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Trekkies see science fiction become science fact
Set your mobiles to stun...

By Ben King

Published: Wednesday 30 May 2001

As the visitors to the recent Star Trek-inspired 'Federation Science' exhibition at London's Science Museum mull over the technology within the science fiction series, people around them are walking around, freely talking on communicators the size of a pack of playing cards. So that's one Star Trek 'invention' which has ended up on the streets. But are there any others? We sent our roving reporter to go boldly in search of other Star Trek inspired gadgets...

Communicators
On Star Trek: Characters wandering around on planets keep in touch with the Bridge (and each other) using a handheld walkie-talkie. If the plot demands, they can have video conferencing too. Added functionality sees a location finder help lost crew members or those kidnapped by aliens.

Next Generation crew members communicate by touching a little button on their chests and calling the name of the person they're talking to.

Reality check: The communications bit we already have, with the mobile phone. Video, speech recognition and location sensing is coming, but only slowly.

Phones built into clothing are on the roadmap too, with several companies demoing phone-in-a-watch concepts - though this is more Dick Tracy than Captain Kirk.

The Tricorder
On Star Trek: A little box, a bit like a PDA, which can do anything the plot requires -scanning for hidden aliens, medical diagnosis, scientific research, whatever.

Reality check: The US army is developing technology that can detect a human heartbeat behind a 20cm wall, so a wobbly piece of scenery shouldn't pose much of a problem. It's worth noting that we do also have DNA analysers sensitive enough to work from a single human cell.

Matter Transporter
On Star Trek: Mr Spock and friends climb into a machine that looks like the stage of a Soho pole-dancing club. One special effect later, they're standing on a distant planet.

Reality check: We're more likely to meet aliens with Californian accents than we are to see matter transporters. Never mind the fact that it breaks several laws of physics.

Furthermore, would you trust your body to a matter transporter running Windows NT? Professor Anton Zeilinger from Vienna University would - he claims to have teleported photons of light from one place to another. So there's still a long way to go, then.

Warp speed
On Star Trek: Warp drive involves travelling faster than the speed of light, using the power released by mixing matter and anti-matter regulated by dilithium crystals. According to the show it gets invented in 2063, so we'd better hurry.

Reality check: Some high-concept physics gurus reckon it could be possible to bend space, in theory if not in practice. However, the Theory of General Relativity suggests that travelling faster than light would make you heavier than the entire universe - Even William Shatner's belly wasn't that big.

Voice Recognition (VR)
On Star Trek: Everything on the enterprise is controlled by voice - mostly, we presume, because William Shatner talking to his computer in authoritative tones makes better television than a man pressing buttons in silence.

Reality check: Captain Kirk always enunciates clearly, even after a hard day fighting Klingons. But mumble into a 21st century VR system, and it doesn't understand. By the 2300 however, they ought to have designed VR that can understand a tired human with unclear diction.

Cloaking Devices
On Star Trek: Cloaking devices use a gravitational lensing effect to make a starship invisible. Kirk and chums are amazed to find a Klingon starship suddenly appear and start firing at them with no prior warning.

Reality check: Distant stars have been seen to bend light, but the gravitational force it takes to do it is enormous, so this goes into the physically impossible bracket. Stealth bombers are the closest we have - they use special materials and slim designs to avoid detection by enemy radar.

Food Replicators
On Star Trek: A device like a microwave, except you don't have to put any food in. The replicator downloads the file for Delovian Souffle or Algae Puffs and whips it up out of thin air in less time than it takes to crack an egg. It's not perfect, though. Next Generation captain Jean-Luc Picard kept his own supply of real caviar, since the replicator product didn't taste quite as good.

Reality check: The modern microwave oven turns cold food into warm, soggy and tasteless food. Artificial flavourings make synthetic milk shakes taste like strawberries, but they still come in a glass jar. Molecular assembly is a long way off.

Hypospray
On Star Trek: Injection without a needle. A jet of medicine is fired into the body of the patient painlessly and quickly.

Reality Check: Been there, done that. A company called PowderJect makes devices which blast a range of pharmaceuticals into the human body using a high velocity helium gas jet.

Computer core
On Star Trek: Starships have three main processors, which are clearly the most important part of the ship - except the hull, perhaps. They use subspace field generators to process data faster than the speed of light. It's all done with light rather than electricity, and an optical data network links the computer with every part of the ship. Total storage capacity is 1.29 billion kiloquads, and the processor performs 575 trillion calculations per nanosecond.

Reality check: There are times when Microsoft's profits appeared to be rising faster than the speed of light, but as far as we know no-one will be able to get data to travel that fast.

Over a year ago, IBM launched an initiative called Blue Gene for researching the structure of proteins. It will be able to do 1,000 trillion calculations per second, which is still two billion times slower than on the Enterprise.

A quick play with the spreadsheet suggests that we will have computers as powerful as the Enterprise's in about 50 years. So real world computers will wipe the floor with the Federation's efforts by as early as 2200. Eat your heart out, Kirk.

To a contemporary audience, some of the technologies from the first version of Star Trek seem a little old hat. But back in the 60s, the idea of having two computers next to each other that could share information without exchanging floppy disks was pretty revolutionary.

It's amazing to see how much of the vision of 60s Star Trek has come true, even though one obstacle remains: "You cannae change the laws of physics". So don't expect Warp Speed travel for a while.