3 ms·

Funnily enough, the writers of ST:TNG had this idea too. The main computer of the Enterprise-D was huge (9 decks tall) and generated a subspace field so that o

Funnily enough, the writers of ST:TNG had this idea too. The main computer of the Enterprise-D was huge (9 decks tall) and generated a subspace field so that optical processing ran faster than light.

native_samples 5y ago
Star Trek's tech vision is astounding. How many things in it have actually been built? I count: • Tablets (the padds) • VR "holodecks" • Computers that you can talk to and ask questions • "Tricorders" (smartphones?) • Turbolifts (https://www.dezeen.com/2017/07/12/thyssenkrupp-unveils-worlds-first-rope-less-sideways-moving-elevator-system-multi/ https://www.dezeen.com/2017/07/12/thyssenkrupp-unveils-world...) Maybe we'll get to add a warp drive to the list by the time I die. What else?
- moonbug 5y ago
  The navigation was done by whales.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  Communicators would be something like Bluetooth earpieces. You've got Tricorders wrong, they're a generalized non-contact diagnostic tool; someone was working on one but it was just a load of diagnostic devices stuck together. We've got body temperature, and pulse is doable, but not sure what else can really be added to a Tricorder, maybe a tiny mass-spectrometer gets you part way there.
  - eganist 5y ago
    > You've got Tricorders wrong, they're a generalized non-contact diagnostic tool; someone was working on one but it was just a load of diagnostic devices stuck together. We've got body temperature, and pulse is doable, but not sure what else can really be added to a Tricorder, maybe a tiny mass-spectrometer gets you part way there. In fairness, a tricorder would probably need to be a device capable of gathering data about quantum fields within an extremely local region of space and then analyzing based on known frames of reference and data models, so we're probably a ways off on that one. The harder part of that challenge is building a device capable of analyzing quantum fields in the most abstract sense. But once that's done, even if it's in the form of a massive machine that can only analyze spacetime in a small chamber, even if that machine is rooms-big, the race to the first tricorder begins. (I could be completely off-base with my comment on analyzing quantum fields. I'm not at all an expert.)
  - ben_w 5y ago
    I literally bought a Bluetooth enabled TNG-style comm badge for my partner for Christmas. TOS-style communicators are basically flip-phones with absurd range. Given that WiFi signals can be used as wall-penetrating radars capable of pose, breathing, and pulse determination, that could be added without too much difficulty. Likewise broad range IR and UV cameras (which I assume will become standard when phone manufacturers can no longer differentiate by zoom, just as they added zoom when everyone had enough megapixels). Geiger counter would probably just upset people when they realise even organic bananas contain radioactive potassium, but could be done. Carbon monoxide and other air quality sensors are fairly plausible IMO. Not sure how many you could put in a phone (zero? Just CO? Whole mass spectrometer?), but I can see the desire. Make an atomic clock good enough and small enough, and you could detect temporal anomalies caused by the nearby football stadium filling up (no, really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582161) My head-cannon is the small cylinder prop used in the medical tricorder is supposed to be a miniature MRI or CT scanner. I suspect either would be a mistake to add to a consumer product.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    Is it so wrong? My phone can: - Identify places and objects with the camera and give me data about them (Google Lens) - Plot graphs of the local geomagnetic fields, my exact position on earth (the built in compass and GPS) - Plot graphs of local radio traffic, signal strengths etc (wifi scanners) - Control other devices - Diagnose medical conditions Smartphones can do a lot already just with the sensors they already have.
- mikro2nd 5y ago
  "Computers that you can talk to and ask questions" Pity the answers are so often rubbish and the "side-effects" so obnoxious. ST (and most other SF) seems not to have predicted that.
- Aardwolf 5y ago
  "The Game" episode of TNG predicted addictive viral mobile games
- dougmwne 5y ago
  Walking around with the sum total of human knowledge. That featured heavily in a lot of episodes where the ship carried around a library of everything and and could communicate back to the network on Earth for everything squared. Often problems were solved by database search algorithm. And the VR Holodeck is spot on actually. I was having moments where I was questioning how much better the experience really would be with a matter-energy converter. It already works pretty well using stupid human perceptual tricks.
  - mr_gibbins 5y ago
    We used to have the sum total of human knowledge, or at least a good facsimile of it. Unfortunately, with the Internet as we know it transformed into a handful of walled gardens, finding detailed knowledge is increasingly difficult. Wikipedia is excellent, as usual. But it is an encyclopaedia, not a definitive source of original knowledge, and it remains the case that I can browse my modest (physical) bookshelves and find a book on, say, Russian modern history that will give me far more in-depth information in the first ten pages than I can find online. Same applies for almost any genre, except perhaps fiction. Seven Years In Tibet taught me more about Tibetan geography and culture than any amount of Googling could do. The idea of an infinite knowledge bank is appealing and I think the Internet could have made it - imagine a suite of applications that complement Wikipedia - but commercialism has ruined the utopia, as it is designed to do.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      Technically, all the books are online now thanks to Google's book scanning programme and Kindle. You might have to buy it to see the pages but that's OK. Of course Star Trek didn't have money, so ...
- aasasd 5y ago
  If you ever try to follow what a holodeck can and can't do, you easily see that few of our technology predictions can even hold a candle to it. There's some finger-waggling in-universe to explain away the discrepancy, but the ‘fact’ is that a holodeck would create matter with which you can interact, out of thin air, and expand this volume of matter seemingly for kilometers around, while purportedly being located in a room. VR is but a feeble emulation of holodeck's glory.
  - aasasd 5y ago
    In fact, if you consider the in-universe explanation of ‘holodeck creates fake matter that can't actually exist and function outside of the holodeck’, then things may possibly be even more impressive. So, presumably people discovered some kind of a different matter, with which we could interact, but which exists only temporarily on the holodeck thing. Since it flips in and out of existence when the holodeck activates or deactivates, it sounds like some kind of energy that masquerades and works as matter. But how much regular energy would you need to expend to hold this matter-energy in place and make it work? All discussion of teleportation and ‘transporter’ devices comes to conclusions that disassembling and assembling human-scale objects would require huge amounts of energy, like on levels of Kardashev Type II. But a holodeck pretty much does about the same kind of thing continuously, all the time while it's in use. Imagine, at the vague minimum, running a present-day country's worth of energy supply to power your VR box.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    Yes I know how the holodeck was hypothesised to work, but the actual goal of the deck was VR entertainment and we have that.
- Accujack 5y ago
  Interestingly, most of those ideas were far earlier than ST:TNG was. Roddenberry had written a lot of them down based on 1960s science fiction during the time he was working on the original series. He wanted to do the holodeck already back then, but there was no way to do it reasonably convincingly given the technology of the time.

Funnily enough, the writers of ST:TNG had this idea too. The main computer of the Enterprise-D was huge (9 decks tall) and generated a subspace field so that optical processing ran faster than light.

native_samples 5y ago

Star Trek's tech vision is astounding. How many things in it have actually been built? I count: • Tablets (the padds) • VR "holodecks" • Computers that you can talk to and ask questions • "Tricorders" (smartphones?) • Turbolifts (https://www.dezeen.com/2017/07/12/thyssenkrupp-unveils-worlds-first-rope-less-sideways-moving-elevator-system-multi/ https://www.dezeen.com/2017/07/12/thyssenkrupp-unveils-world...) Maybe we'll get to add a warp drive to the list by the time I die. What else?

moonbug 5y ago
The navigation was done by whales.
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
Communicators would be something like Bluetooth earpieces. You've got Tricorders wrong, they're a generalized non-contact diagnostic tool; someone was working on one but it was just a load of diagnostic devices stuck together. We've got body temperature, and pulse is doable, but not sure what else can really be added to a Tricorder, maybe a tiny mass-spectrometer gets you part way there.
- eganist 5y ago
  > You've got Tricorders wrong, they're a generalized non-contact diagnostic tool; someone was working on one but it was just a load of diagnostic devices stuck together. We've got body temperature, and pulse is doable, but not sure what else can really be added to a Tricorder, maybe a tiny mass-spectrometer gets you part way there. In fairness, a tricorder would probably need to be a device capable of gathering data about quantum fields within an extremely local region of space and then analyzing based on known frames of reference and data models, so we're probably a ways off on that one. The harder part of that challenge is building a device capable of analyzing quantum fields in the most abstract sense. But once that's done, even if it's in the form of a massive machine that can only analyze spacetime in a small chamber, even if that machine is rooms-big, the race to the first tricorder begins. (I could be completely off-base with my comment on analyzing quantum fields. I'm not at all an expert.)
- ben_w 5y ago
  I literally bought a Bluetooth enabled TNG-style comm badge for my partner for Christmas. TOS-style communicators are basically flip-phones with absurd range. Given that WiFi signals can be used as wall-penetrating radars capable of pose, breathing, and pulse determination, that could be added without too much difficulty. Likewise broad range IR and UV cameras (which I assume will become standard when phone manufacturers can no longer differentiate by zoom, just as they added zoom when everyone had enough megapixels). Geiger counter would probably just upset people when they realise even organic bananas contain radioactive potassium, but could be done. Carbon monoxide and other air quality sensors are fairly plausible IMO. Not sure how many you could put in a phone (zero? Just CO? Whole mass spectrometer?), but I can see the desire. Make an atomic clock good enough and small enough, and you could detect temporal anomalies caused by the nearby football stadium filling up (no, really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582161) My head-cannon is the small cylinder prop used in the medical tricorder is supposed to be a miniature MRI or CT scanner. I suspect either would be a mistake to add to a consumer product.
- native_samples 5y ago
  Is it so wrong? My phone can: - Identify places and objects with the camera and give me data about them (Google Lens) - Plot graphs of the local geomagnetic fields, my exact position on earth (the built in compass and GPS) - Plot graphs of local radio traffic, signal strengths etc (wifi scanners) - Control other devices - Diagnose medical conditions Smartphones can do a lot already just with the sensors they already have.
mikro2nd 5y ago
"Computers that you can talk to and ask questions" Pity the answers are so often rubbish and the "side-effects" so obnoxious. ST (and most other SF) seems not to have predicted that.
Aardwolf 5y ago
"The Game" episode of TNG predicted addictive viral mobile games
dougmwne 5y ago
Walking around with the sum total of human knowledge. That featured heavily in a lot of episodes where the ship carried around a library of everything and and could communicate back to the network on Earth for everything squared. Often problems were solved by database search algorithm. And the VR Holodeck is spot on actually. I was having moments where I was questioning how much better the experience really would be with a matter-energy converter. It already works pretty well using stupid human perceptual tricks.
- mr_gibbins 5y ago
  We used to have the sum total of human knowledge, or at least a good facsimile of it. Unfortunately, with the Internet as we know it transformed into a handful of walled gardens, finding detailed knowledge is increasingly difficult. Wikipedia is excellent, as usual. But it is an encyclopaedia, not a definitive source of original knowledge, and it remains the case that I can browse my modest (physical) bookshelves and find a book on, say, Russian modern history that will give me far more in-depth information in the first ten pages than I can find online. Same applies for almost any genre, except perhaps fiction. Seven Years In Tibet taught me more about Tibetan geography and culture than any amount of Googling could do. The idea of an infinite knowledge bank is appealing and I think the Internet could have made it - imagine a suite of applications that complement Wikipedia - but commercialism has ruined the utopia, as it is designed to do.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    Technically, all the books are online now thanks to Google's book scanning programme and Kindle. You might have to buy it to see the pages but that's OK. Of course Star Trek didn't have money, so ...
aasasd 5y ago
If you ever try to follow what a holodeck can and can't do, you easily see that few of our technology predictions can even hold a candle to it. There's some finger-waggling in-universe to explain away the discrepancy, but the ‘fact’ is that a holodeck would create matter with which you can interact, out of thin air, and expand this volume of matter seemingly for kilometers around, while purportedly being located in a room. VR is but a feeble emulation of holodeck's glory.
- aasasd 5y ago
  In fact, if you consider the in-universe explanation of ‘holodeck creates fake matter that can't actually exist and function outside of the holodeck’, then things may possibly be even more impressive. So, presumably people discovered some kind of a different matter, with which we could interact, but which exists only temporarily on the holodeck thing. Since it flips in and out of existence when the holodeck activates or deactivates, it sounds like some kind of energy that masquerades and works as matter. But how much regular energy would you need to expend to hold this matter-energy in place and make it work? All discussion of teleportation and ‘transporter’ devices comes to conclusions that disassembling and assembling human-scale objects would require huge amounts of energy, like on levels of Kardashev Type II. But a holodeck pretty much does about the same kind of thing continuously, all the time while it's in use. Imagine, at the vague minimum, running a present-day country's worth of energy supply to power your VR box.
- native_samples 5y ago
  Yes I know how the holodeck was hypothesised to work, but the actual goal of the deck was VR entertainment and we have that.
Accujack 5y ago
Interestingly, most of those ideas were far earlier than ST:TNG was. Roddenberry had written a lot of them down based on 1960s science fiction during the time he was working on the original series. He wanted to do the holodeck already back then, but there was no way to do it reasonably convincingly given the technology of the time.