How Today's Technology Is Rapidly Catching Up to Star Trek

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.

I’m assuming your comment was sarcasm. “Obamacare” can’t even build a working website to sign people up even with the investment of half a billion U.S. tax payers dollars.

I never said ObamaCare was funding the development of the technology, or that it even cares one way or the other about the technology.

I only said ObamaCare is accelerating the development of the technology.

There's a big difference.

Personalized medicine.

Do a Google search on the words "companion diagnostics."

The relatively many times faster than the speed of light travel, however, is still a pipe dream.
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Agree. Similarly string theory is either the mathematicians and physicists gone mad or leap to 23rd century technology.

We don’t know. If the former we’re on the slow boat to the nearest star. If the latter then stuff like worm hole travel becomes more possible and we’re on the fast boat to the nearest star.

I have no clue how any of this will turn out. But its fun to speculate.

The relatively many times faster than the speed of light travel, however, is still a pipe dream.

Personally, I suspect that if the speed of light can be breached at all, (I think it's possible, Einstein notwithstanding), then travelling at ludicrous speed is not out of the realm of possibility.

Your point on the distances involved is well taken though. I'll take this opportunity to pimp the Coolest Program Ever. It's called Celestia and is essentially a universe simulator. It allows you to 'travel' to just about anywhere in the galaxy, and to other galaxies as well, (though other galaxies don't have the detail built in that ours does). Spend a little time flying around the solar system at just the speed of light, and you get a feel for how big the solar system really is. Yeah, it only takes about 8 minutes or so to get to Mercury, but you're looking at a lot longer travel times to Jupiter and Saturn. Once you've played with that for a while, increase speed to 30 AU/sec. At that speed, you're crossing the solar system in 1 second. It still takes days to get to alpha centuri. Want to go further? Be sure to pack a lunch.

Another really cool feature is to go to a star like Betelgeuse, That star is so freaking huge that if you dropped it in place of the Sun in our solar system, the earth would be under the star's surface.

Lots of cool stuff in Celestia, and once you've run out of the natural wonders of the universe to look through, you'll want to go to the Celestia Motherload where you can get additional data that will add more detail to planets, more stars, and other similar things. The real cool stuff is the spacecraft though. You can download models of just about every major nasa mission. I especially like the Voyager pack. Then, you can download fictional spacecraft. Want to see the USS Enterprise up close? They have it, in detail that you wouldn't believe. I think the Starbase around the earth is the most impressive craft, but you can also get stuff like the Babylon 5 space station.

Celestia is available for free download for Linux, OSX, and Windows at the first link above.

If you have kids with any interest in space at all, this is a must have program IMO.

As a follow up to my last post, here's some distances at Light Speed for objects around the Solar System:

All are calculated from the Earth at 01:18 CDT on 7/2/14

Mars: 5m 30.7s

Venus: 11m 39.2s

Mars: 8m 19s

Jupiter 51m 47.4s

Saturn: 1h 17m 14.2s

Uranus: 2h 47m 6.9s

Neptune: 4h 4m 32.4s

Pluto: 4h 23m 50.2s

Voyager 1: 15h 26m 10.9s

Voyager 2: 14h 28m 31.6s

The distance between Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 is 18h 48m 59.5s

I love celestia. Can you tell?

I think that the translator that can handle previously unknown languages is “possible”, maybe even with todays technology and a big investment. Think of what the NSA does in cryptography, breaking codes. You are basically translating an unknown language, but just finding the “words” not the meaning.

In the small portion of one episode I watched of “Deep Space 9” one of the crew kept trying to keep a female alien speaking. The more she spoke the more the computer could learn her language and add it to the translator.

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