There is something about the collective conscious that says that if you see it in print something is to be believed, considered and reasonable. From the media side of that coin I can assure you that is certainly not always so, but it is quite amazing how a brain such as that of Leonardo da Vinci or H. G. Wells could conjure up parts of the future so accurately.

We are also reminded that Arthur C. Clarke is often given credit for the geostationary orbit. His vision of worldwide radio communications from "Rocket Stations" (Wireless World October 1945, "Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-Wide Radio Coverage?") was apparently gigantic but in fact the notion of geostationary orbits at 35,900 km was described by Hermann Oberth and Herman Noordung (born Potocnik) in the 1920s. They didn't imagine such stations as communications devices but as lookout positions over the earth. These German scientists may, in fact, have "borrowed" the idea from the Russian scientist and inventor Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857 - 1935) who, in his own right, published plans for metal dirigibles (1892), an airplane (1894) and a spaceship using liquid propellants (1903.)

It took until August 1964 for NASA to achieve a true geostationary orbit with Syncom 3 at the corrected altitude of 35,786 km (because of the 3 minute 56 second error in the sidereal day) and the world has become a different place.

Where now should we look for ideas of what can be done in the future? A good place is surely within the mastery of science fiction and the most well known is Star Trek. How many of the fictionally convenient devices and systems on this television show might become functional in the future?

Some Star Trek systems are already believable. I have no problem seeing the Ship's computer in operation today -- not performing the shipborne tasks but in terms of the verbal contact between man and machine: I hope, however, never to be on the receiving end of an Arthur C. Clarke-like HAL. I am also a real believer in the probability of androids; cybernetics is moving fast and the computer control required is becoming more and more attainable in the size limitations.

But other aspects of Trek-tech have me beat. Impulse power appears to be fusion reactor power and we seem to have gone full circle on that with no tangible results; but that doesn't mean that limitless resources poured at it might not crack it. At the same time the notion of matter-antimatter power is already proven in ion drives on craft that have already flown with frozen anti-hydrogen being the antimatter. The idea that such a drive can propel a craft into "warp" speeds is in total defiance of Einstein's theories; it seems from what is understood today that there is little possibility of physical travel at speeds faster than that of light. (I've always loved the notion that vehicles traveling at warp speeds are totally immune to any physical barrier -- obviously planets that get in the way just aren't there when you cannot see them.)

How about the Transporter? It takes you apart molecule by molecule, whizzes you on some kind of energy beam, stops on a molecule, and then puts you back together again exactly right. I am definitely not going to be the test rabbit for that technology. But maybe the energy beam used in the transporter is the same one used in a Phaser, which as far as I can see has no physical logic to it at all.

I like the medical advances on Trek. Non-pervasive inoculations are already in use and there would seem to be grounds for accepting that the tricorder is a possibility; temperature, pulse, blood pressure without any physical contact are all easy to imagine analog technologies, and maybe examining the state of organs remotely is just an extension of imaging techniques we already have or are working on.

The Replicator would save the universe from starvation, would protect our limited resources because we would not need to destroy them; in fact replication technology used to feed and clothe the world would probably result in a peaceful world. Creating things in this way is totally outside my imagination, but once you can do this with real materials you could certainly create virtual things for a Holodeck -- the ultimate playground for the imaginative.

Although there are other technologies on the television show, the quintessential development on Star Trek for me is that of remote sensing. Receiving information about a target without having to send a signal to that target is the ultimate in detection techniques: what could we be looking for with our sensors? Arthur C. Clarke stated what was to become Clarke's Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is virtually indistinguishable from magic" but today digging coherent signals out of noise could unlock many unimaginable doors, particularly for sensing. The corollary to Clarke's Law is Factor's Law (after SETI League President, Richard Factor) that states, "Any sufficiently advanced modulation scheme is virtually indistinguishable from noise." Give me the dollars and the people and I would work on remote sensors, looking for naturally occurring modulation schemes that we haven't thought of to describe objects, people and other growing and living things.

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