My in-laws were in town this weekend and we went and saw Star Trek as a group together. The wife and I had already seen it, but they hadn’t, and if I’m going to watch a movie twice this summer Star Trek would be the one. It’s a fun flick.
Thing is, I notice a common trend in my thinking when watching any movie with sci-fi based technology in it these last couple of years: Where the frick are they getting all this energy from?
Yes, I know it’s not real, but my inner nerd wonders just how we’re going to be able to accomplish some of this stuff, because mark my words: We will eventually.
The Iron Man movie is what started it. That goofy little ‘arc reactor’ is really the only thing we need to make that idea real, aside from it actually flying. The ground-pounding aspects of it are entirely possible though if we could create an endless energy source inside the suit.
As for Star Trek there’s a bunch of things we’d need to get there, and I’m comfortable with the idea that we’d be able to use some sort of massive nuclear reactor on a star ship, but what about the shuttles? Those things are nifty: They just hover above ground and slowly ascent into space. That’s going to require some kind of energy source we can’t even imagine yet.
Energy is a big topic right now, and when I look at the Sci-Fi world I realize that’s our next big hurdle in achieve some of these dreams.
We’ve already accomplished a heck of a lot when it comes to actually doing what Sci-Fi predicted a while ago. We’ve put men in space and on the moon. In Star Trek it’s a given that we can instantly communicate with anybody else we need to by simply pressing a button on our lapel and speaking into a microphone. On the anniversary of Gene Roddenberry’s death a few years ago I received a couple of ultra-cheap Bluetooth headsets in the mail and it hit me: We can do that now.
Hell, Transparent aluminium was fiction but it’s real now.
Mankind’s development of technology is increasing at an exponential rate. As a species we’re about 200,000 years old. Around 6,000 years ago we got keen on cooking our food and development really sparked up. Writing, language, religion, and governments sprang forth from that. We learned, we grew. It wasn’t more than 600 years ago that Columbus sailed the ocean to re-discover America. After that we figured out that Earth was round, and in today’s world what was once thought unthinkable (circumnavigation of the world) was almost achieved by the 17 year old younger brother of a former co-worker a decade ago.
Within 100 years of the first flight at Kitty Hawk we broke the sound barrier.
We are going to conquer space travel. I have no doubt about that. The only question is how long it will take. and I predict it’ll come about the same time we make a massive advance in energy production.