Thursday, May 15, 2008

The World Is Looking More Like Star Trek Every Day

This post gets a little geeky, so bear with me. In the show Star Trek: Voyager they had what they called "Nanoprobes". And now scientists at UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara and MIT have come up with the "nanoworm". But this isn't the first thing in our lives that's been influenced by Star Trek. The cell phone you can't live without? Based the the communicator. Remember the ear piece that Lt. Uhura wore? Bluetooth headset. Star Trek had music stored digitally years before the advent of the MP3. When you walk into the grocery store and the door magically opens on it's own. First seen in Star Trek. And scientists today are actually working on holodeck and transporter technology.

And while on the subject of the real world meets Trek, the Trek universe had what Gene Roddenberry called "The Eugenics Wars".
The Eugenics Wars (or the Great Wars) were a series of conflicts fought on Earth in the mid-1990s. The result of a scientific attempt to improve the Human race through selective breeding and genetic engineering
Now, why bring this up? Because of stories like this. Now, obviously it's far fetched. We're decades away from being able to do what Hitler wanted to do and create the perfect human, but it is a slippery slope and if we're not careful that imaginary Eugenics War may not be just science fiction one day. Read the last sentence on the page. What happens when it becomes safe?
Superior ability creates superior ambition

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh yes...Star Trek was always one of my favorites, but I lost touch with it because I graduated and had to get a job. If anyone goes to Vegas they have a great star trek museum, I checked out last month when I went with my fiance. AnswersTV.com
has a nice little video on the place that you can watch. And if anyone has the time and money I would def say take the trip, you wont regret it.

Anonymous said...

I so want a holodeck!!!