Star Trek's Future Now

The original Star Trek (TOS) TV series of the '60s was a bit before my time; I grew up with Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) reruns on Canadian broadcast TV in the '90s instead. But regardless of era, technologists throughout the years have been inspired by the fictional universe following the crew of the USS Enterprise. The story took place in the 23rd century, but it has taken a fraction of that time for us to invent some of its technologies.

Treknology: The Science of Star Trek from Tricorders to Warp Drive is a coffee table book that explores how fiction maps to reality. It was published in 2017, so me reading this in 2026 has allowed another decade of development, mostly around robotics and AI. But those advancements raise the question: what about the other areas where we've stagnated—or even regressed—in the past 70 years? The technological progress we make is uneven because we're choosing, as a civilization, our areas of investment. These selections shape incentives for the whole of society to pursue narrow goals.

Treknology lists 28 inventions from the show and compares those depictions with modern equivalents. And immediately, there is a clear contrast on digital devices. The tricorders and handheld computers from TOS—extrapolated from room-filling supercomputers of the '60s—map directly to smartphones and tablets in the 21st century. Universal Translators from fiction exist for most human languages, and we've improved the technology to fit in earbuds instead of clunky microphones.

Recent progress around AI has subsequently pushed a number of other domains towards Trekkian standards. When OpenAI unveiled its voice chat, it was widely reported that the product was inspired by the 2013 movie Her, but we can trace the technological lineage back to Star Trek's conversational computer assistants. Androids were established via Isaac Asimov and other sci-fi authors, but TNG's Lieutenant Commander Data popularized the archetype to a mass audience; today's humanoid robots echo back to that characterization.

All these innovations are possible because we've spent the intervening decades focused on digital technologies. We experienced successive eras of computing: starting with the personal computer, then the internet, then smartphones, and now AI. And as each new technology built on the previous era's foundations, the advances came about in degrees that would be unfathomable to Gene Roddenberry and the rest of his show writers.

In stark contrast, where we've fallen short of the Trekkian vision is in the realm of physical technology. To be fair, there is a category of fantastical science fiction that is bound by hard science constraints. Faster-than-light space travel via Warp Drives is not possible with our understanding of the laws of physics; teleporters make for a great plot device but are equally daunting. Happily, I was going to cite antimatter tech as another such example, but CERN scientists just announced a successful experiment to contain and transport antimatter. They achieved it, though, in a rather unglamorous truck.

But we seem to have lost interest in space tech. In the '60s, we were in the midst of the Space Race, trying to show technological supremacy by pushing into the cosmos. And we succeeded spectacularly: first by overcoming Earth's gravity, then by orbiting the planet, and finally by setting foot on the moon. But with the end of the Cold War and NASA budget cuts through the decades since, we've lost the ability to replicate these milestones. With no missions to support, our rockets and space shuttles were either decommissioned or simply fell into disrepair^[1].

Our societal priorities are laid bare when we look at the utopian ideals of the show. In its day, Star Trek pushed on social issues: they cast diverse actors, in gender and in race, to play important crew members aboard the Starship Enterprise. Human civilization was portrayed to be post-scarcity, so there was no need to compete for limited resources or capital; rather, people were driven intrinsically by personal mission and purpose. This also meant that the ugly prejudice present at the time, and arguably persists today, was rendered irrelevant.

Of course, Star Trek—like many other pieces of science fiction—used its stories for social and political commentary. TOS used alien races to stand in for sovereign nations and the actions of its characters to showcase misguided US foreign policies. TNG confronted everything from refugees to legal rights to drug addiction. It's disheartening to see that most of these societal issues, which were prevalent enough in the '80s and '90s for the writers to incorporate into their episodes, remain major areas of societal tension.

Progress is a choice. Society chooses which problems it is interested in solving, and advances that frontier by creating the incentive structures to direct its citizenry's focus. Miniature computers and human-like voice assistants were just as fantastical as warp drives 60–70 years ago, but the research and development in these areas, compounded across decades, have advanced us beyond what was imaginable.

Climate, space, community; many are major, global issues that we have struggled to tackle with the full collective force of humanity. Star Trek envisions a future when we have moved past these problems to find new ones in the stars, but we first have to figure out a way to orient ourselves in the same direction.