Science Inspired By Star Trek: Making It So

Star Trek has inspired countless scientist. The character of Wesley Crusher was essentially written for me: A young child watching Star Trek: The Next Generation because her father loved the original series. As a teenager, Kathryn Janeway was the first woman I saw on television who got as excited about science as I did. Sometimes you name your discoveries after your favourite science fiction franchise. And then there’s the scientists who did science inspired by Star Trek. They took a look at their televisions and decided to make it so.

Tricorder

There have been a number of devices described as being a tricorder when they were announced. But the first device actually officially branded as one actually came out in the 1990s. Vital Technologies actually received permission to call their handheld scanner the TR-107 TRICORDER Mark 1, implying that it’s the precursor to the Mark 7 devices seen in the show. Very few devices were ultimately produced, but they still existed.

IN the 21^st century, there was an X-Prize competition specifically trying to motivate people to develop a medical tricorder. Final Frontier Medical Devices (yep) won the competition by developing an AI based engine that works with non-invasive sensors to analyze vital signs and body chemistry to diagnose twelve different diseases. It’s an amazing leap forward from the simple light meter that was sold as the Mark 1 only two decades earlier.

Transporter

No, no one has a working transporter yet. Not even so much as a couple atoms. But there are some interesting theories on how to do it. There has even been some talk of it working for inanimate objects, though the method described sounds more like a replicator with a bit of DRM than a transporter. There’s even been some early work on teleporting information over a distance. There have actually been a few studies where they were able to use quantum entanglement to transfer a qubit across a room or further. Mass would obviously be a lot more complicated than that, but it’s an interesting start.

Still, the fact that people are even trying to get a transporter working is an impressive case of the impact of Star Trek on real science. Many technologies seen on the show are extrapolations from current scientific theories. The transporter was never one of them. The transporter was merely a narrative convenience because they couldn’t afford to film a shuttle landing sequence every episode. But scientists have never liked to let a little word like impossible stop them.

Tractor Beams

Tractor beams aren’t exactly exclusive to Star Trek. But the current proposed applications  are far more in line with Star Trek goals than a lot of other franchises. Right now, the energy beam is only able to pull in particles that are on the micrometer scale. So not exactly getting the Millenium Falcon onto a Star Destroyer. But an exploration vessel like the Enterprise could use even the current small scale version for collecting samples. If there’s no mechanical part reaching into the area you want to sample, the mechanical part can’t get damaged.

Hypospray

Now here’s a bit of Star Trek technology I really wanted when I was a little girl watching with my dad. Delivering all those vaccines without needing a needle! Jet injectors have actually existed for a while, but for a long time the technology didn’t allow for fine adjustments. That might have been okay for Dr. McCoy on a ship that had mostly human crew other than Spock, but Dr. Crusher on the Enterprise-D not only had a lot more aliens, she had the crewmembers small children present. She needed something she could adjust easily. In 2012 Taberner and coworkers at MIT developed a new device  that allows the operator to adjust the speed and depth of drug delivery for each injection.

I was going to end this post with the influence that Star Trek has had on the real life space program. But that’s actually so extensive that it deserves an entry of its own. So we’ll be boldly going again sometime soon!