Star Trek technologies....what ones do you think will actually be real?

[Hayabusa Rider]

Originally posted by: lowtech

Originally posted by: Hayabusarider

Originally posted by: RyanSengara

Originally posted by: Hayabusarider
I call shenanigans

Phasers- Non reflecting beams that somehow dissociates matter. Not in this lifetime. Nothing known can do this. No, it is not a laser. It is something else.

Force fields. There are 4 fundamental forces. In increasing order of strength, gravity, electromagnetism, weak force (mediates radioactive decay), strong force ( holds the subatomic world together). None of these can block living beings from walking through an area. Nope, not this.

Artificial gravity- Well I cannot say, since I (and no one else for that matter) really understands it. Ask me again when someone comes up with a quantum theory of it.

Time travel- No. Theoretically possible if you consumed a substantial portion of the universe in the process, but that aint happening at a TARDIS near you.

Replicators- With nanotechnology, limited replication may be possible. You could have source material that could become a chair then morph into a table, but Earl Grey tea or a hot babe, no.

Warp drive- Nope. FTL travel not done in this universe

Transporters. No again. Yes a few atoms were moved, well not exactly moved (close enough, but conceptually difficult to be precise about what happened). Teleporting a person compared to this is like saying you will one day be able to lift the moon if it could rest on the surface of the Earth, because you can lift a grain of sand now.

What else is left of the gee wiz stuff?

Holodecks. Well sorta. Not in the real world, but it ought to one day be possible to overide sensory input and create experience, kind of like the Matrix.

Antimatter? Problem is that you have to make it, therefore it really a storage medium. You would have to consume enormous amounts of resources to make a little bit. Not really useful

Everything you just said, is all bs. Your assumptions and predictions for the most part are wrong.

I'm game. Refute them

What you have said is true at the moment, but it could be different in the future. If people think like you then we are still could be living in a cave & thinking that the world is flat. Man couldn't fly and moon walk is impossible. Dream and creativity is what drive science.

Well,

"What you have said is true at the moment, but it could be different in the future."

Two things about the future, first is the only certainty and that is we are all going to die. Second, the future is never what you expect it to be. Ask me what the future holds. I cannot say. I do know a little bit about physical law. My objections were mostly based on the laws of physics. Until someone invalidates Einstein, you may not like limits, but old Al looks better as time goes on.








"If people think like you then we are still could be living in a cave & thinking that the world is flat. Man couldn't fly and moon walk is impossible."

What is my educational background? How do I think based on a post? Remember, on the internet one never knows who the other is or what they do or have done. A moon walk was not a physical impossibility, but a technical one for many years. Tell me, what law of physics were we able to violate to put Armstrong on the moon?





"Dream and creativity is what drive science". No, this is what drives fiction. Science was the Curies grinding down piles of pitchblende over years and years and years. It was tenacity, and unwavering objectivity. Science is a hundred experiments of a genius all being failures. It is one lucky find of a lesser person that earns a Nobel. Science is a pain in the ass. Science is really the scientific method. A way to systematically and painstakingly examinine the physical world. It is adhering to techniques and principles to further human knowlege. It is not a deux ex machina, pulling out solutions from wishful thinking. If any of the above happen, it will most likely be due to a graduate student working on a PhD thesis who was lucky and smart enough to recognize something unusual or significant. Others will build on that, and if it stands the rigors of peer review, and is repeatable, then you have something. It is not a few physicists proclaming cold fusion because that is what they hoped they have. Yearning for a result beforehand is a recipe for disaster. I know a grad student who never got his degree because he sharpie enhanced a band on a gel. Why? Because he wanted something to be there. He thought it was, but just not clear. Well, it never was. Not repeatable. Too bad, he was good, but unprincipled.

Want to know what science really is about? It is about knowing what is knowable, not what you would like to be. When known physical laws change, then I will be wrong. Until then, I stand by my prior post.

 

[Zenmervolt]

Originally posted by: caramel
i knew that! i was just testing you guys! 😛

*shuffles feet*

It's OK. We forgive you. (Mainly just because of your sig though. 😉 😛)

ZV

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Originally posted by: Heisenberg

Originally posted by: Hayabusarider
I call shenanigans

Phasers- Non reflecting beams that somehow dissociates matter. Not in this lifetime. Nothing known can do this. No, it is not a laser. It is something else.

Force fields. There are 4 fundamental forces. In increasing order of strength, gravity, electromagnetism, weak force (mediates radioactive decay), strong force ( holds the subatomic world together). None of these can block living beings from walking through an area. Nope, not this.

Artificial gravity- Well I cannot say, since I (and no one else for that matter) really understands it. Ask me again when someone comes up with a quantum theory of it.

Time travel- No. Theoretically possible if you consumed a substantial portion of the universe in the process, but that aint happening at a TARDIS near you.

Replicators- With nanotechnology, limited replication may be possible. You could have source material that could become a chair then morph into a table, but Earl Grey tea or a hot babe, no.

Warp drive- Nope. FTL travel not done in this universe

Transporters. No again. Yes a few atoms were moved, well not exactly moved (close enough, but conceptually difficult to be precise about what happened). Teleporting a person compared to this is like saying you will one day be able to lift the moon if it could rest on the surface of the Earth, because you can lift a grain of sand now.

What else is left of the gee wiz stuff?

Holodecks. Well sorta. Not in the real world, but it ought to one day be possible to overide sensory input and create experience, kind of like the Matrix.

Antimatter? Problem is that you have to make it, therefore it really a storage medium. You would have to consume enormous amounts of resources to make a little bit. Not really useful

Some of your info is not quite correct.

Time travel - it does exist, but only into the future. All you have to do is be traveling at a significant portion of the speed of light and time dilation will occur. Time will pass more slowly for you than for someone at rest.

Warp drive - FTL does exist. The superluminal light article you linked shows that. In that case though, the light cannot contain any information. As far as warp drive, it is thought that creating a wormhole would allow for non-local FTL travel while still not exceeding the speed of light locally.

Antimatter - the problem right now is it just isn't efficient as a power source. If some efficient way of creating it could be found (meaning you get more energy out than required to create it) it could be very useful.

I can work with this-

Time travel as most people think of it is really moving at will in the temporal dimension. What you describe is certaintly true, as has been demonstrated in experiments. I don't know that would be under what is considered "travel" though. Semantics really, but your explanation is certainly correct.

FTL- Notice that this applies to massless photons unable to carry information. My bad, I left a loophole. FTL should have been FTL travel. I thought the context of the thread made that self evident though. Regarding the wormhole. If you look at what is required to make one, you see what I meant about the energy needed to open one big enough to get into. This link should provide more credibility than what I could provide here.


Antimatter- I grant that as a storage medium it is extremely useful in spaceflight etc. It is not a power source though, in a true sense. Unless someone can find out how to revoke parity and create antimatter from matter, whatever you get out you have to put in first. Perhaps vacuum energy some day? A more hopeful prospect, as it violates no known laws of physics to tap it, but practically, no one has any ideas how to go about it. Some people feel that you cant get a free lunch, but this remains to be seen.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

I am not here to rain on people's parades. If we do not blow ourselves back to the stone age, or engineer a killer bug in a lab that wipes us all out, what happens in 500 or a 1000 years is going to make some of Star Trek look about as primitive as shooting people to the Moon out of cannons. Who two hundred years ago could have forseen just what I am doing right now? I am using a device (laptop) powered by some inexplicable means(electricity) communicating by magic (electromagnetic waves as radio) that performs the incomprehensible, made up of largely unknown materials. With this, I can share thoughts, pictures, and information with people thousands of miles away. NO ONE saw this. That is what I meant about the future being unknowable. So what if we dont get the star trek wish list? Something equally wonderful and certainly more astounding is bound to happen.

 

[Heisenberg]

Originally posted by: Hayabusarider
I can work with this-

Time travel as most people think of it is really moving at will in the temporal dimension. What you describe is certaintly true, as has been demonstrated in experiments. I don't know that would be under what is considered "travel" though. Semantics really, but your explanation is certainly correct.

FTL- Notice that this applies to massless photons unable to carry information. My bad, I left a loophole. FTL should have been FTL travel. I thought the context of the thread made that self evident though. Regarding the wormhole. If you look at what is required to make one, you see what I meant about the energy needed to open one big enough to get into. This link should provide more credibility than what I could provide here.


Antimatter- I grant that as a storage medium it is extremely useful in spaceflight etc. It is not a power source though, in a true sense. Unless someone can find out how to revoke parity and create antimatter from matter, whatever you get out you have to put in first. Perhaps vacuum energy some day? A more hopeful prospect, as it violates no known laws of physics to tap it, but practically, no one has any ideas how to go about it. Some people feel that you cant get a free lunch, but this remains to be seen.

FTL - I agree the wormhole thing is a little iffy. The energy requirements in themselves are likely to be on a scale that seems impossible today. And although quantum theory permits negative energies, (to get past gravity collapsing the wormhole before you could get through it) it's far from being well-understood enough to be utilizied.

Antimatter - I also think it's first uses will be in space travel where containing the most energy is the smallest space is vital. That still leaves the problem of production if it is to be used for a power source on earth. While the current methods to produce it are hugely inefficient, there may be other ways that just haven't been discovered. AFAIK, it's still not clear why exactly the universe (at least what we can observe) has a predominance of matter over anti-matter. Quantum theory does not have any inherent preference in it to explain that. Maybe when resolve that question we'll find a way to produce it efficiently.

Most of these technologies, although permitted by theory, have huge logistical problems associated with them, and therefore are labelled as being impossible. However, I have hope that we'll eventually make practical anything not expressly prohibited by natural laws. Maybe I'm wrong, but as of now I won't discount anything even if there's the slightest hope it will someday be possible and practical.

 

[SharkyTM]

1. Transporters: there have been many attemps at "transporter" technology, but the main problem is that we can turn matter into an energy stream, direct that stream without too much loss to another place, but we just can't turn energy into anything but different forms of energy... we can take a drop of water, convert it into almost pure energy, then use a laser to transmit most of that energy (whatever isnt lost as heat) to another place, use a series of collectors to catch the energy, and transform the photons into some other kind of energy, like mechanical or electrical... only problem is that there is no way to convert any of it to matter...
2. Warp speed: Well... Read Discover... there's a theory on the table right now from a young physist who is trying to prove Einstein's theory of general relativity wrong... he has an idea that superliminal speeds are very possible, just at a submolecular scale...
3. Replicators: Using a laser connected to a CAD/CAM machine, and a voice recogizing computer with good touchscreen control, they can now make any 3-d object. The CAD/CAM machine has a resivoir of light-activated polymer, similar to the glue used on dental braces, and when a design is chosen, it begins "drawing" the object 1 perpindicular slice at a time. The plastic hardens instantly when the laser's light hits it, then the tray holding the object lowers a millimeter or so, covering the old slice with polymer, and the next slice is "drawn" in laser/plastic. It takes quite a while, because of the speed of the machines and the computers+ time to clean the object. The tech is primitive, but in under an hour, these machines can make just about any object under 3' cubed from a strong, resilient plastic. In the future, your home server will have millions of common objects in memory, and you can just tell it, "Bob, i need 8 silver dinner forks that match my christmas napkin rings." In 10 minutes, your kitchen cabinet will open and drop 8 new forks onto the table, each made from stainless steel and encased in a "smart" polymer that your dishwasher removes to clean, then redeposits once the fork is clean...
4: phasers... considering how much money is dumped, and i mean dumped into the military, it wouldn't surprise me if we saw military lasers and particle accelerators in the next 1-200 years. Phasers are a little far though...
5: force fields: Do-able, but the health risks would probably be considerable. I imagine they would not only stop you, but also damage your tissues to some degree over time.
6. the big issue is how to power this stuff...

shark

 

[HombrePequeno]

Originally posted by: Skoorb
A teleporter, to my knowledge, already exists in a VERY simplified form. Some scientists were able to move an atom across a room or something silly like that, but that technology seems more likely than warp travel.

In regards to time travel if you put an atomic clock on the top of a high building and one at the bottom over time they will fall out of sync. If that' even worth a damn thing in regards to time travel we've got a ways to go yet. Time travel is something I really don't think we need at all 😀 See: Timecop!

Holodeck I'm sure we'll have in a way. Although creating an environment like that is a total waste of time all we really need is a shunt into our brains and a computer creates, as far as our senses can tell, an alternate reality. A basic form could be VR goggles and something on your crotch so that you could "have sex" with pamela anderson or something like that, but something directly influencing our senses would be a surefire way - and likely I think in the future - to give us the holodeck effect.

Actually the teleporter is probably the least likely technology to become reality. Sure we can do little tricks with quantum teleportation and get a particle out of trillions and trillions of particles through a barrier at "faster than light" but it's not likely to get much better than that. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would be a good thing to look up.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Heisenberg- you may be aware that there is a real push on now to understand the dominance of matter over antimatter. Quantum mechanics is great as far as it goes, but is woefully incomplete. What is puzzling that it works so well as fragmented as it is. Perhaps that is because Quantum mechanics is really a group of marginally connected theories which are mostly complete in their own right. QED and QCD, for example. Anyway, my money is on how symmetry was broken early on. Perhaps there were conditions favoring parity violation in an anisotropic way. We of course see evidence of parity violations now in radioactive decay, suggesting spacetime is asymmetric. Of course the old theory of John Wheeler (think it was him) nags me. He puzzled why all electrons are the same. He concluded that there is ONE electron, weaving and bobbing throughout spacetime forwards and backwards, emerging at many places at once. The fly in the ointment was that antielectrons can be considered normal electrons moving backwards in time. If that were the case, we ought to see the same number of antielectrons as electrons and that means they would have cancelled each other out and we would see nothing. Now I know this is wild speculation, but I wonder if asymmetric space were able to "hide" time reversal in some fashion. In any case, I am sure the true explanation will be fascinating.

 

[xeno2060]

Originally posted by: xeno2060

Originally posted by: mchammer187
holo-deck i hope 🙂

just holograms + AI + a force field

jessica alba, tara reid, willa ford at one time 😀

i dont think warp can be real but anything is possible i guess

edit: anyways back to the post
1. Molecular transport probably no
2. Warp probably not
3. Force field yes
4. Phaser yes (isn't this just like a laser?)
5. Anti-matter like energy generation maybe but Cold Fusion i see is a definate possibility within the next century or two

Cold Fusion will be a reallity in decades not centuries. Anti-Matter does exist and can be captured in small quantities but, the power needed to make it in an Accelerator(particle) is so great right now that it is not practical
to consider as a viable power source. Current theories suggest that a particle called a Graviton exists which could bridge the wave particle and missings mass problem (i.e. Dark Matter) so with a clean unlimited power supply most of those technologies could exist within a century or so. 😉

Understanding Inner Space is the key to Outer space, the more we know about what the universe is made of is the key