Trek Tech vs Reality
In a distant part of the galaxy, 300 years in the future,
Starship Enterprise Captain James T. Kirk talks to his crew via a
communicator; has his medical officer assess medical conditions through a
handheld device called a tricorder; synthesizes food and physical goods
using his replicator; and travels short distances via a transporter.
Kirk’s successors hold meetings in virtual-reality chambers, called
holodecks, and operate alien spacecraft using displays mounted on their
foreheads. All this takes place in the TV series Star Trek, and is of course science fiction.
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.
Take
Captain Kirk’s communicator. It was surely an inspiration for the first
generation of flip phones, those clunky mobile devices that we used in
the 1990s. These have evolved into smartphones, far more advanced than
the science-fiction communicator. Kirk’s device didn’t receive e-mail,
play music, surf the Web, provide directions, or take photos, after all.
It also didn’t sweet-talk him as Apple’s Siri does when you ask her the
right questions.
Soon, our smartphones will also add the medical-assessment features of a tricorder, and it won’t need to be a separate device.
Apple
recently announced that iOS 8 will provide a platform for
medical-sensor data that will be displayed by an app called Health.
Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and others are all racing to build their own
platforms and medical devices. We will soon see a new generation of
wearable devices such as bracelets, watches, and clothing that use
external sensors to perform electrocardiograms and measure our
temperature, blood oxygenation, and other vital signs. These will later
be replaced by less obtrusive sensors in skin patches, tattoos and
eventually microchips embedded in our bodies. As well, we will have
cameras and heat, gas, and sound sensors in our bathrooms, kitchens, and
living rooms that constantly monitor our health and lifestyle.
What
are making these health sensors possible are miniaturized mechanical
and microelectromechanical (MEMS) elements made using microfabrication
technology. Similar advances in microfluidics and nanofluidics are
enabling development of labs on thumbnail-sized chips. Nanobiosym, for
example is developing a device, called GENE-Radar, that can identify,
within minutes, a range of illnesses, including AIDS, malaria,
tuberculosis, and cancer. Such devices will also be ubiquitous and
immediately identify a broad range of disease markers. Unlike the
Star Trek tricorder, which is used occasionally, they will constantly be monitoring our bodies.
When
you look at the advances that have already happened in 3D printing, you
begin to realize that this is the making of the Star Trek replicator.
3D printers can create objects in plastic, metal, glass, titanium, human
cells, and yes, even chocolate from a design. Today’s 3D printers are
painfully slow, and it takes many hours to print a breadbox-sized
object; but in a decade, they will become as common, fast, and
inexpensive as our laser document printers. In about two decades, we
will be 3D printing our dinner as well as our electronics.
We already have
Star Trek– and
Jetsons-like
video-chat capabilities. Rather than require the large, clunky monitors
that we saw George Jetson and Captain Kathryn Janeway use, ours use
free Facetime and Skype apps that run on smartphones and laptops.
Holodeck-type video conferences have also been possible for several
years. I spoke via hologram, in 2011, to a bunch of entrepreneurs in
Uruguay using technology that a small company there, Holograam, had
developed. Remember the holographic message from Princess Leia to
Obi-Wan Kenobi, in
Star Wars? That’s how my beamed image looked.
Start-ups
such as Oculus, which Facebook recently purchased, are developing
virtual-reality goggles that simulate the real world. Others companies
are developing three-dimensional projectors that beam images onto
screens that make a person look as though physically present. These
technologies are in their infancy, but watch them grow and add touch and
smell capabilities. We will be meeting each other through virtual
reality, and it will feel as if we are really there.
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 Falcon rockets. 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.
______
Vivek
Wadhwa is a fellow at Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford
University, director of research at Center for Entrepreneurship and
Research Commercialization at Duke, and distinguished fellow at
Singularity University. His past appointments include Harvard Law
School, University of California Berkeley, and Emory University. This
article originally ran last year in The Washington Post
. Follow him at https://twitter.com/wadhwa.
