similar to the transporter, but on a smaller scale. However, unlike transporters, which duplicate matter at the quantum level, replicators must be capable of a large number of different materials on demand. If patterns were to be stored at the quantum level, an impossible amount of data storage (or a set of original copies of the materials) would be required. To resolve this, patterns are stored in memory at the molecular level.
The drawback of doing so is that it is impossible to replicate objects with complicated quantum structures, such as living beings, dilithium, gold, or latinum. (However, in the TNG episode “Allegiance”, aliens used their version of replicators to create a Picard impostor.) Additionally, read/write errors cause a number of single-bit errors to occur in replicated materials. Though usually undetectable to human senses, computer scanning can be used to reveal these discrepancies, and they may explain the frequent complaint (by some gourmets and connoisseurs) that replicated food and beverages suffer from substandard taste. These errors also may cause a nontoxic material to become toxic when replicated, or create strains of deadly viruses and bacteria from previously harmless ones.
Okay, but what kind of “bulk matter” are they using?
Dammit, Lyle, I’m an editor, not a scientist!
Honestly though, there’s probably a dude whose sole job is to watch the computers and wait for a micrometeor to fly by or to find an asteroid or an uninhabited planet with all kinds of tasty particles that can be broken down into a soup that can be used to make chicken, building materials, and Earl Grey tea.
That makes sense, because I also always wondered about all the tiny particles that they must be crashing into all the time.
They use the navigational deflector!
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Navigational_deflector