Does Star Trek become reality someday?

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I'm big fan of Star Trek,

I'm remembering watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was showed in National Polish TV (TVP) in middle 90's I have 8 or 9 years old, believing that Starfleet is real thing, and wanting to join it when i become older and become starship captain like Captain Jean-Luc Picard

Unfortunately, I later learned that this is all fiction and i was very sad

But I've become a big fan of Star Trek Q in particular

I watched all the Star Trek, now in June, going to the premiere of the new one, i was Mad about destruction of Vulcan
I hope Q fix this someday:-)

BTW I'm big fan of science-fiction.

I wonder if the reality presented in Star Trek will someday come true.

I mean spacecraft moving at warp speed, visiting strange new worlds, where no man has gone before.

Not in your/our lifetimes.
Thats for sure.
Both generations of Star Trek are set like five centuries in the future.


Interplanetary (within our solar system) travel might well become routine someday, but interstellar travel like that in star trek faces the cosmic speed limit -the speed of light- as a hurtle. The distances to the stars are just too great for routine travel at sublight speeds even to the nearest stars. Find a way to break the light barrier and defy Einstein and it could happen. But it doesnt seem possible to do that.

Some say Star Trek is already happening-but in reverse.
The UFO's are aliens visiting us.
Not sayin I agree.

I've never actually seen Star Trek, but I had a physics teacher in high school who was really into it. One day he brought a book called "The Physics of Star Trek" into class and talked about it. I think the summary of it was: most of the technology in Star Trek is theoretically possible.

Some of the technology in the original series was developed in real life after the series came out like hand-held communication devices & medical beds with computers. So I think we can eventual develop more technology that was in Star Trek but I doubt we'd be going to other planets in our lifetimes.

There is much modern technology that was inspired by the original Star Trek - for instance, flip-phones were designed to look as much like Kirk's communicator as possible. (Kirk's communicator, though, couldn't access computer networks, display images, or play games.)

Transporters seem to be even theoretically impossible - so far.

Warp drive as depicted may or may not be possible, as it relied on an understanding of physics far beyond our own (knowledge of the existence of subspace, realms of existence in a superspace, not dissimilar from modern brane theory). However, Miguel Alcubierre did come up with a theoretical way to exceed lightspeed without violating Einsteinian physics, based on the idea that while an object cannot go faster than light, the expansion of space itself can. His theory would compress the space in front of a bubble of space containing the craft, and expand the space behind it - the ship would remain in flat space, but the bubble would be riding the compression and expansion of space. The problem with Alcubierre's theory was that it required a mass of exotic matter about as great as that of Jupiter. However, in recent years, Howard White worked out a modified version in which the mass would be a flattened toroid, and the edges of the warp field would be vibrated; this would give effective "velocities" of up to ten times the speed of light, and reduce the exotic-matter requirement to about 500 kilograms or so. Of course, thus far we have no idea how to produce exotic matter, and can't even prove it exists; hope is given by discovery of a Higgs boson, but may be dashed if this Higgs boson violates the standard model (a matter still in question). However, NASA is constructing a testbed on which to examine Alcubierre/White warp theory at a microscopic scale. If they can produce tiny little warp bubbles, it will prove the theory correct - then we can work on how to get exotic matter.

The rest of the technology is at least possible. For instance, a researcher in California, working under a military contract for non-lethal weapons, has developed a phaser - it fires a low-power laser to ionize the air between the emitter and the target, then a phased electrical pulse to follow the ionized channel to the target. The problem with the device currently is that it's too big to be carried in anything smaller than the bed of a pickup. However, given how technology has shrunk the size of devices over the years, I wouldn't bet against a handheld version within 200 years...

i have no faith whatsoever, that humanity will be able to avoid the great self-destruction.

humanity couldn't avoid the great self-destruction in star trek either...

^^^
i am not familiar enough with the various trek programs to know which one depicted the end.

There have been mentions of World War Three, and six hundred million dead.

that couldn't have been much of a ww3, IMHO. so humanity survived otherwise there would've been no future to depict in the various star treks.

The Eugenic Wars


By the way, I wonder what you think about genetic engineering and bio-engineering.
In Star Trek the development of these sciences is condemned

Bioengineering mostly gets a bad rap from people who don't know anything about it

But there is some danger.

I always thought that Gene Roddenberry did not like gene therapy

That he preferred natural self-improvement and human spirit over speedy artificially "human" whose genius is bought for money.

Anyway, I think that Gene Roddenberry did not like the money as such.

Many people accused of a Star Trek for being crypto-communism propaganda, because there is practically no mention of the economy and the money, but similar charges are made about The Smurfs

Yeah, genetic therapy in a sense of how it's described in Star Trek, or Gattica (great movie!), is pretty serious and does have many moral implications. But genetic modification and bio-engineering in and of themselves are not well understood by the general public, and often get a bad rap based on misconceptions and misinformation (see: GMO controversy). In my opinion, both fields have a huge degree of potential, but that potential may never be fully realized due to public backlash. Just look at stem cell research...the potential to cure hundreds of life-threatening and debilitating diseases, and yet supporters of it are often branded as though they were the devil himself. Sorry for straying a bit off topic, but it's an issue I feel strongly for (after all I went to school for 4 years for this stuff lol)

As for Star Trek becoming reality...it's a nice thought but doubtful. For one, and this is something that really bothers me in nearly all sci-fi shows and movies, is almost all the alien species are extremely anthropomorphic. I don't see it as likely that a species that developed completely independently, light years away, would end up sharing so many human characteristics. And secondly, the distances...while there are theories out there that do allow for faster than light travel, these are all highly theoretical and it's improbable at best that, even if the theories pan out, we'll ever develop the technology for it. There's little to no money in exploration, so that's a huge investment to make with no immediate payback. That said though, if we could get a ship that could even go 1/10 light speed, we could at least send probes and maybe humans to a nearby star system. And I do think that that may be a reasonable goal.

It has always kind of made me sad though, to think that we may never know what all is 'out there'. We're just a tiny speck in one galaxy of billions...quite a bit out there to discover, wouldn't you say?

I can imagine us colonizing the space in our solar system in the near future. There is nothing that makes it physically impossible, manufacturing continues to become more automated and there are more than enough raw materials in space for habitat construction.

I don't see why we couldn't send a self sustaining habitat to the nearest star. I'm not enough of an expert to know what kinds of phenomena we can exploit to bend space or transport people or what kinds of complications would get in the way. But I really don't see why we wouldn't be able to slowly spread across the stars until we bump into something.

Gattaca i love the movie
I watched a movie, great story about triumph of human spirit