Old Brass Bowl: To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before.

Dear Friends,

Captains Log, Stardate 09-08-2011.
Today the TV series Star Trek celebrates its 45th birthday. On this day last year, physicists at the Australian National University celebrated by announcing that they've built a rough equivalent of a tractor beam -- okay, more like a device capable of transporting small glass particles one and a half meters across a laboratory desk without touching them. But still -- a tractor beam in concept.

In celebration of the birthday of Star Trek I will take a quick look at other Star Trek technologies that have inspired real-world scientists.

When he launched the original series in 1966, Gene Roddenberry famously chose anti-matter as the ship's fuel. Would you believe that small amounts of anti-matter are now created almost routinely at the CERN facility in Switzerland, although not nearly enough to power a spaceship, yet. Throughout Star Trek: The Next Generation, touch-based control panels called PADDs (personal access display devices) were frequently used by crew members. Today we have the Ipad. How many of you realised that Star Trek foresaw the convenience of portable digital storage. On Star Trek, they were the small square coloured pieces of plastic that they inserted into various computer consoles, but in the 80s and 90s we had the 3.5-inch floppy disk that was remarkably close to the same size as those pieces of plastic that they had on Star Trek.Later, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, they had isolinear chips that could hold gigabytes upon gigabytes of data. These days, you don’t see floppy disks being used but USB flash drives which are, incidentally, pretty close to the same size that Star Trek TNG showed the isolinear chips were.

In 1966, the world watched in wonder as the doors on the Enterprise miraculously opened when people approached. Today RTE (request to exit) technology is so commonplace that I have witnessed people walking into doors when the RTE sensor was broken. Many of the then fictional technologies are already here. Tricorders? The Department of Homeland Security is well on its way toward developing a patient triage tool: a snazzy handheld device one could magically wave over an injured person to make an instant medical diagnosis. And Martin Cooper, inventor of the cellphone, has admitted he drew inspiration from the flip-top handheld devices sported by Captain Kirk and his crew to communicate while exploring alien planets. Today's bluetooth earpieces make Lieutenant Uhura's look primitive and today's speech recognition could easily hold its own against the Enterprise computer's.

Thanks to advances in "meta-materials" research, the cloaking devices used by Romulan and Klingon ships might also be on the horizon. In 2009, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley used a mixture of ceramic, Teflon and fiber composites to deflect light waves around a three-dimensional object -- effectively "cloaking" it from sight. As for the famous transporter technology -- "Beam me up, Scotty!" -- quantum teleportation is advancing rapidly. In 2010, a team of Chinese scientists broke records when they successfully teleported information between photons over a free space distance of nearly ten miles. Even better, they were "able to maintain the fidelity of the long-distance teleportation at 89 percent." While that's pretty impressive when we're talking about information, it's still a long way from teleporting an entire human being -- Captain Kirk wouldn't be so eager to beam down onto a planet if there were a chance 11% of him might not make the trip.

The Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response (PHASR) gun is under development at the US Air Force Research Laboratory which like Star Trek's phasers can "stun" assailants. The real PHASR is a non-lethal, portable deterrent weapon which uses a laser system to blind the enemy temporarily. The Universal Translator is not here yet but the US military is using the Phraselator in Iraq for speech translation. The website Google, among others, can translate web sites and phone manufacturer NEC is launching the first mobile phone with speech translation.

Given all of that, can warp drives, traversable wormholes to other dimensions and parallel universes be far behind? Probably. We're nowhere near being able to harness the huge amounts of energy that would be required to achieve those perennial features of the Star Trek universe but what history has taught us is that anything the mind can conceive the mind can achieve and though it may take a thousand years to mature and bear fruit, Gene Roddenberry and his team has sowed the seed.

However, the influence of Star Trek goes way beyond the technology. One only have to google Star Trek to see the millions of websites dedicated to the language and culture of the Borg, Klingon, Bajoran, Ferengi, Andorii, Vulcan and a dozen other species introduced to the world by Star Trek.You can log on to the Klingon Language Institute and become fluent in Klingon. I kid you not. There is even a translation of the Bible into Klingon! I am still trying to wrap my mind around the theological implications of that one!

No one can really be sure why Star Trek has realised the phenomenal success it enjoyed over the last 45 years but it has spanned generations and attracted fans from all demographics. I still remember watching Star Trek with my grandfather on our black and white Zenith and enjoying it as I do now sitting with my granddaughter watching it on my computer. I believe the theme of technological advancement paired with the shows expression of social progress was a major factor when it first started. The original series had its finger on the pulse of the 1960s. It addressed the issue of race relations head-on though casting. The multicultural bridge crew included a member of African descent (Uhura), East Asian descent (Sulu) and Russian descent (Chekov), all serving alongside an alien from another planet, Vulcan (Spock). It was what the world needed. Over he years the show has continued to highlight the best of what mankind can be without being judgemental and people have responded with their support.

It seems that Star Trek is here to stay as it continues to attract a new generation of fans.

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