Monday, July 14, 2014

How Today's Technology Is Rapidly Catching Up to Star Trek

A measly hundred years ago the horseless carriage was all the rage in the high tech arena. lol
Wow, we humans work really fast... creating space age technology at lightning speeds shortly after falling off the horse. How did we humans do it so fast? Human ingenuity? Back engineering Alien technology? The average human can't back engineer our own stuff, like a television, for instance (not that a television is our own stuff, as is true with everything television is off the shelf, extraterrestrial shelf). The average person could not recreate from scratch the micro electronics inside the most basic of electronic components, and that is what top engineers are when it comes to back engineering Alien stuff (the average person). Neither back engineering or human ingenuity is to blame for the quantum leap from horse and buggy to Star Trek in a few short decades...yes, Star Trek is here now. Star Trek type ships are common as acorns and populate space in numbers that would astound any conscious or semi conscious human being. People come into this life with advanced knowledge preloaded into them from galactic places, carrying technological seeds that are mixed into their DNA after they are born (or during an abduction). Schooling wakes up the seeds and people follow their dreams literally into predestined career paths, mostly clueless of the process behind it all. Technology in copious abundance permeating the universe turns the wheels that create today's magical electronic gadgets and toys on this planet. Gadgets that seem new, exciting and leading edge to most people, have always been part of existence...blocked out after earthly incarceration.

There are no technological gadgets at higher levels as there are at lower levels, still, Alien class ships are out of this world and mind-numbing fun to be in, as will be space travel in the coming decades for those in the human dimension.

This science fiction is, however, becoming science reality.
Many of the technologies that we saw in Star Trek are beginning to materialize, and ours may actually be better than Starfleet's. Best of all, we won't have to wait 300 years.
The universal translator that Captain Kirk used to talk to alien species is also in development. Google Translate already does a great job of translating pages of text from one human language to another. And earlier this year, Microsoft demonstrated a real-time, voice-based, language interpreter that works on Skype. I don't expect any progress on alien languages until we encounter some alien species, but a commercially available virtual real-time translator (a virtual interpreter) for human languages isn't so far away. Scientists recently announced that they had made breakthroughs in quantum teleportation. They were able to show a promise of quantum information transmission -- showing the duplication in the spin state of an electron between one place and another, through quantum tunneling -- without transmitting matter or energy through the space intervening. This led to hopes that we might one day see a Star Trek-like transporter that can beam our atoms from one place to another. I am not waiting for this one, however, as there is no way that I will willingly allow my atoms to be disintegrated in one location and reassembled in another. I would worry about a software bug or a hardware crash. We saw these too in Star Trek. I'll just stick to the self-driving cars that will become commercially available by the end of this decade. The most exciting Star Trek marvel of all -- the Starship Enterprise -- may also be on its way.
In discussion at Fox Studios in March 2012, Elon Musk told me that he planned to retire on Mars. He said he was inspired by Star Trek and planned to build a spacecraft like the Starship Enterprise to take him there. I really thought he was joking -- or had had too much to drink. But after that, his company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, successfully docked a spacecraft it had built, called the Dragon, with the International Space Station and returned with cargo. On Dec. 3, 2013, SpaceX launched a commercial geostationary satellite using Falconrockets. SpaceX says it is planning a Dragon/Falcon 9 flight in 2015, which will have a fully certified, human-rated, escape system useable during launch.I'll bet that Musk does develop a version 1 of the Enterprise. And he may well be our first real-life Captain Kirk.