The science fiction of yesterday can very fast become the science
fact of today. It's as if science fiction throws down a challenge to our
scientists: Hey, have you seen this? Bet you can't make this one! But before
we know it, it's been made. Here are just five such examples.
Computer Discs
Remember
in The Original Series, the record tapes? Those coloured cubes or
rectangular pieces of plastic were data storage devices. Inserting them into a
desktop computer console or terminal, they were used to store all manner of information
on the Enterprise.
Well,
not too long after the original
Star Trek came out, the floppy disc was
born. Originally developed in an 8" format, 5¼" and 3½" soon
followed as data storage means improved. When
double-sided disks were
introduced, it was a big deal for business users.It wasn't long before these disks were superseded by CD and
SD cards, but those old floppy disks bore a huge resemblance to those old Star
Trek record tapes.
Communicator
Of course, one can't mention any of these developments
without thinking of the iconic Star Trek communicator.
Surely this device inspired the flip-phone. I wonder how
many of us enjoyed opening our flip-phones Kirk-style?
The Communications Earpiece
Whilst Uhura's communications earpiece wasn't copyrighted as
'Bluetooth', it certainly did much the same job as a Bluetooth headset today!
* * * * *
Those are just three of the inventions we take for granted,
but what about more significant developments? Here are two.
Solar Sails
In science fiction terms, this technology
is old, arising countless times in novels and short stories. For example, in his
1865 science fiction classic,
"From the Earth to the Moon",
Jules Verne speculated about light-propelled spacecraft.
In 1951, Carl Wiley (under the pseudonym Russell Saunders)
wrote an article called "Clipper Ships in Space" for Astounding
Science Fiction about how solar sails could be built in orbit and used for
space travel.
Cordwainer Smith also published a science fiction story "The
Lady Who Sailed the Soul" in Galaxy Magazine in 1960. Although
more of a romance, the story also describes a solar sail spaceship.
Then we have Pierre Boulle’s novel, "Planet of the
Apes" in 1963, in which he describes Jinn and Phyllis's sail craft as
"a kind of sphere with a shell—the sail—made of amazingly thin material,
and it would move through space, just pushed by the pressure of light
beams."
So, by the time Star Trek: Deep Space 9 utilised the theory
in Explorers, when Jake and Benjamin Sisko create such a craft in a
father/son bonding exercise, it was old hat in sci-fi terms.
Today, solar sails have been developed and used in a raft of
projects in varying guises, but on 21 May 2010, Japan Aerospace Exploration
Agency (JAXA) launched the world's first interplanetary solar sail
spacecraft "IKAROS" (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by
Radiation of the Sun) to Venus. Using a new solar-photon propulsion method, it
was the first true solar sail spacecraft fully propelled by sunlight, and was
the first spacecraft to succeed in solar sail flight.
Transparent Aluminum
In the film
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,
the crew of the
Enterprise is assigned the task of traveling back in
time to 1986 to capture a pair of humpback whales, and bringing them back to
the future. However, to construct an adequate tank for the whales on board
their borrowed Klingon spaceship, good old Scotty goes to a plexiglass maker
and gives him the extremely valuable recipe for "transparent
aluminum" in exchange for the first batch.
In 1986, this sounded fanciful, but aluminium oxynitride,
aka ALON, is the real-world transparent aluminum.
It's a transparent ceramic composed of aluminium, oxygen and nitrogen. Four
times harder than glass it is optically transparent, and bulletproof to
anything up to and including a 50-caliber round.
