When Science Fiction Becomes Science Fact

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 When double-sided disks were introduced, it was a big deal for business users.It wasn't long before these disks were superseded by CD and SD cards, but those old floppy disks bore a huge resemblance to those old Star Trek record tapes.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!

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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.