When the first episode of this series was aired 43 years ago, nobody felt it would redefine technology
When the first episode of this series was aired 43 years ago, nobody felt it would redefine technology
Often, we have heard people say that fact is stranger than fiction, but few are the times when people actually talk about how fiction leads to fact. But if we were to take this concept of something we see on TV today actually inspiring technology tomorrow seriously, we must consider the hit franchise Star Trek.
On September 8, 1966, the first episode of Star Trek was aired. The series was not originally a hit, though it soon became extremely popular so popular that TV guide rated it as the top cult show. So large is the world of Star Trek that we even have a name for its fans Trekkies.
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Beam me up, Scotty: Ok, so you may not have a phaser like Kirk, but be pleased that you have a mobile phone just like Spock! pic/trekcore.com |
Boosting technology
One of the things that we may not have appreciated fully is the contribution of Star trek to technology. When we were children, many of us who watched it on B&W TV sets used to create the flip-top communicators that featured on Star Trek with matchboxes. Today, many of the flip-to-open mobiles may be said to have been inspired by Star Trek.
And many of the designers admit to this. In an article written by Benny Evangelista that appears on
www.sfgate.com, Rob Haitani, product design architect for Palm-One, says that the UI (user interface) for the Palm OS was inspired by the UI of the Enterprise bridge panels. He also says that the first Treo had a form factor similar to the communicators in the original series.
Still to come
While some technology can be said to have been inspired by Star Treku2014apart from mobile phones, Wikipedia says that the Tablet PC, the PDA, and the MRI (based on Dr McCoy's diagnostic table) have all been inspired by this series we still have a long way to go. Sure, you have a flippable mobile, but have you ever gone through a wormhole?
Since the series has inspired new technology, we have to ask how true is Star trek to science? Physicist David Allen Batchelor of NASA, who has written a piece called 'The Science of Star Trek', says in this article that "Accurate science is seldom exciting and spectacular enough to base a weekly adventure TV show upon.
Generally Star Trek is pretty intelligently written and more faithful to science than any other science fiction series ever shown on television."
True or not, it is important to note that this is an extremely interesting series, and if it inspires our technologists to come up with more interesting gadgets for us in the days to come, well, let's treat it as an added bonus!
QUICK TAKE>>Star Trek was first aired on September 8, 1966
>>Some of the technology that it featured then is available today
>>Tablet PCs, mobile phones and the MRI were inspired by this series
Out of this worldSome of the technology that featured in Star Trek includes:
>>Matter-antimatter power generation
>>Impulse engines
>>Androids
>>Tricorders
>>Deflector shields
>>Subspace communications
>>Phasers
>>Healing rays
>>Replicator
>>Transporter
>>Holodeck
>>Universal language translator
>>Warp interstellar drive
>>Wormhole interstellar travel
>>Time travel
Source: The Science of Star Trek by David Allen Batchelor
