Current Science Fiction = Future Science Fact?

[Noah]

What do ya'll think? Will we ever develop technology like on Star Trek and Star Wars? I saw an article in Popular Science a while ago that showed disigns scientist have for a warp drive, and the awesome thing was that a lot of them were VERY similar to what they "use" on Star Trek. But if they will work, who knows?

Noah

[Mallory Knox]

Some things yes, some things no. Spaceships/deep space travel? Probably. Holodecks? Maybe. Replicators/transporters? Probably not.

[Tormod]

As for the transporters, recent research has shown that teleportation - at least on a quantum level - may be possible. Which doesn't mean we'll soon be zipping aorund the universe, but it is a promising idea.

http://www.hypography.com/topics/teleportation.cfm

Tormod

[Noah]

Yes, just the other day they said they had been able to "transport" a beam of light. The head guy over this research needs to change his name to Scotty

Noah

[Evalain88]

I have one question :
If they can transport a bean -----they could transport a person with average mass= 1000 the mass of the bean with about 100 000 000 times more powerful "ray" or whatever it is. In this case the transfer in seconds could be posiblly about 1 000 000 000 times the bean time transfer for about 10 m right? How are the scientists going to deal with time? They could lose the person......he may never come back! As the amount of time of being (no where) increases so does the risk. Don't you all think?
Thank you
Regards to all
Eva H.I.

[Noah]

Yes, and another problem brought up about "transporters" is the energy they produce. If you transform an entire human into energy, you will have a MASSIVE amount of energy to deal with. But who knows what time and technology will bring us.

Noah

[Evalain88]

Yeah I agree.....if the person is transfered into energy and the experiment doesn't complete because it will be dense(there's no disagreement on that). You never know how dense a human could be as some form of energy. And another problem occurs--brain affection or never resolving back in normal shape. There could be brain....body,blood mostly(radiation), affections. There could be fatal damages. What I sugest is high electronic technics and instead of turning into energy the person,we turn a machine into energy form that could transfer him/her very easly and fast without damaging any part of the body in any way. I think it's safer.
But it all depends on Physics and Chemistry and math and if they all combined we could fix something up. It could be posible. But we have to include the time as major trouble maker in such experiment.

[UncleAl]

It is a remarkable but verifiable fact that mankind is wholly incapable of predicting its future - through its priests, its madmen, its laity, or its scientists. No stated vision of the future has ever come true. Whether it is an HP calculator killing the slide rule, CDs killing licorice pizzas, PCR and recombinant DNA, the Soviet implosion, or the Net and e-mail remaking the whole of First World civilization... nobody saw it coming. Nobody.

Science fiction exists to expose defective futures, thereby rendering them impossible. Imagine everything you can. The future lies huddled in the untouched residue, precisely like the very last entity remaining after Pandora opened the damned box. NASA hasn't got a chance.

[Kelddath]

Hmmmh, what about Jules Verne for instance, didn't he predict a submarine, a trip to the moon(OK, we didn't actualy use a cannon, but ok), then a hot air baloon and a lot more things that were thought to be a sci-fi. Then, if you look at Da Vinci(helicopter, parashoot,...).

Modern sci-fi(cyberpunk, neocyberpunk) talks about things that are not so far away, and you could easily draw paralels with the things that already exist. Star trek(star wars) is more a pop sci-fi, then anything else, made for masses, but still there are few things that are not so sci-fi anymore:
teleporter - Hmmm, didn't "we" already teleport a photon?
Phasor beam - paralel with a laser beam, that we use in mining to surgery(nothing special actually)
Holodeck - A mix of computer games and VR(huh i can't wait to play Baldurs gate VIII in holodeck)

k.

[Noah]

Doing a little more reading, some say it's not quite that simple.

1. Teleporter-It is said that we will have problems with anything over the atomic level, and no way we could transport a human.

2. Phaser Beam-If it is a "laser beam", then yes, we already have it. But you could be dodging it like you see on TV.

3. Holodeck. One problem is making a light projection solid. In ST. it says it uses a magnetic contament field to hold the photons in, but light is not affected by a magnetic field.

But that does not mean that we really won't figure out a way to do these things. It would be nice if we did, hopefully in my lifetime