The realm of science fiction is often that of the future, whether the near future, or many centuries or even millennia from now. There are many exceptions, especially when aliens bring the fiction to the story. The Day the Earth Stood Still, Starman, E.T., and Independence Day are just a few examples of sci-fi stories set in the present. In the stories that occur in or give a glimpse into the future, the writer(s) must predict what that future will be like. In this post, I’ll ruminate on what sci-fi writers have predicted for our future in general, and then zero in on some of their predictions about technology. And I’ll comment on whether those predictions have already come true, or could come true in the future.
When I think about all the sci-fi books, movies, and TV shows I know, they seem to split into two camps about our future: those that are positive, or at least hopeful, about their outlook for Earth and humanity; and those with a dystopian view. It seems to me that the negative outlook is more prevalent. But maybe that shouldn’t surprise us. As an article on this subject by Tasha Robinson notes, “Science fiction has always had a paranoid undercurrent.” Also, stories about people overcoming incredible odds in a dystopian world can make for exciting fiction. A future with bunnies hopping and birds chirping may not be quite as pulse-pounding.
But a positive view of the future can sell books (or movie tickets, or streaming services). Some popular books, movies and shows have depicted a generally positive, hopeful future for humanity. Some examples from books are Men Like Gods by H. G. Wells, The Golden Age by John C. Wright, The Martian (also a great movie) by Andy Weir, and 2001: A Space Odyssey (another great movie) by Arthur C. Clarke. Many of the most positive movies about our future are oriented, not surprisingly, toward children; for example, Meet the Robinsons, Big Hero 6, Belle (2021), the Bill & Ted trilogy (for older children), and Jetsons: The Movie. Some examples of films for more mature audiences that portrayed a generally positive future are Arrival, Contact, Her, Tomorrowland, and of course, the world of Star Trek, which despite some dark subject matter—e.g., several major wars, the Borg, the Dominion, and many cases of humans behaving very badly—is considered one of the most hopeful sci-fi views of the future.
On the negative side, it’s pretty easy to come up with a long list of sci-fi stories in which the bunnies are definitely not hopping. Star Wars, for example, is about a galaxy where an evil empire thinks nothing of destroying entire planets. The universe of the Stargate movie and series is filled with very powerful, very nasty aliens that can ruin your whole day. In the Planet of the Apes films, the Earth has been taken over by… okay, it’s in the title. In Battlestar Galactica, humanity is nearly wiped out by AI and the survivors are fleeing for their lives. In the Terminator movies, AI threatens humanity’s existence. Ex Machina explores what AI might do to the human race if unfettered… hmm… do you see a pattern there?
Then there’s the sci-fi stories that offer hope in an otherwise dystopian future. An example is one of my favorite movies, Interstellar. Most of the film is about a desperate attempt to save at least some of the human race from a dying Earth of 2067. But at the end, we’re told that love is the only thing that can transcend all dimensions, including space and time, and with help from aliens, a five dimension tesseract, and good ol’ Morse code, humanity is saved from extinction. Other examples of this mixed view are books like Brave New World, The Giver, Uglies and its sequels, Childhood’s End, and Logan’s Run that describe peaceful societies that have survived catastrophic wars and now shun violence. Yet there always seems to be some terrible downside to these otherwise Utopian societies that the protagonists must overcome. Studies have proven that actual disasters usually bring out the best in people. But at Tasha Robinson noted in her article mentioned earlier, “… there’s no huge drama in collective cooperation and support, so there’s less of it in fiction.”
Now let’s turn to sci-fi’s take on technology of the future. I realize that’s a huge subject that would take an entire book or three to do it justice. So for this post, I’m going to narrow my focus to one small slice of sci-fi: the world of Star Trek. I chose Star Trek because I’m familiar with it and I think it offers a rich assortment of tech that it either created or developed more fully from other sci-fi works.
Star Trek is about the exploration of “space, the final frontier” (except for Deep Space Nine, which is an outlier in multiple respects). So it needed a way to “explore strange new worlds” and “seek out new life and new civilizations” without boring its audience. Enter the warp drive, which allows faster-than-light travel by distorting the shape of the space-time continuum. Star Trek didn’t invent warp drive; the term is generally attributed to author John W. Campbell in 1957, although the concept of using curved (or warped) space to facilitate space travel dates back to the 1930s. But is warp drive actually possible? In 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed his Alcubierre drive, a kind of warp drive consistent with Einstein’s field equations. In Star Trek, warp drive for Earth ships was invented in 2063, so we still have a while to get there. Unfortunately, scientists believe that warp drive may not be possible because it depends on warping space, which requires negative mass/energy—antimatter. And antimatter doesn’t “fall” the right way to support warp drive. Maybe if we had some of those dilithium crystals from the Starship Enterprise…
Speaking of antimatter… a warp drive would require tremendous amounts of energy—more than could be supplied by even a fusion reactor. Star Trek’s starships use engines powered by matter and antimatter. This idea was first proposed by physicist Eugen Sänger in 1953. An antimatter reactor would provide 300 times more energy than a fusion reactor, but there’s numerous issues, including cost, that must be resolved before an antimatter engine is practical. And then it won’t be capable of hyperlight speeds, at least not any time soon. Warp drive by 2063 looks iffy at best. So, what kinds of propulsion will spaceships of the near future use? I’ll explore that question in a future blog post.
Because Star Trek is full of spaceships traveling faster than light, it had to come up with other tech to allow travel at such speeds. For example, a navigational deflector was required to ensure that space dust doesn’t hit a starship traveling at millions of kilometers per second and… well, it wouldn’t be pretty. Such a deflector would be possible, if not practical, today using lasers or perhaps an electromagnetic field. Another problem with warp drive is rapid acceleration and deceleration. If you’ve ever watched a Star Trek show or movie, you’ve probably seen a starship fire up its warp engines and disappear in, literally, a flash. To keep the ships in one piece and the people inside those ships from splattering against bulkheads, Star Trek came up with inertial dampers (more accurately inertial negation). There’s many examples of such dampers, or dampeners, today, such as liquid-filled G-suits worn by fighter pilots. Even ballast in a ship is an example of an inertial dampener. But inertial dampeners that can handle hyperlight speeds? Don’t hold your breath.
So, the crews of Star Trek’s starships are protected from certain death when starting or stopping. But how about when they’re warping through space? We can’t have them floating all over the place, can we? (We could, but the special effects budget couldn’t handle it.) No problem! Star Trek’s starships have deck plating that uses particles called gravitons to create gravity within the ships. The good news is, gravitons are real, if hypothetical, particles that mediate gravitational force. So the idea of using gravitons to create artificial gravity is pretty clever. Unfortunately, current science has no idea how artificial gravity could be created on a spaceship other than with tried-and-true rotation (cf. 2001: A Space Odyssey) or acceleration.
What will Starfleet personnel eat on board their starships? Back in the “old days” of the 2150s on the Enterprise NX-01, it was mostly real food cooked by a chef (how quaint!), augmented by a “protein re-sequencer.” But later Star Trek ships have food synthesizers and replicators (not to be confused with Stargate’s nasty replicators) that could convert energy into all kinds of food and just about anything else you could ask for, then recycle the waste back to energy. Interestingly, this is one bit of Star Trek tech that is close to being real. At least one company is working on making food with 3D printers. Nestlé is developing Star Trek-like food replicators. And Imperial College physicists have discovered how to make matter from light.
Now suppose a starship encounters some aliens—a first contact, perhaps—and the crew wants to communicate with them. On many sci-fi movies and TV shows, all aliens speak English, so that may not be a problem. But suppose these aliens don’t. Star Trek borrowed the concept of a universal translator from Murray Leinster’s 1945 novella First Contact. That device can instantly translate almost any language. In the original Star Trek, it was built into the ship’s main computer and a rarely-seen device that looked like a microphone. Later, the translator was incorporated into the crew’s comm badges. Nowadays, our “universal translators” look a lot like smart phones. I don’t know if they can translate Klingon or Romulan yet, but it came in handy on my trip to Europe last year.
Now it’s time to pay these aliens a visit. The creators of Star Trek realized that having crews take shuttles to get anywhere would not only be slow and boring (unless a shuttle crashes) but expensive in special effects. So they borrowed a concept, teleportation, first conceived by science fiction writers in the late 1800s, and came up with the transporter—a device that converts matter into energy, transmits the energy through space, and reconstitutes the matter at the destination. It’s a great plot device… never mind that it’s impossible (except for quantum teleportation, which is different) and it kills the person being transported each and every time, for a few seconds at least. Maybe that’s why Dr. McCoy never much liked the transporter.
After “beaming down,” the science officer will pull out his or her trusty tricorder, a hand-held device that can perform the three functions of sensing, recording, and computing, to scan the area for danger (or maybe to search for a beryllium sphere). There are different tricorders for scientists, medical staff, and engineers. There’s many real-world examples of devices that can perform at least some of the functions of a tricorder. There was even a contest about 10 years ago to see who could develop the best tricorder.
But suppose these aliens aren’t friendly. Then some other Star Trek tech will come into play. After at least one red-shirted security officer dies, the crew may need to defend themselves with their phasers (set to “stun” of course), one of the many kinds of futuristic weapons in the Star Trek universe. Or maybe not so futuristic… Raytheon developed what they call a Phaser (but it’s actually a maser), a directed-energy weapon that uses high-power microwave electromagnetic radiation to destroy hostile drones. More to the point, the U.S. military developed a pulsed energy projectile weapon (which is what a Star Trek phaser is) that can stun a human target.
But, back to the imperiled away team… eventually they’ll need to get the heck off the planet, so the captain (or first officer, if it’s not the original Star Trek) will pull out his or her flip phone—I mean, communicator—call the ship, and request emergency transport… assuming something isn’t blocking the communicator signal or the transporter (which seems to happen quite a lot). The Star Trek communicator, whether flip phone or comm badge style, is one piece of future tech that is commonplace today—although our cellular devices are still a bit larger than a Star Trek comm badge.
After the away team beams back to the ship, what if the aliens have the audacity to open fire on the Starfleet vessel? Hopefully the Captain has ordered the shields to be raised (why they’re not up all the time, I’ll never understand) and they’re capable of repelling the aliens’ attack—if not, see phasers, above. These defensive screens are a type of force field (a concept first used in sci-fi in the early 1900s) supposedly composed of gravitons—handy particles, those gravitons! But are force fields possible? Yes and no. If all you need to do is protect against electromagnetic radiation or shock waves, the answer is Yes. But if you need protection against weapons like lasers, phasers, photon torpedoes and the like, that’s not going to be available any time soon. What if the ship’s shields don’t protect it from damage? Then the Captain will order Damage Control parties to fix it, in part by replicating transparent aluminum panels. Transparent aluminum exists today… no doubt because Starfleet Engineer Montgomery Scott went back in time to 1986 and shared the formula with a Plexiglas engineer—tsk tsk, changing the past!
At this point the science officer will probably ask the main computer for an AI analysis of the aliens’ behavior, to get ideas on how to communicate with them. Or maybe the ship will have an officer named Data, an advanced AI with a positronic brain (first conceived by Issac Asimov over 80 years ago). But AI isn’t always helpful in Star Trek, or in other sci-fi. There’s many examples of AI running amok in Star Trek (M-5, Nomad, Vger, Lore, Control etc.) and many other shows, movies and books (HAL, Skynet etc.). If the starship crew encounters one of those evil AIs, they may have to abandon ship in escape pods…if the pod bay doors will open.
If anyone was injured on the run-in with the aliens, the ship’s doctor will fix them right up using tech such as full-body scanner beds (a real thing today), suture-less wound repair (also a real thing, sort of), and hyposprays (which existed, as jet injectors, when Star Trek debuted in the 1960s). The doctor may be a human (or Denobulan or Vulcan) or could even be a hologram—but a special kind of hologram that is sentient and has solid form. Holograms exist today—but not the solid, sentient type.
As the crew is warping off to its next mission, they may need some R&R and might select their favorite program on a holodeck, which uses the same technology as Star Trek’s holographic doctors to create a realistic 3D simulation of a real or imaginary setting. Although holography was first described by Alexander Moszkowski in 1922, the concept of something like a holodeck first appeared in a 1950 story by Ray Bradbury. But as is the case with holographic doctors, there will be no holodecks in our immediate future—at least not something with sentient, solid characters and simulated settings that have no limits on size despite being housed in a room of fixed dimensions.
In this lengthy post, I’ve only scratched the surface on what sci-fi writers have predicted for our future. As I explained, some of that future has already arrived, or will be here soon. Other prognostications are a-ways off—if they’ll ever come to pass. Writing this post deepened my appreciation for the imagination and creativity of sci-fi writers, who’ve dreamed of concepts such as warp drive when the scientific theory behind it was barely inked, or holography before there was any science behind it. Who knows what they’ll think of next?
