Star Trek Has Changed Our Lives

The world is turning into a Buck Rogers world of the future. In case you don’t know who Buck Rogers was, he was a fictional character that went into orbit and then went into hibernation and woke hundreds of years later and had to get used to the way things were in the future. This is the way many old timers feel today. I am a little luckier than most because I was always involved in advancing technology so as things advanced I took advantage of the fact, but many others still can’t use a computer or operate a cell phone properly. You can usually tell who are old timers without seeing them, Β because they don’t know how to text. I know, but I do not like to do it. Nowhere has technology advanced faster than in the field of weapons and war. It has been said that most advances in technology are due to war and that is probably as true today as it was thousands of years ago.

A lot of what we have seen in science fiction shows and films is coming true. It seems the ideas for advanced devices and weapons are thought up first in science fiction and then someone, be it an engineer or scientist says, “This is a good idea why don’t we try and build it”. We all know that the flip top cell phone looks remarkably like the communicator in the original Star Trek television show and many say it was the spark that caused the invention. One of the things we heard a lot about in the original Star Trek were how sub-space weapons were banned. In Star Trek a sub-space weapon could be fired near a target and it would cause a rip in space which would travel toward the target at warp speed and destroy the target. Today we have begun experimenting with exploding modified Buckminsterfullerene molecules. These are commonly known as buckyballs. This is a nanoscale explosive and produces tremendous heat and pressure practically instantly. While it is not said to tear a hole in space who knows what the future holds for this type of explosive?

One of the most spectacular weapons on the Enterprise was its lasers, called phasers. They often talked about the power of them compared to the power of an enemy’s lasers. In one episode they estimated an attacking ship was about 200 years behind in laser technology and its lasers were not powerful enough to break through their shields. Today we are beginning to use lasers as weapons. They are crude as the first automobiles were crude, but I am sure this will change over the years. The US Navy has combined several commercial lasers used for welding and created a shipboard weapon out of it which can shoot down drones and blow up boats. As we learn how to increase the power of these lasers they will become far more dangerous. In November 2014, China revealed that it had invented a laser weapon for shooting down drones. They said it would only take about five seconds of hitting the target to destroy it. They ran a public test and shot down over 30 drones with it. It is said to have a range of about 1.2 miles and is capable of shooting down drones that fly up to 100 miles per hour at an altitude of about 1,600 feet.

In Star Trek we heard the familiar phrase “shields up.” The military has longed for shields of this type for many years and has tried different things over the years. One of the most successful was created by the British. They managed to electrify an armored car made of different layers of metals. The outer layer being copper. When the generator was sending current through the vehicle no missile could penetrate more than the outer layer, because the current would set it off when it made contact. This was one of the first attempts at a practical shield. Now Boeing, the famous aircraft designer has announced it has filed a patent for a shield, but one of a different nature. The shield is not designed to stop a bomb from penetrating it, but it does set up a wave which will stop a pressure wave and blast wave from destroying a structure within the area. Pressure and shock waves are responsible for causing major damage during an attack.

The Romulans developed an invisibility shield. Captain Kirk went to great lengths to steal it from them having Spock get it on with the female Romulan military leader so he could steal the shield. Today we are working toward that same goal. We started years ago when we secretly created the F-117 stealth fighter and surprised the world with it. It didn’t have visual invisibility or even radar invisibility, but it did have only a tiny radar signature which made the enemy think it was a bird. We have been improving on this ever since and have also developed a material which gives us visual invisibility. Russia has introduced a new fighter plane into the mix and it is being said in some circles that it is far superior to any stealth fighters we have. It is being called a super weapon by military experts. The plane is the TA-50 PAK FA. It is being built by Sukhoi and will go into service in 2016. It cost about $50 million dollars each, which is far less than one of our best planes. Putin said it is superior to the F-22 in every area.

We are yet to conquer some other aspects of what was shown us on Star Trek, but we are working on them. One of those things is warp drive. There is a lot of work going into this and there are even one or two people who claim to have developed a warp engine. NASA states hyperspace drives or any other term for faster than light travel is still at the level of speculation, but we are edging toward some facets of it. If we are to believe the deceased head of the Lockheed Skunkworks who confessed on his deathbed that we already had the ability to visit any place in the universe we wanted to go, we would have to disregard what NASA told us. This isn’t very hard to do since they have tried to lead us down the garden path many times before.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the medical tricorder in Star Trek. While we still have not equaled all its capabilities or its compact size, we have developed similar technologies which were part of it. The MRI and CAT scanners work much the same way. NASA has developed a device for the space station which can detect and identify environmental pathogens in minutes. It is the LOCAD-PTS. Our temperatures can be taken today without anything touching us using a laser and a small device has been created which combines several of the tricorder’s abilities which have to do with temperature, blood pressure and such.
Lastly I would like to mention the fact there was universal translators used in Star Trek. I think most of us have noticed what has been going on in this area. We can now easily interpret text to our language using a browser, but there are even more efficient translators available which will translate spoken language instantly. It may not be long before everyone will have this ability at their fingertips.

There are more devices I haven’t mentioned such as global positioning and how the crew of the Enterprise was able to locate the exact position of someone on a planet below. Transparent aluminum which was used in a Star Trek movie is being tested by the military. We are even testing a type of phaser known by the military as PHASR. Could Gene Roddenberry have been an alien and this show put on the air to advance our culture? It is just a thought.