Predictions Made by Star Trek and Other Movies

Whether a fan of the show or not, a lot of the technology that was featured in Star Trek has become a part of our everyday lives. Not all of the wonderful gadgets have come to pass. Two devices that we would all love to see – the transporter and the replicator – are still a way off. But recent news stories have pointed out that both these very useful bits of kit are not beyond the realm of possibility.

While a working transporter is still a long, long way off, The Independent recently reported that scientists have set a new record in sending information through thin air using the technology of quantum teleportation. And Pocket-lint ran a story saying that Star Trek’s replicator could arrive in the next year or so if a theorised photon collider turns light into matter.

So those two are still in the realm of science fiction … now here are a few Star Trek devices that have become fact.

• Sensors allowed the Enterprise crew to detect information about distant worlds before they sent a landing party down to the surface. It also could detect information from distant objects at faster-than-light speed. That's quite a bit beyond our present technology, but we do have sophisticated sensing devices that can gather data on magnetic fields, radioactivity and vibration, and imaging technology that can create three-dimensional pictures of the interiors of objects, including the human body.
• The Enterprise can put up electromagnetic shields to block attacks. While we have the ability to deflect electrically charged objects, we don’t yet have anything close to the Enterprise's capabilities.
• Healing rays, which Starfleet doctors used to cure diseases and treat injuries. In "Star Trek: The Next Generation," Dr. Crusher used rays to treat patients. While physicians use lasers to perform surgery, we don't yet have the abilities of Dr. Crusher's device.
• The first flip phones, the Motorola StarTAC, was released all the way back in 1996. These days the flip phone has all but been replaced by the flatscreen smartphone, but there are still a few people around who like to “play Kirk” with their commincator-like clamshell phone.
• Star Trek: The Original Series saw communications officer Lt Uhura use a rather clunky wireless earpiece to chat with the bosses back at Starfleet HQ. The modern Bluetooth devices are much mroe comfortable, but probably don’t have the same sort of range.
• Teleportation, which enabled Captain Kirk to utter his trademark line, "Beam me up, Scotty!" In 2004, scientists actually succeeded in scanning an atom and reproducing it at a distant location. But teleporting something composed of many particles, such as a person, still eludes them.
• Nobody was sad to see the back of those heavy, cumbersome cathode ray tube TV sets that most of us grew up with. But even the Star Trek of the 1960s had flatscreen TVs. So why did it take so long for the rest of us to get them?
• The Kirk-era Star Trek did have tablets, but they were a bit on the chunky side. It was in the 1980s revival Star Trek: The Next Generation that we first saw saw the iPad-like tablet that we all know and love today.
• Google Glass - this virtual display device was first seen in use during the war against the Dominion on Star Trek: Deep Space 9.
• Hypospray: A perfect device for needle-phobes, the hypospray was developed on the 1960s TV show out of necessity – network censors would not let them show hypodermic syringes (they probably thought it would encourage drug use). Today, jet injectors use a gas-powered cartridge to fire inoculations through the skin.
• The medical tricorder has been seen in all the different Star Trek series. It changed size and shape through the years, but always did basically the same thing – tell Dr McCoy (or Crusher, or Bashir, or Flox) exactly what was going on inside their patient. Now there are many devices that can perform a similar operation – such as the Scanadu SCOUT.
• The tricorder, Spock's handheld device for measuring conditions on alien planets. Spock used the tricorder to check everything from atmospheric composition to the presence of diseases. NASA actually has developed a handheld device called LOCAD, used by astronauts on the International Space Station, that can detect potentially dangerous microorganisms.

Randomly Selected Predictions Made by Sci-Fi Writers that came True

We already have voice-controlled computers and communicators in the form of smartphones. A working Holodeck is under development as well as Phasers.

Below is a list compiled by Thor Jensen, PC Magazine, and other sources.

• The world of money and finance is completely different than it was a century ago, with decentralized banks and electronic balances making it possible to access your funds from just about anywhere on Earth. Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward is remembered for introducing the concept of “universal credit.” Citizens of his future utopia carry a card that allows them to spend “credit” from a central bank on goods and services without paper money changing hands. Today we call them credit cards.
• In the 1903 story The Land Ironclads, H.G. Wells took the then-current technology of metal-hulled warships and put them on land, creating war machines that are the precursors to the modern tank. Wells’s creations were approximately 100 feet long and rolled on eight pairs of wheels, each of which had its own independent turning axle. A conning tower in the top let the captain survey the scene. In the story, a force of just fourteen of them conquers an entire army. The first tanks were deployed on the battlefield in 1916 during the Battle of the Somme.
• By the time Ray Bradbury published his dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, portable audio was a reality. But headphones were massive, ungainly over-the-ear contraptions that weighed a ton. That’s why his description of “little seashells… thimble radios” that brought an “electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk” is so affecting. He’s precisely describing the earbud headphone, which didn’t come into serious popular use until 2000. In-ear headphones would be released to the mass market in 1980 although it wasn’t until Apple bundled them with the iPod that they became the de facto method of listening.
• The first demonstration of consumer video conferencing (video chat) came at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where AT&T wowed crowds with its “picturephone.” The technology has obviously come a long way since then, with FaceTime and Skype standard on computers and phones, but the first sci-fi discussion of video phones came in Hugo Gernsback’s ancient serial Ralph 124c 41+. The book's plot is corny even by the standards of the day, but the reason it's remembered is that Gernsback crammed every page with futuristic predictions. Some of them are absurd (everybody roller-skates everywhere), but others like the "Telephot" video-conferencing device have made their way into the real world - Gernsback's “telephot” that let people have eye contact while speaking across long distances.
• One of Jules Verne's most famous works published in 1865, From The Earth To The Moon, predicted many aspects of the 1969 manned lunar landing of Apollo 11. In the story, Verne's astronauts take off from a launching pad in Florida (just like the Apollo astronauts did) and return to Earth in capsules that land safely in the ocean. He even did remarkably accurate calculations as to the amount of force that would be needed to propel the rocket out of Earth’s atmosphere. Of course, his method was an enormous cannon buried in the ground...
• When George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1949, the concept of a dystopian state monitored by an interconnected web of security cameras seemed absurd. Fast forward to the 21st century and there are over 32 closed circuit television cameras within 200 yards of the house Orwell wrote his book. Video surveillance is an inescapable part of public life, with cameras in both public and private spaces. Add in GPS tracking of individuals and NSA surveillance without a warrant and all we’re missing is a Big Brother to make the world that Orwell created real.
• One of the biggest advances in human civilization over the last century has been our communications network. In the early part of the 20th century, communication advanced by leaps and bounds. But there were still limitations on how quickly you could get a signal across the globe. It’s hard now to think of a time when the world wasn’t connected by a massive web of satellite transmissions, but in 1945, when Arthur C. Clarke wrote a manuscript called The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications, it posited geosynchronous satellites (a hot topic at the time) being used for telecommunications relays, most notably for television signals. Note that this is before broadcast television was anything even resembling a commercial concern. Clarke's letter to the Wireless World magazine editor titled “Peacetime Uses For V2,” posited that the rocket technology used in World War II could be repurposed to place satellites in Earth's orbit. Those satellites could be placed at a height that would keep them locked to the same spot on the surface. Geosynchronous satellites are the keystone of the system, and the "Clarke orbit" is still in use today.
• John Brunner’s Stand On Zanzibar, published in 1969, posits a future America of 2010 that sounds eerily similar to the one we live in now. The story concerns a pair of New York roommates who get embroiled in worldwide espionage, but a great number of pages are devoted towards building the future world of 2010, which features (among other things) Honda as the leading manufacturer of electric cars. In addition, Brunner predicted online digital avatars, hookup culture, and Detroit techno in his pages. Even more curious, Brunner predicted that the leader of the United States in 2010 would be "President Obomi." And young men and women are eschewing marriage for short-term, low commitment hookups. It’s quite the startling read.
• Real-Time Audio Translation: Talking computers with artificial intelligence conversed with Starfleet captains in natural language. While our computers aren't quite as powerful, text-to-speech software already is a reality. We do have electronic gadgets that laborously translate spoken words from foreign languages to English reminiscent of the Universal Translator used in Star Trek, which enabled the Enterprise crew to instantly understand aliens. It is also like the the Babel Fish in Douglas Adams’s legendary Hitchhiker’s Guide series, a tiny earbud-sized animal that could instantaneously translate one language into another. These only work on pre-set languages, and the process is nowhere as smooth and effortless as it was on the Star Trek TV series. In April 2014, Microsoft demoed an astonishing technology being developed for Skype that makes audio translation possible in nearly real time. The software is still in its infancy, but the Spanish-to-English (and vice versa) version went live, and more languages are expected soon.
• George Orwell penned 1984 at the dawn of the Cold War, postulating a nightmarish future world in which constant war between massive nations was a given, not just a theory. The novel still stands as one of the most powerful works in the genre, but one of his predictions is especially chilling in light of recent events. In the nation of Oceana, all citizens are constantly under surveillance from the government, through hidden microphones, cameras, and interception of communications. Obviously, this has a dark mirror in the NSA spying scandal of 2013, in which we learned that the United States government had been monitoring millions of people without their knowledge. (Image)
• Waterbeds: Not all of these predictions are for seriously high-tech concepts. Sci-fi legend Robert Heinlein first wrote about a mattress filled with water to provide comfort to sleepers in his 1942 novel Beyond The Horizon, and included them in several other books. He even explored the possibility of building one for real, but it wasn’t until design student Charles Prior Hall patented his concept in 1968 that they became a reality. For the next two decades, the sloshy sleeping system would be an icon of the Sexual Revolution – unsurprising, because Hall’s original name for the waterbed was the "Pleasure Pit."