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minutiae (pronounced mĭ-no͞oˈshē-ə) — the small, precise, or trivial details of something.

‘Star Trek’ is the greatest sci-fi franchise of all. Why it’s stood the test of time

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Of all the science fiction franchises in the known universe, the one I would take to a desert island — or planet, I guess — is “Star Trek.”

I am not a Trekkie by any means (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I have never dressed as a Vulcan. I can’t speak a word of Klingon or identify the starships by their silhouettes or tell you how many tribbles it takes to make trouble. But a lot of general knowledge has seeped into my brain over the years: “Beam me up, Scotty.” “Fascinating.” “He’s dead, Jim.” “I’m a doctor, not a [insert any other profession].” “Make it so.” “Engage.” I’m au fait with all those catchphrases. I’ve watched every series, if not in their entirety, and all of the movies . (I do not count the J.J. Abrams big screen reboots, which operate on another timeline, though I’ve seen those too.) And I have greeted each new iteration with interest and a certain “Hello, old friend, what are you up to now?” affection.

This year marks the centenary of creator Gene Roddenberry’s birth and 55 years since the premiere of what is now officially referred to as “The Original Series” or “TOS,” and there are various home video remasterings and reboxings available. Thursday sees the premiere of the excellent “Star Trek: Prodigy,” streaming on Paramount+, where the franchise is star-based. This new CGI series is about a bunch of misfit teenagers escaping a slave-labor camp in a stolen Federation starship, on the run from a very bad guy — but kind of joyriding too. (It’s being advertised as the first “Trek” series aimed at young audiences, somehow forgetting or reclassifying the early 1970s “Star Trek: The Animated Series,” which featured William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley in their original roles as Kirk, Spock and McCoy, aired Saturday mornings, and won a Daytime Emmy as a “children’s series” in 1975.) None of the characters is human or in some cases even humanoid, apart from the hologram of Capt. Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), employed here as a kind of interactive help-bot. It is quite lively in terms of action, and funny where it’s supposed to be, but as in all “Star Trek” series and films, character is what counts most.

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From the name forward, the franchise bears comparison with “Star Wars,” with its spaceships and aliens and interplanetary scope, not to mention the range of storytelling platforms — movies and TV, cartoons and comics, novels and fan fiction.

I wouldn’t deny that there’s fun to be had from George Lucas’ baby, now bouncing for Disney, but “Star Wars” is not science fiction. It’s a fantasy set in space, where wizards do magic and heroes fight with swords and prophesied chosen ones take up their lightsabers; a special effects western cum samurai film cum collection of war movies in which, a few defections notwithstanding, good fights bad until one obliterates the other; and an expensive homage to the cheap Saturday serials of the 1930s. Its one endlessly repeated theme is bad parenting — or, in the case of “The Mandalorian,” the first “Star Wars” live-action television series, good (surrogate) parenting . But “Star Wars” on the whole has no real interest in ideas, in asking “Why?” or “What if?” The droids are comic relief, and slaves. Joseph Campbell’s the Hero with a Thousand Faces has often been cited, by Lucas and others, to connect these characters to a deeper storytelling tradition; the problem with a thousand-faced hero, however, is that you have seen that shtick a thousand times.

“Star Trek” is a different animal. From the beginning it had a mission, not just to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no earthlings had gone before, but to model a future for its audience that was a little ahead of its time. Where “Star Wars” was slow off the mark with diversity — the only Black actor in “A New Hope,” James Earl Jones, supplied the voice of a white character, and even now has only managed one same-sex kiss between minor characters — “Star Trek” made diversity a point from the beginning, with George Takei’s Sulu and Nichelle Nichols ’ Uhura on the bridge. (Whether the 1968 kiss between Kirk and Uhura was the first interracial kiss on television is a subject of debate and semantics, but it was in any case ahead of its time.) The third series, “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” put a Black man (Avery Brooks’ Sisko) in charge; the next, “Star Trek: Voyager,” a woman (Mulgrew’s Janeway). Throughout the various series, and in the sci-fi tradition, contemporary earthly issues — racism, Cold War politics, environmental degradation, despotism, sexism — are seen through the lens of future, extraterrestrial exploits. The presence of aliens (also ethnically diverse), on the crew or just passing through, offered writers a chance to comment with distance on the puzzlements of human behavior.

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That “Star Trek,” which originally ran from from 1966 to 1969, returned to television in the first place — there was a nearly 20-year break before “Star Trek: The Next Generation” — owes something to “Star Wars,” of course, which made space operas eminently bankable. But it had plenty of firepower of its own, charged by the the post-cancellation success of the original series, which flourished in syndication. A 1975 “Star Trek” convention in New York City, two years before “Star Wars” premiered, reportedly drew a crowd of 15,000 and turned thousands more away at the door; by 1986, the year before “The Next Generation” premiered, it was the most successful syndicated series going. A big-screen franchise, eventually numbering six films with the original crew, was up and running by 1979, followed by four “Next Generation” films — the first of which paired Shatner’s Kirk and Patrick Stewart’s Picard in a timeless corner of space.

To be sure, the revival of the brand may also be seen as a bottom-line event, designed to bring subscribers to what was then known as CBS All Access and is now called Paramount+, much as “The Mandalorian” was a boon to Disney+.

But it has produced excellent results. I’m a fan of all these shows: “Star Trek: Discovery,” especially in its adventuresome second and third seasons, with a fourth season premiering Nov. 18; the deep and thoughtful “Star Trek: Picard,” with Stewart back in the saddle (though going rogue); “Star Trek: Lower Decks,” an adult cartoon about service workers on a “second contact” vessel, that both parodies and celebrates the spirit and story conventions of the live-action shows while adding quotidian context and details. (We see how the ordinary crew lives; I can’t tell if it’s canonical, but it should be.) And there are more “Treks” arriving: the aforementioned “Prodigy”; “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” a spinoff at once from the second season of “Discovery” and the original “Star Trek” pilot, with Ethan Peck as a well-cast young Spock, Anson Mount as Capt. Christopher Pike and Rebecca Romijn as his Number One; and when one of the current series departs and other stars align, “Star Trek: Section 31,” another “Discovery” spinoff, with Michelle Yeoh reprising her role as Philippa Georgiou.

Because it was born and grew up on television, in an age when special effects were a luxury and not a given, the franchise has been devoted less to action than talk, and to philosophical questions — what it means to be human, or Vulcan, or Klingon, an android or noncorporeal. The fact that there are many, many, many hours of “Star Trek” content — which are, to some extent, preserved in the new series, with their intersecting plotlines — means that “Star Trek” has had the space to tell many sorts of stories: mystery stories, love stories (and impossible-love stories), funny stories, family stories, spy stories, horror stories, workplace stories. Much of the charm in the original series derives from the double act Shatner and Nimoy developed, based in a kind of affectionate mutual incompatibility, and subsequent “Treks” developed bonds between characters it is easy to invest in, and which in some cases (as with Capt. Picard and Data) became their very foundation.

It’s an emotional show, and not infrequently a show about having emotions — giving in to them, repressing them, making use of them. On the one hand you’ve got Spock, and all the Vulcans who came after, pumping for logic; on the other, there’s Data the android, a logical being who dearly wants to know what it is to be human, like his friends. It’s significant that the second series, “The Next Generation,” added a therapist to the crew — Marina Sirtis’ Deanna Troi — and eventually a bartender (Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan), which is to say, another sort of therapist.

The original series could be incredibly silly, unwittingly (and sometimes wittingly) self-parodying. The lack of money, one might say, was on the screen. One could practically smell the gray paint and plywood on the Enterprise sets. The series’ celebrated technobabble is just a kind of reformulated abracadabra; human characters get the hang of alien gear faster than you could look up how to reset your car’s clock in the owner’s manual. Everything happens in the nick of time. Kirk’s occasional romantic interludes might have seemed kind of hilarious even at the time, but certainly are risible now; and although there were strong roles written for women from the beginning, they were often stuck in some sort of minidress.

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And despite their hopeful tenor, these shows’ creation was not always peaceable. Roddenberry, whose involvement was lesser and greater over the years for reasons of health or business, could be critical of “Trek” made under others’ watch if he felt they weren’t staying true to his big themes. (Wikipedia will give you a pretty good idea of the rough roads some series and films have taken on the way to launch, and after.) But taken as a whole over time, “Star Trek” has remained remarkably true to a vision: Peace is better than war; violence is dramatically less interesting than discussion; difference is not merely respected but portrayed as a positive good.

There is the convention of the disposable crewman (“redshirts,” referring to the color of their uniform, has become a generic term for an anonymous character who dies early in a scene to indicate danger), but death even of the nameless is not usually paid back with death; revenge, while it is a motivating factor for characters in many stories, is regarded in the “Trek” universe as a dish best not served at all.

Mighty heroes mowing down hordes of literally faceless enemies, crowds cheering military victories — that is not the “Star Trek” style. There is relief when a foe is sent packing, but rarely glee. Phasers are usually set to stun. Spock’s Vulcan nerve pinch can send an opponent to the floor, but the Vulcan death grip (“The Enterprise Incident,” Season 3) is a fiction, a subterfuge. Current custom and affordable, high-quality modern SFX technology does mean that there is more space battling in the new “Treks” and more martial arts-style fighting (you are not going to leave Yeoh sitting in a chair, after all), but diplomacy remains the goal, and it is only when that fails that big things are blown up. “Get us out of here” is a thing Capt. Kirk would regularly say.

“Star Trek” envisions an Earth in which, as in John Lennon’s “Imagine,” the old dividing lines — ethnic, political, religious — have all disappeared; there is no war, no poverty, no pollution, and technology finally works for us rather than against us. Though these things seemed possible in the progressive era when “Star Trek” was born, I’ve grown increasingly doubtful about humanity’s ability to intelligently regulate its most local affairs, let alone join with alien species in a project of interplanetary goodwill.

Which may be why I love the “Star Trek” universe, and why I melt when, at the end of the third season of “Discovery” — a season very much about coming to terms with one’s nature and needs, limits and abilities — Sonequa Martin-Green’s (newly promoted) Capt. Burnham says, “The need to connect is at our core as sentient beings. It takes time effort and understanding … but if we work at it a miracle can happen.”

And who knows? The future is a long road.

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From the Smithsonian Museums

SMITHSONIAN BOOKS

The Influence of Star Trek and Science Fiction on Real Science

For Star Trek Day, learn about the relationship between sci-fi and real-life science in this excerpt from “Reality Ahead of Schedule”

As with several other iconic Star Trek technologies, replicators are directly responsible for inspiring developments in real-life technology, which use 3-D printing to create food, meals, plastic and metal items, buildings, and even complex machine parts. Star Trek is far from being the only sci-fi source of inspiration for the dream of a device that can produce finished items from scratch.

Reality Ahead of Schedule: How Science Fiction Inspires Science Fact

A rich visual history of science fiction's impact on real-world technologies, this book is perfect for lovers of H. G. Wells, Star Trek, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, Aldous Huxley, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

To trace the roots of Star Trek ’s replicator, it is necessary to understand that it is essentially a repurposed form of the transporter—the teleportation or matter transmission device that “beams” the crew between starship and planet surface. According to legend, the transporter was invented only because the original series lacked the budget to film special, effect-heavy scenes of planetary landing shuttles, but Star Trek did not invent the concept of matter transmission. Its first appearance in science fiction dates back at least as far as 1877, in Edward Page Mitchell’s story “The Man Without a Body,” which prefigures George Langelaan’s much better-known 1957 story “The Fly,” by having a scientist experience a teleportation mishap when his batteries die while he is only partway through a transmission, so that only his head rematerializes. The replicator uses the same basic principle as the transporter, in which the atomic structure of a physical object is scanned and the information is used to reconstruct the object at the “receiving” end through energy-matter conversion. In practice, all transporters are replicators and matter “transmission” is a misnomer, because matter itself is not transmitted, only information. Every time Captain Kirk steps out of the transporter having “beamed up” from a planet’s surface, it is, in fact, a copy of him—the original has been disintegrated during the initial phase of the operation.

In the world of the TV series, the replicators of Picard’s Enterprise are a development of food synthesizers— simpler machines present on James Kirk’s Enterprise in the original Star Trek series (known as The Original Series , or TOS). These closely resemble the later replicators but were conceived by the writers of TOS more as highly advanced, mechanical food preparation devices instead of matter-energy converters. They, therefore, represented a televisual outing for a concept long popular in science fiction: the automatic food preparation device. A machine that performs complex autonomous physical tasks can reasonably be described as a robot, and, as early as 1899, Elizabeth Bellamy’s novel Ely’s Automatic Housemaid features a robot cook, which might be seen as a precursor to later food synthesizers. Unspecified “mechanical apparatus” was at work in the automated cafeterias of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars. In his 1912 A Princess of Mars , Burroughs, probably inspired by the automat (a kind of vending machine café imported from Germany to the United States in 1902), describes “gorgeous eating places where we were served entirely by mechanical apparatus. No hand touched the food from the time it entered the building in its raw state until it emerged hot and delicious upon the tables before the guests, in response to the touching of tiny buttons to indicate their desires.”

Moving from Burroughs’s mechanical cafeterias to a Star Trek -style food synthesizer was simply a matter of miniaturization, and, by 1933, David H. Keller was imagining “a small but complete production laboratory, not much larger than [an] electric refrigerator … entirely automatic and practically foolproof.” In his story “Unto Us A Child Is Born,” Keller envisages a machine that can both create food and prepare it “for the table in any form desired by the consumer. All that was necessary was the selection of one of the twenty-five menus and the pressing of the proper buttons.” Only recently has this dream of a kitchen appliance-scale food synthesizer neared reality, with the launch of the Genie food replicator, explicitly inspired by Star Trek ’s replicator. The Genie, a device not much larger than a microwave with futuristic styling, claims to be “a kitchen in a box” that can make nutritious, freshly cooked meals in 30 seconds. However, it should be noted that the device relies on pods that contain dehydrated ingredients; in other words, the food preparation labor has simply been moved upstream in the process, and the Genie might be little more than a device for adding hot water to a cup of dried noodles.

So what is meant by today’s technology boosters when they talk excitedly about Star Trek -inspired, real-life replicators? The technology to which they refer is the 3-D printer, a device that lays down some form of plastic (in the sense of malleable) medium in layers to build up a three-dimensional form. Such printers are heralded as the drivers of a second Industrial Revolution, in which manufacturing is distributed and universal, available to all through desktop 3-D printing machines. These devices are already available, usually restricted to fabrication using quick-setting plastics or resins, but larger and more specialized machines can print in media varying from living cells and foodstuffs to metal to mud or concrete. Large-scale concrete printers, for example, are suggested as a solution to housing crises, such as those found in refugee camps, where rapidly assembled, cheaply erected structures are needed. Meanwhile, biological implants and replacement tissues can be printed by laying down layers of cells on organic scaffolding, and, in the near future, it may be possible to print entire organs for transplant.

Although the 3-D printing community often plays up the lineage of inspiration from Star Trek ’s replicators to desktop fabricators, in practice, the former has a completely different mechanism. The true conceptual forefather of the 3-D printer is a 1964 story by Italian writer Primo Levi, “L’ordine a buon mercata” (“Order on the Cheap”). A mysterious multinational enterprise of dubious intentions makes available a device called the Mimer duplicator, which can create exact replicas of anything from money and diamonds to food and humans. It works by extruding “extremely thin superimposed layers” of a multielement substance named “pabulum.” This is a concise and extremely accurate description of how a modern-day 3-D printer works.

Star Trek featured gadgetry and devices that have since become iconic, and that have been directly responsible for inspiring the gadgetry and devices that have come to dominate modern personal technology—including the smartphone and the tablet computer—and perhaps soon to include portable, personal medical devices. Science and technology sometimes progresses in mighty leaps, but more generally it advances incrementally, contingent on prior research.

Reality Ahead of Schedule:  How Science Fiction Inspires Science Fact  is available from Smithsonian Books. Visit  Smithsonian Books’ website  to learn more about its publications and a full list of titles. 

Excerpt from  Reality Ahead of Schedule  © 2019 by Carlton Books Limited

• Entertainment /

13 science fiction authors on how Star Trek influenced their lives

By Andrew Liptak

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Star Trek has had an enormous influence on the world of science fiction ever since it aired on NBC in 1966. Gene Roddenberry’s drama aboard a spaceship introduced millions of viewers to science fiction across the world, and inspired some viewers to become science fiction authors in their own right.

We asked a handful of authors how they came to discover Star Trek , and how the show inspired them. Here is what they told us:

Allen M. Steele, author of Coyote and Arkwright :

I was eight years old when Star Trek came on the air, so I was in on it from the beginning... but in a strange sort of way. The NBC affiliate in my hometown, Nashville TN, didn't show the first season; it was pre-empted in that Friday 9PM time slot by a locally produced country music program. No one knows the the reason why — NBC had been showing preview trailers for Star Trek all summer long, so kids like me were looking forward to it — although it's been rumored that WSM-TV didn't want to air a show that featured a black woman in a starring role.

I caught up with Star Trek the following Christmas when my sister Genevieve gave me the first Star Trek novel written by James Blish. However, because I had nothing to go on except for the James Bama cover illustration, the trailer, and a small handful of cast photos in TV Guide , my mental images of the Enterprise and its crew were almost entirely from my own imagination. For me, Star Trek began as a literary experience, not as something I saw on TV.

Therefore, on my mental screen, Kirk was much older; Spock was bald and very, very green; McCoy looked like my pediatrician (who had a strong resemblance to Leo G. Carroll); and the interior of the Enterprise looked much like the Jupiter II from Lost in Space . It wasn't until the following year that WSM finally dumped the Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton Show and began showing ST in the middle of its second season, and that's when I got to see what all these people and places really looked like.

Stanley Love, retired Astronaut, STS-122

I grew up watching Star Trek reruns. When I was twelve years old, my favorite sweater was a blue one with Mr. Spock's science-section badge sewn on it. At that age, I couldn't have articulated why I liked the show so much. Now I can. Where else could you watch a diverse crew working together in harmony? Where else could you watch people using science and technology to defeat villains and overcome terrible obstacles? Where else could you watch hot girls in skimpy outfits? Okay, maybe there were other opportunities for that last one, but Star Trek did sort of offer one-stop shopping in that regard.

Star Trek was one of the things that guided me into a career in space exploration: a doctorate in Astronomy, research in planetary science, work in aerospace engineering, and eventually a billet on a Space Shuttle mission. Even after years of working in space exploration and following science fiction, Star Trek still stands out as an example for both. Listen. We must all go to the future, or perish along the way. There are no other options. Star Trek , unlike much contemporary science fiction, shows us a future worth dreaming about — and a future worth working hard to make real.

Peter Tieryas, VFX artist and author of United States of Japan:

What I loved about Star Trek was that its focus wasn't so much on science fiction as it was about humanity and deeper social issues. The best episodes bring a whole new perspective on modern problems and form an ideal which we can aspire to, whether it's the historical and moral quandaries of The Next Generation , to how religion and war push the boundaries of the Federation in Deep Space 9 .

Whenever I write, I think about the way my favorite episodes influenced me

That's in a sense what makes so many episodes timeless with messages that still resonate all the way back to TOS. Whenever I write, I think about the way my favorite episodes influenced me and try to re-create that thematic link in my stories so that it's more than just some cool sci-fi idea (or in my case, mechas fighting). One episode that has always stuck out for me was "Tapestry" from TNG . Q gives Picard a chance to change one of the big regrets in his life and he does, only to find that his earlier recklessness and boldness was what gave his life later meaning. This is one of those episodes I think a lot about whenever I'm faced with an important decision.

Mistakes are okay (even if it means losing your heart and getting it replaced with an artificial one like Picard), and accepting the parts of ourselves that we might not like as much later actually forms the "tapestry" of our lives.

Madeline Ashby author of vN , iD, and Company Town :

Growing up, Star Trek was a silly show that my dad liked, and occasionally we would watch it together. I remember sitting on the threadbare couch in the duplex my parents rented, the one with the green shag carpet that looked like Scotty had beamed it right from an M-class planet and onto our floors, and watching syndicated episodes with Dad. Dad recorded them on a Betamax, pausing during commercials and editing in-deck to create almost-seamless commercial-free episodes. Dad was convinced that "City on the Edge of Forever" was the best episode ever made. He kept it on a 4-hour Betamax tape with "The Cage." (For my money, "The Menagerie" is more interesting; Trek has always been best when it's about policy, and the implications of policy.)

Later the show was there for me during university, during lazy noons between classes, on late mornings with a lover who everyone agreed was more of a Spock than a Kirk. By then my friends and I were already doing nostalgic marathons of TNG : after 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, we fantasized about our leaders being Picards. It's why we voted in Obama — Obama, our first nerd president, is a Picard. I married the Spock.

Now I'm married again, to a man who is more Kirk than Spock. He's in the other room, home sick from work and watching TOS reruns as we speak. Perhaps I'm biased by current experience, but I've come to see Kirk in a new light. Kirk is just a guy who craves the validation of command, and loves his crew more than he loves the Federation. His primary goal is making sure everyone gets home okay. Like we the audience, he's happiest when the bridge crew is together, functioning well, playing their parts, doing their bit. He's as comforted and soothed by the episodic nature of his life as we are by the formula of each episode. Much has been written about the revolutionary nature of Trek , about its hopeful depiction of an inclusive future, of its predictive accuracy when showcasing the communicator and tricorder. Now, as automation ramps up and more people are out of work (or alienated from what labour they do have), I think what Trek does best is show us a future without money wherein people can and do love their jobs, challenge themselves, and think through the ramifications of their decisions. That attitude in itself is world-changing.

Geetanjali Dighe, author of Living with Trees and The Last Dying Man :

I was 10, it was the 80's. Television was new, probably a few years old in my small home town of Nagpur, in India. The Indian Government's public broadcasting arm, DoorDarshan (literally "Far Visions," shortened to DD), showed programs for a few hours a day.

On Sundays we'd wait for a foreign show called "Star Trek." About ten to twelve children of all ages would gather around the TV, sit cross-legged on the floor, and watch as a magical voiceover began. The music of opening credits mesmerized us. This show was unlike anything we had ever seen. The people in the show went places we had never imagined. None of us understood all of the English words, and subtitles wasn't a thing then. But oh there was a spaceship and there were stars!

I didn't know then that the show was a re-run. For me it was real; it was what some people did. People could go on voyages in the star-filled sky. It was a fact. I thought, this is what they did in America. In America you could go to the stars. By America I, like many others, meant all of the English speaking world. England was 'America' when I was 10.

Years later, I read hard science fiction. Years later I wore trousers because I wanted to, even if I was the first girl to do so in my colony. Years later I went on a voyage to another country, as a single woman lugging a single bag. Year later I applied for Clarion West Writers Workshop and got in on the Octavia Butler Scholarship.

I am no longer ten, and the world is not how I imagined it to be; we still have miles to go.

But it has been a blessed voyage and I still believe in the dream of Star Trek.

Eugene Myers, author of Fair Coin and Silence of Six:

Star Trek accounts for my first professional rejections; when I was in junior high, I wrote spec scripts for Star Trek: DS9 and Star Trek: Voyager (on a typewriter!) and submitted them to Paramount, which was still considering unsolicited manuscripts at the time. They didn't take them, so I guess that also makes the stories my first real attempts at fan fiction... I also submitted a story to one of the early Strange New Worlds fanfic anthologies, well before I tried writing and publishing my own original fiction. Later, Star Trek clearly influenced and perhaps inspired my first novel, Fair Coin , particularly the alternate universe episodes "Mirror, Mirror" ( TOS ) and "Parallels" ( TNG ).

I realized that the best science fiction can be entertaining as well as profound

In my freshman year of college I joined a discussion group about the "moral and philosophical issues in Star Trek ," which later expanded to reflect all science fiction. That was probably the first time I looked at the shows critically and recognized how often they commented on human nature and problems in society, as the Twilight Zone had — and realized that the best science fiction can be entertaining as well as profound. Even with all the SF literature I read growing up, Twilight Zone and Star Trek most shaped my interests in SF and the kinds of stories I want to tell.

Elizabeth Bonesteel, author of The Cold Between :

I was raised with The Original Series , and went to my first Star Trek convention when I was 11 (my dad bought me a tribble). It’s probably hard to overstate how much Star Trek has influenced my view of science fiction, and what I tend to create myself. Star Trek , even in its darkest moments, tells a story of hope, and even peace — that we may yet manage to let go of the constraints and prejudices that hold us back, and not only survive in the future, but thrive.

For me, the message of Star Trek has always been that each of us makes the choice — to do good, or not; to move forward, or not; to help, or not — and that our individual choice matters. We are all connected, and you don’t have to be The Chosen One to work toward a positive future. I think that’s definitely a theme in the kinds of stories I like to tell: that you don’t have to have super powers to make a difference. You just have to have courage at the right time.

Nerine Dorman, author of Khepera Rising and Khepera Redeemed :

Star Trek was my introduction to SF as a genre, and it was on telly in South Africa during the 1980s at a time when South African broadcasting was... well, not that exciting. I do recall watching it with my parents, and the series most certainly inspired us kids to be fearless explorers when we played our make-believe games. Because I was a girl, I could never be the captain, of course, but we still had loads of fun. Years later, TNG aired, and Patrick Stewart will always make my heart beat a little faster. I was able to see First Contact on the big screen, and the Borg scared me witless; on a subconscious level there was a message there too, that has taken me years to digest.

This is the future we'd like to see, where humanity is able to grow into its role as noble protectors of the galaxy

I think what I love best about Star Trek is the idealism about our future in space that is encapsulated in the setting. This is the future we'd like to see, where humanity is able to grow into its role as noble protectors of the galaxy. Star Trek is aspirational. It reminds me to look up at the stars from time to time, and dream of something more, something bigger than what we currently are — mired in petty squabbles about outdated Bronze Age godlings that cause us to tear ourselves to pieces. As a storyteller I understand that I might not be able to make those destiny-changing decisions for my species, but I can weave the tales that might inspire future decision-makers to reach for the stars instead of grubbing in mud and blood.

Susan Jane Bigelow, author of Broken and Sky Ranger :

Star Trek was one of my foundational science fiction experiences. I watched Star Trek reruns and new episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation every week with my sister in the basement of our house. I went to conventions, bought pins, wrote weird fanfic, and dreamed and dreamed and dreamed.

If I had to pick a few things, I would say that Star Trek captured the essence of a grand venture into a dangerous, limitless unknown more than any other science fiction I've ever encountered. A lot of my love of science fiction and humanity's own real-life space programs sprang from that sense of wonder Star Trek kindled in me. I also have a real love of stories set on spaceships, especially ones that are all about interaction and drama between members of the crew.

But mostly I think Star Trek gave me a love of storytelling. One of the first things I ever wrote and shared was a Trek parody called "Star Trek Sells Out," which I wrote on our Apple IIgs. The only thing I remember from it is Captain Picard saying "fire at will!" and everyone shooting at Will Riker. My jokes have improved, but that's really where it all started.

David Brin, author of Existence and Startide Rising :

Five decades ago, I was at the perfect age. Almost sixteen, pumped with eagerness for science and fiction and outer space and dreams of escaping the dreary prisons of home and high school. And suddenly on the dreary wasteland of TV, in vivid color, appeared something completely unlike anything we ever saw before. Star Trek.

But Star Trek was something else, something new. It lifted, surprised, challenged and offered hope. Amid the ructions of that awful decade – from Vietnam to civil rights to riots and assassinations – here was the notion that hope was conceivable. That (shoo-be-do) things were going to be all right.

In any event, the ship -- Star Trek’s Enterprise -- stands for something, every time we look at it. This traveling city is civilization. The Federation’s culture and laws, industry and consensus values -- like the Prime Directive -- are all carried in this condensed vessel, along with the dramatic diversity of its crew. Every single time there is an adventure, the civilization of the United Federation of Planets is put to the test, through its proxy, the hero-ship.

At times, this lets the show poke at mistakes, ways that some error or flaw or even crime is being done, in civilization’s name! And generally, it is shown best healed by light. Only, when the Enterprise (or Voyager or DS9 ) passes each test, often with flying colors, so too, by implication, does civilization itself.

A civilization that might – perhaps -- even be worthy of our grandchildren.

(Excerpted from To Boldly Go... Star Trek at Fifty )

F. Brett Cox, Professor of English, editor of Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic:

The original Star Trek first aired when I was in grade school. It was, for all intents and purposes, my first exposure to science fiction. It’s hard to overstate the show’s impact. Here was far-future space exploration presented, not as a series of brute encounters with monsters, but as a (more or less) plausible and coherent scenario.

Here was the remarkable notion that what was new and different could be understood

Here was the remarkable notion that what was new and different could be understood. Here was the basic apparatus of science fiction — first contact, time travel, interstellar travel, computer tech — presented as a given. Here was a multiethnic workplace, also presented as a given. (I would be surprised if the current generation were not sick and tired of hearing people my age go on about this aspect of the show, but it was true, and it mattered even more than you can imagine.) Here were, as needed, exciting race-against-time crises. Here was Spock. Spock! Mad love to Spock.

Did it influence my own work? Maybe not so much — although I think the first science fiction story I ever tried to write contained a reference to warp drive. Did it influence me? You bet. To this day, I cannot regard Star Trek in any of its incarnations with anything other than affection and gratitude.

Becky Chambers, author of A Long Way to A Small, Angry Planet

Some of my earliest memories are of Star Trek . I have fuzzy recollections of sitting on the couch between my parents as Jerry Goldsmith's majestic fanfare blasted out of our clunky '80s TV, eating rocky road out of the tub, too little to understand that what I was watching wasn't real. The Reading Rainbow episode "The Bionic Bunny Show" -- in which LeVar Burton goes behind-the-scenes on the TNG set -- blew my mind wide open. That was how I grasped that TV was something people made , that you could build spaceships and phasers and alien masks. That was the first domino that started me down the path toward writing sci-fi. And as I grew up, Star Trek was ever-present. I was two when "Encounter at Farpoint" aired. I was sixteen when "Endgame" aired. That's new Star Trek episodes every year, regular as clockwork, from the start of childhood to adolescence. I watched them religiously. If that's not formative, I don't know what is.

Star Trek has continued to shape my life since then -- I met my wife in 2004 in a Trek -themed play-by-post RPG -- and it is hands-down the biggest creative influence on my writing. I cherish Star Trek 's hopeful vision of the future, and that's a quality I aim for in my own work (albeit on a much smaller scale and different stage). I very consciously thought about Star Trek when working on my first novel -- the things I loved, the things I didn't, the ideas I wanted to riff on and take elsewhere. My imagining of the future is more scuffed and humble than Roddenberry's post-scarcity utopia, but it is born out of that idea, no question. I wouldn't be writing optimistic space opera if I hadn't been brought up with my head full of said same.

William Ledbetter, author of In A Wide Sky, Hidden , and The Long Fall Up :

I'm really old, so I remember seeing first runs of Star Trek (along with other '60s science fiction programs like Lost in Space , Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea , Johnny Quest, etc.) on network TV when I was a kid. Between programs like Star Trek and watching the actual moon landings on TV, I grew up with the idea of space travel permanently embedded in my head.

Of course I wanted to be an astronaut, but as I grew older, I realized that was going to be very hard to do, especially when the military told me I could never be a fighter pilot (that was about the only route open to being an astronaut then) since I didn't have perfect vision. So I downgraded my ambition slightly, but have still worked in the aerospace industry for the past 35 years. I've helped design rocket programs, aircraft engines, missiles, and even the radiator system for the International Space Station.

I doubt that would have happened had I not been introduced to space and the "final frontier" so early in my life. On top of Star Trek helping to launch my day job career, it helped feed my desire to write science fiction, with a focus on space travel, as well.

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Published Sep 12, 2023

How Voyager, Janeway, and Star Trek Pushed Science Fiction into Bold New Directions

A case study exploring the changes in storytelling and the impact of the presence of women leadership in Star Trek.

StarTrek.com

Before earning her Ph.D, Dr. Leigh McKagen pondered what her research would look like. A Virginia Tech graduate twice over (in 2006 and 2009), Dr. McKagen was teaching at her alma mater and was mentally working herself into the right state of mind to go for the doctorate. Her problem was settling a subject for her dissertation from the world of culture, politics, history, and ethics.

One evening, after putting their daughter to bed, Dr. McKagen’s husband invited her to watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with him. This was fortuitous, as she had been considering looking at American Science Fiction as a subject. Before she knew it, the long time science fiction fan had been sucked in by TNG, and soon Star Trek: Voyager , watching two and three shows a day — logging every single episode over a year and a half.

She found Picard to be an amazing leader, but it was Janeway who really piqued her interest. She dove headfirst into the world of the U.S.S. Voyager and its adventures in the Delta Quadrant, and how those stories reflected a style of storytelling that can trace its roots from Gulliver’s Travels to Gunsmoke . Even without knowing it, Janeway and her crew were a part of an imperial saga, told by the Spanish, French, English, and yes, Americans, to justify conquest.

In between teaching at Virginia Tech, raising her three-year-old, giving birth to a baby boy, and through the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. McKagen wrote her masterpiece, which looks at the cultural significance of Star Trek: Voyager , and how the show and its star, Kate Mulgrew, both pushed the boundaries of what had been done for women characters in the role as leader within the boundaries of the genre of American Science Fiction.

StarTrek.com: Tell us about your project.

Dr. Leigh McKagen: My dissertation is a case study, essentially, of Star Trek: Voyager , and the various ways that European Imperialism and imperial ideologies and practices are written into the narrative. This happens in a number of ways, including the reliance on castaway and adventure narratives that serve to establish the right of the explorer in the way of American settler colonialism.

I explore the way that Voyager taps into the creation of the domestic space-home against the wilds of the frontier of the Delta Quadrant, as one of the many traditions of American imperialism. That was fundamental in the creation of an American empire and an American nation.

Then I ended the project with an exploration of ways that Voyager offers some moments of exception to these imperial narratives. The way to think about how the genre, Star Trek in particular, and American Science Fiction television more broadly, could move beyond that.

The overarching purpose of moving beyond these narratives is the crisis known as the Anthropocene — the Climate Crisis of the 21st Century — that was in large part caused by Western imperialism and capitalism. I’m seeking a way to use this work as a way to not only diagnose the problem, but also see where change could come, or where change could happen within those dominant, and often unacknowledged narratives.

StarTrek.com: How did you become interested in using Star Trek for this huge project?

Dr. Leigh McKagen: It sort of happened almost by accident. In terms of general interest in the show, and then we’ll speak academically, they are sort of two separate things. I actually did not watch a lot of Star Trek growing up unlike a lot of academics who work with Star Trek . So I think I come at it sort of from the perspective from writing about it, which puts me in an interesting position. I was familiar with it, and I had seen a few episodes. I knew the pop-culture significance of the series, but I hadn’t really dug into Star Trek . I was very interested in popular culture as a teaching tool.

I started using a lot of science fiction and fantasy TV in my classes. I would show a Buffy the Vampire [ Slayer ] episode and we would talk about communication. I used those tools as a way to bridge the gap for my students between the academic stuff that they were reading and their real life.

So when I started thinking about a Ph.D. I sat down and talked with [the director of the academic program], and said ‘I want to write a dissertation on science fiction, on science fiction television. I want to explore how this genre engages with America and American culture.’ This particular genre of American television engages with the story that we tell ourselves about what it means to be American.

And then my husband, Branden, said 'Hey, let’s start watching Next Generation !' I said ‘sure.’ I had never really sat down and watched from start to finish. It sounded great.

It didn’t take long of watching it for me, not only to get hooked as a science fiction fan, and also as someone who was working with the genre from an academic standpoint. My original ideas for the dissertation actually involved talking about and tracking 20 years worth of American television.

But my committee said this was really a big project. They encouraged me to cut it down and to pick just one show to work with. It was hard enough to juggle the 172 Voyager episodes, not to mention the many others.

Through all of this, I still was not really sure exactly where I was going to engage with the genre, but I started reading more about imperialism and, in particular, ways that imperialism is still a very much present and ongoing formation and player in not only the global order but also in our daily lives in ways that we often don’t talk about or don’t acknowledge. America has always pushed against the label of being an empire, even though we absolutely always have been, from the early days of settler colonialism.

I was very interested in how that started playing out in these narratives that we tell about the present, as science fiction does, but also about the future, which Star Trek , in particular, really tries to engage with.

StarTrek.com: Why did you focus on Voyager , and not The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine ?

Dr. Leigh McKagen: In large part, it was a practical decision in picking Voyager , because a lot less people talk about Voyager , which made it seem more manageable for me and also perhaps, more interesting. Everyone wants to talk about The Next Generation because it’s amazing.

Voyager is often a footnote in somebody’s book. I’m reading these books about the myth of Star Trek and even ones that were written in the late '90s and early 2000s, there are only two pages on Voyager . I still really don’t know why people don’t talk about it, but I did, and it was fun.

One of my committee members kept pushing me on [saying], 'you’ve got to think about what was going on in the ‘90s and why Voyager was doing these things and tackling these issues.'

It is very important and interesting to look at the time period in which these shows were being made. I think that Deep Space Nine and Voyager really do reflect the deep uncertainty in the ‘90s, where we — the government and the popular narrative — was really trying to figure out what was going on. In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and in the wake of the Cold War and the rising Culture Wars, and I hit on this in a couple places… trying to figure out what was really going on. To some degree, those shows are a reflection of that.

StarTrek.com: What were some episodes of Star Trek that got away from the “imperialistic” narrative?

Dr. Leigh McKagen: The Next Generation episode that did this best was “ Inner Light .” It’s one of everybody’s favorites; it won a Hugo for very good reason and it’s a phenomenal episode because they lose. Because Picard just lives that life unable to save things; Picard as Kamin, he does not win and they do witness the natural destruction of the planet. Picard has to take that and live with those ideas.

There’s something to be said in studying and exploring those episodes, and Voyager plays with those in a couple of ways. Like “Memorial,” there’s definitely potential there. I think it’s important to note that and I think that is why I really wanted to keep that last chapter, but maybe that’s not the point right now. It’s important to engage in that, even though it’s a minor part or an afterthought of the project in some ways it might seem. But to note when something is going well or perhaps differently in completive ways and more could be done with that.

Entertainment Weekly's January 20, 1995 cover featuring Kate Mulgrew as Captain Janeway

Entertainment Weekly

StarTrek.com: Why is Janeway so important?

Dr. Leigh McKagen: There’s a cover of the January 1995 Entertainment Weekly that has Janeway in uniform, which was out right before the series aired as the flagship show of this new network (UPN). And the tag of the cover of the magazine says “boldly going where only men have gone before.” And I think that in a lot of ways, that was really important in the ‘90s. And it continued to be important to me, maybe as a female audience member, but certainly someone who was engaging with the show, even in my 30s, that this is such a male-dominated show up until the ‘90s.

While there’s a lot of Janeway that’s masculine, they at least wanted to engage with that, or straddle that kind of passionate captain in ways that not even Picard isn’t quite able to be.

For me, I think that makes Janeway a more interesting study than someone like Picard or Sisko, who was great, and even Archer. Trying to watch through all these series, all the captains were unique in their own way and they have their own battles to fight, which make each series unique. But Janeway was in the position as being the only woman captain, but being the only woman captain in exile. She can’t just go and get new crewmembers when something isn’t going her way.

She can’t just turn to the Federation for help — not that Picard and others could do that either, but sometimes there were problems with communications or what have you. So she’s very much the solo figure. [At the same time], she’s just such a strong character and always so decisive and really smart. There’s definitely a lot to admire about Janeway.

StarTrek.com: What does it mean now that Michael Burnham — an African American woman — is the face of the Star Trek franchise?

Dr. Leigh McKagen: It’s two fold — I think it’s amazing that we also had a second-in-command main character (Burnham), but we also had the captain (Georgiou). The captain and the second-in-command are both women and not white, and I think that those are great things.

I think that there’s some very interesting things happening with Star Trek: Discovery , and I look forward to sitting down and watching that series a lot more carefully, and engaging with it as perhaps a follow-up to the things that were happening in the earlier series. In particular, in Voyager , a woman-led show, going where no man has gone before.

StarTrek.com: What could Star Trek do to change the narrative in science fiction?

Dr. Leigh McKagen: That’s someplace that I definitely want to go with my research. The final chapter engages with some of the ways they could have done that. Then I think that if Western Science Fiction, and particularly American Science Fiction will have to move away from the classic “western” approach and shift to stories like AfroFuturism and other alternatives. That’s ultimately what I’d like to see.

Some of the ideas from Ursula K. Le Guin, who's such an amazing science fiction author, and the ideas of thinking about stories that don’t have to have a beginning, middle, and end. Where you don’t have to triumph over something or return home. What would have happened if the Voyager story ended like it did with " Course: Oblivion " did in that one episode. It would have been depressing, sure, but substantially more realistic in the long run.

In order to move beyond the “hero-journey,” which is very imperialistic, we must ditch the hero. If anybody could do it, then I think it could be Star Trek and that would have a whole lot of power.

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This article was originally published on August 18, 2020.

Eric Pesola (he/him) lives in Virginia with his wife, children, shitzhu, and cats named Archer and Hoshi. The dog is not named after a Trek character. He’s on Twitter as @epesola .

Star Trek: Discovery Seasons 1-4 are streaming exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., the UK, Canada, Switzerland, South Korea, Latin America, Germany, France, Italy, Australia and Austria. Seasons 2 and 3 also are available on the Pluto TV “Star Trek” channel in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. The series streams on Super Drama in Japan, TVNZ in New Zealand, and SkyShowtime in Spain, Portugal, Poland, The Nordics, The Netherlands, and Central and Eastern Europe and also airs on Cosmote TV in Greece. The series is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution.

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• Published: 07 September 2016

Science fiction: Boldly going for 50 years

• Sidney Perkowitz 1 , 2  

Nature volume  537 ,  pages 165–166 ( 2016 ) Cite this article

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Sidney Perkowitz scans the impacts of Star Trek on science, technology and society.

Half a century ago, in September 1966, the first episode of Star Trek aired on the US television network NBC. NASA was still three years short of landing people on the Moon, yet the innovative series was soon zipping viewers light years beyond the Solar System every week. After a few hiccups it gained cult status, along with the inimitable crew of the starship USS Enterprise , led by Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner). It went into syndication and spawned 6 television series up to 2005; there are now also 13 feature films, with Star Trek Beyond debuting in July this year.

Part of Star Trek's enduring magic is its winning mix of twenty-third-century technology and the recognizable diversity and complexity enshrined in the beings — human and otherwise — created by the show's originator Gene Roddenberry and his writers. As Roddenberry put it, “We stress humanity.” The series wore its ethics on its sleeve at a time when the Vietnam War was raging and anti-war protests were proliferating, along with racial tensions that culminated in major US urban riots in 1967–68. Roddenberry's United Federation of Planets, a kind of galactic United Nations, is an advanced society wielding advanced technology, and the non-militaristic aims of the Enterprise are intoned at the beginning of every episode in the original series (TOS): “To explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man [later, 'no one'] has gone before.”

Over the decades, Star Trek technologies have fired the imaginations of physicists, engineers and roboticists. Perhaps the most intriguing innovation is the warp drive, the propulsion system that surrounds the Enterprise with a bubble of distorted space-time and moves the craft faster than light to traverse light years in days or weeks. In 1994, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre showed that such a bubble is possible within Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, but would demand massive amounts of negative energy, also known as exotic matter ( M. Alcubierre Class. Quantum Grav. 11 , L73; 1994 ). This is not known to exist except (possibly) in minuscule quantities; and some physicists speculate that the Alcubierre drive might annihilate the destined star system. The warp drive remains imaginary — for now.

However, another application of warped space-time in the series has been realized: a cloaking device that shields spacecraft from view by bending light around them. In 2006, electrical engineers David Smith and David Schurig built a 'metamaterial' electromagnetic cloak that hid an object from microwaves by refracting them to pass around it, much as water flows around an obstacle (D. Schurig et al . Science 314 , 977–980; 2006). Now, similar diversionary tactics are being used to hide small objects under visible light, for instance by electrical engineer Xingjie Ni and his colleagues, who devised a “skin cloak” 80 nanometres thick to do the job (X. Ni et al . Science 349 , 1310–1314; 2015).

The exotic Enterprise transporter, which instantaneously dematerializes and teleports people and things (inspiring the catchphrase “Beam me up”), was supposedly conceived to save the costs of staging repeated spaceship landings. It has a real analogue in quantum teleportation. In 2015, for instance, quantum optics researcher Hiroki Takesue and his colleagues harnessed entanglement to send the properties of one photon to another over 100 kilometres of optical fibre ( H. Takesue et al . Optica 2 , 832–835; 2015 ). Above the atomic level, however, we're a long way from teleporting entire organisms or objects.

Other Star Trek technologies anticipated modern trends. The tricorder that TOS medic Leonard 'Bones' McCoy (DeForest Kelley) uses for diagnosis has spawned real devices, such as SCOUT from medical-technology company Scanadu in Moffett Field, California. Meanwhile, activity trackers already perform basic health monitoring, recording pulse rate, calorie intake and quality of sleep.

Artificial intelligence has begun to emerge in technologies such as speech recognition by Apple's personal-assistant program Siri, Google's self-driving car and the 'all-terrain' Atlas robot created for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. All are significant developments that could pave the way to an eventual approximation of Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner), the sentient android who debuted on television series The Next Generation in the late 1980s.

Star Trek's holodeck — the immersive virtual-reality environment in which the Enterprise crew visits simulated locales — is also years away, but huge advances in the technology are afoot. The Oculus Rift headset, for instance, provides a visual and auditory virtual-reality experience, but must be tethered to a computer, thus falling short of delivering the seamless holodeck experience.

Three-dimensional printers, which lay down successive layers of material to form intricate shapes, are now being adapted to handle food, perhaps a step towards Enterprise meal replicators. The Creative Machines Lab, then at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, designed one model as part of its open-access Fab@Home project, and Natural Machines in Barcelona, Spain, touts its Foodini printer as simplifying the making of textured or layered foods such as ravioli.

Many young would-be scientists have found the series inspirational.

More generally, and arguably with greater long-term significance, Star Trek raised enthusiasm for space exploration and science. In 1975, fans convinced NASA to name its first test space shuttle orbiter Enterprise (the craft was unpowered and never reached space). And many young would-be scientists have found the series inspirational.

Its social message has been no less important. The federation ethic ensured that Kirk, Next Generation Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and their successors 'waged peace' even when confronted by aliens such as the Klingons, a people genetically predisposed to hostility. The February 1968 episode 'A Private Little War', an allegory about Vietnam, was a pointed example. Roddenberry believed that humanity must learn to delight in difference, even in alien life-forms, and ready itself to “meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there”.

Star Trek's portrayal of human diversity and refusal to engage in national exceptionalism remain landmark achievements. Emerging at a time of racial exclusion in US television, TOS crew included Lieutenant Nyota Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), the first prominent African American female role in a US television series, as well as the 'pan-Asian' helmsman Hikaru Sulu (George Takei), Russian navigator Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig) — and, of course, Leonard Nimoy's star turn as half-Vulcan Commander Spock. Native American first officer Chakotay (Robert Beltran) emerged in the series Voyager (1995–2001). The gender balance tended to the heavily male until the advent of Voyager Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), with half-Klingon chief engineer B'Elanna Torres (Hispanic actress Roxann Dawson). Real-world impacts abound. Nichols, for instance, has related how US civil-rights leader Martin Luther King urged her to remain in the series when she was considering other professional options. Her character, in turn, inspired astronaut Mae Jemison, the first African American woman to be sent into space by NASA.

Fifty years later, how does our world compare with Roddenberry's universe? The changes in technology are transformational; and although interstellar travel has yet to become reality, NASA's projected 2030s human mission to Mars follows the dream “to boldly go”. The progressive social values that Star Trek pioneered on television are now much more widely held. But new conflicts and geopolitical stand-offs have erupted, despite efforts by our own federation, the United Nations. Amid these shifts and tensions, this vastly influential franchise continues to carry a subtle but clear message — we can be better than we are.

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Sidney Perkowitz (http://sidneyperkowitz.net) is Charles Howard Candler Emeritus Professor of Physics at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He writes frequently about science, technology and culture; his latest books are Universal Foam 2.0 and Frankenstein 2018 (in progress).,

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In the 23rd Century, Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise explore the galaxy and defend the United Federation of Planets. In the 23rd Century, Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise explore the galaxy and defend the United Federation of Planets. In the 23rd Century, Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise explore the galaxy and defend the United Federation of Planets.

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"Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!"

Fans and non-fans alike know these famous words from the opening monologue voiced by actor William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek (NBC, 1966-69). In 1987, for Star Trek: the Next Generation (syndication, 1987-1994), it was updated to call out the "ongoing" mission and broadened to a call to "boldly go where no one has gone before." Either way, the words evoke the franchise's focus on an imagined future where explorers travel the cosmos, as well as  Star Trek's impact in the real world. For decades, Star Trek has has drawn many people into world of science fiction, while also inspiring people to become astronauts, scientists, and pilots in the real world. The  Star Trek  franchise has continuously transcended cultural boundaries—often showing us how our own future could be more equal.

Learn About:      Star Trek in the Collection       Get to Know Star Trek       Characters Who Boldly Went       Star Trek : Fact or Fiction?

Star Trek in the Museum's Collection

Over the years, the National Air and Space Museum has collected memorabilia and objects related to the Star Trek franchise, including the studio model of the starship  Enterprise from the original series.

Why collect objects from a fictional show?

All air and space milestones begin with inspiration. So does science fiction. Iconic objects from Star Trek  displayed amid our spacecraft celebrate the journey from imagination to achievement, and continue to provide inspiration.

This studio model was used for filming the original Star Trek television series, which aired from 1966 to 1969. In the television show, the starship  Enterprise traveled at speeds measured in multiples of the speed of light using warp drives, a propulsion concept extrapolated from supersonic flight to imagine a future with faster-than-light travel. It appeared in all 79 episodes of the original series.

In 2016, the Museum set out on its own mission: to conserve the studio model for generations to come. The Museum’s goal was to stabilize the model, document its history of changes, and return it to the appearance it had for the August 1967 filming of the episode “The Trouble with Tribbles.” That episode marked the last known modification of the model during Star Trek’s production.

Spock, as portrayed by Leonard Nimoy, is the half-human, half-Vulcan second-in-command to Captain Kirk in the original series. He is perhaps one of the most recognizable characters from the Star Trek franchise.

Spock is often known for his pointy ears and Vulcan salute and greeting ("Live Long and Prosper"). The Vulcans are a humanoid alien species who live by logic and reason, and are often devoid of any emotion.

The Museum has multiple Spock ears in its collection, from originals used in filming to a reproduction ear that was made by fan who went on to produce art and visual effects for later adaptations of Star Trek. 

Watch as curator Margaret Weitekamp unboxes the a set of Spock ear tips donated by the Nimoy family, and sees them for the first time as a Museum artifact.

Discovery how Spock’s ear tips from the original series joined the Museum’s collection. 

Follow Museum conservators as they work on a replica Spock ear tip made by a fan.

Museum staff share their memories of Nimoy.

For Museum geologist Bob Craddock, Spock meant something special.

This model of a Klingon D7 Battle Cruiser. It was was used in the filming of the original television series as the standard fighter spacecraft of the warlike Klingon Empire. It was donated to the Smithsonian Institution in 1973. The Klingons are a fictional species from the Star Trek universe. They serve as recurring antagonists in the original Star Trek series, but have appeared as allies in later Star Trek  adaptations.

How do you create an alien language?

Just like you might not speak the same language as someone from another country, when encountering an alien species from a different planet, there is a good chance you might not understand their language. According to the Star Trek story line, Starfleet first makes contact with the Klingon Empire in the year ("stardate") 2151. Watch this clip from our video series, "STEM in 30", as we talk to Marc Okrand, who created the Klingon language for Star Trek.  

Object at National Museum of American History

Object at National Museum of African American History and Culture

Object at the National Postal Museum

Not a major Star Trek fan? Check out these 3 fast facts about the franchise to get up to (warp) speed.

Pictured: The cast of Star Trek: The Original Series  (1966-1969), often referred to in shorthand by fans as ST:TOS.

Star Trek is a science fiction franchise that follows the humans and aliens who serve in Starfleet. Starfleet is a space-based humanitarian armada of the United Federation of Planets—the interstellar government featured in Star Trek. While stories often follow the adventures of a particular captain and crew, they also often pull on real-world issues. 

The original series ran from 1966 to 1969 on NBC. Its depiction of a racially-integrated, multinational crew of men and women working together successfully, as well as its attention to contemporary social and political issues, pushed the boundaries of network television, earning Star Trek a dedicated fan base that lobbied for the franchise's continuation.

Today there are several spin-off series, a film franchise, and more.

Star Trek was created by American screenwriter and producer Gene Roddenberry. Roddenberry pitched the show to Desilu Productions, which provided early support. Co-Founder and studio head of Desilu Productions, Lucille Ball, was instrumental in moving the project forward. Desilu Productions and Roddenberry developed a script and pitched the show to NBC, who picked it up.

Even after Roddenberry's death in 1991, the franchise has continued to grow with new television shows, movies, and other media. 

The original Star Trek television series first aired in 1966 and ran for three seasons. NBC threatened to cancel the show after its second season. However, fans mounted a massive letter writing campaign in support of a third season and the show was renewed. With a total of 79 episodes, the original series was cancelled in 1969 at the end of its third season (to the protest of many fans).

Characters Who Boldly Went Where None Had Gone Before

Gene Roddenberry envisioned the bridge crew for the starship Enterprise as including men and women of different races all working together—in a time when humans in the real world were fighting for equality during the Civil Rights Era.

There is no shortage of iconic characters from Star Trek , and to cover them all we would need to travel at warp speed. Below, find stories about a few of the characters, and the actors who boldly went where none had gone before that portrayed them.

Nichelle Nichols portrayed Lieutenant Uhura in the original series. The character gained a first name, Nyota, in novelizations published in the 1980s. In the show, Uhura serves as the translator and communications officer for Captain Kirk aboard the starship Enterprise , speaking multiple alien languages. Nichols was one of the first Black women to hold a prominent role in a major television series. In addition to breaking barriers on screen, she helped NASA recruit astronaut candidates to join the Space Shuttle program. 

Nichelle Nichols stars in this promotional film, "Whats in it For Me?" made for the Air and Space Museum in the late 1970s. The film was produced by Nichols's company Women in Motion for the Museum. In it, Nichols, appearing as her character Lt. Uhura ,  tours the Museum with a young girl who asks her if girls really can travel outer space, just like Uhura does aboard the starship Enterprise in Star Trek.

George Takei portrayed Lieutenant Sulu, Captain Kirk's third officer and senior helmsman, in the original series. The character gained a first name, Hikaru, in a novelization published in 1981. Takei made history as the first Asian American to play a major, non-stereotyped character on an American television show. In his work, he's embraced the Star Trek philosophy of diversity and social justice, advocating for LGBTQ+ rights and sharing his experience in the Japanese-American incarceration camps during World War II.

Star Trek: The Original Series  is well known for being a leader in terms of gender and racial integration—featuring a cast of men and women of different races working together. But it turns out this environment of inclusion did not always extend to queer identity. Later Star Trek adaptations have included same-sex relationships and non-binary identities. 

Star Trek : Fact or Fiction?

Science fiction often draws on real life space exploration for ideas that make the fantastical seem realistic. Let's take a closer look at where fiction ends and reality begins. 

Join our spacesuit curator Cathleen Lewis as she breaks down spacesuits from Star Trek and other pieces of science fiction. 

Join the hosts of our video series "STEM in 30" as they talk to experts about how real science influenced the Star Trek universe. 

Star Trek is not only popular—it's important for current scholarship and industry! As a franchise, Star Trek has drawn upon real history for its narratives and influenced space history through its depictions of a possible future. In this educational panel program, four presenters offered brief, compelling insights into how relevant Star Trek is today.

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September 8, 2016

The Science Sticklers Who Kept Star Trek in Line

Fifty years after the original series premiere, it's still the gold standard of scientific accuracy, even with the occasional blunder

By Thomas Vinciguerra

The goal of scientific accuracy began with the creator and executive producer, Gene Roddenberry (third from the right).

NASA Wikimedia Commons

In the early days of television, small-screen science fiction generally ignored the laws of nature, technology and common sense. Take the 1960s TV series Lost in Space. In one early segment a comet’s heat somehow threatens to fry a couple of members of the spacefaring Robinson family. Pretty far-fetched, considering that comets are made of ice, rock and dust.

Even quality shows like The Twilight Zone made gaffes, as in the 1962 episode “The Little People,” which postulated humanoids hundreds of feet high. Unfortunately, as a body’s height is squared, its volume is cubed. So these fictional life-forms would in reality collapse under their own weight.

Then, in 1966, came Star Trek , setting the new gold standard of scientific plausibility in TV entertainment . This year the cult series celebrates the 50th anniversary of its September 8 premiere.

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The goal of scientific accuracy began with the creator and executive producer, Gene Roddenberry. “Roddenberry told me, ‘I wanted scientists to be able to watch our show, believe it, enjoy it and not laugh at it,’” says Marc Cushman, co-author of These Are The Voyages , a three-volume set about the making of the series. “He said, ‘I wanted to know that if it’s not probable, it’s at least possible.’”

Many of the details that gave Star Trek its futuristic feel—medical monitors, hand-held communications devices, automatically sliding doors—have become reality. What, after all, was Mr. Spock’s “library computer” but an early imagining of the internet? What about those square record tapes, packed with digitized information, which the crew slipped into convenient slots for everything from readouts to meals? They were no more than 23rd-century floppy disks.

Admittedly, Star Trek sometimes reached too far. We likely won't see faster-than-light travel, aka “warp drive,” achieved anytime soon. Not to mention the transporter—a device that broke down bodies and objects into energy, “beamed” the particles to a certain point and then rearranged them into their original components. “Of everything they had on Star Trek,” Jerry Pournelle, former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, said in 1978 in the magazine Science Fantasy Film Classics , “the transporter is the toughest of the lot. It’s going to be the longest one coming.”

Nevertheless, the makers of Star Trek did try to get things largely right and reasonable, starting with the first pilot episode, “The Cage.” Roddenberry contracted with Harvey P. Lynn, Jr., a RAND Corporation physicist, to provide technical advice for a nominal fee. As later documented in a book about making the series, Lynn’s comments were varied and astute. For example, he picked up on one particular line of dialogue from the pilot script: “Any oxygen planets?” the commander asks. In his feedback on the episode Lynn wrote, “Technically, a planet could have oxygen and still be unsuitable to sustain life for many other reasons.” Hence, in the final version an Enterprise underling reports, “Our reading shows an oxygen–nitrogen atmosphere, sir. Heavy with inert elements but well within safety limits.”

Elsewhere, Roddenberry had written that the home planet of the featured alien race, the telepathic Talosians, had a gravity that was “1.3 of Earth.” But he also described the inhabitants as small and slim, with elongated heads. “This is not consistent with a gravity of 1.3,” Lynn pointed out at the time, “but it is consistent with a gravity of less than that of the Earth. Why not substitute ‘0.85,’ ‘point 85,’ or ‘85 percent’?” So the line was changed to “zero point nine of Earth.”

When Star Trek became a regular series, the show's producers turned to the De Forest Research, Inc., to provide scientific and legal guidance. “What [Roddenberry] was trying to avoid was the standard television clichés of bug-eyed monsters,” according to 89-year-old company founder Kellam de Forest.

The majority of script review fell to de Forest's then-associates, Joan Pearce and Peter Sloman. “Most of the time, the science was not at the level that I had to do too much consulting,” Sloman, 66, recalls. “Once in awhile I would call someone at U.C.L.A. in the physics department, but in most cases I knew enough. Unless it was an active violation of physical laws, I would tend to let it go, because so much had been established in science fiction. Like time travel. Wells did it, Heinlein did it, so we did it.”

Some problematic matters were solved with the stroke of a pen. In the popular comedic episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” episode writer David Gerrold conceived a species of cute, purring, rapidly breeding little fluff balls. But de Forest’s team pounced on the creatures' “asexual” nature. “Asexual means reproducing by fission,” they wrote. “Better make it bisexual, meaning the creature is both male and female.” So Gerrold rewrote accordingly.

Similarly, the episode “By Any Other Name,” envisioned the Enterprise crew being captured by the Kelvans, a race that could freeze their enemies’ nerve impulses. Pearce objected. “If all nerve impulses were paralyzed,” she wrote in a feedback memo, “the organism will die because the automatic as well as the voluntary muscles will be affected.” The solution: The head Kelvan intones, “You are all paralyzed by a selective field that neutralizes nerve impulses to the voluntary muscles.”

“Joan did not suffer fools gladly,” Sloman says with a chuckle. “She didn’t suffer them at all. She loved words and liked to use them properly and got pissed off when they were not.” Hence, Pearce seized on this utterance by the navigator, Ensign Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig), in “Bread and Circuses” on approaching the planet 892-IV: “Only one sixteenth parsec away, Captain. We should be there in seconds.”

“This is equivalent to the driver of an automobile traveling at 60 miles per hour, saying, ‘Only a few feet away. We should be there in seconds,’” Pearce protested. “Suggest the Enterprise will be traveling at low sublight speed (for example, 5,000 kilometers per second) and the system be 100,000 kilometers away.”

Perhaps the most nettlesome scientific conundrum that Star Trek encountered occurred in “The Devil in the Dark,” written by producer Gene L. Coon. The script called for a hideous, corrosive-spitting blob of a creature that eats solid rock, moving as easily through that medium as Homo sapiens move through the air. This “horta” was made of compounds based not on carbon but on its nearest elemental relative, silicon.

Stern words came back from de Forest and company: “Silicon-based life could only develop and be sustained under conditions of extreme heat—perhaps an environment comparable to that prevailing on the planet Mercury. It could not possibly exist in the oxygen atmosphere. In the presence of oxygen the silicon compounds would undergo spontaneous chemical transformation—that is, they would burn.”

Ultimately, the Star Trek crew skirted the issue with a synthesized, artificially created, human-friendly, underground environment. That scenario still allowed for a skeptical Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) to argue, “Silicon-based life is physiologically impossible—especially in an oxygen atmosphere.” To which the ever-logical Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) responds, “It may be, doctor, that the creature can exist for brief periods in such an atmosphere before returning to its own environment.” It may have been fudging but it was also an honest attempt to reconcile scientific law and artistic license.

As Star Trek flew on, its penchant for plausibility turned out to be a double-edged sword. Fans picked up on, and began dissecting, the show’s self-assured techno-jargon. “A stereotypical letter,” co-producer Robert H. Justman mused in a later memoir, “might say: ‘In act three of last week’s show Capt. Kirk’s narration indicated a star date of 4891.4, but he’d already mentioned star date 4323.7 in act one. This means he made love to Phobos 7’s four-breast alien maiden princess before he arrived and beamed down. How can this be?”

Peter Sloman once received a letter from a high school classmate who skewered him for allowing the hull skin temperature of the show’s Galileo shuttlecraft to reach an impossibly high threshold upon reentering a planetary atmosphere. “You do realize,” Sloman’s friend wrote, “that this temperature is 500 degrees above the recrystallization point of iron?”

There were other blunders: In “The Omega Glory,” McCoy remarks that the human body is about 96 percent water. The actual figure is approximately 60 percent. In “Court Martial,” Capt. Kirk explains how to enhance the power of the Enterprise’ s computer auditory sensor. “By installing a booster, we can increase that capability on the order of 1 to the fourth power.” Alas, the good captain didn’t grasp that 1 raised to the fourth power is still 1.

Sloman, who majored in linguistics at Georgetown University, had a particular prejudice against the “universal translator,” a handheld device that, in the episode "Metamorphosis," turned extraterrestrial thoughts (not even language) into English. Unless the gizmo had bona fide telepathic powers, he argued, it was unworkable. “It was like something out of Captain Video,” a series that predated Star Trek by about 15 years.

In the end, though, when it came to serving both the god of drama and the caesar of science, Star Trek more than held its own. No less than science fiction giant Isaac Asimov said as much: “That’s what makes the difference between Star Trek and all the other science fiction series that I have seen,” he said in an interview in the mid-1970s. “ Star Trek was the only one when, whoever it was who was involved, Gene—and I mention no names—insisted on people knowing something about science and preparing. And it showed, you know! You could see that even when you broke the laws of science, you were doing it intelligently and plausibly.”

Star Trek’s Holodeck: from science fiction to a new reality

Senior lecturer, RMIT University

Disclosure statement

Fabio Zambetta has received funding from the ARC (Australian Research Council) under the ARC Linkage and ARC Discovery programs.

RMIT University provides funding as a strategic partner of The Conversation AU.

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Many of the technological advances predicted in Star Trek’s fictional universe have become reality , such as the mobile communicator and hand-held tablet computers.

Others, such as tractor beams and warp drives , are still a work in progress. But what of the Holodeck ?

The Holodeck first appeared in The Practical Joker , a 1974 episode of the Star Trek animated series. It was depicted as a recreation room containing a simulated, alternative version of reality. It featured heavily in The Next Generation series and in the 1996 film First Contact .

Anyone entering the Holodeck could interact with “solid” props and characters in any scenario based on whatever parameters they programmed.

These programs are not unlike the narrative-driven, cinematic videogames we have today, such as Grand Theft Auto , Red Dead Redemption or The Witcher .

The Holodeck was a narrative device that allowed Star Trek’s writers to experiment with philosophical questions in settings not available in a typical sci-fi context.

It inspired several generations of computer scientists who spearheaded research in artificial intelligence, computer graphics and human-computer interaction.

The convergence of these research areas has given rise to other forms of reality on the path to the construction of a real Holodeck.

A real Holodeck?

In virtual reality ( VR ) we are fully immersed in a synthetic, “virtual” version of reality, experienced through dedicated VR headsets such as the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive .

A typical example of VR is an immersive war game that puts a user in charge of a Roman army as Caesar, battling Vercingetorix’s Gaul troops at Alesia.

But VR has a major drawback for some applications. Being isolated from the real world, it’s not easy to engage in social interaction or physical movement in a way that feels natural to most people.

Augmented reality ( AR ) blends synthetic, virtual objects with the view of our physical reality. In AR, we can interact with virtual humans inhabiting our physical space or we can work with our children, for example, to build virtual LEGO houses on real tables in our own living rooms.

Headsets are available that allow us to create AR in our office or lounge rooms, such as the Microsoft Hololens or the Meta .

But AR headsets still suffer from several technical limitations, such as a reduced field of view. The software that lets the virtual and real worlds interact believably and naturally still needs work.

Sensing humans

Real-world Holodeck programs would also need the technology to sense human actions. This would provide useful information that the virtual personas inhabiting the Holodeck programs would use to anticipate our human intentions.

Progress here has been fast and constant, with great improvements in speech recognition and language translation, such as Apple’s Siri , Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana .

We now take almost for granted the ability to search for information with speech or to command our mobiles to schedule meetings and appointments. Other devices, originally conceived for entertainment applications, can track human gestures or even their full body posture.

For example, Microsoft Kinect can track a human body, and the technology is now included in the Hololens as its gesture-recognition component.

Lots of other sensing devices are now commonplace in mobile devices, such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, and temperature and pressure sensors.

The general trend is towards giving humans the ability to communicate using a combination of their body and their voice via hands-free or wearable user interfaces.

Enter the artificial intelligence

The key ingredient for Holodeck programs in the real world is the ability to equip virtual characters with sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence (AI).

AI and machine learning – the art of teaching a machine how to learn to perform a complex task – have seen advances in areas such as automated game playing , autonomous car driving and drone control , and deep learning .

These advances, while noteworthy, do not necessarily show strong progress towards general forms of artificial intelligence (AGI) exhibited by humans.

It has been argued that defining or providing general human intelligence may prove a very elusive problem for a long time, or indeed forever.

Fortunately, a restricted version of a Holodeck program may only require a slightly weaker, not fully general form of intelligence. This was exemplified by androids in the popular TV series reboot of Westworld .

Almost human? Close enough

The good news is that this may shorten the time needed to realise the hypothetical Holodeck programs. The bad news is that such a feat is still beyond us at this stage, although recent progress in machine learning will likely help us close the gap faster.

The question is then whether we shall ever be able to reach the level of sophistication in AR and AI needed to build a Holodeck? And if so, when?

Making predictions on such matters is not trivial, but I am inclined to think that current advances in VR and AR technologies will provide us with the required sophisticated headsets within the next five to ten years.

The question then is also whether we shall ever be able to achieve AR using alternative forms of projections that remove the need for a headset altogether.

This may be possible, eventually, but it would be irrelevant if headsets could be miniaturised and potentially implanted into human eyes, similar to what was suggested in other sci-fi classics such as Neuromancer or Snow Crash , and recently advocated by transhumanists .

The recent predictions about breakthroughs in general artificial intelligence by experts seem to converge around a date around 2040. This would put the sort of AI required for Holodeck characters somewhat earlier than that.

So I believe that one day humans will be able to experience some form of Holodeck similar to what was envisaged in Star Trek.

To paraphrase Star Teek’s infamous Borg alien race, I will say that resistance to this technological progress is futile and it will be assimilated, one day.

• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Science fiction
• Augmented reality
• Virtual reality
• Machine learning

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The  U.S.S. Enterprise  explores the far corners of the universe in the television show  Star Trek: The Next Generation . One engineer today thinks we could build an actual  Enterprise  in the next 20 or 30 years.

‘Star Trek’ Is Right About Almost Everything

The epic series—celebrating its 50th anniversary this year—bases its science fiction on scientific fact.

Resistance is futile.

For half a century now the Star Trek franchise has been winning new fans and inspiring real-world innovators. Over the course of 12 feature films (the 13th will be released next month) and six TV series—plus an ever-growing constellation of books, games, comics, magazines, and documentaries—it has boldly gone where no science fiction has gone before.

The secret to its success, says Andrew Fazekas , is its allegiance to science fact. Fazekas—a National Geographic writer and astronomy blogger known as the Night Sky Guy—is the author of a new book on the series’ reality-based astronomy and prescient technology. In Star Trek: The Official Guide to our Universe , he explains that unlike most sci-fi, the franchise has always rooted the innate human urge to explore in plausible science, providing “a hopeful pathway to a possible human future that’s not too distant.”

With Star Trek celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, National Geographic recently spoke with Fazekas about the real science and enduring appeal of the series.

You’re a science writer, amateur astronomer, and lifelong fan of Star Trek . This book, you say, represents a sort of Vulcan mind-meld of those passions. Tell me a bit about how and why it came together.

I’ve been an amateur astronomer—a backyard stargazer—since I was 10 years old. At the same time, I’ve always been a Star Trek fan. So I knew that I wanted to mix these two very different worlds together. But I wasn’t sure how.

Then I began to realize that in Star Trek , most of the astronomical objects and destinations have real-life counterparts. Watching the TV shows and movies, you hear names like Andromeda galaxy and Alpha Centauri —real things I’ve come across in my own travels across the night sky.

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I soon began to find many instances where I could reference the series in terms of an astronomical object. Like, if I would show someone a supernova through my telescope, I could quote the Star Trek episode in which it appeared. And I could say, “Remember in ‘All Our Yesterdays’ when the Enterprise had to rush away because the impending explosion of the star would destroy the planet?”

About 10 years ago, I began to make a casual list of all the astronomical objects that have appeared in Star Trek . And as I went through the episodes, I saw, again and again, that the writers were always talking about real-life stuff. They were always taking real science seriously.

Tell me about your methodology. I imagine it involved a lot of research and collaboration with scientists. How did you decide what to focus on and explicate?

Star Trek is a fire hose of information and trivia. It’s overwhelming. So I decided that I needed to focus on a few things. Coming from an astronomy-education background, I knew I needed to make it easy for the reader. To make it something that they’d be familiar with: a guidebook about the night sky.

So we’d start off with things in the solar system. Then we’d move on to planets outside the solar system—the exoplanets. Then I’d explain the stars—where they’re born, how they live, where they die. And finally I’d get to the grandest structures of the galaxy.

The cornerstone of this book is looking at the destinations and the true science of Star Trek . Scores of today’s scientists and engineers and physicists—as well as mathematicians, chemists, even astronauts—were inspired as children by Star Trek to pursue these fields professionally. The show captured their imaginations.

And that’s what’s so cool about Star Trek . I mean, I’m not dissing Star Wars —I like that too—but I find it to be much more fantasy-based. I liken Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings . Star Trek is more of a realistic vision.

What were the biggest surprises you encountered in the course of writing this book?

One thing is just how accurate the science really is, throughout all the different incarnations. The foundation that Star Trek is built on is scientifically sturdy. You can tell that the writers and producers took the time to get the science right.

They did that by involving real scientific consultants, whose professional opinions were incorporated into the plotlines, the filming of the scenes. And over the decades—as our technology has gotten better, as we’ve pushed the boundaries of exploration, as we’ve learned more about our universe—new knowledge has made its way into Star Trek plots and story lines.

Nowadays the canvas that all these adventures play out on is almost hyperreal. With the computer simulations we have these days, Hollywood has the ability to re-create any kind of object in space, based on whatever knowledge we have, and give us the ringside seats to the cosmos that all we space geeks wish we had.

In an episode of the original TV series, crew members find themselves encircled by a force field at the O.K. Corral. Since it first aired 50 years ago,  Star Trek  has relied heavily on input from actual scientists, including physicists, astrophysicists, mathematicians, and chemists.

For instance, let’s say the Enterprise is hiding out in a nebula. Well, as earthbound stargazers we’re never going to be able to see what it would be like. We have only an outside view of these beautiful, colorful star clusters. But Hollywood can now place us within that nebula. And it’s based on computer simulations that real scientists are using to understand what these clouds are, how they form, how they evolve. It’s amazing! It’s like you’re there.

Of course, there has to be artistic license taken. The whole idea of warp drive or teleportation —those were plot devices that were included by [ Star Trek creator] Gene Roddenberry . He came up with those devices 50 years ago, to move the storyline along. You can’t have your characters taking 300 or 400 years to get to one star system.

The technology in Star Trek has often proved prescient in terms of real-world innovations. Specifically, what are some of those things?

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that device that they called the PADD (Personal Access Display Device). It had no keypad; you just used your finger. Today we call it an iPad, or a tablet. Really eerie. The dream has come true! Life is imitating art.

Of course, it’s not a coincidence that an iPad and a smartphone and wrist-worn medical devices look like they do. They harken back to what we saw in Star Trek in 1966.

Then there’s voice recognition—talking to your device. It reminds me of a scene in Star Trek IV —the one with the whales—where Scotty goes to this engineering firm, and wants to talk to the computer. So he goes, “Hello, computer.” Then Bones says to him, “You’re supposed to use the mouse!” And Scotty says, “Oh, how quaint.” And then he speaks into the mouse.

Scores of today’s scientists and engineers and physicists—as well as mathematicians, chemists, even astronauts—were inspired as children by Star Trek to pursue these fields professionally. Andrew Fazekas , author, Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe

We’re already there. We can dictate. We have voice recognition. We can type a letter or an email without even touching a keyboard now.

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In the first Star Trek series, they had a quadriplegic character sitting in a big, burly machine. All you saw was his head. And he could communicate only by using this flashing light—two flashes for yes, one flash for no.

Look what we have now. Stephen Hawking is able to communicate through his computer. He can speak full sentences. He can write books! It’s not just a flashing light. So technology there has far surpassed Star Trek . And that’s supposed to be 300 years in the future! We’ve gone much farther, much faster than they envisioned back in 1966.

Conversely, which visions of the future haven’t come to pass? Are there any things—in terms of astronomy, technology, or general science—that Star Trek has really gotten wrong?

The biggie is warp drive. That may very well remain science fiction. It depends on which scientists you talk to. But right now there are scientists doing experiments in the laboratory, on very small scales, to see if this is something we might one day be able to do. Equations exist that show that this might be possible.

Still, warp drive may very well never materialize. The same thing with teleportation. Quantum teleportation—moving a particle from one system to another—does exist. And one day we may, perhaps, be able to move inanimate objects. But teleporting humans—I mean, would we ever really want to do that? You would have to literally deconstruct a living being onto a molecular level, then reconstruct it. Its DNA would be pulled apart.

I was recently asked: Are we molding our future the way we are because we’re trying to mirror and mimic Star Trek ? Or is it just happening on its own? I think it’s the former. We’re being influenced by this very popular science-fiction franchise.

I think one of the things that distinguishes Star Trek from other sci-fi is its philosophical bent—its thoughtful consideration of life, the universe, and everything. Do you think that approach is the reason why it has endured and thrived for so long, finding new audiences across half a century?

There’s definitely something there for everyone, for different kinds of fans and generations. And that thoughtfulness you mention is what touches so many people. Even folks who aren’t science geeks, per se. They like the message that Star Trek has of a hopeful future for humankind. That we’ve passed through these petty problems and difficulties we have now amongst nations and cultures and races. In the Star Trek future of humankind, we’ve gone beyond all that.

Also, this yearning and passion for exploring the unknown—for pushing the frontier. I think that’s very deeply rooted in the DNA of humans. The desire to go where no one has gone before. North America would not have been explored if we didn’t push beyond the European continent. In Star Trek , the stage is not one continent or planet; it’s the entire Milky Way galaxy—and beyond.

On an episode of  Star Trek: The Next Generation , the crew modifies a photon torpedo, which they'll use to mine a nebula for subatomic particles known as vertions. The astronomical objects we see in  Star Trek  often overlap with those in our own universe. 

These are the things that really speak to people. And I think what also captures their attention, through all the incarnations of Star Trek , is how the series has always incorporated social issues of the times. The civil rights movement, for instance, was very big in the original series. Remember that iconic kiss between Uhura and Captain Kirk ? That made a lot of waves at the time. It was one of the first interracial kisses on TV.

William Shatner wrote the foreword to this book. Did you meet him or any other Star Trek stars during your research? Were you ever, um, starstruck ?

I knew right from the start that I wanted to have Shatner involved—to have him launch the book from the beginning and introduce it. Because it’s a grand, sweeping cosmic adventure that’s very much like the stories that take place in Star Trek . And who better than Captain Kirk to set the scene?

So I begged my editors: “Please get Shatner! If we need to, appeal to his roots and let him know that the author is also from Montreal, and that we went to the same university.” It seemed to work. They made it happen, the stars aligned, and Shatner was part of the book.

You can see from the intro that he wrote that he’s very much into science and science fiction. And you can tell that he wrote it. I’m very keen to thank him personally.

But no—unfortunately I haven’t yet met anyone from Star Trek in person. I’m hoping to rectify that during my book tour. I’ll have opportunities to meet up with most of the cast members of the different series at the major Star Trek convention in New York—the grand 50th anniversary gala—in early September. My dream is to have the cast members all sign my book.

Star clusters like these are perfect laboratories for examining the evolutionary path of stars. But while earthbound astronomers can only observe them from afar, Starfleet crews get to conduct their studies up close. 

What effect do you want this book to have on readers? What’s the desired takeaway?

As an astronomy educator and communicator, I hope that people who aren’t familiar with the night sky but love Star Trek will take this book and understand what they’ve actually seen—the true science behind an exploding supernova, for instance.

The sky is a natural resource that we’ve really become disconnected from. People sit at their computers, in front of their devices. And that part of the future that Star Trek has shown us is coming true. But it’s detached us from nature—from the grandness of nature that is the night sky above us. And that’s the canvas that Star Trek plays out on: the heavens above.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Science Friday

Star trek’s science advisor reveals the real astrophysics on screen.

29:26 minutes

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Science concepts have always been integral to the Star Trek franchise: from warp speed travel to dilithium. But how much does the series accurately depict?

Ira speaks with astrophysicist Dr. Erin Macdonald, science consultant for Star Trek about the legacy of the franchise, and how accurate the science is within the series.

Further Reading

• Learn more about Dr. Macdonald’s work .
• Watch Dr. Macdonald explain the real science behind the Gorn Chase scene in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
• Watch another video of Dr. Macdonald explaining warp drive .

Segment Guests

Dr. Erin Macdonald is scientific consultant to the Star Trek franchise. She’s based in Los Angeles, California.

Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. There are a few pop culture franchises that do science quite like Star Trek.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER: Space, a final frontier.

IRA FLATOW: Is there a more recognizable opening line on television more iconic than that one? The Star Trek series released in 1966, starring William Shatner as Captain Kirk, Leonard Nimoy as Spock. And since then, there have been a dozen shows exploring the Star Trek universe.

Some have been live action. Some animated. But all explore concepts in astrophysics. And when I watch these shows, I love them. I always think how accurate is the science in this franchise? It’s an apt question, for our next guest is going to tell me all about it.

Dr. Erin Macdonald, scientific consultant for the Star Trek franchise. She has a PhD in astrophysics, and she joins us from Los Angeles. Welcome to Science Friday.

ERIN MACDONALD: Hi, Ira. I’m really honored to be here. Thanks for having me.

IRA FLATOW: I’m so happy to have you. Tell me a bit about your history as a science consultant for Star Trek. When did that all start? How did you get involved?

ERIN MACDONALD: Yeah. It’s been going back to season three of Star Trek Discovery was when I came on, when they jumped forward to the future. My background, as you mentioned, is in astrophysics, particularly in gravitational waves. I’ve always used science fiction to teach science. And when I left academia, I started giving talks at pop culture conventions, which sort of led me into the entertainment industry.

IRA FLATOW: That’s terrific. We want to get our listeners in on this. Because I know we’re going to melt the phone lines when I give out the phone number. Our number is 844-724-8255, 844-724-8255, to talk about the science that’s in Star Trek, or tweet us @SciFri. Were you always a big Trekker, a Star Trek fan?

ERIN MACDONALD: Yeah. I mean, I wasn’t really exposed to it until I was in college. I was doing my undergraduate degrees in physics and math. And in the Venn diagram of Star Trek fans and physics majors, there’s a big overlap in the middle there.

And so at our sort of college parties, we would watch Next Generation. And that was kind of my first exposure to it, and I fell absolutely in love with it. The big moment for me was when the 2009 Kelvin film came out. That was the night we all graduated.

And so we did our big graduation, and then we went to the midnight premiere, back when those were actually at midnight, and surrounded by Star Trek fans I realized like, these are my people. This is where it’s at.

IRA FLATOW: And how many Star Trek shows are airing at the same time these days?

ERIN MACDONALD: Now, I think we’ve had five going. So there’s a lot– different flavors, as you mentioned. Some are live action. Some are animated. Some are targeted at kids. And what’s great is that they all kind of have different flavors of science, and they all approach their storytelling differently, as Star Trek always has.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. So give me an idea of what a day in the life of a science consultant looks like. What kinds of things are you actually doing?

ERIN MACDONALD: Yeah. A lot of it is working directly with the writers and showrunners. And so they’ll reach out to me if they have specific questions. And then I sometimes try to sit about once a week in the writers room itself helping them break ideas, if they have questions in the moment, or come up with story concepts.

I work as a writer. I’m a big fan of science fiction anyway. So being able to help with that process. And then a big part of my job is literally just editing scripts– going through them, and at the very minimum, making sure we don’t say anything wrong– a big job.

IRA FLATOW: What do you mean say anything wrong– for example?

ERIN MACDONALD: For example, like refer to our solar system or a star system as a galaxy. That’s a common mistake that happens in science fiction all the time, and getting those things conflated. Making sure we talk about planets the right way, making sure we talk about nebulas the right way, and that they’re just dust and gas, and all of those little nuances that can sometimes slip by.

IRA FLATOW: One of the central tenets of watching a film, a fiction film, is the willful suspension of your belief, right?

ERIN MACDONALD: Absolutely.

IRA FLATOW: How does that play into what you do, and in Star Trek, in general?

ERIN MACDONALD: Well, I think sometimes– a lot of what I do when I say I don’t want them to say anything wrong, sometimes we’ll have great fun, fantastical storylines that isn’t really rooted in science. And the advice is to just not try to explain it.

Because I think that’s when that suspension of disbelief– when you’re talking about a giant energy being that’s grabbing a hold of the ship, as soon as you start to apply science to it, that’s when you’re going to start to lose people, when if you just let it be, you could just ride the story.

IRA FLATOW: But sometimes over the years, if you wait around long enough, some of the things that you may think are– you need to suspend your belief actually come true. And I’m thinking about all the times we used to watch Captain Kirk or Jean-Luc Picard talk to the computer– like, verbally speak to– like, really? It understands what you’re saying? But now we can do that.

ERIN MACDONALD: We have that indeed. In fact, my own little in-home listening system responds to computers well. Can’t be a Star Trek fan without that. And yeah, I mean this long legacy. Even I remember the original series, x Kirk would video call down to the medical bay. And that seemed so fantastical. And now that’s almost how we live our lives.

IRA FLATOW: Or Hurra would have a little thing in her ear. You can’t have a tiny little receiver in your ear, right?

ERIN MACDONALD: Right. Right. A little wireless receptor– who’d have thought?

IRA FLATOW: Do you have a favorite science plot line you’ve consulted on?

ERIN MACDONALD: Yeah. I mean, there’s been a few. My first one was to do the big story arc for season three, which was called The Burn. And what I was brought on for was to really apply some science to the dilithium, which is a fictional Star Trek element that’s been around since the ’60s, and plays a role in the technology of these starships. And I was able to kind of add on some canonical explanations to it that was really exciting and really special.

And then in that same season, I also consulted on episode five, I believe, where they encounter a coronal mass ejection. And that was the first time that we’ve had one of those in Star Trek before. So that was fun.

IRA FLATOW: That is dilithium crystals. Really? Where do they come– where do they come from? Do we have a history on that?

ERIN MACDONALD: Well, yeah. The first thing I had to establish was is it dilithium or is it dilithium? Because as many Star Trek fans, who are also chemistry majors, will point out that lithium does not allow itself to be combined in such a way. And so we established, nope. It is just called dilithium, and it’s its own thing. I came up with these subatomic particles that tap into subspace to make the story work that way.

IRA FLATOW: You talked about just having to accept things when something big happens. You don’t want to explain it. And I think one of those things that I’ve always wondered about, and we have gotten calls about in the past, is warp speed. How do you how do you survive going to warp speed? The human body can’t really take that kind of acceleration.

ERIN MACDONALD: No. This is true. I mean, the ships do have inertial dampeners, which is kind of the equivalent of seat belts.

IRA FLATOW: Oh, I forgot about that– the intertial dampener.

ERIN MACDONALD: Yeah. Yeah. Because inertia is the thing that’s going to get you, right? But when you do go to warp, the whole concept of warp drive mathematically is really interesting, and it is actually possible. The concept is that you’re building a bubble of space time around your ship.

So on the ship itself, you’re still traveling, I mean, at the speeds they are, much faster than we can conceive of now. But even then, they’re not quite at the speed of light. And then the bubble of space time just carries the ship faster than light. Because in our rules of general relativity, nothing says that spacetime itself can’t go faster than the speed of light. It’s just stuff on the surface of it.

IRA FLATOW: I love that explanation. Let’s go to– I’m going to hit– there are a couple of harder ones on the phone I’m going to get them to ask you. Marti in Ellensburg, Washington. Hi. Welcome to Science Friday.

AUDIENCE: Hi. Thanks. I’m just wondering, especially since I just got a new knee, are the Borg really possible?

ERIN MACDONALD: Oh, the Borg. Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Tell us what the Borg are, if you will, first.

ERIN MACDONALD: Absolutely. So the Borg is probably something a lot of young Star Trek fans remember is the first thing that gave them nightmares. But it’s essentially a sort of cybernetic species that goes around assimilating different cultures, and they incorporate a lot of technology into their beings.

But the big thing that the Borg have, that was kind of established in Star Trek Voyager in more detail, is these nanoprobes– so these little itty-bitty mechanical devices that swim throughout your bloodstream and coordinate all of the cybernetic implants that you’ve got.

So I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I don’t know if you have to worry about that with your knee quite yet. But it’s certainly interesting. And I think this idea of integrating– it’s really biotechnology– integrating robotics with our bodies– we are not far away from.

IRA FLATOW: Do you ever go in the opposite direction? Do you ever suggest something that they could incorporate into the script that you’re thinking about?

ERIN MACDONALD: Yeah, quite a few times. I mean, I don’t want to take too much credit because these writers, they come up with really, really cool stories.

But like the CME, the Coronal Mass Ejection, that I mentioned, that was a big one where it was like, let’s just have a space disaster. We just want a cool space disaster that’s going to interrupt the transporter. What would be a fun one that we could use with that?

And so then we kind of built the story around it being a coronal mass ejection, which is, for people who aren’t aware, it’s like a solar flare plus. It carries a lot of massive radiation particles, in addition to the kind of normal solar flares that we see.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. A lot of people want to talk to you. Let’s go to Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. I don’t think we’ve ever been there. Jeff, welcome to Science Friday.

AUDIENCE: Hi. Yeah, thanks. I’m reading a series of books now. And they use something called an Alcubierre drive. Supposedly, it’s a real theoretical thing. And I was just wondering is that the same thing as the warp drive?

ERIN MACDONALD: Yeah, absolutely. So the Alcubierre drive was the first major warp drive that was mathematically laid out. And so as I talked about where warp is about building a bubble of spacetime around your ship, the Alcubierre drive takes that concept.

And the key with it– so mathematically, this warp drive, the Alcubierre drive, could work. The issue is the amount of energy required to do it. Because mass bends spacetime– that’s the bowling ball on the trampoline analogy.

If you don’t have that mass to build a warp bubble, you need an equivalent amount of energy, which is times the speed of light squared. So that’s a level of energy we don’t know how to harness yet. So that’s the barrier that’s keeping us from getting there.

IRA FLATOW: You have to keep up with all these things, don’t you?

ERIN MACDONALD: Yeah. And sometimes the writers get to it before I do. A lot of the writers love science. They’re really interested in it. And so I’ll pop into a writers room. And they’ll be like, hey, Erin, tell us about this new black hole finding. And I’ve got to go look it up. And it’s really cool. It’s great to have a team that’s so invested in science as well.

IRA FLATOW: All right. We’re talking with Erin Macdonald. She’s science consultant for Star Trek. She’s based in Los Angeles. If you’d like to join us, please. You can tweet us– some more tweets coming in– @SciFri. Or you can call us 844-724-8255. We have to take a break. We’ll be right back. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. I’m talking with Dr. Erin Macdonald, science consultant for the Star Trek franchise. She’s based out in Los Angeles, of course. Our number– 844-724-8255 if you’d like to talk to us and ask a question– 844-SCI-TALK.

Dr. Macdonald, do you ever view this as more than just a science fiction thingy, but maybe a teaching experience?

ERIN MACDONALD: Oh, absolutely. I think it’s hard to undersell how influential Star Trek has been on science. It’s been around for, gosh, 60-plus years at this point. And it has influenced and inspired people to become scientists.

And so there is some responsibility to uphold that legacy of inspiring people and getting the science correct. And particularly, with the new show Star Trek Prodigy, which is targeted at kids, a lot of that is actually more of a teaching job and leaning on my teaching background to try to explain difficult concepts to kids, and hopefully inspire them to become scientists.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Because it can inspire a lot of people to think about the laws of physics. I mean, seriously. I mean, let me go to, for example, my next caller. Let’s go to Nicholas in New Bedford, Mass. Hi, Nicholas.

AUDIENCE: Hi.

IRA FLATOW: Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: So in the latest season of Star Trek Discovery, we see the ship go past the edge of our galaxy into another galaxy where the laws of physics seem to differ very greatly. Now, is this some way something theoretical? Is there actually evidence that suggests that in another galaxy, but still in our same universe, there could be very different laws of physics?

ERIN MACDONALD: Understood. Yeah. No, I really appreciate that question. So yeah, in season four of Star Trek Discovery, the crew go past the galactic barrier, which was inspired from all the way back to the original series. And then they enter a what’s actually a star system, where species 10-C lives.

And what the species 10-C has done is they create a bubble that’s almost like a Dyson sphere plus that surrounds the entire star system and is protecting them from the outside. So that was more on the science fiction side. It’s always a bit of a spectrum. But what’s fun about exploring the galactic barrier, because that was more on the legacy of Star Trek, we did actually try to look up if there was any science based on that.

And just really quickly, we do have this thing called the heliopause at the edge of our solar system, where radiation particles from the sun kind of get stopped because they don’t have enough escape velocity to fully escape our solar system and the gravity well of the star.

And I was thinking like, well, what if there’s something similar at the edge of our galaxy, like galactapause, if you will. And actually, since we kind of were coming up with that idea, I did actually see a paper hit the preprint archive on the idea of a galactapause. And so this idea that there is radiation particles.

Now, it’s not so much that the laws of physics in the species 10-C star system had changed, but more that they had created an environment in which they could live and be protected from the exterior intergalactic space.

IRA FLATOW: Very well put. That’s like a master’s thesis right there.

ERIN MACDONALD: [LAUGHS] Sorry. A lot of science in one sitting, I know.

IRA FLATOW: I want to talk about Data. Because Data is, I think, one of the unique things about the Star Trek. Data– for both of you who have been in a cave for decades, Data is an Android. He’s a key star in Star Trek. And his desire to become more human all the time is giving him a personality now less science fiction-like and more science present, do you think?

ERIN MACDONALD: I do think so. And for people who might not be aware, I could recommend– it’s in my top five episodes of Star Trek to watch– is The Measure of a Man from an original series– or from the Next Generation– excuse me– that explores the rights of Data.

And I think watching that with a context now that we have with artificial intelligence, and these great strides that are happening faster than we can keep up with, is even more interesting than it even was back in the day. Because it really forces you to think about the rights of artificial intelligence. And I do think this is a conversation that we’re going to be having for a long time, and it’s going to dominate our culture in the next decade.

IRA FLATOW: Kurt in Fort Dodge Iowa. Hi, Kurt.

AUDIENCE: Yes. Hello.

IRA FLATOW: Hi there. Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: Well, I was just wondering through all the different shows and the exploration that they represent and everything that they do in the universe, I was just wondering how come you don’t really see a whole lot of exploration or explanation around trying to understand black holes.

ERIN MACDONALD: Oh, that’s a–

IRA FLATOW: You do, but you can’t see it. No, that was a bad joke. I’m sorry.

ERIN MACDONALD: [LAUGHS] Yeah. I mean, we do try to incorporate some of that. I mean, thinking about the history of science. I talked about how science is integrated with Star Trek for so long.

One of the cool things is that in the original series back in the 60s, we still hadn’t detected a black hole. It hadn’t even been coined in the literature. And I think Captain Kirk at one point says that there was like a void of blackness in space. And within a year, the term black hole had been coined in publications, which is about chicken and the egg. We don’t really know which came first with that one.

But we have tried to integrate some, and even with things that we’ve discovered through gravitational waves, we’re starting to build out our pictures of black holes even just better than we knew 10, 15 years ago. And so those start to fold into our stories a little bit more, this idea of roaming black holes. And yeah, obviously, you have to have some visual imagery that’s going to be fun to go with it.

In the recent season, season one of Strange New Worlds, they actually escape an enemy. I won’t spoil it too much, they escape an enemy by utilizing gravitational time dilation and sling-shotting around a black hole. So it’s all about just trying to find the right scientific phenomena that fits the story.

IRA FLATOW: You’re never fearful of going through your wormholes though, right?

ERIN MACDONALD: Oh, those.

IRA FLATOW: Star Trek goes through wormholes a lot.

ERIN MACDONALD: Exactly. In fact, Deep Space Nine was pretty much set at a wormhole. [LAUGHS]

IRA FLATOW: Jerry in Heber Springs, Arkansas. Welcome to Science Friday.

AUDIENCE: Hey. How you doing, Ira?

IRA FLATOW: Hey, there. Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: Hey. So I got just kind of an off-the-wall question. It’s more in personality than technology. But for your guest there, has there ever been anything that was presented by a writer or the staff where you just went, ah, yeah, no. That’s not going to work.

ERIN MACDONALD: [LAUGHS] I appreciate that question. I do think–

IRA FLATOW: Do you have that power  [LAUGHS] ?

ERIN MACDONALD: Right. I will say I do think it’s important as a science advisor to be a positive force in the room and to not squash people’s dreams and ideas. And so I try to take a “yes and” approach to story ideas that are presented to me. And sometimes it’s more important to just say that’s a really cool idea. Let’s not explain it. Let’s just let that be, and try to adjust as necessary to what we do know in science.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Well, because Rich in– where is it– Yorba Linda, California, is going to ask about something like that. Go ahead, Rich.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, thanks. My question was how legitimate is the transporter and the replicator. What kind of science do you justify that whole concept?

ERIN MACDONALD: I love– I love the transporter. OK, I’ll make this really brief. So the transporter with our physics knowledge we have now could never work. Because you break down all of the particles of the body down to almost the subatomic particles, and you have to know exactly where they are to put them back together.

And Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which is a physics concept, doesn’t allow that. The more you know about where a particle is, the less you know about the speed it’s going. And then there’s an ultimate Heisenberg limit that you can’t reach.

But in Star Trek– The Next Generation, they’re repairing the transporter at one point, and there’s a Heisenberg compensator.

IRA FLATOW: Oh, wow.

ERIN MACDONALD: And that compensates for Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. And how does the Heisenberg compensator work? It works very well. Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: You know what I want to see in Star Trek? I want to see you bring in spooky action at a distance somehow. That would be really fun. One thing happening on one side of the universe being reflected on the other side of the universe in the same way.

ERIN MACDONALD: That would be awesome.

IRA FLATOW: That– yeah. Have you had moments where you’ve actually had to change the science because it’s not working for the story?

ERIN MACDONALD: Yeah. Actually, we did with– in Discovery, there was one time where they were trying to escape– we had the dark matter anomaly, and they were writing the gravitational waves out of it, which is my technical scientific background. And gravitational waves don’t exactly work the way we were visualizing it.

The visuals, as they’re all standing around the table in The Ready Room trying to plan this, were looking like ocean waves. And gravitational waves really look more like sound waves, like compression waves that are happening in multiple dimensions.

And so they tried– to their credit, they tried to image it correctly like gravitational waves look, and it immediately pulled people out. Because you hear wave, and you expect to see something. And so we decided to just leave it looking like an ocean wave because it wasn’t worth the time and explanation it would take to explain to people why it looked that way. They’re just trying to say they’re going to ride the waves out.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Yeah. One concept that we’re getting closer to with virtual reality is the Holodeck, right?

ERIN MACDONALD: Yes. Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

IRA FLATOW: Was that one of the original ideas in Star Trek? Did someone in the early years come up with that, or did that trickle down later on?

ERIN MACDONALD: I think it was really more in the next generation is when they explored the Holodeck. And I will say– I mean, I have a virtual reality device, and it does throw you. It is a weird experience, and it does feel like the Holodeck sometimes. And I do think, yeah, we are going to get close to that technology soon.

IRA FLATOW: Jeffrey in Pittsburgh. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, there. Jeffrey, are you there?

AUDIENCE: Hello. Yeah, I’m sorry. I just had a break in the signal and then your voice. Ira. Ira, Dr. Macdonald, thank you for the very entertaining and interesting conversation. Mine is a comment and then a quick question.

As an emergency physician and somebody that’s old enough to be a fan of the original Star Trek, a medical tricorder was fascinating to me. And as I see patients today in my practice, it occurred to me that with the micronization of sensors, as well as artificial intelligence, machine learning, which I’m getting into and interested in, we’re getting close faster than I think most people realize to an early medical tricorder. And Dr. Macdonald, with your access to the scientists that you talk to, what are your thoughts on that?

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Good question. Thanks, doc.

ERIN MACDONALD: Yeah. I mean, you know, what’s interesting is I do think necessity drives invention. And in the last couple of years, we’ve tried to– we’ve been at a place where we’ve had to have more remote medical diagnostic capabilities, where you’re able to diagnose people from a distance or without touching them.

And then also technologies. I mean, I’m wearing a device on my wrist that’s measuring my heart rate, is measuring my pacing and all of those. And so, yes, certainly our technology is getting us there.

And I think even a few years ago– it’s probably close to a decade now– there was an XPRIZE to try to develop a device that could diagnose, I think, it was like five vital signs and diagnosed 12 diseases. And someone did win that. It’s just, at the time, prohibitively large and expensive.

But the technology does exist. And I do think, as you mentioned, the miniaturization of technology will get us there as well, as well as machine learning.

IRA FLATOW: You know, I kind of think that– you touched on this before, a little bit about science education. But I think speaking and talking about these things actually makes some of them happen. I’m thinking of the first flip phone, that Motorola flip phone, was based on Star Trek, wasn’t it?

ERIN MACDONALD: Yeah, absolutely. Everyone wanted to pop open that phone and call the Enterprise. And it drives that. And I– also, the one I think of too, is when we all started getting e-readers. Those were the exact shape and size of the data pads in the next generation.

And you can’t avoid the fact that people are watching this on Star Trek, or any science fiction, and think, I really want that. And then they work toward it, and they end up inventing these things.

IRA FLATOW: Cool. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Comment from Dan on Twitter who says, I teach a first-year college course called Science Fiction, Science Fact, and we watch some episodes of Star Trek- The Next Generation to discuss the importance of science fiction in understanding science. Which episodes would you recommend for teaching science? I love Measure of a Man on Data.

ERIN MACDONALD: Oh, that’s a great question. I think one of the best things– oh, there’s so many good ones– is like the science is so embedded in the DNA of Star Trek that– my personal favorite episode of Star Trek ever is Voyager’s Counterpoint. And that’s where Janeway is trying to discover where a wormhole is going to appear.

And it’s not so much about educating like what a wormhole is, but I think seeing scientists science. And Star Trek does have a lot of that, where there is a scientific problem the crew is faced with, and they approach it as scientists. And that’s something– a role I play, as well as a science advisor, is to advise on what information you need and how you approach problems.

IRA FLATOW: You know, I see the evolution, so to speak, of Star Trek from the Kirk days, where they would settle things by fighting out in the back lot someplace on a cheap set. That’s how they settled things. And then they got more cerebral later, right? But Picard solved everything with his brain. He outsmarted you. He outthought you.

ERIN MACDONALD: Yeah, absolutely. They all have their own little approaches. And you mentioned fighting on the planet with fisticuffs. But in that episode in arena, Spock and McCoy are up watching this fight go on and be like, he’s not going to figure it out. He’s got to do the chemistry. He’s got to do the science, and he eventually figures it out.

IRA FLATOW: If you could move Star Trek in some generation, some direction, I mean, where would you like to see it go?

ERIN MACDONALD: I’ve really enjoyed Prodigy and reframing these classic Star Trek ethos. Like you said, the philosophical, as well as the problem-solving and the scientific to be targeted at kids. And seeing more of that, having these more hard sci-fi shows that are accessible and available to kids, I think, really can influence an entire generation in how they decide to pursue their careers.

IRA FLATOW: Is there a teaching material? I mean, do they make teaching materials out of Star Trek episodes that they could use in school? Maybe they should be doing that.

ERIN MACDONALD: I mean, I’ve heard– I’ve certainly heard a lot of teachers, as the commenter mentioned, who use science fiction. In fact, I did as well. And for Star Trek Prodigy, we also did a series of webisodes that people can watch that was the science of Star Trek Prodigy, where we did short 5, 10-minute explainers of the science in these episodes.

So people can go and find them. They’re where you watch Prodigy, and they’re also available streaming online. Because we do want to find ways to teach through Star Trek. I think it is so effective.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, it is. And I guess once you get hooked on Star Trek, you’re hooked.

ERIN MACDONALD: You’re hooked.

IRA FLATOW: You’re hooked. So if you get hooked on– because kids are natural-born scientists. They want to know how everything works. They want to take it all apart. They’ll make mistakes. And you kind of get that vibe from Star Trek, so–

ERIN MACDONALD: Absolutely. Yeah, I agree. We’re all scientists at heart starting out. We problem-solve.

IRA FLATOW: Dr. Macdonald, good luck. You have an enviable job, I think.

ERIN MACDONALD: Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: Dr. Erin Macdonald, Science Consultant for the Star Trek franchise based in Los Angeles. Thank you for taking time and sharing what you know.

ERIN MACDONALD: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Meet the Producers and Host

About kathleen davis.

Kathleen Davis is a producer at Science Friday, which means she spends the week brainstorming, researching, and writing, typically in that order. She’s a big fan of stories related to strange animal facts and dystopian technology.

About Ira Flatow

Ira Flatow is the host and executive producer of Science Friday .  His green thumb has revived many an office plant at death’s door.

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50 years of star trek, and the influence of science fiction.

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The Science of Star Trek

Is There Any Real Science Behind Trek?

• An Introduction to Astronomy
• Important Astronomers
• Solar System
• Stars, Planets, and Galaxies
• Space Exploration
• Weather & Climate
• Ph.D., Physics and Astronomy, Purdue University
• B.S., Physics, Purdue University

Star Trek is one of the most popular science fiction series of all time and loved by people around the world. In its TV shows, movies, novels, comics, and podcasts, future inhabitants of Earth go on quests to the far reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy . They travel across space using advanced technologies like warp drive propulsion systems and artificial gravity . Along the way, the Star Trek denizens explore strange new worlds. The science and technology in Star Trek are dazzling and lead many fans to ask: could such propulsion systems and other technological advances exist now or in the future? 

In a few cases, the science is actually quite sound and we either have the technology now (such as the first rudimentary medical tricorders and communications devices) or someone will be developing it sometime in the near future. Other technologies in the Star Trek universe are sometimes in agreement with our understanding of physics—such as the warp drive—but are highly improbable to ever exist. For those, we might have to wait until our technology abilities catch up to theory. Still Trek ideas are more in the realm of imagination and don't stand a chance of ever becoming a reality.

What Exists Today or Will Sometime in the Near Future

Impulse Drive : The impulse drive is not unlike our chemical rockets of today, only more advanced. With advances taking place today , it is not unreasonable to think that we will one day have propulsion systems similar to the impulse drive on the starship Enterprise.

Cloaking Devices : The irony here, of course, is that this is a technology that humans have yet to grasp in the early  Star Trek series (although the Klingon Empire has it). Yet this is one of the technologies that is closest to becoming a reality today. There are devices that cloak small objects up to the size of people, but making an entire spaceship disappear is still quite a ways away.

Communication Devices : In Star Trek, no one goes anywhere without one. All members of Starfleet carried with them a device that allowed them to communicate with other members of the crew. In reality, many people don't go anywhere without their smartphones, and there are even working comm badges.

Tricorder-like Devices: In Star Trek, portable sensors are used "in the field" for everything from medical diagnoses to rock and atmospheric sampling. Today's spacecraft on Mars and beyond use such sensors, although not quite yet "portable". In recent years, teams of inventors have created working medical tricorder-like machines that are already making their way into the market. 

Possible, but Highly Improbable

Time Travel : Time travel into the past or the future is not in strict violation of the laws of physics. However, the amount of energy needed to accomplish such a feat takes the practicality of it out of reach.

Wormholes : A wormhole is a theoretical construct of general relativity that, under certain circumstances can be created in places like black holes . The main problem is that passing through (or even approaching) a wormhole created by such objects would be potentially deadly. The alternative is to create a wormhole in a location of your choosing, but this would require the presence of exotic matter that isn't known to exist in large quantities and would require so much energy that it is not likely we could ever achieve it. So while wormholes may very well exist, it seems highly improbable that we would ever be able to travel through one.

Warp Drive : Like wormholes, warp drive does not violate any laws of physics. However, it too would require such immense amounts of energy and exotic matter that it seems improbable that developing such technology will ever be possible.

Energy Shields and Tractor Beams : These technologies are linchpins to the Star Trek series. We could someday have technologies that have a similar effect as those used in the films. However, they will likely work in a much different manner.

Matter-antimatter Power : The starship Enterprise famously uses a matter-antimatter reaction chamber to create the energy used to power the ship. While the principle behind this power plant is sound, the problem is creating enough antimatter to make it practical. As of today, it is extremely unlikely that we will ever obtain enough antimatter to justify making such a device.

Most Likely Impossible

• Artificial Gravity : Of course, we actually have artificial gravity technology in use today. For these applications, we use rotating centrifuges to produce a similar effect to gravity, and such devices may make their way onto spacecraft of the future. However, this is quite different from what is used in Star Trek . There, an anti-gravitational field is somehow created on board the starship. While this may be possible someday, our current understanding of physics is at a loss as to how this might actually work. This is mostly because we don't actually understand gravity that well. So it is possible that this technology might move up the list as our scientific understanding grows.
• Instantaneous Matter Transport : "Beam me up, Scotty!" It's one of the most famous lines in all of science fiction. And while it allows the plot of the Star Trek films to move along at a more rapid pace, the science behind the technology is sketchy at best. It seems highly unlikely that such technology will ever exist.

Edited and updated by Carolyn Collins Petersen.

• Sub-light Speed in Star Trek: Can It Be Done?
• Could Matter-Antimatter Reactors Work?
• Is Warp Drive From 'Star Trek' Possible?
• Star Trek: Instantaneous Matter Transport
• Wormholes: What Are They and Can We Use Them?
• Can We Travel Through Time to the Past?
• Time Travel: Dream or Possible Reality?
• Is Time Travel Possible?
• How to Use Italics
• The Casimir Effect
• The 10 Closest Stars to Earth
• Profile of Stanley Woodard, NASA Aerospace Engineer
• Smartphone Technologies of the Future
• The History of Tablet Compters
• Going Inside a Star to See How It Works
• What Is Calculus? Definition and Practical Applications

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The Unexpected Resurrection of Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison died in 2018. Now, thanks to J. Michael Straczynski, he’s back. And louder than ever.

In 1968, a notoriously caustic science fiction writer accused Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry of peddling “utopian bullshit.” In 1978, this same writer — in an introduction written for Doctor Who paperbacks — mocked Star Wars , decrying it as “adolescent nonsense.” In 1983, when he learned that James Cameron had admitted to “ripping off” one of his stories, he sued and got his name put in the end credits of The Terminator . In a 1979 interview in Starlog , Mark Hamill, baffled by this angry, impish contrarian, said: “I don’t want to get on a panel with Ellison… I thought he was like a game show host.” So who the hell was Harlan Ellison? And more importantly, why did he matter?

For generations of science fiction and fantasy aficionados, saying the name Harlan Ellison is like uttering a dark spell. Ellison’s writing — primarily in short story format — is fantastic and provocative, but his reputation for contentiousness was equally potent, often overshadowing the art itself. And for younger genre fans, the name Harlan Ellison might not mean anything at all. If you’re into science fiction and fantasy and came of age in the new millennium (and his 2014 Simpsons cameo went over your head), there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Ellison.

“There was a time when he was one of the hottest speakers on college campuses anywhere, and now, he’s fallen between the cracks,” J. Michael Straczynski tells Inverse . “It was really important for me to introduce people to Harlan’s work again. A lot of his work just hasn’t been available for the past 10 or 20 years.”

Following Ellison’s death in 2018, Straczynski — comic book writing legend and creator of Babylon 5 — set out to reboot the legacy of the most energetic, and perhaps misunderstood, figure in all of speculative fiction. But this mission isn’t an attempt to sanitize or censor Ellison. Instead, with the release of a new book Greatest Hits (edited by Straczynski, with introductions from Neil Gaiman and Cassandra Khaw), Ellison’s specific brand of fantasy has re-emerged from those cracks, zombie warts and all.

The Leader of the New Wave

Harlan Ellison in 1977.

Harlan Ellison hated labels. Especially the label of “sci-fi writer.” In a 2013 profile written by Jaime Lowe for New York Magazine , Ellison said, “Call me a science-fiction writer and I will come to your house and nail your dog’s head to the coffee table!”

Part of his animosity stemmed from his tireless work to undo the genre stereotypes and constraints put on writers who worked outside of the mainstream. From the beginning of the 20th century up to the 1960s, the genre of science fiction was very different from what came next. A huge part of that change was the revolution of the “New Wave” of science fiction writers who pushed back against the stodgier and stuffier traditions of “Hard SF” and infused the genre with more literary and poetic sensibilities. Some started saying the written genre of “SF” stood for “speculative fiction,” not just science fiction. But without Ellison, science fiction (or speculative fiction) might never have grown up.

“What Harlan did in particular was to codify the New Wave,” Straczynski says. “With Dangerous Visions , he pulled it all together into one place and made it an event.”

Published in 1967, Dangerous Visions was a massive SF anthology of short stories, all edited and acquired by Ellison. (It’s just been republished, complete with a new introduction from Patton Oswalt. ) The goal was to give writers a home for short stories that were so extreme or taboo that even science fiction publications wouldn’t touch them. The first volume included edgy tales from Philip K. Dick, Robert Bloch, and J.G. Ballard, while the second volume, Again, Dangerous Visions , boasted classic short stories from the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, Joanna Russ, and Kate Wilhelm. As something of a trademark of Ellison, each story contained a lengthy introduction about the author, written in a rapid-fire, off-the-cuff style that would make Hunter S. Thompson blush. In his introduction to Dangerous Visions , Ellison brazenly declared : “What you hold in your hands is more than a book. If we’re lucky, it will be a revolution.” In a sense, he was right.

“There’s the whole thing about social movements,” Straczynski says. “Often, one person stands up and sort of embodies all of what they’re saying, and then it becomes a movement, and then it becomes a thing. And with Dangerous Visions and the New Wave, Harlan became that movement and that spearhead.”

But beyond bolstering the careers of others (he was Octavia Butler’s mentor and champion) Ellison’s own writing was unlike any other science fiction stories in the field. His two most famous stories, “Repent, Harlequin, Said the Ticktock Man” (1966) and “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (1967), are simultaneously arresting and, for their time, extremely creative. In the first, a future society obsessed with time subtracts minutes from people’s lives when they are late or break the law. In the second, a sadistic AI keeps six human beings alive and tortures them to the ends of the Earth. But that’s just the tip of the dark matter iceberg that is Harlan Ellison.

“He pulled it all together into one place and made it an event.”

He pioneered stories about super-powered telepaths with his classic “Deeper Than Darkness” (1957) and touched on concepts of immortal, undying evil in “Mefisto in Onyx” (1993). When read today, his doppelganger story “Shatterday” (1977) feels like a condensed version of a David Lynch movie, combined with the parallel worlds antics of contemporary Apple TV shows like Constellation and Dark Matter .

But Ellison’s brand of dark speculative fiction wasn’t just limited to the page. He was also part of a growing trend in the 1950s and 1960s, in which authors of prose sci-fi began writing for TV. With thrilling episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Outer Limits , plus authorship of what is considered to be the best episode of the original Star Trek , Ellison was like a one-person Black Mirror . Indeed, one of his sci-fi horror stories, “Life Hutch,” was adapted as part of Love Death and Robots in 2021.

So with all of this success and brilliant output, why was Harlan Ellison so angry?

The Antichrist of Science Fiction

Writer Harlan Ellison at Mile High comics book store in 1982.

Harlan Ellison wrote Star Trek ’s seminal time-travel tragedy, the 1967 episode “The City on the Edge of Forever.” For almost six decades, this single story has often been cited as the best episode of Star Trek , ever, and its legacy continues to be relevant to the canon today — Michelle Yeoh’s upcoming Section 31 movie is a direct result of her character, Philippa Georgiou, stepping through the Guardian of Forever , a time portal originally introduced in Ellison’s episode.

Ellison infamously hated the aired version of the episode. While at least one entire book has been written about this kerfuffle, Ellison’s frustration basically comes down to a rowdy, and utterly divergent rewrite, which he said compromised his artistic integrity. Ellison felt steamrolled by Gene Roddenberry, which was ironic because just one year prior he’d formed “The Committee” — a select group of massive science fiction authors, including Frank Herbert , A.E. van Vogt, and others — with the express purpose of making sure Star Trek remained on the air.

“I think he just saw a lot of sloppiness going on [with Star Wars ].”

“What Star Trek really did was popularize science fiction in ways that hadn’t been done before,” Straczynski says. “It brought a new language in the vernacular to the popular culture. It galvanized the space program. There will never be another Star Trek any more than there’ll be another Beatles, and their place in the culture cannot be overestimated. The downside of that is that it codified a certain kind of storytelling in ways that limit other opportunities.”

Ellison clearly saw the rise of big franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars as a double-edged sword for the larger world of speculative fiction. Yes, it made SF more mainstream, but it was also reductive. So he went on the attack. In the humorous and raunchy story “How’s the Nightlife on Cissalda?” (1977), Ellison, still annoyed by his Star Trek experience, depicted a fictionalized version of William Shatner unsuccessfully trying to seduce an alien creature.

The classic Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever.”

When it came to Trek , Harlan Ellison liked to bite the hand that fed him.

“He could dine off of ‘I wrote for Star Trek ’ for quite some time,” Straczynski says. “He was able to parlay that to success in many respects, even though he hated the process.”

While his anger over being rewritten explains some of his animosity with Star Trek — and its fans — why was Ellison so anti Star Wars ? As someone from the print world of science fiction who had tried to start a more progressive, literary trend in the genre, Ellison almost certainly saw the gee-whiz swashbuckling brand of Star Wars’ heroism as inherently regressive, more reminiscent of the conservative era of SF publishing in the ’30s and ’40s, than anything from what was then the modern era of speculative fiction.

“I think he just saw a lot of sloppiness going on [with Star Wars ],” Straczynski says. “Harlan was fairly rigorous in his writing, and there was just so much there that didn’t make sense.”

Ellison was hardly a voice in the wilderness on this topic: His friend and colleague Ursula K. Le Guin also trashed Star Wars in 1978, writing , “What is nostalgia doing in a science fiction movie?”

Because of his acerbic and often petty put-downs, Ellison behaved in public more like a bratty rock star than a writer. In a 1977 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction , he even referred to himself as “the antichrist of science fiction.” In 1982, in the introduction for Ellison’s book Stalking the Nightmare , Stephen King acknowledged that not everyone was down with Ellison’s brand of iconoclasm but defended his artistic idealism, writing, “People who are afraid don’t like people who are brave.”

A Rebirth Before Death

Harlan Ellison and lifelong friend Walter Koenig (of Star Trek fame) at the Star Trek Las Vegas Convention in 2014. Ellison’s animosity toward Trekkies lightened up in the last years of his life.

Because he cared about human rights (and the often tramped-on rights of writers), Ellison didn’t make things easy on himself. As Straczynski writes in his introduction to Greatest Hits , it was “exhausting” to be Harlan Ellison.

But then, after 2006, following a surreal acceptance speech at the Hugo Awards, something unexpected happened: Harlan Ellison, publicly, appeared to repent for some of his bad behavior. He was no longer giving terse and angry interviews. He was apologizing. He allowed a documentarian to chronicle his life. He even lightened up on Trekkies. In 2014, with the full cooperation of the Star Trek licensing division, IDW Comics published Star Trek: Harlan Ellison’s City on the Edge of Forever, a five-part miniseries that presented Ellison’s original award-winning teleplay as an episode of the classic Trek. In the letters pages, Ellison even walked back long-held assertions about how his script was misinterpreted, admitting, among other things, that despite decades of complaining about other writers not knowing the difference between “runes” and “ruins,” it turns out no such confusion ever existed.

In 2011, I was asked to call Harlan Ellison, after having written a review of his short story, “How Interesting: A Tiny Man.” Fearful of his litigious reputation (I had compared Ellison to the Gallagher brothers from Oasis in my essay), I dialed the number with trepidation. But it turned out that the angry old man had merely wanted to thank me, saying “I appreciate you taking the time to read my story and say something about it.”

So, what happened? Why did Ellison mellow out later in his life? While it’s a much longer tale — that Straczynski plans to tell in due course — let’s just say that the lighter, more ebullient side of Ellison was partially because of the influence of Straczynski himself. There’s a reason why Ellison chose Straczynski to take on his literary estate, and their friendship and trust for each other is part of why Ellison’s final years were ones of good humor and grace.

A Writer’s Writer

Harlan Ellison, around the time he edited Dangerous Visions in 1967.

Ellison disliked the pretension of writers and often insisted it shouldn’t be thought of as a “holy chore” but a job like any other. He often would sit in the windows of bookshops with his typewriter and write short stories based on prompts that were put in sealed envelopes ahead of time. In the final short story in Greatest Hits — “All the Lies That Are My Life” — Ellison makes a working-class distinction between an author and a writer . The former was someone who liked awards and prestige, the latter was “someone who gets hemorrhoids from sitting on his ass all his life… writing .”

This kind of attitude is probably best exemplified in his epic “Pay the Writer” rant , which highlights the ways in which the act of writing is so brutally devalued in the capitalist nightmare. Celebrated writer Patty Lin — the author of the recently published memoir End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood — remembers Harlan Ellison’s staunch support of the rights of writers fondly. At the end of the 2007-08 Writers Guild of America strike, Lin recalls Ellison being furious that the WGA had capitulated too easily. Wearing “rumpled pajamas,” Lin says, Ellison chastised the union leadership for not going far enough. “We had them by the balls,” Lin remembers Ellison saying, depressed that the WGA didn’t get a better contact.

“It was that no-bullshit, justifiably angry way he expressed it that was so on brand.”

“I loved Harlan Ellison for what he said that day,” Lin tells Inverse . “It was exactly what I was thinking and what many other people in that room were probably thinking. It was that no-bullshit, justifiably angry way he expressed it that was so on brand. And that dramatic flair was what made him a great storyteller.”

As the title suggests, Greatest Hits is a kind of historical document. These are stories that don’t necessarily reflect where science fiction and fantasy are going but where the genre has been, as seen through the dark lenses of Harlan Ellison. Some of the stories (like “Shatterday”) hold up beautifully. Some, as Cassandra Khaw points out in her introduction, have problematic elements.

But unlike recent reissues of books by Roald Dahl or Ian Fleming , these stories remain uncensored. The fight against censorship was one of Ellison’s lifelong passions, and so, other than a few content warning labels in the book, the sex, sci-fi, and rock ’n’ roll of this writer's vision remains intact and raucous. Like the punk rock of genre fiction, Ellison’s stories are as jarring and blistering as ever.

“No, no, you don’t touch Harlan’s stuff, man,” Straczynski says. “Even if he’s dead, he’ll come after you.”

Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits is out now from Union Square and Co.

• Science Fiction

Welcome to the future: 11 ideas that went from science fiction to reality

These modern-day technologies appeared in science fiction decades before their time.

 Science fiction has always been a medium for futuristic imagination and while different colored aliens and intergalactic travel are yet to be discovered, there is an array of technologies that are no longer figments of the imagination thanks to the world of science fiction. Some of the creative inventions that have appeared in family-favorite movies like "Back to the Future" and "Total Recall," are now at the forefront of modern technology. Here are a few of our favorite technologies that went from science fiction to reality. 

The mobile phone

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From: "Star Trek: The Original Series"

It's something that almost everyone has in their pockets. Mobile phones have become a necessity in modern life with a plethora of remarkable features. The first mobile phone was invented in 1973, the Motorola DynaTAC. It was a bulky thing that weighed 2.4 lbs. (1.1 kilograms) and had a talk time of about 35 minutes.  It also cost thousands of dollars. 

The Motorola DynaTAC was invented by Martin Cooper, who led a team that created the phone in just 90 days. A long-standing rumor was that Cooper got his inspiration from an episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk used his hand-held communications device. However, Cooper stated in a 2015 interview that the original inspiration was from a comic strip called Dick Tracy, in which the character used a "wrist two-way radio." 

 The universal translator 

While exploring space, characters such as Captain Kirk and Spock would come across alien life who spoke a different language. To understand the galactic foreigners, the Star Trek characters used a device that immediately translated the alien's unusual language. Star Trek's universal communicator was first seen on screen as Spock tampered with it in order to communicate with a non-biological entity (Series 2 Episode 9, Metamorphosis). 

Although the idea in Star Trek was to communicate with intelligent alien life, a device capable of breaking down language barriers would revolutionize real-time communication. Now, products such as Sourcenext's Pocketalk and Skype's new voice translation service are capable of providing instantaneous translation between languages. Flawless real-time communication is far off, but the technological advancements over the last decade mean this feat is within reach. 

Teleportation

From : "Star Trek: The Original Series"

The idea behind "beaming" someone up was that a person could be broken down into an energy form (dematerialization) and then converted back into matter at their destination (rematerialization). Transporting people this way on Star Trek's USS Enterprise had been around since the very beginning of the series, debuting in the pilot episode.

Scientists haven't figured out how to teleport humans yet, but they can teleport balls of energy known as photons. In this case, teleportation is based on a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement . This refers to a condition in quantum mechanics where two entangled particles may be very far from one another, yet remain connected so that actions performed on one affect the other, regardless of distance. The information exchange between the two photons occurs at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light.

Related: Chinese Scientists Just Set the Record for the Farthest Quantum Teleportation

 3D holograms 

From: "Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope"

Not long into the first Star Wars movie, Obi-Wan Kenobi receives a holographic message. By definition, a hologram is a 3D image created from the interference of light beams from a laser onto a 2D surface, and can only be seen in one angle. 

In 2018, researchers from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, created a real hologram. Their technique, called volumetric display, works like an Etch-A-Sketch toy, but uses particles at high speeds. With lasers, researchers can trap particles and move them into a designated shape while another set of lasers emit red, green and blue light onto the particle and create an image. But so far, this can only happen on extremely small scales.  

Related: Cool! 'Star Wars'-Like Tech Warps Light into 360-Degree 3D Images

Bionic limbs

From: "Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back"

Imagine getting your hand chopped off by your own father and falling to the bottom of a floating building to then have your long-lost sister come and pick you up. It's unlikely in reality, but not in the Star Wars movies. After losing his hand, Luke Skywalker receives a bionic version that has all the functions of a normal hand. This scenario is now more feasible than the previous one.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, have been developing a way for amputees to control each of their prosthetic fingers using an ultrasonic sensor. In the movie, Skywalker's prosthesis uses electromyogram sensors attached to his muscles. The sensors can be switched into different modes and are controlled by the flexing or contracting of his muscles. The prosthesis created by the Georgia Tech researchers, however, uses machine learning and ultrasound signals to detect fine finger-by-finger movement.

Digital Billboards

From: "Blade Runner"

Director Ridley Scott presents a landscape shot of futuristic Los Angeles in the movie "Blade Runner." While scanning the skyscrapers, a huge, digital, almost-cinematic billboard appears on one of the buildings. This pre-internet concept sparked the imagination of Andrew Phipps Newman, the CEO of DOOH.com. DOOH — which stands for Digital Out Of Home — is a company dedicated to providing live, dynamic advertisements through the use of digital billboards. The company is now at the forefront of advertising as it offers a more enticing form; one that will make people stop and stare.

Digital billboards have come a long way since DOOH was founded in 2013. They have taken advantage of crowded cities, such as London and New York, to utilize this unique advertising tactic. Perhaps the more recent "Blade Runner 2049" will bring us even more new technologies.

Artificial Intelligence

The "Blade Runner" story heavily revolves around the idea of synthetic humans, which require artificial intelligence (AI). Some people might be worried about the potential fallout of giving computers intelligence, which has had disastrous consequences in many science-fiction works. But AI has some very useful applications in reality. For instance, astronomers have trained machines to find exoplanets using computer-based learning techniques. While sifting through copious amounts of data collected by missions such as NASA's Kepler and TESS missions, AI can identify the telltale signs of an exoplanet lurking in the data. 

Related: Why You Shouldn't Expect to See 'Blade Runner' Replicants Anytime Soon

Space stations

From: "2001: A Space Odyssey" 

Orbiting Earth in "2001: A Space Odyssey" is Space Station V, a large establishment located in low-Earth orbit where astronauts can bounce around in microgravity. Does this sound familiar?

The Space Station V provided inspiration for the International Space Station (ISS), which has been orbiting the Earth since 1998 and currently accommodates up to six astronauts at a time. Although Space Station V appears much more luxurious, the ISS has accomplished much more science. The ISS has been fundamental to microgravity research since the start of its construction in 1998. 

The Space Station V wasn't just an out-of-this-world holiday experience, it was also employed as a pit-stop before traveling to the Moon and other long-duration space destinations. The proposed Deep Space Gateway would be a station orbiting the moon that would serve a similar purpose.

Related: The 25 Greatest Spaceships of Science Fiction

From: "2001: A Space Odyssey"

Tablets are wonderful handheld computers that can be controlled at the press of a finger. These handy devices are used by people across the globe, and even further upwards on the ISS. Apple claims to have invented the tablet with the release of its iPad. However, Samsung made an extremely interesting case in court that Apple was wrong: Stanley Kubrick and Sir Arthur C. Clarke did, by including the device in 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968.

In the film, Dr. David Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole watch news updates from their flat-screen computers, which they called "newspads." Samsung claimed that these "newspads" were the original tablet, featured in a film over 40 years before the first iPad arrived in 2010. This argument was not successful though, as the judge ruled that Samsung could not utilize this particular piece of evidence .  

Hoverboards

From: "Back to the Future Part II"

The Back to the Future trilogy is a highly enjoyable trio of time-traveling adventures, but it is Part II that presents the creators' vision of 2015. The film predicted a far more outlandish 2015 than what actually happened just five years ago, but it got one thing correct: hoverboards, just like the one Marty McFly "borrows" to make a quick escape.

Although they aren't as widespread as the film perceives, hoverboards now exist . The first real one was created in 2015 by Arx Pax , a company based in California. The company invented the Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA™) used to provide the levitation of a hoverboard. The board generates a magnetic field, which in turn creates an eddy current, which then creates another opposing magnetic field. These magnetic fields repel each other against a copper "hoverpark" that provides lift. 

Driverless cars

From: "Total Recall"

In the 1990 film, set in 2084, Total Recall's main protagonist Douglas Quaid (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) finds himself in the middle of a sci-fi showdown on Mars. In one scene Quaid is on the run from the bad guys and jumps into a driverless car. In the front is "Johnny Cab," which is the car's on-board computer system. All Johnny needs is an address to take the car to its intended destination.

Although the driverless car wasn't seen in action before the protagonist yells profanities and takes over the driving, the idea of having a car that takes you to your destination using its onboard satellite navigation has become increasingly popular . The company at the forefront of driverless cars is Waymo , as they want to eradicate the human error and inattention that results in dangerous and fatal accidents.

In 2017, NASA stated its intentions to help in the production of driverless cars, as they would improve the technologies of robotic vehicles on extraterrestrial surfaces such as the Moon or Mars. 

Additional resources: 

• The 'Star Trek' Holodeck: From Science Fiction to a New Reality
• Star Trek: History & Effect on Space Technology
• Meet CIMON, the 1st Robot with Artificial Intelligence to Fly in Space
• Best Space Movies in the Universe

This article was adapted from a previous version published in All About Space magazine, a Future Ltd. publication. Email Lee Cavendish at [email protected]. Follow us on Twitter  @Spacedotcom  and on  Facebook .

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Lee Cavendish holds a degree in Observational Astronomy from the University of South Wales, United Kingdom, where his research interests focused on studying the main types of eclipsing binary star systems: Algol, Beta Lyrae and W Ursae Majoris. He is the former staff writer for our sister publication All About Space magazine, where he covered everything from the latest space technologies and mission launches to planetary science and complexities of the universe.

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Star Trek's Writers Didn't Invent The Borg Queen – A Paramount Executive Did

When the Borg were first introduced on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (in the 1989 episode "Q Who"), they were terrifying. Clearly inspired by the works of H.R. Giger, the Borg sported tubes, servos, wires, and ineffable black machinery sprouting from their bodies. The Borg were made up of other species that had been kidnapped and assimilated into their collective, their minds wiped and replaced with a singular, terrifying machine consciousness. The Borg traversed space in outsized cube-shaped vessels, likewise crisscrossed with wires and ducts. They only had one goal: to grow. As Q (John de Lancie) described them, the Borg are the ultimate users. They look out at the universe and emotionlessly see nothing but raw materials to expand with.

The Borg returned periodically throughout "Next Generation," becoming one of the show's more impressive antagonists. The race of soulless machine people proved to be a great villain.

Naturally, when "Next Generation" moved into feature films, the Borg had to return. Jonathan Frakes' 1996 film "Star Trek: First Contact" featured the Borg traveling back in time to a vulnerable moment of Earth's history, hoping to alter events in their favor. In the past, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise discovered a new Borg wrinkle: they didn't have a group consciousness but were ruled by a sweaty, malevolent, emotional Queen (Alice Krige). Giving the Borg a "boss monster" was a silly twist that has, unfortunately, become a key part of "Star Trek" lore.

In the oral history book "The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams," edited by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, "First Contact" co-writer Brannon Braga revealed that the Borg Queen was invented by a Paramount executive named Jonathan Dolgen ... who thought the Borg were boring.

To elucidate: "Star Trek: First Contact" is about a Borg attack on Earth that is cut short by the tactical savvy of Starfleet and the Enterprise-E. Just before their ship is destroyed, the Borg send a small spherical vessel through a mysterious time portal. The Enterprise pursues, getting caught briefly in a "time wake" and for a moment see that history has been altered. The Earth's population is now nine billion Borgs. The Enterprise goes back to the year 2063 to prevent their timeline alteration.

Audiences finally meet the Borg Queen a third of the way into the film. Unlike the other Borgs, the Queen is individualistic, sexual, and emotional and claims to speak for the Borg. Uncharacteristically, she states very specific goals. She was a fun, slinky, terrifying movie monster, but she made the Borg less threatening; the previously single-minded cyborgs now had a leader one could negotiate with.

Which is how Dolgen wanted it. The exec said that the Borg were dull, amounting to little more than robot zombies. They needed a voice. Screenwriter Brannon Braga hastened to come up with a "fix." Braga recalled: 

"We did a substantial rewrite. Also, it was Jonathan Dolgen at the time who ran Paramount, the biggest cheese there was, and he was also a ravenous 'Star Trek' fan. Rick and I used to go into his office for meetings all the time, and he would say, 'Oh, I really like this episode and that episode.' I think he was the one who said the Borg are boring. They're just zombies, you need a voice. We thought, 'S***, okay, it's like a hive. Like a bee colony. Let's make a queen,' and it was probably the best invention we could have possibly come up with." 

A hive? Sure.

Assimilate this

Turning the Borg into a hive made the villains a lot less interesting. Instead of being an unreasonable machine intelligence, there was now a hierarchy on board a Borg ship, with a "captain" calling the shots and the "drones" taking orders. And if the Queen was sexual and emotional, she was suddenly prone to trickery and manipulation herself. Indeed, in the climax of "First Contact," Data (Brent Spiner) hoodwinks the Borg Queen; she is emotionally distracted enough to let Data (Brent Spiner) re-aim the ship's torpedos.

But Braga was just following orders from Paramount, and a Borg Queen was his most elegant solution. At least the change was demanded by a Trekkie with his own vision of the franchise, and not an ignorant moneyman looking for toyetic images.

Early in the scriptwriting process, it seemed that Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) was to be the hero. Braga realized that Picard should be the one to face off against the Borg again, saying:

"I don't think anyone realized by shuffling Picard and Riker around it would change things so monumentally, but I'm glad it did. Because it was the next movie, and it had been two years since you had last seen Picard, you kind of wanted to do big things with him. You wanted to have him fall in love and take a woman with him at the end. Actually, it was a good instinct on Patrick's part, because you want to see these characters in new situations. But this is an action movie. A romance? What a stupid idea. In the rewrite, the Borg meets the captain and he's our action hero."

"First Contact," despite its action film trappings , was a big hit, and is often considered the best of the "NextGen" movies. A Hive it is.

Sci-fi TV is in its golden age: What you need to know now

In a career that spans 50 years, John Peel has done it all, written it all and seen it all in sci-fi — published some 120 novels, including a few dozen tie-ins of established classics like “Star Trek” and “Doctor Who,” written sci-fi books for kids and young adults, and sci-fi series under his own name (like “2099").

But the Manorville resident since 1991 admits he has never seen anything quite like this — more sci-fi splashed across more networks and streaming services than any single human being could hope to consume in a year.

Local sci-fi author John Peel in the library/office of his Manorville house on April 18, 2024 where he has a full collections of classic sci-fi series. Credit: Elizabeth Sagarin

Much of this bounty is good, he says, much compelling, much bleak. A proud Trekkie  born in England 70 years ago, Peel explains that “''Star Trek'' was very optimistic because "that was [creator] Gene Roddenberry's vision — that we can make things work. Nowadays, some of these shows say 'No we can't!' ”

Using sci-fi to stare into the dark night of our collective souls is hardly all that's behind this new golden age of sci-fi, he says. Rather, “people are really turning to sci-fi at the moment because the world has changed so much.”

We're frankly living through a moment right now that's science fictional. - Lisa Yaszek, Georgia Tech, Atlanta

The idea of science fiction as a beacon to guide us forward to a bright and distant future — or a dark and threatening one — has been around since at least the 1940s, when Isaac Asimov first began publishing his monumental “Foundation” series (about, indeed, a “dark” age that would last 30,000 years, now a brilliant series on Apple TV+). TV embraced the genre not long after (“Buck Rogers,” “Captain Video”) and hasn't let go since.

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But what's going on right now is unprecedented. There are dozens of series on a half-dozen streamers  not counting cable channel Syfy (which after all is sci-fi-all-the-time, with a smattering of horror). There are another 15 shows in development arriving between next week (“Dark Matter,” Apple TV+, May 8) and well into next year (including “Dune” and “Alien” prequels).

Streaming is obviously behind this TV sci-fipalooza. The adaptations of videogames to TV series are as well.

Yet Peel and some other observers point to something else — a transformative moment in the culture at large that feels both restless and anxious. Sci-fi is, and always has been, made for times like these, they say.

Maybe we look to sci-fi to predict where we are going or to offer some answers - Ken Deep, Ridge

“There are a number of factors that have come together, but we're frankly living through a moment right now that's science fictional,” says Lisa Yaszek, Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Yaszek cites the “revival of the space race,” funded in part by private billionaires, like Elon Musk, which classic sci-fi author Robert Heinlein long ago prophesied.

“And everyone's talking about AI, which is certainly not quite the way we thought it was going to look like,” she says. “But it's definitely making really science fictional changes right up to the way we do labor and the way we think about humans and how we represent ourselves in politics. So it's a very, very exciting moment — either that or terrifying. Or both.”

Ken Deep, a Ridge resident and sci-fi expert who has run “Doctor Who” conventions on Long Island since 2013 (and just published “The Companions of Doctor Who”), puts it this way: “I feel like we are living in a dystopian nightmare right now, and maybe we look to sci-fi to predict where we are going or to offer some answers. We all want to know that it doesn’t end here, that the future is bright, or at least that we make it through.

 “Or maybe,” he adds, “we are just looking for a fantastic escape.”

Ken Deep, a world-leading expert on Doctor Who holds his book The Companions of Doctor Who while standing with a replica Tardis built by and standing in his friend Steven Davis' yard in Baldwin on April 16, 2024. Credit: Newsday/Steve Pfost

Indeed, this golden age of sci-fi TV has been driven by lots of disparate elements — social, cultural, and of course commercial — while television just underwent a revolution (streaming), which continues to have a huge impact.

There are a lot of genuinely great sci-fi series on TV right now, and lots of questions, too. Here's a handy guide to some of those.

First things first: What exactly is “sci-fi” anyway? 

Experts like Yaszek insist that anything with a science-fictional hook qualifies, regardless of whether it's set in the past, present or future. That means the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which began on the big screen in 2008) is a type of sci-fi, and so are “The Handmaid's Tale” (2017) and “Stranger Things”' (2016). She argues that those are part of this “golden age,” too.

There are, in fact, at least two dozen sci-fi subgenres, and dozens of subgenres within those, including slipstream, which combines elements of speculative fiction with sci-fi elements (“Handmaid's”), or cosmic horror (“Stranger Things”). Many of these have become well-represented on TV in recent years, most notably animé.

But this TV boom is really about hard science fiction, or that most famous genre of them all, largely preoccupied with trips to the stars, or the application of awe-inspiring theory (quantum superposition) to wildly imaginative leaps (multiple universes). 

Which series got this sci-fi TV renaissance started? 

Doug Jones as Saru, Sonequa Martin-Green as Burnham, Chelah Horsdal as Rillak and Hiro Kanagawa as Dr. Hirai of the Paramount+ original series "Star Trek: Discovery." Credit: Paramount+/Marni Grossman

 Two of them did. Launching in 2017 after a 12-year “Trek” break on TV, “Star Trek: Discovery” returned with that classic utopian “Trek” outlook that had been so much a part of the previous five scripted spinoffs, but with one critically important twist — the captain of the USS Discovery was a Black woman (with a male name, Michael Burnham), played by Sonequa Martin-Green. Diversity, and especially LGBTQ representation, has been a big part of this boom, and “Discovery” — which ends its five-year run next month — deserves a lot of the credit for that, says Yaszek and others. Since 1966 when the original “Trek” launched, there have been 12 “Trek” series, with five arriving after “Discovery.”

“The Expanse” deserves some credit, too. After Syfy canceled the much-beloved space opera in 2018, fans — aka “screaming firehawks” — collected 100,000 signatures for a petition that persuaded Prime Video to continue for three more seasons. (Incidentally, a letter-writing campaign also extended the original “Trek” by a season.)   

But why has 'Trek' resonated so much over a particularly divisive stretch in American culture and politics?

Stefanie Gangone, a "Star Trek" fan, with her vehicle resembling The Galileo from that show, in North Babylon, on, April 17, 2024. Credit: Newsday/Steve Pfost

One of Long Island's leading “Trek” experts (and a Trekkie) has a theory.

Stefanie Gangone, a children's librarian from North Babylon, stages an annual “Trek” convention at the Hyatt Regency in Hauppauge (Gangone says she expects a record 1,200 attendees at the next one, which will run May 31 through June 2).

These newest “Trek” series are “not only about hope, but also empathy for all humankind," Gangone says. "They have characters who are gay or nonbinary. PTSD, depression and social anxiety are also depicted in many episodes. Fans can relate [and] until the Vulcans come to visit us, we aren't going to give up on hope for a more peaceful planet. 'Star Trek' gives us that.”

As Georgia Tech's Yaszek explains, “All moments where we see booms in sci-fi TV coincide with key moments in the space race, or in the evolution of small screens and the stories that we can produce for them; and key moments when we are thinking about the value of various kinds of cultural diversity, especially in terms of feminism and civil rights.”

 After “Discovery” wraps May 30, a sixth “Star Trek” series will arrive later this year (“Starfleet Academy”) and a movie, "Star Trek: Section 31,” about the spy agency known as Section 31, starring Michelle Yeoh. They'll join “Picard,” “Short Treks,” “Lower Decks,” “Strange New Worlds” and “Prodigy” on Paramount+.

What are some of the other big series out there right now?

The first season of “3 Body Problem” — an adaptation of Liu Cixin's trilogy about an alien invasion of Earth — arrived last month to become the most streamed series on Netflix.

“Fallout” — based on the role-playing video game of the same name, and set in the aftermath of a nuclear war in the distant future — premiered April 12 on Prime and was also an instant hit.

Then, on May, 8, “Dark Matter” — a nine-part series drawn from Blake Crouch's 2016 bestseller about a physicist trapped between parallel universes — launches on Apple TV+.

All of this is part of a TV sci-fi wave that's not expected to crest for months. The longest-running sci-fi TV series of them all — a total of 40 seasons — the time-bending “Doctor Who,” comes to Disney+ on May 10, with a new “doctor” played by Rwandan-Scottish star Ncuti Gatwa, as the first Black actor to lead the series and the first to identify as queer.  

What else is coming up?

Mae (Amandla Stenberg) in Lucasfilm's "The Acolyte"on Disney+. Credit: Lucasfilm Ltd.

Two new live-action “Star Wars” series are on deck, beginning with the “The Acolyte” (Disney+) on June 4, then “Skeleton Crew” later this year. (The former is a mystery-thriller with Carrie-Anne Moss and Amandla Stenberg, set in the last days of the High Republic; the latter about four kids lost in a galaxy.)

Warner Bros. Discovery is also about to build out the “Dune” universe with a TV series, “Dune: Prophecy” — set 10,000 years before the events of the hit movies, about the sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit, a secret order of female spies with superpowers. It will stream on Max most likely this fall. 

Series based on sci-fi classics “Alien,” “Blade Runner,” “Time Bandits,” “Battlestar Galactica” and “The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy” are in production and should arrive by this time next year.

What has streaming got to do with this?

Lee Pace in "Foundation," streaming on Apple TV+. Credit: Apple TV+

The streaming revolution — and this golden age of sci-fi — really got underway in 2019 with the launch of Apple TV+ and HBO Max (now Max). The first “Star Wars” series, “The Mandalorian,” ' launched Nov. 12 on Disney+ that year and has since been followed by four others — all of them hits. “Andor,” in particular, was especially acclaimed

Apple quickly got into sci-fi and now has five ongoing series: “Invasion” (alien species on earth); “Silo” (dystopian underground community); “Constellation” (astronaut returns to earth, with problems); and “Foundation” (the long-aborning adaptation of the Asimov series, also critically acclaimed, going into a third season).

“Severance” (about workers stripped of their memories, with a second season now in production) and “For All Mankind” are especially big hits for the service, the latter an alt-history — about the U.S.-Soviet space race, which was recently renewed for a fifth season.

Sci-fi seems made for streaming, because, as Ken Deep explains, "There are no more constraints on running time or formula."

The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and the Child in "The Mandalorian" season two, on Disney+. Credit: Disney+

Why do showrunners like streaming so much? 

Joel Edgerton in "Dark Matter" on Apple TV+. Credit: Apple TV+/Sandy Morris

In a recent Zoom interview, “Dark Matter's” Crouch said that his serpentine story of a scientist (Joel Edgerton) morphing into identical copies of himself across multiple universes couldn't have possibly played as a movie.

“Originally when I was writing the novel, the first 140 pages leaked and we got a lot of interest in Hollywood for a movie, but I hadn't finished the book yet [and] when I finished the book, it had gotten a lot bigger than a 120-minute movie.”

He then spent years trying to write scripts that would work as one but they “just didn't have any heart to them and to have that, I needed someone to come along and say, 'Here, do nine 60-minute episodes. Just do the book. '

“We have a lot of characters playing multiple versions of themselves and to have the freedom to be able to tackle super-challenging subject matter and not have to reduce it to something that's bite-size was so freeing, and allowed me to really build out a world [over nine episodes]. I don't think it would have been possible to adapt this book back in the aughts because it needed that [streaming] platform to breathe and the resources to render that world, or worlds.” He adds, “I feel like streaming has opened the door to this current boom we're in.”

What about video game adaptations?

Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal in HBO's "The Last of Us." Credit: HBO/Liane Hentscher

There were countless TV series based on video games — almost all animé and few that have busted out to a broader audience. But that began to change on March 24, 2022, with the launch of Paramount +'s “Halo” (based on the game about a 26th century war between humanity and an alien race called the Covenant). It changed a whole lot more with HBO's January 2023 launch of “The Last of Us,” the post-apocalyptic-mutant-fungus game that had first arrived 10 years earlier.

That was a monster hit, and the race is now on. Gaming website TheGamer.com cites 22 series in development at Netflix, Paramount, Prime and Peacock. Most are part of the so-called “military sci-fi” genre, and include titles like “Tomb Raider,” “Mass Effect” and “God of War.”

So, why do showrunners love video games so much? 

Ella Purnell, Michael Emerson and Dale Dickey in Prime Video's Season 1 of “Fallout." Credit: Prime Video/Jojo Whilden

At last year's Comic-Con, Jonathan Nolan — who co-created Prime's “Fallout” with his wife, Lisa Joy — said he started playing the game in 2008 when he was working on “The Dark Knight.” “I was always drawn to adaptations where we have a little bit of room to create. There is, for example, no one 'Batman' canon, but dozens and hundreds of writers and artists who have worked on that character for over 80 years, so we were able to pick it up and tell our own story [in 'Dark Knight'].”

The same, he said, with “Fallout” — which is sci-fi alt-history where humans are forced into underground vaults following a nuclear holocaust. Streaming, he said, allowed “us to tell an original story in the 'Fallout' universe, free to create new characters that connected us to the rest of the 'Fallout' world.”

Does this sci-fi boom on TV reflect a deepening pessimism in the culture at large?

 Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, James Doohan in the original "Star Trek" (1966-69) Credit: Paramount/Everett Collection

This depends to an extent on whom you ask, and which shows they champion. There have been many mood shifts in sci-fi TV dating to the 1960s, but the classic standard-bearers like “Doctor Who” and especially “Star Trek” have almost always taken a sunnier, more optimistic outlook on the future — and on people.

Some observers, however, say their influence has waned as sci-fi TV has turned darker and more pessimistic. If “Trek”-influenced sci-fi was all about looking into the future for signs of hope, most series now are about looking to the future for signs of the apocalypse. 

Long Island “Doctor Who” expert Ken Deep says “science fiction typically will either be predictive or reflective.” But the current crop on TV, he suggests, seems to be both. Peel — the prolific author who admits that his lodestars remain “Doctor Who” and “Star Trek” — says: “It's harder to look to the future with optimism, to look for something bright on the horizon, but that's what we really need. We need something that inspires people to say, 'Yes! This is possible! There is a way [forward].' But I'm not sure a lot of people see their way out of it [and] that's what's reflected on TV.”

All doom and gloom? (Not entirely)

Cynthy Wu in "For All Mankind," streaming on Apple TV+. Credit: Apple TV+

Rowan J. Coleman, a 28-year-old sci-fi TV expert living in Scotland,  who launched his popular YouTube channel as a teenager in 2013, says by email: “I don't think modern sci-fi [on TV] has become cynical, just more pragmatic perhaps. I remember a trailer for 'The Expanse,' which had the line '500 Years in the Future We're Still at Each Other's Throats.' It was gritty but many of its stories were about people defying the odds and coming together to overcome a problem.”

 Apple's “For All Mankind,” is another example, he says: “That show deals with a lot of systemic problems and by no means is the world perfect, but it does show the world getting better and better with each new season.

“Science fiction may have stopped being blindly optimistic, but it hasn't stopped being optimistic.''

Verne Gay is Newsday's TV writer and critic. He has covered the media business for more than 30 years.

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Screen Rant

8 sci-fi movie inventions ruined by real science.

Plenty of science fiction movies have presented fantastic technology which remains pure fiction, with actual science refuting its ability to exits.

• Big-screen sci-fi gadgets like lightsabers and transporters are pure fantasy due to real-world physics limitations.
• From shrinking tech to time travel, many sci-fi devices rely on impossible concepts like bypassing the laws of nature.
• Holograms and cryogenic stasis may look cool in movies, but real-life science still has a long way to go to make them a reality.

Science fiction movies often encourage audiences to dream up technologies beyond their wildest dreams, making them seem realistic enough to be plausible, only to be bitterly disappointed by the limitations of real-world science. The most ambitious science fiction movies have presented a wide variety of settings, from the spacefaring fantasy worlds of Star Wars to the grounded realism of films like Arrival . As a result, the cutting-edge inventions presented by these films run the gamut of plausibility, with many being closer to magic than science.

The laws of physics are a definitive roadblock in the path of developing many of the most famous science fiction devices in the real world. Try though they might to explain away reality-defying objects with undiscovered materials, rare elements, or fictional applications of real-world physics, some of the most exciting ideas from the genre are doomed to never make it past the ideation stage, operating on assumptions about the natural world that simply can't be replicated in reality. No matter the technology level humans are able to one day achieve, some sci-fi gadgets will sadly manifest in the real world.

10 Great Science Fiction Movies Set In Historical Times

8 lightsabers, the star wars series.

One of the most iconic movie weapons ever created, lightsabers need little introduction. The mythical weapons of both the legendary Jedi order and the insidious Sith, these blazing hot swords of pure light can slice through nearly anything in the Star Wars universe , barring specialty-made materials like Durasteel. Not only that, but they're also capable of deflecting bolts from energy-based blaster weapons, making them an impressive source of offense as well as defense. In the lore of the franchise, the lightsabers are powered by the mysterious Kyber crystals.

The lightsabers operate on different laws of physics than those in reality . Creating a powerful enough beam of light to cut through solid metal would result in a much longer, unwieldy weapon, not limited in its projection to a mere three feet. Even ignoring the issues regarding the lightsabers' power source, which would easily need to be connected to some kind of power-generating backpack with today's available technology, the ability of the weapons to physically clash with one another disobeys the properties of light. In reality, crossing lightsabers would simply pass through one another.

7 Transporters

The star trek series.

With its signature sound and colorful special effects, Transporters are some of the most iconic imagery of the legendary science fiction franchise, opening up the imagination to instantaneous planetside travel without the need of landing shuttles or orbital drop pods.

The only thing better than traveling at speeds surpassing light itself is the ability to near-instantly teleport, and plenty of science fiction films have put their own spin on the concept . Perhaps the most famous is the Transporter technology of the Star Trek series, activated by a remote operator at the behest of the classic phrase, " Beam me up, Scotty! " With its signature sound and colorful special effects, Transporters are some of the most iconic imagery of the legendary science fiction franchise, opening up the imagination to instantaneous planetside travel without the need of landing shuttles or orbital drop pods.

The issue with teleportation technology isn't so much the scientific possibility, but the philosophical concerns regarding teleporting a thinking human . It's actually not too outlandish to imagine the disintegration of physical objects into intangible data that can then be received at a different access point and reconstituted. In real life, scientists have succeeded in teleporting single photons . Yet there's no guarantee that if a human being were to use teleportation, their exact copy would retain any of their previous memories. Even if they did, the technical death and copying of a single person creates an uncomfortable "Ship of Theseus" problem.

The Dune Series

Frank Herbert's Dune novels have been seeing an incredible resurgence in popularity thanks to Denis Villeneuve's excellent adaptations, introducing hordes of new fans to the far-out technology of the series for the first time. Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two both feature some pretty unbelievable technology, such as prophetic psychoactive drugs and bullet-deflecting energy shields. However, one charming piece of iconic Fremen equipment, the Thumper, seems like a straightforward mechanical device -- Simply plant it in the sand, allow the pulses to travel, and wait for a giant sand worm to show up .

Unfortunately, even the humble Thumper seems to be outside the reach of believable technology, despite seeming like a simple mechanical device. As pointed out by pop-culture physicist Niel DeGrasse Tyson on Twitter following Dune: Part Two 's release, the idea of soundwaves traveling through sand in order to draw out a subterranean creature is impossible on any planet . Sand is an incredibly effective dampener of sound, meaning that even massive shockwaves sent through a desert wouldn't have much of an effect. The idea that the Shai-Hulud could hear across such vast distances underground is impossible to begin with.

5 Hyperdrives

Another unbelievable invention to spring from the mind of George Lucas, the Hyperdrives of Star Wars fame have less than a passing relationship with the real-world laws of physics. In the universe, Hyperdrives operate by propelling a spacefaring vessel to velocities greater than the speed of light, allowing them to enter the mysterious dimension of Hyperspace . In reality, the speed of light is a limit inherent to the laws of physics, meaning that it would take an infinite amount of energy for material objects to accelerate to the lightspeed, let alone surpass it.

The controversial Holdo Maneuver of Star Wars: The Last Jedi further complicates matters. Assuming that Hyperspace is an immaterial dimension that objects traveling faster than the speed of light quickly enter, they shouldn't be able to have an effect on the physical world. Otherwise, it makes no sense that the Star Wars series isn't filled with lightspeed weaponry being haphazardly fired across every naval battle between spaceships. Regardless, the premise of outspeeding light itself is in direct defiance of a proven universal constant.

4 Holograms

The star wars series, the star trek series, the mcu.

Holograms are one of the most iconic science fiction creations, being inherent to no single series. Popularized time and time again by Star Wars , Star Trek , and even Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universes , holograms present a far more futuristic idea for a user interface, interacting with technology with constructs of light that might even respond to human touch . Unfortunately, the real-world behavior of light particles once again rears its ugly head when it comes to the actual practicality of holograms.

Holograms do exist in a sense, infamously used by the musical talents of Hatsune Miku and the late Tupac. However, these projections are quite literally the work of smoke and mirrors, relying on optical illusions, meaning that true holograms are still a distant dream of sci-fi creators . In actuality, it would be impossible to establish a way for light to arbitrarily stop at a predetermined distance, meaning that any attempt at creating a hologram would quickly devolve into a standard projector screen. That's not even to mention the concept of being able to touch and move holograms around Tony Stark-style.

3 Shrinking

Honey, i shrunk the kids.

Shrinking technology has a flirtatious relationship with science fiction movies, showing up in places like the MCU's Ant-Man trilogy and the upcoming reboot of Honey, I Shrunk The Kids . There's even a strangely specific trope used in various TV shows regarding a situation in which characters are forced to undergo a fantastic voyage within the body of another character, typically with the aid of a shrinking submarine. It's fascinating to imagine exploring the world from a more diminutive point of view , allowing scientists to study natural phenomena like insects up close and personal, though the dangers would certainly be palpable.

Sadly, the concept of shrinking a living being down to size remains a distant dream of fantastical science fiction movies. Atoms are the basic building blocks of all matter, and to shrink an object, one would either have to be made out of less atoms or change the actual size of the atoms themselves, both of which present their own problems . In the case of the former, this could work with certain inorganic matter, but no living thing could survive the process. Otherwise, atoms are simply the smallest unit that physical matter can be subdivided into, with no exceptions.

The 20 Best Science Fiction TV Series Of All Time

2 backwards time travel, the back to the future trilogy, the terminator series.

From the Terminator franchise to the Back to the Future trilogy, each movie has its own rules for time travel.

Time travel has long been the subject of fascination for science fiction movies, being a subgenre all of its own. From the Terminator franchise to the Back to the Future trilogy, each movie has its own rules for time travel. While time travel to the future could be theoretically possible, with movies like Interstellar exploring the delicate relationship high-speed travel and time have with one another, moving backwards is a scientific impossibility. Some versions of general relativity suggest that the necessary warping of spacetime time travel would require wouldn't allow potential voyagers to move backwards in the time stream .

One of the better episodes of Futurama, season 6, episode 7, " The Late Philip J. Fry ", played with this concept. Professor Farnsworth, Fry, and Bender all booking a one-way ticket to the distant future, comically witnessing the birth of a new universe identical to their own, allowing them to return to their own time in a roundabout sense. While it may be possible to step into the future, going backwards a la Marty McFly is a pure fantasy .

DID YOU KNOW: in one of the first drafts of Back to the Future (1985), the creators made the time machine into a kind of refrigerator (via Collider ).

1 Cryogenic Stasis

Another way to time travel in a sense, the concept of cryogenic stasis has been played with in a great deal of science fiction films . Used most notably in the Alien franchise , the scantily-clad warrant officer Ellen Ripley begins the first film fresh out of a cryogenic stasis pod, allowing herself and the rest of her crew to endure the brutal distances of interstellar travel. In real life, the effects of such technology would extend far beyond one's legs falling asleep.

Freezing someone to wake them up at a later time is simple enough in concept -- After all, some real world frogs and insects use a similar form of hibernation to last through tough winters. Over such dramatic time periods, however, ice crystals would inevitably form between the very cells of the human body, wreaking havoc on the hapless sleeper. Additionally, the levels of glucose that creatures who use cryogenic stasis in real life use as a sort of biological antifreeze would easily kill a human being, making such techniques exist only in the realm of science fiction .

Kinda Frugal

20 Science Fiction Technologies That Are Coming Soon

Posted: March 9, 2024 | Last updated: March 9, 2024

Science fiction has promised us extraordinary solutions for centuries, from the biggest to the most minor problems. Some, like Jules Verne’s submarines and Star Trek’s handheld communicators, are a fact of life these days.

But science is constantly advancing, and today, technologies that once appeared only in books and television shows are becoming reality.

Here are 20 of the most fantastic technologies leaping from the pages of your favorite novel into the everyday world.

1. Artificial Meat

Lab-grown food has been a staple of science fiction for over a century. From the space required to grow plants to the climate-damaging effects of mass-raising cattle, the need for alternatives grows more urgent every year. 

The race is on to develop artificial meat that tastes like the real thing without the drawbacks, and hundreds of companies are entering the race. Lab-grown foie gras , the fattened liver of a duck or goose, is already a reality. Scientists are also working hard to develop alternatives for sushi fish.

2. Genetic Cures

Authors and sci-fi fans have relied on genetic engineering’s promise since the idea first caught the attention and hearts of futurists.

In 2023, medical genetic engineering in adults became a reality for the first time when the FDA approved the first treatment for sickle cell disease that uses CRISPR, a gene editing technology.

3. Floating Farms

Farming the oceans is an old dream of sci-fi, a way of increasing humanity’s food supply as our numbers continue to grow. But there’s a hybrid approach that puts a twist on the old saw of seaweed and fish farming in the open ocean.

Forward Thinking Architecture’s Javier Ponc has designed a miniature farm, only 260 feet long, that combines hydroponics and aquaculture. The farm can be anchored to sea, lake, or river beds and towed by a ship to different locations. 

Powered by solar panels on top, the hydroponics go in the middle, and the nutrients from the plants feed a fish farm below. The prototype can produce eight tons of vegetables and two tons of fish yearly.

4. A.I. Science

Science fiction loves to debate the merits of artificial intelligence, but with the rise of large language models (LLM), it is finally becoming a reality.

While A.I. is known for smart chatting and creating art, scientists have been working to use it to advance knowledge. Normal LLMs have stark limitations in research settings. Most science-focused AIsI. have to be built for each unique application and can only be used in the field they were designed for.

A multidisciplinary group of scientists is working to build a Polymathic A.I. This powerful artificial lab assistant is flexible enough to have multiple applications and be used in several fields, such as physics, chemistry, materials engineering, biology, and more. 

The A.I. will be able to perform literature meta-analysis, design experimental protocols, and identify new avenues of research, among other things.  

5. Living Robots

Robots have been part of science fiction for just over a century, but in recent decades, futurists have wondered if steel and plastic are the best materials to make them. Biological robots, built from DNA and flesh, can be grown rather than constructed and may even be able to heal themselves.

Scientists took to the idea with a will, and Tufts University researchers have used frog stem cells to build tiny living robots, dubbed “xenobots,” no bigger than a millimeter. 

The robots have been programmed to swim and pick up items. They can also replicate themselves. Xenobots may one day be the forerunners of robots that clean up microplastics or deliver targeted medicine. 

6. Living Concrete

Since Roman times, concrete technology has been developed and refined, and it is now the second most used substance in the world after water. When futurists think of tomorrow’s materials, there’s always a place for some variation of humble concrete.

However, scientists worldwide are working to bring concrete into the future. Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder developed a new approach to designing more sustainable buildings and created a ‘living concrete’ that can grow and regenerate itself. It is a cutting-edge material that can repair itself without human intervention.

7. Better Energy Storage

While a host of science fiction technologies seek to generate power cheaper, faster, cleaner, and in larger amounts, one aspect is often overlooked: how to store that power. 

Fortunately, scientists are on the job to ensure none of that precious power goes to waste. Efforts are underway to transform concrete into batteries, aiming for houses powered by their own foundations and roads that can charge electric vehicles. Some teams are working with compressed air or hydraulic fluids.

Other scientists are looking back at older technology, like the grandfather clock. The ancient mechanical clock still holds the prestige of being relatively accurate today. To use the mechanism as a battery, surplus electricity is used to lift a multi-ton weight, then dropped to drive a generator and convert the weight back into usable electricity. 

8. 3D Printed Bones

3D printing is one of those technologies that joined the ranks of sci-fi backward. Until about 40 years ago, the idea of a box that dispensed whatever you wanted was firmly in the realm of fantasy. The idea caught fire, and soon, replicators and makers were a must-have for any sci-fi world.

Scientists are taking another step towards printing anything by making custom bone grafts using the tech. Cerhum, a Belgian company, uses the same minerals that the body does to create customized facial bone grafts, which the body then converts to natural bone over a few months.

9. Augmented Reality

An iconic part of cyberpunk is the translucent heads-up display that future denizens will use to navigate the world, much like smartphones.

While information technology exists to support dreams and appears in games like Pokemon G.O., scientists are facing the challenge of developing the hardware to allow humans to reliably browse their surroundings digitally in real-time. Smaller displays, better controls, and tiny batteries are all under development to turn this sci-fi concept into an ordinary reality.

10. Digital Twins

The idea of a scanner that can quickly and easily create a perfect model of a patient has been part of sci-fi for a long time, and one U.S. company thinks they’ve developed it. 

Q Bio has developed Gemini, a Digital Twin Platform that structures any type of information in the human body and generates a health forecast. 

The scanner then outputs a “digital twin” of the patient that mirrors an individual’s overall physical and lifestyle indicators. 

 Doctors can use the twin to diagnose, track ongoing health, build plans for preventative medicine, and compare to future scans to detect minute changes that can warn of more severe problems to come.  

11. Asteroid Mining

A long-term dream of futurists, asteroid mining, is rapidly becoming a reality. Fifteen thousand asteroids have been identified as possibilities, and just the ten closest would yield $1.5 trillion in materials.

A startup called AstroForge launched a prototype space refinery in April 2023. AstroForge’s second mission is in 2024. Another company called Karman+ is working on an optical mining technology to collect and refine water from asteroids. 

12. Blockchain

Hacking has been part of the human consciousness, particularly sci-fi, since digital computers got off the ground. Cybersecurity, the science of protecting data and systems from bad actors, got a boost from an unlikely source: cryptocurrency.

Blockchain is a distributed database spread on different network nodes, maintaining secure and decentralized transactions. It can be used for other record types, and it’s very difficult to hack and almost impossible to remove or change records. 

Fields as disparate as voting security, medical, business, and legal are all racing to develop ways to store records in blockchains, increasing the security for their clients. 

13. Better Wearables

From combadges to smart clothing, wearables have been part of sci-fi for decades. Scientists have been working to deliver on the promise of that technology for almost as long, resulting in things like smartwatches and wearable health monitors. 

Better wearables are coming along fast. 

California-based company MoJo has been developing smart contact lenses since 2015. Other teams are working on contacts that monitor blood sugar in tears and relay patients’ information via smartphone.

Scientists are also developing heart and respiratory system monitors that can be printed onto fabric and worn like bandages.

14. Sonic Fire Extinguishers

Fire is one of humanity’s oldest technologies, but since urbanization began, humanity has sought ways to contain it when it goes rogue. A proposal straight out of sci-fi may be the answer: scream at it really loudly. 

Since fire consumes oxygen, and sound is a pressure wave, a loud enough bass frequency can stifle the oxygen supply to a fire and suffocate it. A conceptual ‘Feuxzy’ drone has been created to monitor and keep forest fires at bay by using low-frequency bass sounds to disrupt the air around the fire. 

15. Personalized Medicine

The idea of medicine explicitly tuned to the patient is decades old but is only now becoming a reality. Mapping the genome has been possible for a long time, but doctors are working on new ways to interpret and read that data.

The goal is to use a person’s genes to diagnose health issues and develop genetic-level treatments customized to the patient. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) calls the study of how genes control the interactions of medications with your body medicines pharmacogenomics.

16. Water From Air

The need for water is essential to dystopias like Waterworld and Mad Max and exploratory fiction like The Martian. But potable water is just as necessary here on Earth, and the supply dwindles yearly.

Source, a start-up in the U.S., has introduced ‘hydropanels,’ a renewable water technology that is able to provide clean and sustainable water technology from sun and air. 

Like a solar panel, it can produce water without the use of electricity and infrastructure. It produces 3-5 liters (up to 1.3 gallons) of clean drinking water a day.

17. Space Catapults

Space is hard to reach. Moving on any surface uses friction, pushing against the surface to move. In three dimensions, such as underwater or in the air, propellers and turbines can use the medium they’re immersed in to move. 

But space is a vacuum, and you have to go almost straight up at high speed. 

Consequently, you need fuel and a source of oxygen for the fuel to burn. Since fuel and oxygen have weight, the more of each you carry, the more you need to lift the total load. 

This results in a complicated dance, and the heaviest part of any space launch is almost always the fuel tank.

SpinLaunch is an alternative prototype system that launches satellites into space using a ground-based, electric-powered kinetic launch system. 

The launcher spins the payload at 5,000 mph and fires it upward at that speed. Maneuvering thrusters are still required, but those engines tend to be small and lightweight.

18. Hydrogen Planes

Hydrogen for transportation took a big hit when the Hindenburg burned, but futurists and sci-fi authors have never let go. As the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen is too attractive and valuable to abandon. 

A team at The Aerospace Technology Institute in the U.K. is working on that dream, and they’ve got an exciting project ready for testing. Fly Zero is an experimental airplane that its designers hope will be able to carry passengers from London to the U.S. nonstop or London to New Zealand with one-stop, all without any carbon emissions.

19. Guide Robots

Guide dogs that help blind and differently-abled people navigate the world are ubiquitous but have a few significant drawbacks. The first is that they take up to six months to train. Second, a guide dog can cost up to $50,000 in training and upkeep every year of its working life. Last, most can only work for 8-10 years, resulting in difficult decisions for their handlers and several dogs needed over a lifetime.

Science fiction and regular science have devised a solution that promises lower costs and longer term. Students at Loughborough University in the U.K. have developed an early prototype robot that can perform the functions of a guide dog, with the added benefit of access to GPS and mapping technology. 

20. Quiet Supersonic Flight

Faster than sound, supersonic flight offers one serious advantage over traditional commercial flight: it’s more than twice as fast. In 1996, a Concorde plane, the original supersonic passenger aircraft, successfully flew from New York to London in 2 hours and 52 minutes.

Unfortunately, supersonic flight makes a bang similar in volume to thunder, with 110 decibels. Air traffic is too dense for every plane to set off a thunderclap as it passes overhead.

NASA developed the X-59 Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST) airplane to reduce the sonic boom. A unique fuselage architecture breaks up the air pattern that causes the booms. The goal is to reduce the sound of supersonic flight to be comparable to that of a standard passenger plane. 

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