Treknology-Star Trek Tech 300 Years Ahead of the Future

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TREKNOLOGY STAR TREK TECH 300 YEARS AHEAD OF THE FUTURE

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BOXFIREPRESS

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Ca.lamito.us, an imprint of Boxfire Press.

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TREKNOLOGY. Copyright © 2013 by Justin McLachlan LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articls and reviews. For information, please contact Boxfire Press at http://boxfirepress.com.

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ISBN 978-0-9827675-TK

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Every attempt has been made to ensure this book is free from typos and errors. We apologize if you do stumble across one and hope it won’t hurt your enjoyment of the story. Thanks to changes in technology we can easily correct errors for future readers with your help. Contact us at [email protected].

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for Craig

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As with the first book, I have to thank Dr. Scott Sparks for answering endless medical questions (say a dragon breaks your ribs... what would that feel like?), reading drafts and saying, “wait, you can do better”; my wonderful editor, Kate Day and her keen sense of what sucks and what doesn’t, my brother Craig and his ability to fill plot holes and finally, to you, for picking up this book and taking the time to read it.

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Introduction—xv

WE Have Arrived—3

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300 Years Ahead of the Future

TRICORDER = iPHONE—5 THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING DEVICE—9 TOUCHA TOUCHA TOUCH ME—13

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What would you like to do today?—17 REFRIGERATOR, DO THY BIDDING—24 500 INTERNAL Server Error—26

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Here, There and Everywhere—29

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Building a matter energy transporter

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E = MC2—32

Bits and Bytes, or The Sum of Us—35 Big Things In Little Packages—42

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The Coming Rust Belt—48 Place Your Bets—50

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How to make anything invisible—53 Cloaking devices

SHAKE, RATTLE AND ROLL—57

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It’s all Meta—61

From Thin Air—63

SUBTITLE—69

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Holodecks, Holograms and Holodoctors

The force is not with us—73 But all hope isn’t lost—75

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TIN MEN—79 Artif icial life, in all its forms

Definition: Person?—84 UHM, SKYNET ANYONE?—88

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BOttoms Up—82

Dominion—94

The State of Things—97

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Subtitle—102

FASTER THAN A SPEEDING BULLET—103

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On the path to a warp drive

THIS GUY, ALBERT EINSTEIN—106 THE LOOPHOLE—107

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The Alcubierre drive—116 NASA TO THE RESCUE—118 Engage!—119

The Economics of the Future—121

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Money, Money, Money

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A Technological Construct—128 The Big Pool Of Money—133

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Is the tide turning?—138

The final Frontier—141

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A conclusion, of sorts

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Appendix—For the uninitiated—145 A Star Trek Crash Course

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References and suggestions for future reading —149 Glossary—153

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CHRONOLOGY—161

Key technological events in the Star Trek Universe

ABOUT JUSTIN McLACHLAN—178

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rowing up, I was a bit of television whore. Scooby Doo, Batman, ThunderCats, Transformers, MacGyver. These shows consumed me. I ran around wearing a Batman cape that my grandmother had cut and sewn for me for years beyond an appropriate age. I even once sent her on a quest to buy real Scooby-snacks, even though no such thing existed. Every car I rode in became a Batmobile and me Batman, despite never being allowed in the driver’s seat. I even harbored a vague sense of expectation that the crossbars on the hilt of my toy sword of omens would morph if I just asked for sight beyond sight with enough conviction. That they never did was always a big disappointment. When the last episode of MacGyver aired and he drove off into the sunset on his motorcycle, I cried actually, and told Richard Dean Anderson that he was a quitter and I hated him. Please don’t tell anyone. I was only ten. My point is that when I say consumed, I mean consumed. TV preoccupied me so much that my dad eventually decreed that I could watch just one hour a day. The pretext was that I’d go outside and play instead, but I usually spent

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the day staring at a blank screen, waiting for primetime. Take that, Dad. When I was a bit older, he finally conceded defeat on the one-hour rule and I actually got a TV for my room. It was my parent’s old, 19-inch television that they’d probably have just as soon thrown away, but it was a TV. In my bedroom. This was as life-changing as my first DVR. No cable, though. I had to rely on an antenna and some well-placed tin foil which, on a clear day, would pull one channel from a station in Pittsburgh. And every night at 7 p.m., that one channel aired a show that, even after my particularly bad breakup with MacGyver, would become my next love. It was called Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’d only vaguely heard of it. I’d seen parts of an episode years earlier with my grandmother and I’d asked to her explain what a “generation” was. Even after a simple example (I’m a generation, your mom is a generation and you’re another generation, she’d said) I still didn’t quite get it. No matter. Something about TNG immediately captured my imagination and still hasn’t let go. I got to a point where I could tell you what an episode was about if you gave me the title, or I could tell you the title if you told me what the episode was about. I even had the order and episode numbers memorized, thanks to a list in the Star Trek Magazine that was meant to be a ballot to vote for favorites episodes. I tore it out and kept it in a scrapbook.1 I also collected Star Trek trading cards made by Topps.

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1. I’ll admit, I pale in comparison to true fans—I’ll use that phrase instead of “trekkie” or “trekker” to avoid picking the wrong one and possibly fueling a Bloods vs. Crips caliber street war at some future convention. I really don’t want to be knifed because I chose the wrong word. And while I’m an expert on the Next Generation, there were still episodes of Voyager that I hadn’t seen when I started writing and my knowledge of Deep Space Nine is more limited, though I’ve watched the entire show, again, in preparation for this book. I also just watched Enterprise for the first time ever. Some of you, though, are scoffing at what is obviously a feeble commitment to the Star Trek universe compared with your own. I won’t argue.

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Every time I saved up $2.10, I went and bought a new pack at the only convenience store in town that sold them. I have an entire collection now, save a few special holographic cards that weren’t part of the normal set. I bought the Star Trek the Next Generation Technical Manual and The Star Trek Encyclopedia, two books I’ve relied on extensively to write Treknology. On birthdays and holidays I got Star Trek toys as presents. My favorite was the phaser (type II), though the sound effects on my Enterprise model were awesome.2 I also had a Romulan Warbird and a Klingon Battle Cruiser. I got a working model of the Enterprise-D’s bridge and a toy transporter with a two-way mirror inside it to make all my Star Trek action figures appear and disappear. I collected every Micro Machine ship cast, and then displayed them on a shelf above my desk well into high school. You did remember that I said consumed, right? Years later, when I was living in San Diego and working as a freelance writer, JJ Abrams was about to reboot the Star Trek franchise. I did an article for the now-defunct San Diego News Network about Star Trek technology that had already arrived, 300 years ahead of the future.3 I did an

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2. Finally, I could shoot photon torpedoes at my brother and not have to make the sound myself. 3. You might be asking how I arrived at 300 years, especially if you’re one of the people in the first note ready to pick up your knife. Here’s the problem I faced. Star Trek takes place in the future, but in a future that stretched vast spans of time. The Original Series took place around 200 hundred years from now and Enterprise was set about fifty years earlier, in the late 2100s. The Next Generation and subsequent shows like Deep Space Nine and Voyager were set almost 360 to 370 years from today and the movies are span a couple decades all on their own. To make matters worse, no two single pieces of technology developed at the same time. We had warp drive very early and well before transporters, for example. Holodecks, surprisingly, seemed to come much later. To fix this, I settled on a rough average of the various timespans, and then rounded up toward the number 300. I spend a lot more time talking about the later shows, not The Original Series or even Enterprise (though Enterprise answers some interesting questions, so it’ll pop up now and then) so this seemed the most appropriate. I know this isn’t a perfect solution, but I wanted you to at least know there’s some logic behind it.

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interview for a local radio station the day the film opened about the article, and I think they were most surprised about one of my technological pronouncements. I’ll get to what it was later, in the first chapter, actually, but it got me thinking—in terms of Star Trek’s technology, what’s here already and what’s soon to come? So, I set off on a mission to find out. Unlike other works written on this subject, like the seminal The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss, and to which I owe a debt of gratitude for its expertise, I don’t rely on my own knowledge of science. Instead, I talked to experts and did a lot of research, distilled here to the simplest and finest points. I scanned our technological horizon to find out just where we are, and where we’re about to boldly go. I make few predictions, but a lot of comparisons. The fact is, and you might disagree at first, even viscerally, a lot of what we’ve seen in Star Trek is already here, or well on its way. I’ll explain it in more detail, but trust me. When you start to examine the current state of technology with eye toward fiction like Star Trek, you see the parallels between art and life everywhere. In this case, life really does imitate art, just a lot sooner than we all probably thought. Part of the reason I took this journey is that so many books on future technology and science seem to spend so much of their time telling us about what we can’t do or what won’t ever be possible, as if the writers had crystal balls sitting on their desks. This was hard for me on a lot of levels. When someone, an expert in theoretical physics no less, wrote he didn’t think we’d ever have a transporter or replicator, it was like he was tearing my childhood dreams right out of my head. I pictured myself living on the Enterprise because no one told me I couldn’t, no one told me it would never be possible. Today, I choose to take the same approach. The promise of Star Trek isn’t just in its technology, but in

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the future it represents. Kill the dream of the technology, and you kill the dream of the future. I’m not talking about holodecks and warp drive, I’m talking about a world where mankind has evolved beyond our worst qualities. You probably can’t separate that evolution from the technology that makes it possible. That’s not to say that I don’t question our evolution. We’ve been warning ourselves about the rise of the machines since we first ever dreamed of machines, it seems, in stories that make cautionary tales look like nursery rhymes. Think, I, Robot and Battlestar Gallactica. We can’t talk about building androids without talking about how they’d treat us in turn, and maybe even more importantly, how we’d treat them as their creators. And Holodecks? You do know what goes on in a holodeck, right? We’re just starting to scratch the surface of what computer-mediated communication means for our social development. Imagine when we don’t even need real people for face-to-face … interaction … with other humans. What I’m getting at here—and you’ll hear me say it a lot, so prepare—is that there’s more to the question of technological evolution than just “can we?” It should always be followed by or in some proximity to “should we?” Ian Malcolm said as much to John Hammond in Jurassic Park, and they still barely got off that island with their lives. I always make it a point to listen to chaoticians, especially ones played by Jeff Goldblum. One caveat. Technology changes so fast that chasing after every latest development would have been futile. No matter the effort, Treknology would still have been out of date the minute I hit save. In most cases, I tried to focus instead more on the challenges and next steps in Star Trek-centric fields like computers, holography, physics and so on without digging down too much on specific products under development or the newest bit of incremental research. There’s cer-

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tainly some of that in the book, though, it couldn’t be avoided entirely. But, I aimed for a more high-level approach when possible. It seemed like everyday an article would pop-up in my feed reader with some new development that impacted Treknology, but eventually I had to hit a deadline. You can visit my Web site for some of that more bleeding-edge stuff. Also, the thing that occurred to me over and over again while writing Treknology is that no piece of technology occurs in a vacuum. Holodecks might be awesome for entertainment and… other things. But holographic technology also has huge implications for near-future computers, at least when it comes to data storage and maybe even user interfaces. A computer that we can talk to and one that talks back is a big step for computer science, but it’s also a necessary part of another piece of Star Trek technology: Data. All this to say that I chose many times along the way to take an unusual path at exploring the challenges we face. Researching the chapter on androids for example, I spent some time talking with animators to figure out how what they do informs robotics.4 If we’re going to achieve the kind of technology that we can only dream about today, it’ll be an interdisciplinary achievement. I started researching and writing with the mindset that nothing is impossible, no matter how unlikely. I hope that if nothing else, you finish Treknology convinced of that, too. I’ve not hesitated to point out the current challenges, of course, and there are many. Many, many, many. But if there’s anything Star Trek showed us, there are few challenges that can’t be overcome given time and determination (and sometimes, maybe a little help from Wesley Crusher). We have all the determination we need, now it’s jut a matter of time. Hope you enjoy.

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4. See my blog at www.justinmclachlan.com for my interview with the animators at the award-winning Moonbot Studios.

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UN “Impossible is a word that humans use far too often.” —Seven of Nine

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300 Years Ahead of the Future “End of program” —THE Computer

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’m about to make some of you very angry, but here’s the truth. Our computer technology is pretty much already beyond anything the crew of the Enterprise had. What we can’t do today, we’ll be able to soon. We’ve advanced so much so quickly that comparisons between the shows’ and today’s computers are difficult to make. It’s not just that we’ve diverged in design and concept, it’s also scope and power and size. In the span of a few decades, we’ve gone from mainframes to desktop computers to mobile devices that rival anything we could’ve imagined just years ago. Even some of our supercomputers, the kind that still take up rooms and run calculations on complex events like nuclear bomb det-

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onations, run on the same chips that power PlayStations.1 And speaking of mobile, every few months an article pops up about how someone is that much closer to building a functioning Tricorder—the mobile computer the crew of the Enterprise used—when they miss the fact that millions of us already carry Tricorders around in our pockets. We just call them iPhones.2 Stay with me here. I can see the protests forming in your brains, ready to spill out in angry emails and posts on my Facebook wall. Yes, I know an iPhone doesn’t do everything a Tricorder could. I know the primary purpose of an iPhone, to make calls, is something a Tricorder was never used for. I know that they don’t even really look alike. Tricorders flip open, and smartphones don’t do that anymore.3 But the devices do have a ton of similarities and we’re going to have to reset our thinking a little if we’re going to get through this book together in one piece. I’m going to take some unusual approaches to comparing Star Trek’s future technology with today’s, because while life imitates art and art tries to imitate life, we’re not using mirrors—more like, fuzzy watercolors. And when it comes to computers, we’re going to have to really reset. The mobile revolution of the last few years has dramatically changed our direction. Take the Tricorder again, with its unimaginative gray box, thicker than a deck of cards and with a screen smaller than a Google Images thumbnail. Let go of that specific idea and in-

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1. Liz Zyga, “US Air Force connects 1,760 PlayStation 3’s to build supercomputer”, Phys.org, December 2, 2010. 2. Or, to not offend anyone with a Blackberry or Android phone in their pocket, just “smartphones.” I chose not to use that because it no more accurately describes the device than iPhone does, but at least iPhone will get everyone’s—the fanboys’ and the haters’— hearts racing, albeit for different reasons. 3. But alas, have you seen Star Trek: Nemesis? No hard feelings if you haven’t, but write me and let me know why this move was important for any discussion of a smartphone-Tricorder comparison.

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stead start thinking that we can do and have done better. You’ll be to be surprised not just how much everyday life already owes Star Trek, especially when it comes to computers, but also how much we’ve already left it behind—or will.

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Here’s an example that’s a lot more difficult to deny. The iPad. Think, think, think. Where have you seen these before? Captain Picard used them to read Shakespeare, right? Troi and Riker did crew evaluations on them. Remember that TNG episode, Lower Decks (7x15)? They had a spread of them on the table in Ten Forward. Dr. Crusher always seemed to have one in her hand, either reviewing medical records or trying to convince Geordi LaForge to sing The Pirates of Penzance (Disaster, 5x5). On the show, they called them PADDs, or Personal Access Display Devices. We call them “revolutionary” and “magical,” but some Hollywood writers imagined them more than two decades ago.4 Even Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda, gatekeepers of Star Trek’s tech acknowledge in the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual that, while it seemed so futuristic at the time, the PADD was well within our technological grasp.5 Their only real-world example at the time, though, was Apple’s Newton—the iPad’s predecessor and a spectacular failure in the marketplace. Guess we just weren’t ready.

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4. Apple Launches iPad, Apple.com, January 27, 2010 http://www.apple.com/ pr/library/2010/01/27Apple-Launches-iPad.html. 5. Michael Okuda and Rick Sternbach, Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, (New York: Pocket Books, 1991).

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But, do you see where I’m coming from, now? Some of you don’t. Some of you have your arms crossed and are dangerously close to harassing me on Twitter about this, I can tell. Hey @ justinmclachlan, iPhone ≠ Tricorder. Hate you.6 You’re so in love with the Idea, capital I, of a Tricorder that you’ll never agree that it’s already here until you have a device, in-hand, with those lovely flashing Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta lights down the side. Well, I’ll give you that the theory between the two devices is different, yes, but the result is the same. And we can probably all agree, at least, considering the iPad-PADD connection, that the comparison isn’t that crazy. Just like on the shows, we took our computers, shrunk them down and turned them into Tricorders. Look at it this way. According to the Technical Manual7, the Tricorders used in TNG, DS9 and Voyager were “portable sensing, computing and data communication” devices. Take away all the talk about Star Trek and the future and yada, yada, yada and just look at that definition: portable sensing, computing and data communication device. Sound familiar? What’s a smartphone aside from a portable sensing, computing and data communication device? Our phones even add voice communication, something Star Trek separated into another device. The Tricorder gave the Enterprise crew access to almost any bit of information they needed. On my iPhone, I have almost unlimited access to the world’s knowledge sources like Wikipedia, and Google. It keeps me connected to current events and the financial markets. It has maps of every conceivable road in most countries and, thanks to my Stargazer app, can even tell

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6. I’m not the only one who’s made this comparison, but I was one of the first. I first wrote of the iPhone-Tricorder connection in the now-defunct San Diego News Network on the eve of the premiere of the 2009 film, and then got the third-degree about it from some talk radio hosts the next day. 7. Michael Okuda and Rick Sternbach, ibid.

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me what constellations are overhead in the night sky. It knows what the weather is like, can convert currencies and do complex calculations, it can even help me find myself—physically, not emotionally (though there might be an app for that, I’ll have to check). It knows that if I’m at Target, it should remind me to buy toothpaste. I could go on an on like this, but hopefully you’re seeing my point. True, up until recently I had to mostly synthesize the information for myself, but Apple’s latest iPhones come standard with an app called Siri.8 Siri can understand complex plain-language queries—spoken, not just typed—and find the information for me and even complete tasks. She mostly uses the same sources that I would if I’m looking up information for myself, she just puts together what’s the most probable correct answer without me having to do the leg work. An unlike other similar voice-activated assistant apps, Siri maintains context between lines in the conversation. So if I ask her to add a reminder to buy my mom a birthday gift (December 31, for those of you who would also like to get my mom a gift), but then I say, oh, also send her a text message that I’ll have to miss Thanksgiving, Siri can probably figure out who “her” is based on our previous conversation. That might not seem like much, but as we’ll see in a bit, it’s really a remarkable bit of computing in a tiny little package. Siri is though, a work in progress.

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Me: Siri, what is a Tricorder? Siri: Searching the web for try quarter. Me: You spelled that wrong.

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8. Other third-party apps, most notably Evi, can do this, too. Wolfram Alpha, a web-based search engine, is the brains behind a lot of Evi’s and Siri’s magic.

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Siri: If you say so.

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Bitch. I did finally get her to look up “Tricorder,” though it took an elaborate series of voice commands just so I could spell the word out. Even after all that, she took me to a Wolfram-Alpha mashup of the word “tricorner” instead. That’s a fruit fly gene, not a futuristic piece of mobile computing technology.9 Ah, but wait! you say. All that is done by accessing external data sources via old-fashioned radio signals. On Star Trek, the crew used their Tricorders to gather real-time information via arrays of internal sensors. Well, our iPhones can do that to, just in a more limited sense. What about the global positioning system? It’s not a sensor per se, but—in conjunction with one of those external data sources like Google Maps—can give us our real time, physical location pretty much anywhere in the world. And don’t forget about the camera. It is a sensor. For example, through it, the iPhone can already understand barcodes and all the complex information they hold, recognize faces and other objects, and when it coordinates with GPS, understand its environment. I have an “augmented reality” app that, when I hold my phone’s camera up to the road in front of me, overlays signs on my screen that point not only to the closest D. C. Metro station, but also tell me what train lines run through it and how long I have to get there before the next arrives. If you have something other than an iPhone, you might even have a near-field communication radio in your phone that can read

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9. This is probably a failing of Wolfram-Alpha more than Siri—she’s relying on it to pull the data and it’s the one doing the interpretation in this case—and despite the difficulty she had recognizing the word, she still represents our most significant leap toward Star Trek-like computers. There’s a lot more to say about that, and we’ll get to it in a few moments, but even without Siri, my iPhone still rivals the Tricorder.

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special radio tags (near-field chips) in close proximity. Ah, but wait again! you say. What about Dr. Crusher? Some of you have already started down this path in an angry email to me, but hold off just a minute. I’m not ignoring her and that pesky medical Tricorder she carried around, with its little detachable sensor. That’s right. You got me. A little. Detachable. Sensor. We don’t really have anything like that. Yet.

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For most of Star Trek, Medical Tricorders were different than the standard-issue ones the rest of the crew carried around. They contained added data and sensor modules that held all the information needed to diagnosis and treat an array of injuries and illnesses in many different species.10 Emphasis here on the sensor part, because that’s where the Medical Tricorder’s magic happened. One wonders what a doctor in the 24th Century needs medical school for, but I digress. Point of order, but the idea of these peripherals is a little out of field today. If we wanted our iPhones to become medical scanning devices, we’d most likely build the tech into them, not add to their profiles with bulky attachments. We certainly wouldn’t need it for data or a medical library, as is the case in Star Trek. Most of our computers, from desktops to tablets, can already hold an astonishing amount of information and even then, we’ve shrunk enormous amounts of data down to

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10. Apparently, according to the TNG Technical manual, ibid., the module covered medical conditions for all humanoids and 216 DNA-based non-humanoids. Onboard the Enterprise, though, it could access the ship’s full medical library, which presumably covered a lot more species.

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the size of a quarter with solid-state memory like SD cards.11 In most smartphones, once you slip that little card inside its slot, you’d barely even know it was there. I have the same issue with the detachable sensor. At the time, it probably made for better television because it emphasized and reinforced the futuristic feel of the technology, but this was before things like handheld barcode scanners proliferated in grocery stores. I just don’t see any indication that we’re moving away from integrated tech in our mobile devices and I can’t imagine we’d head that route with any new, ingenious sensors.12 It’s all beside the point now, because the tech isn’t here, but we’re working on it. Take, for example, so-called labs on chip, or LOCs. They’re miniature labs shrunken down to the size of microchips that can detect disease with only a tiny drop of fluid or other biomatter. They show great promise for medicine in third world countries where conditions and lack of resources make it difficult to set up full-scale labs, but disease is also rampant. LOCs are small, portable, cheap to make and disposable. Think about having a LOC slot on your phone, like we do now for SD cards. Think you might have Strepp throat? Get the appropriate LOC, slip in it your phone and then exhale across the surface. Molecules from your breath enter tiny, invisible pores and interact with the LOC, much like a device already under development by scientists at Stony Brook University.

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11. Solid state is a fancy way of saying that it has no moving parts, unlike most hard drives still in use in desktop and laptop computers. The flash memory in your camera is probably solid-state and if you own a Macbook Air, it has a solid-state hard drive. Apple recently introduced a fusion drive, a seamless combination of old-style hard drives and solid-state ones that are supposed to offer better speed and efficiency. 12. Of course, this doesn’t hold true for third-party peripherals. They can’t integrate their tech into the iPhone, so it will always be an addon until Apple gobbles them up and integrates it themselves. This seems a bit of a crapshoot, see the aforementioned lack of near-field technology in Apple devices.

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Your phone confirms your sore throat is indeed the result of Group A Streptococcus bacteria and then sends the test results to your doctor. He gets the notice on his own handheld device, reviews the test and clicks a button to have your pharmacy fill a standard course of Azithromycin (with your medical history at his fingertips, he already knows you’re allergic to Penicillin). Boom. You’re back on the road to healthiness. Sure, this isn’t exactly analogous to the way Dr. Crusher’s Tricorder worked, and LOCs are a far stretch from shrinking, say, an entire CT Scanner or MRI down to the size of something that can fit in the palm of your hand, but they’re a giant step in the right direction. And computers and their parts get smaller over time. That’s kind of what they do. Before we developed integrated circuitry, the Macbook Air sitting on my lap right now would’ve filled rooms and rooms with vacuum tubes and still not even come close to the Mac’s processing power. Experience tells us to expect our devices to become more compact, more efficient, and more form-friendly, so it’s not really a great surprise when they do. Take Terahertz Spectrometers, for example, which produce T-rays, can detect a variety of biological anomalies. We’re already using them at airports in those controversial body scanners. Because T-rays are on the infrared end of the spectrum, they probably aren’t harmful like the X-rays used in hospitals. Earlier this year, a team of international scientists announced they’d developed a breakthrough way to produce a strong T-ray beam using nanotechnology, so, in other words, with very small components.13 How long do you think it’ll be before we see T-ray technology in a hand-held device? Talk about magical

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13. H. Tanoto, “Greatly enhanced continuous-wave terahertz emission by nano-electrodes in a photoconductive photomixer,” Nature Photonics, 6, 121-126, doi:10.1038/nphoton.2011.322, January 15, 2012.

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and revolutionary. Despite my solid belief that I’m holding a Tricorder in my pocket right now, the quest for something more like what appears in the show is ongoing. Qualcomm is offering a $10 million dollar prize to the team or company that can bring the medical Tricorder to life. “Imagine a portable, wireless device in the palm of your hand that monitors and diagnoses your health conditions. That’s the technology envisioned by this competition, and it will allow unprecedented access to personal health metrics.”14 One well-funded startup in California, Scanadu, has already built a prototype that relies on—wait for it—an iPhone and a peripheral that uses a spectral camera and a LOC.15 Pretty impressive. After all this, if you’re still not with me, you should head over to www.tricorderproject.org and talk with Peter Jansen, a cognitive science researcher who’s created an open-source, moretrue to the show version of the Tricorder. He’s already built the Mark II and while he scrapped the Mark III, (it departed too much from the philosophy of the Tricorder, he says) he’s in active development on the Mark IV (through most of The Next Generation, the crew used Mark VII models). Jansen’s goal was to pack as many different kinds of sensors as he could into a small device that resembled the show’s prop as closely as it could. He came pretty close. This thing has ten different sensor types, from atmospheric humidity to ultrasonic distance. Not sure what you might need them all for in every day life, but who am I to argue? If you have a look at the pictures of the Mark II, though, you’ll see something familiar: an iOS-style keyboard, like the

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14. see www.qualcommtricorderxprize.org. 15. Ben Coxworth, “Scanadu Developing Medical Tricorder,” Gizmag, December 30, 2011.

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one that’s in my iPhone. Hmm.

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The Enterprise’s computer touchscreens were, at the time, a bold, future-facing feature. Today, in the real world, they’re already ubiquitous. I mean, imagine our computers without them. If you’re old enough to have lived through The Next Generation in first-run syndication, then it shouldn’t be too hard. There weren’t many around back then. But think about how many times a day you use them now, and the computers that wouldn’t be possible or as friendly without them. No iPhones, no Surface, no Kindle Fire, no Windows 8. Everything from ATMs to airline check-in kiosks would not just operate differently, but would be orders of magnitude less flexible than they are now. There might not even be any airline check-in kiosks without touchscreens. Forget self-checkouts. Okay, that last one might be a blessing, but innumerous devices are now built around touch and it’s difficult to imagine them without that capability. Surely the Enterprise had a lot to do with that. I know this seems odd now—maybe even quaint—but watching Star Trek, the idea of a computer screen that would respond to my fingertips was so intriguing to me. I knew, in reality, they were little more than acrylic with backlit transparencies, I knew it was all just television magic, but I’d never seen anything like them before. I dreamed of sitting on the Enterprise bridge, maybe at ops, my hands gliding over the controls. I’d have no idea what any of them did, and might have accidentally dumped the warp core, but still, it would’ve been awesome.

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On the Enterprise, the signature look of its orange, yellow and blue controls was called LCARS, or Library Computer Access and Retrieval System, and it was designed by Michael Okuda. We didn’t really see this much on the show, if, at all, but LCARS could reconfigure itself depending on the controls activated or the personal preferences of the user, according to the TNG Technical Manual.16 Okuda’s goal was to “create a visual style that suggests an extremely simple means of organizing and controlling very complex processes and hardware.”17 It’s a bit of a shame that he doesn’t get the credit he deserves for his influence on today’s touch interfaces. And You’ve already labeled me an Apple fanboy by now, so I’m just going to say it: the original iPhone’s buttons-on-black-screen owe something to the scenic design of Star Trek’s computers. There was more than a vague similarity there. And look at Windows 8. It’s minimalist, sleek, designed for touch from the ground up. Hell, it looks like it could’ve been on the Enterprise. Recreating LCARS is something of a passion for fans and I’ll admit, reluctantly, that I spent some hours as a kid recreating the Conn from drawings in the Technical Manual in Paintbrush of all things. My mother laughed at me when I showed her my painstaking work, rightfully. But today, there are dozens of websites devoted to LCARS, even one that’s trying to develop LCARS standards for things like app and screensaver development, like the World Wide Web Consortium develops HTML standards. There’s software that exists that can transform some Windows based computers to LCARS-style interfaces and I’ve tried several apps on my iPad that, while mostly aesthetic in function, give me a bit of that experience I longed


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for so much as a kid. Of course, we did have touch screens in the 90s, but they were clunky compared to today’s standards. In fact, we had touch screens long before Star Trek ever made them famous; E.A. Johnson at the Royal Radar Establishment in the United Kingdom invented the fist touchscreen around 1966. Hewlett-Packard introduced a home computer with a touchscreen in 1983, four years before The Next Generation premiered. It used a grid of infrared light to detect finger movements, something like how we use lasers to read barcodes today. Microsoft introduced a tablet edition of Windows XP in 2002 that could accept touch-input from a stylus; I had one for a brief time but it never really caught on with the public. Everything changed when the iPhone hit in 2007. I know, I know, here he goes again. The iPhone, yada yada, blah blah, Steve Jobs. Magical. Yay. Some of you are tuning me out (the rest of you, my true brothers in solidarity, I’ll see you in line for the iPhone 6—we’ll have a lot of time to stand there and talk about it), but we’re talking about the revolution and evolution of our computing systems, and fanboy or not, we can’t deny Apple’s place. I know some of you will try, and you can argue that yes, my office looks like an Apple Store and I’m therefore not objective. Well, I’ll give you that, but at least you know my biases. And I’ll go on the record saying I pushed myself into a Microsoft Store recently just to have some hands-on experience with Windows 8. I’m actually considering buying one. And don’t worry, later chapters will cover androids and warp drives and transporters, and unless Cupertino’s branching out into some new industries I don’t know about, this will be the most you hear about Apple in the whole book. Having written those words, I’m now fearing an Apple exec say “Oh, and one more thing” at a company even just days before Tre-

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knology is published, but for now we’re going to operate on the assumption that the company has no interest in interstellar travel—yet. Google on the other hand… Here’s the takeaway form all this. Apple not only helped push computers with touchscreens to the masses, they mainstreamed a very specific type of touchscreen that most consumers had never encountered: one capable of registering more than one touch at a time. Sound simple? It’s not. This is the key to the iPhone’s characteristic pinching and zooming, its flicking and scrolling.18 This is the magic. Apple didn’t invent multitouch, though; the technology had been around in various forms for nearly two decades, but they do, sort of, maybe hold some patents related to it and they certainly get credit for bringing it to market.19 Today, touchscreens without multitouch are something of an anachronism. Ask me how many times I’ve tried to pinch the map in my Prius’ built-in GPS and then, fist in the air, cursed Toyota for its backward ways. It’s also a telling sign that the United States recently rejected Apple’s bid to trademark “multitouch”—as key as it is to iOS devices’ ease of use—as too generic to warrant protection.20 And though we can probably agree that touch screens are a key piece of computer technology that’s already moved from Star Trek’s small screen to daily life, they’re not necessarily the holy grail of human-computer interfacing. The Enterprise’s

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18. Interestingly, we did see an example of multitouch technology in LCARS, specifically the console that controlled the transporters. Every time Chief O’Brien slid his fingers up the screen to “energize” he was doing what few touchscreens of our time, until the iPhone and iPad, could do. 19. Those patents are in jeopardy, but not dead yet. http://gizmodo. com/5966835/apples-flagship-multi+touch-patent-has-been-tentatively-invalidated 20. Jordan Golson. “Apple Denied Trademark for Multi-Touch”, MacRumors, September 6, 2011.

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computer had one other feature that we’re actually still working on: the crew could talk to it, and it’d talk back—intelligently.

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Me: Siri, do you like me? Siri: I’m your assistant. And your friend, too. Me: I’m lonely. Siri: I’m sorry to hear that, Justin. You can always talk to me.21

Awww. Later:

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Damn. If only she could.22 My conversations with Siri reminded of an episode of TNG called Remember Me (4x5), where Dr. Crusher seems to be the only one on the Enterprise not erased from existence: Dr. Crusher: Computer, read the entire crew roster for the Enterprise.

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Enterprise Computer: Dr. Beverly Crusher. Dr. Crusher: Have I always been the only member of the crew on the Starship Enterprise? Enterprise Computer: Affirmative. Dr. Crusher: If this were a bad dream, would you tell me? Enterprise Computer: That is not a valid question. Dr. Crusher: Like hell it’s not.

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The computer (voiced, as always, by Gene Rodenberry’s late wife Majel Barrett23), got some even better lines in an episode of Voyager, Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy (6x4), when the Doctor (a hologram) allows himself to start daydreaming and some aliens use the opportunity to take over the ship. Voyager Computer: Warning. Warp core breach a lot sooner than you think.

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Voyager Computer: Warning. Last chance to be a hero, Doctor. Get going!

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Processing natural language is actually not that difficult anymore. Computers can transcribe human speech, but gleaning the meaning of our speech and spitting back an appropriate response is still a challenge. Most computers rely, generally, on hard-coded sets of rules. If a person says this, then respond with this. When these programs encounter input that they don’t understand, though, responding gracefully is difficult. The

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23. Barrett died in 2008, but not before she was able to complete voice work for the Enterprise computer on JJ Abrahams’ 2009 Star Trek film.

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situation requires human intervention in the code in the form of more and more input-response rules. You can imagine, given the complexity of human speech and thought, that writing enough rules to cover even a fraction of possible interactions is virtually impossible. That’s why Siri sometimes responds with “if you say so” or some similar dismissive. There is a better way than forcing a computer down a decision-tree of rules, one we’re just starting to develop and experiment with. To understand how it works though, we’re going to have to take a detour back to the 1950s and talk a little about the godfather of modern computer science, Alan Turing. More than six decades ago, Turing asked whether or not machines like computers could think.24 This is obviously a necessary step, a thinking machine, if we want our computers to understand language and respond in turn without human intervention. But Turing found the terms “think” and “machine” difficult and even dangerous to objectively define in a way that could satisfy the nuances of human intelligence. He suggested instead we should be asking how much of what humans do can computers imitate? So, he proposed a test. If a computer could respond in a way to fool a human to believe he was interacting with another human and not a computer, it passed. You encounter this in the reverse a lot on the web, even if you don’t realize it. Turing’s test is the basis of those CAPTCHAs (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) you have to pass to submit forms or sign up for a Gmail account. Most often, you’re asked to type a series of letters, based on a distorted image, that are supposedly impossible for computers to decipher, but easy for humans. More

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24. Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433-460.

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often than not, I have to take several tries at Google’s current CAPTCHAs, but that might say more about me than it does about the difficulty of their tests. Simpler, but less secure versions ask you to add two numbers or answer a question like “what color is the sky?”25 Turing also proposed a theory that’s the basis of next-generation natural language processing by computers. His idea was simple. Teach it. Treat the computer like we do children. The more rearing you do, the more training, the more likely you’ll end up with a machine capable of making its own choices. In 1950, in the magazine Mind, he wrote “(i)nstead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.”26 Simple, right? But not easy. What Turing’s talking about is machine learning. More to the point, it’s what we think of as artificial intelligence. Machine learning is a key to not only creating computers that can talk back like the Enterprise’s does, but a variety of other programs, too, like those that can read handwriting or give advice on what movie to see.27 The idea is to take a large set of data, in this case snippets of human speech, and translate it or label it for the computer. Then, we write code that makes it possible for the computer to take what it’s learned about that data (based on our translations and labels) and detect similar patterns in real world input it. Hopefully, then, it can respond in an intelligible way. Here’s a more concrete example: “What’s the weather like in

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San Franciso?” To train the computer to understand this sentence, we’re going to have to label it. We want to give the computer as much information about it as we can so, we tell it the parts of speech (“San Francisco” is a proper noun and “what’s” is an interrogative contracted from “what is”) and maybe give it context (“San Francisco” is a place, “what” indicates a question and indicates we want an answer, “weather” is the state of the atmosphere and so on). The key is that we’re not giving the computer if-then scenarios, but training it to understand things like sentence structure and context. That way, when it encounters the sentence “Is it raining in San Diego?” it knows how to respond because it already understands what weather is and that weather is localized to specific places. It can infer what we want to know even if this is the first time it’s heard words like “raining” or “San Diego.” This is a pretty simplistic example, and getting from the “What’s the weather like in San Francisco?” to “Is it raining in San Diego?” will take a lot of training. But here’s where things get interesting, if not a little creepy. The more you talk to the computer, the more input it receives, the more it learns. Sometimes this requires human intervention—more supervised training—sometimes not. It’s Turing’s idea of taking a child brain and teaching it all the way to adult brain realized. Sophisticated systems, like the kind that can respond to natural language, might contain millions of training examples for the computer to learn from. Users provide millions more. Here’s another example of machine learning, one I’m sure you’ve already encountered. Let’s say I own an online video streaming service, and my revenue depends on keeping people engaged and watching more and more programming. The obvious way to do this is to recommend new shows to them, but the recommendations have to be good. I also don’t want to have

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to manually sift through my users’ viewing habits and guess at what they want to watch. I want a computer to do it for me, and I want that computer to be smart enough to know that if someone likes Star Trek, they might also like Battlestar Gallactica or even Fringe. And I want it to be able to do this even if the user has never given us the slightest indication they’re interested in those shows, because, for the sake of our example, they don’t even know they exist. With the proper training, that is actually telling the computer that other people who love Star Trek also really love watching Fringe and Battlestar Gallactica, the computer can predict that I’m going to like those shows too, and recommend them to me. The more the computer is trained, the more it knows about the kinds of shows various people like, the better it gets at making recommendations. For a little help understanding this, I turned to computer science expert and author of the book Nine Algorithms that Changed the Future, John MacCormick. MacCormick grew up in New Zealand, studied mathematics and computer science in England, and now lives and teaches computer science in Pennsylvania at Dickinson College. He received a PhD in computer vision—teaching computers to recognize the vast amounts of information in images—from the University of Oxford, and has worked in the research labs of Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. He says we’re moving away from the kind of procedural, if-then rules that have dominated computer programming for decades and toward teaching computers to actually think for themselves. But I wanted to know how you take a child computer, as Turing put it, and get a really smart adult computer from it? Growth and development is natural for humans, these are processes common to all living organisms. Computers don’t grow, at least not yet. Is machine learning simply a matter of provid-

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ing the computer with enough training examples, or is it more about better quality examples? “It’s both,” MacCormick said. “The more training data you can get and the better that data is, the better your system is going to perform. That’s why, for instance, in this natural language processing that we’re talking about, that is definitely not going to work with this small corpus of translated documents. You need a very large corpus.” In a bit, we’re going to talk about where that large corpus might come from in the future. But still, enough training examples or not, teaching a computer to talk would still require a good bit of human intervention, right? We do have to translate and label the data. We have to give the computer its first initial nudge toward intelligence and then some. I asked MacCormick if there are any techniques coming that would eliminate the need for human training. Can we create a child-computer that can learn without our help? One that can take in the world and grow up on its own? “No, I’m not aware of anything like that,” McCormack said. “The training effort is supervised learning, supervised in that a human told the computer what the right answer was. Eliminating that altogether is not possible using current techniques.” Let’s bank on the word “current.” It is amazing how much the process really is like child rearing. In many ways, we are a reflection of how we’re raised and who does the raising. The same holds true for our machines; the quality of the parent matters. Security researchers have already identified ways to provide bad training data to teach computers to do malicious things, like engage in cybercrime or steal identities.28 You have to wonder, if a thinking computer decides

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to do something bad—who do you prosecute? The computer or the human trainer? If the real-world analogies hold true, a grown-up child would face the consequences on their actions on their own, so maybe a grown up computer would, too? Mom and Dad may have set bad examples for me, but they don’t get thrown in jail if I swipe someone’s credit card.

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Given this seems to be one of our last challenges on the Star Trek-like computer front, building a machine that can think and converse and make decisions, I wanted a better idea on the state of today’s technology. So, I tracked down Ilya Gelfenbeyn, a 28-year-old transplant from Russia who’s on the forefront of natural language processing. Gelfenbeyn studied mathematics at Novosibirsk State University in Russia and got an MBA from the University of Brighton in England. Now, he leads a 17-person team at Speak To It, the developer of a mobile app called Assistant that can process and respond to natural language. Assistant is a Siri competitor, but it was on the scene before she was. We spoke on Skype just a week after Gelfenbeyn relocated from Russia to California. I told him I’d downloaded Assistant on my iPhone earlier that morning but he warned me right away that the Android version, running on the mobile operating system developed by Google, was much better because of limitations in Apple’s software. I took his word for it, some-

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Support Vector Machines. arXiv:1206.6389v1 Appears in Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2012) Submitted 6/27/2012.

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thing I did a lot of the course of the time we spent talking. I got the feeling he was working hard to put a complex topic into points I could understand. As simple as I try to make it sound, machine learning and natural language processing are some of the most complex issues in computer science today, covering fields like language, programming and mathematics. Gelfenbeyn told me that Speak To It employs more linguistic scientists than it does engineers. The current version of Assistant understands not just English, but Spanish and Russian, too. I wanted to know where we’re headed, though. Assistant can write text messages for me, make calls and get the weather, just like Siri. It connects to myriad data sources and acts as kind of a broker, as long as it understands exactly what the user wants to know. It employs a combination of if-then rules and machine learning, but the majority of its learning capabilities are geared toward being more useful to its user. Assistant learns, for example, if you’re mostly interested in knowing the weather before you leave the house in the morning and ask the question every day around the same time, then it tries to have that data ready for you before you even ask. But remember the 90s? Remember Lycos and Excite? “All the assistants that are currently on the market, including us and Siri, they are in I would say in really early stage,” Gelfenbeyn told me. “Basically we compare it to the industry of search engines in beginning of 90s.” So, Gelfenbeyn thinks that where we were pre-Google is where we are with natural language processing today. If you think about it, Google was a disruptive force in search engine land much the same way the iPhone was with cell phones. It entered the market, did what no one thought they could, and then became not just a dominant player but, the player. Decades later and those who got there first in search, like Mi-

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crosoft and Yahoo, are still trying to catch up. Do we need a Google or Apple to swoop in and make talking computers mainstream? Maybe. But no one had to impress upon us the utility of touch screens, something that we saw on Star Trek for years but are now everywhere. Sure, Apple advanced this realm too, with touch screens that kicked the asses of every other touch screen on the market at the time. They raised the bar, but no one claims they invented it. Will natural language process go the same way? Is Siri the game changer? Will ubiquity come when talking to a computer is as easy and natural as talking to a friend over a glass of wine? And maybe most importantly, when can I tell my refrigerator to pour me a glass of filtered water? I hate getting off the couch to do that myself. “We understand that mobile is not enough,” Gelfenbeyn said. “Because all the process is being done in the cloud, it doesn’t really matter to us what the client is. So it’s easy to implement clients for TVs, cars and smart phones…” Maybe easy to him, but you get his point here, right? Voice is coming, and someday soon—much sooner than we probably thought—it might just become the dominant way we interact not only with our computers, but the rest of our machines, too.

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Me: Siri, are you the future? Siri: No comment, Justin.

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With the way things have gone over the last few decades, it’s not a leap to say that computer science will leave Star Trek far behind fairly soon. Already, we’re diverging in a pretty serious

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way. I hinted at this when comparing iPhones and Tricorders. While the Enterprise relied on vast data stores in computers to give the crew any piece of information it needed, we’re moving toward decentralized knowledge contained in millions of computers, accessible through connections like the Internet. Even basic computer functions are moving into what we’ve come to call the cloud (Gelfenbeyn, mentioned it above, when he talked about where the actual processing behind his virtual assistant app took place). You don’t need to install a word processer on your iMac to write a book, you just have to open your browser and connect to Google. You don’t need an encyclopedia on your laptop, or on your bookshelf even, because you can get all the information you need online. We’ve moved from wired connections through Ethernet cables and phone lines to wireless. As we’ll talk about in the chapter on transporters, we’re just starting to move beyond even that to actual teleportation of information. And speaking of machine learning, imagine what a computer could do training on all the data we’ve uploaded to cloud. Soon, we’re going to have to stop looking at the cloud as just a place to store stuff, and more of an active resource that apps like Siri will use to plan our days. Remember that large corpus MacCormick talked about? We’re already creating the largest corpus of training data the planet has seen. Star Trek, though, as far as we saw, never really envisioned the cloud or even the Internet. They didn’t ever have much reason to connect two different computers together. Even Data, arguably the universe’s most sophisticated computer, had to plug a cable into his head just to interface directly with the Enterprise. I’d like to think this has more to do with an abundance of insight and practicality than a lack of foresight or ingenuity. Crossing the real-world needs and knowledge of Star Trek’s writers with the fictional world they crafted, it’s probably a lit-

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tle bit of both. When The Next Generation premiered, things like the Internet and WiFi certainly weren’t in the national consciousness. But in terms of the fiction, maybe it’s just not conceivable that something like the Internet could operate efficiently across light years or parsecs. Maybe it was more practical and more risk-adverse to organize and store the universe’s information in a few computer cores on the Enterprise than it was to trust that the Enterprise could access Google’s data centers without fail in a time of crisis. Think about Captain Picard calling for an analysis of a sucking nebula and getting back the Twitter fail whale instead. Can’t imagine that’d go over well. Computer science is such a key component of the majority of today’s technology and the technology of Star Trek that I’ve chosen just a few topics to cover in this chapter. We’re not done with them, though. I’ve not said much about speed, but advances here are almost a given. The Enterprise computer, though, operated at speeds faster-than-light, but we’re not sure that’s physically possible. We’ll discuss it more in the chapter on warp drive. We’re also going to talk about a pesky computing challenge in the next chapter on transporters and then some other computer science issues again in the chapter on Data and artificial life forms. That’s where it really gets interesting. Data was probably one of the Star Trek universe’s biggest technological achievements. They had warp drive for a couple hundred years, but they couldn’t make another Data. The question is, though, will we ever make a first one? Let’s find out. Onward.

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Building a matter energy transporter

“...from what I’m told, [Captain Archer] wouldn’t even put his dog through this thing.” —Travis Mayweather

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never really understood why Star Trek’s producers axed Dr. Crusher for the entire second season. I loved her, and was never big on Dr. Pulaski and that weird half smock-slash-uniform-slash-skirt thing that she wore. That was just weird. I did, however, get her fear of the transporter, a fear that she shared with Dr. McCoy. Here’s how this thing works, in practical terms. It scans your body, storing a quantum-string level image of you in memory pattern buffer. Then, it literally rips you apart at the subatomic level, converting your decoupled protons and neutrons and Higgs bosons into a matter stream that it collects and shoots off through space to another location. Then, it reverses that process

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and uses the scan it created of you to turn that stream back into bonded matter, reassembling you into a whole person, presumably still alive. This bears repeating, but Star Trek’s transporters rip you apart proton-by-proton, neutron-by-neutron. And I thought tanning beds were dangerous. Ensign Sato, like most of the crew of the Enterprise NX-01, had a problem with this (Vanishing Point, 2x10):

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1. This range grew dramatically in the hands of J.J. Abrahms, the executive producer behind the 2011 Star Trek reboot. Remeber the scene where future-Spock tells Scotty all about the equation for transwarp beaming he’s soon to invent. Well, good for them keeping with the Star Trek requirement that ships traveling at warp have to match warp velocity for transport. But, again, those ships were traveling at warp and one had a big head start. So since when can the transporter beam people across, well, lights years presumably. If the transporter can do that, what would you even need starships for? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one.

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to anywhere else on earth you’d want to go, all in about eight seconds. Also, if you find yourself on a starship in the future, the transporter doesn’t function while traveling at warp, unless the ship and the destination—presumably another ship—are moving at the same speed. You can’t beam through shields, either. And, there’s a key difference arbitrarily forced between the transporter and a replicator that eliminates a pesky story problem: if we can transport living beings, why can’t we just replicate them? In the Technical Manual, Sternbach and Okuda explain that though the transporter and replicator use the same basic technology, a replicator stores patterns of objects at the molecular level, while transporters create patterns at the quantum level.2 It’s just like the difference between new TVs and old TVs, one is standard definition, and the other is high definition. Without that added level of resolution, it’s impossible create a new person the same way Captain Picard creates cups of Earl Grey. Of course, this dubious yet necessary distinction between the two pieces of technology works only in television. No one would’ve been upset about Tasha Yar’s senseless death in the first season of TNG if they could’ve just ordered a new Tasha back aboard the Enterprise. The need for dramatic storytelling with life or death consequences requires this limitation, even if it’s logically fallible. In real-life, if we’d have the ability to recouple a matter stream that was once a whole human being, it’d likely be in our range of ability to create other living things from the kind of matter stores the replicators use. So, when are we going to have these devices at our disposal? Lawrence Krauss, author of The Physics of Star Trek, thinks it probably won’t be too soon. “…building a transporter would

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require us to heat up matter to a temperature a million times the temperature at the center of the Sun, expend more energy in a single machine than all of humanity presently uses, build telescopes larger than the size of the Earth, improve present computers by a factor 1000 billion billion and avoid the laws of quantum mechanics.”3 That’s it? Some of those challenges are going to be easier to overcome than others, maybe even easier than Krauss himself realizes. Others might just be impossible based on our current understanding of the universe. It’s not like us humans to think we’ve got everything figured out until someone smarter comes along and, literally, upends the equation, right? Right.

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3. Krauss, The Physics of Star Trek. 4. Einstein, A. (1905), “Ist die Trägheit eines Körpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhängig?” Annalen der Physik 18: 639–643, doi:10.1002/andp.19053231314. See also the English translation at http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/E_ mc2/www/

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book the Physics of the Impossible says.5 E = mc2 was almost something of an afterthought, a footnote even. Einstein didn’t even mention it until the fifth and last paper in a series of groundbreaking, earth shattering, universe altering revelations that rocked the scientific community more than 100 years ago. In those papers, Einstein had already united space and time, two well known, but incorrectly thought to be separate, concepts with his theory of special relativity. It was almost then, a logical and maybe even fleeting step for him to take two other up-until-then separate concepts, mass and energy, and unite them, too. How, exactly, did he do that? Well, Einstein’s equation6 shows us that an object in motion—and at a basic level, that’s a good way to think of energy, as motion—gained in mass the faster it moved. We’ll talk more about this when we talk about fasterthan-light travel (Einstein would say it’s not possible because of the relativity of space and time and that an object moving at the speed of light would have infinite mass, but there’s a big loophole…), but for that to be true, it means that the energy of motion was being transformed in a way that was increasing the mass of the object. Catch that? The energy was changing so that the moving object gained in mass. It’s that kind of interchangeability that’s at the heart of Star Trek’s transporter. Brian Greene, in The Fabric of the Cosmos, lays it out pretty simply. He compares the interchangeability of mass and energy to exchanging currencies like dollars for euros, except that the exchange rate—dictated by the speed of light—between mass and energy is constant. According to him, this is more than just

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5. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/expe-kaku.html 6. This equation is so elegant that what it tells us about the nature of our universe isn’t apparent at first glance. It ties not only matter to energy, but also space to time. Things that we see as working independent of each other are actually so intertwined that you can’t change one without changing the other in some way.

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an esoteric bit of science. “Our survival depends on Einstein’s equation, since the sun’s life-sustaining heat and light are generated by the conversion of 4.3 million tons of matter into energy every second…” In other words, the sun isn’t going to be around forever. It has a finite amount of fuel to convert to the energy that sustains life on earth. So Einstein’s equation might be leading us toward more than just matter-energy transporters, but also to new sources of power. Greene says “…one day, nuclear reactors on earth may emulate the sun by safely harnessing Einstein’s equation to provide humanity with an essentially limitless supply of energy.”7 We’ve seen this already, in a less than controlled or “safely” harnessed way. Einstein’s theory tells us that we can convert matter to energy, but it also tells us that a devastating amount of energy can be contained in only a small amount of matter. That’s why just a few kilograms of plutonium in an atomic bomb can level an entire city. Kaku says the energy contained in a standard house might be enough to crack the Earth in half.8 The inverse is also true, and like Krauss says, it presents a big challenge to creating a transporter. Converting small amounts of mass to energy produces an enormous amount of energy, and it takes an enormous amount of energy to convert energy into mass. “If one suddenly transformed 50 kilograms (a light adult) of material into energy, one would release the energy equivalent of somewhere in excess of a thousand 1-megaton hydrogen bombs,” Krauss says. “It is hard to imagine how to do this in an environmentally friendly fashion.”9

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7. Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (Vintage, 2005), 354. 8. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/theory-behind-equation.html 9. Krauss, 88.

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Still, particle physicists convert energy to matter all the time in laboratory settings. They take ordinary particles, accelerate them pretty close to the speed of light, and then let them smash into each other. The energy, again, the motion of the particles, is converted into a spray of new particles that usually exist only for a very short time. We just can’t collect and assemble them into anything remotely meaningful, let alone a full-fledged human being. The new particles are so unstable that they don’t even exist in everyday life, so this is the only way that scientists can study them. But, let’s be clear here. No new matter is being created. The way we understand our universe (in no small part thanks to Einstein’s equation) says that can’t happen. Energy is being converted to mass. It gets even more complicated because other rules say that the electrical charge can’t change either, so for each new bit of matter converted, the same amount of antimatter comes into existence to keep everything in balance. And for all the work scientists are doing with particle accelerators around the world, like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, they’ve ended up with a relatively small amount of converted matter.

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We’ve seen that the scientific theory behind the transporter is at least plausible. We’ve known, for more than 100 years, that mass and energy have an intrinsic connection and are essentially interchangeable. But that doesn’t mean that we can yet change them with any sort of organization or control, especially not the kind of organization and control that would be required to assemble a human being atom-by-atom or quark-

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by-quark. That might actually be the least of our problems. Remember Krauss’ list? Not only are the energy requirements prohibitive, but we don’t have sensors with the resolution or reach to scan and pluck a person from any distance, let alone one standing on a transporter pad. Even if we could, the data processing needs are beyond our current abilities. In 2007, when Krauss published the latest version of The Physics of Star Trek, he estimated that the information in even a small human body, encoded as a single pattern by a transporter, would be approximately 1028 bytes.10 Let’s have a look at that number, written out: 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000. “Storing this much information is,” Krauss says, “in an understatement physicist love to use, nontrivial.”11 He’s right. We don’t have a storage device capable of holding that much information—yet. Star Trek’s writers made it intentionally impossible to compare real-life orders of magnitude in computers with those used in the show, but that’s okay. We’re looking at this in real-life terms. Again, back in 2007, the largest hard drive available was one terabyte, or about 1,000 gigabytes. That’s 1012 bytes, or a 10 with twelve zeroes after it. Six years have passed, though, and you can get a three-terabyte drive on Amazon for about $100. Let’s not forget there’s nothing that says that a transporter would be limited to commercially available storage op-

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10. In the newest version, Krauss says the he’s received many notes from readers about way to reduce the amount of data, arguing that we can probably compress a lot of redundant information (everyone has two lungs, ie, so we’d only need to record one, or all the information in the human body is already encoded in DNA, etc.). He dismisses these ideas though, arguing that the complexities of the human body and the individuality of each person would forgo compression. I’m not so sure. Think of the complexity of the images in a typical movie. We already compress these with remarkable fidelity, into not just Blu-ray discs, but streams that can be downloaded over the average wireless network. More on this in a bit. 11. Lawrence Krauss, The Physics of Star Trek, 2007.

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tions, or even a single storage device, either. In 2011, IBM built a data array, a series of connected hard drives, that could hold 120 petabytes of data or about the same amount as 333,000 of those three terabyte drives available from Amazon.com. While that’s still just barely a fraction of the storage capacity needed for a single human pattern, at least according to Krauss’ estimate, it only took us fifty years to get to where we are today. IBM shipped the first hard drive in 1956, it was the size of two refrigerators and held just five megabytes. That’s barely enough to hold a single MP3, but it wasn’t that much different in relative scope than the 120-petabyte data array they built just last year. So, six years ago, Krauss thought our technology was about nineteen powers short of the necessary storage space needed to store a human’s pattern. Today, though, accounting for the fact that we can string a series of hard drives together—data storage solutions that will become more and more common as we move more information into the cloud—we’re actually only about 10 powers away, give or take a power. Krauss is also conservative on his estimates of how long it’d take us to get there. “…one might expect that 190 years from now, at the dawn of the twenty-third century,” he says, “we will have the computer technology on hand to meet the information-transfer challenge of the transporter.” He assumed about ten years for one power of advancement. We’ve gone about nine powers in six. There’s still another computer issue. The typical transporter cycle on Star Trek takes about seven or eight seconds. Krauss’ estimates are probably off and we’ll most likely have the capacity to store a human’s pattern within our lifetimes. The bigger question though, is if we’ll have a computer that can handle that much information that quickly. Maybe we won’t have to, you say. That’s not a bad assump-

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tion. The speed of the transporter was probably more a dramatic device than a comment on the way the technology worked. It needed to be quick to fit into the format of an hour-long television show. There’s nothing, though, that says our real-life transporters couldn’t take thirty seconds or even five minutes. An hour? We’d probably take that over a 24-hour intercontinental plane ride, right? There is some suggestion, however, that even Star Trek’s transporters couldn’t hold on to a pattern for very long without it degrading. Stay in the pattern buffer too long, and there’d be nothing left to rematerialize when you came out the other end. That is, unless you have a really good engineer making some modifications. Take the TNG episode, Relics (6x4). The Enterprise responds to a distress call and finds a crashed ship on the surface of a Dyson Sphere. It’d been there for seventy-five years, but oddly, is still drawing power through some of its systems.

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LaForge: The transporter is still on-line... it’s being fed power from the auxiliary systems. Riker: The rematerialization subroutine has been disabled. LaForge: That’s not all, the phase inducers are connected to the emitter array, the override is completely gone and the pattern buffer’s been locked into a continuous diagnostic cycle. Riker: This doesn’t make any sense. Locking the unit in a diagnostic mode just sends inert matter through the pattern buffer. Why would anyone want to— LaForge: There’s a pattern still in the buffer. Riker: It’s completely intact, less than point zero zero three percent signal degradation. How is that possible? LaForge: I don’t know... but I’ve never seen a transporter system jury-rigged like this.

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Riker: Could someone survive in a transporter buffer for seventy-five years? Geordi: I know a way to find out.

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Geordi energizes, and out pops Montgomery Scott. Incidentally, Scott went into the transporter with another surviving crewmember, but his pattern degraded too much over the years and he didn’t make it. Mr. Scott notwithstanding, let’s assume there’s a good reason why a standard transporter scans, dematerializes, beams and rematerializes all in a few seconds. When will have a computer fast enough to pull this off ? This isn’t a new problem. Throughput, the speed at which computers read and write data, has been giving engineers fits since almost the beginning. Popular Science, in 1947, described an issue with the military’s “big calculators”—the first computers, actually—noting they frequently got answers to their problems “faster than the one-per-second rate” at which their printers could record them. Next-generation computers like the ENIAC and EDVAC, which were still on the drawing board in 1947, were slated to have storage that could hold up to “1,000 10-digit numbers” and access them “in an average time of 1/5,000” of a second,” the magazine said. That would deal with the bottleneck problem because solutions wouldn’t have to be output to the end user immediately after calculation. Popular Science called this remarkable development “memorization,” and the writer actually put “memorization” in quotes.12 I guess it’s not that hard to understand why this “memorization” amazed them. How could a machine “memorize” anything? Back then, crude mercury tanks along the same concept

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12. Stephen L. Freeland, Inside the Biggest Man Made Brain, Popular Science, May 1947.

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lines as today’s thermometers handled data storage, if one could even call it that. You don’t need training in computer science to understand how far we’ve progressed in a relatively short span of time. I spent a few days digging through old documents in the Archives of the American History Museum and reading the designs of these “big calculators” and “mechanical brains,” as reporters often referred to them. It was a lot like reading the TNG Technical Manual. I came across a lot of words and foreign concepts that are so out of context that they barely make any sense today. The only difference is that one set of words applied to a distant past, and those in the Technical Manual to a seemingly less distant future. I turned back to Dr. MacCormick, the computer science expert who wrote Nine Algorithms that Changed the Future, for some help understanding the throughput issue. I asked him about our ability to read massive amounts of data stored on computers, like the amounts that we’d be required to read to reassemble a human from the transporter’s matter stream. Are we any good at this? Is it a challenge? “That’s a pretty well known and well-studied issue, the fact that yes, it can take a lot of time to read through a large amount of data,” he told me. “It’s very application-dependent of course, as I’m sure you know. It is possible, most actual data you can go to an index for it, so that you can find anything you’re interested in very quickly. If you have something that doesn’t have an index, then of course it is going to take a long time to go through it.” The Technical Manual doesn’t mention much of anything about how the transporter stores its data or if it creates some kind of index to quickly find the data it needs, but it’s probably safe to assume that any real-life device we devise, at least in the near or far future, would require one. It would make a

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lot of sense. This is a technology, after all, that has stood the test of time. While indexes underlay modern computing, the Babylonians were organizing their libraries of cuneiforms with indexes over 5,000 years ago.13 You use them everyday, too. Your hard drive is indexed. Every time you type a query into Google, you’re accessing one of the world’s largest indexes. I want to take a moment, actually, and look at little closer at how Google works. We’ll see why in a moment. Google uses a bit of software called a bot or spider to crawl through the Internet’s data by following links. These bots record various details of the Internet’s pages and their structure. Each page is given a number and each part of the page, say every word, is given another number (that’s what enables Google to return index results based on search phrases, as opposed to just single keywords). For example, if the previous paragraph were a single page on the internet, it’d be given a number, say for example’s sake, 1 — and the word “Technical” would be given the number 1 - 2 and the word “Manual” 1 - 3. That way, when I search for “Technical Manual,” Google knows not only which page those words occur on, but that they lie next to each other on the page. Notice any parallel there? It’s the exact application, in theory anyway, that a transporter would have to use to record a transporter pattern. Just as Google scans the internet and records data about the structure of its pages so that they can be found quickly, a transporter would have to scan and record the data encoded in a human so it can be reassembled quickly later. We’re half way there already, right? No. I’m not saying that because we’ve built Google we should be capable of building a transporter. That’s too much of a simplification. But I think it’s important and useful to look

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13. Nine Algorithms that Changed the World.

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for the parallels between what we’re doing now, and the way we think that future tech may have to or could work. Take our data-indexing abilities as kind of proof-of-concept that we could overcome one of the very big data issues that transporter technology would pose. Until someone actually builds a prototype, these kinds of comparisons are the best we can do. And the amount of data in Google’s index is a fraction of what it would take to encode the human body in machine-readable form, so we have a ways to go. Still, given the simple elegance of the index that underpins Google’s search engine, it’s not hard to see why one of Google’s founders, Larry Page, thought he could out do the Enterprise. “The Star Trek computer doesn’t seem that interesting,” he said. “They ask it random questions, it thinks for a while. I think we can do better than that.”14

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Despite our ability to index the Internet via search engines and access the billions of pages with the word “cat” in less than a second, we’re still limited by the physical speeds of our hardware. No matter how good your index, or how big your storage device, it won’t matter if the computer is bogged down by a disc that can’t spin fast enough or a processor that just can’t keep up. The Enterprise’s computer uses subspace fields to fire off calculations and processes at faster than light speeds, but such technology probably isn’t in our near future.15 Subspace is

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14. Nine Algorithms that Changed the World. 15. Or any future that we know of. Remember Einstein’s theory of relativity? It says nothing can go faster than the speed of light, but like I said… there’s a big loophole.

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purely hypothetical. You could even call it science fiction conjecture. That doesn’t mean, though, that we haven’t made some strides in speed already. We talked about solid state drives in the first chapter, those storage disks with capacities like hard drives but without the moving parts? They’re not just smaller, they’re also faster. “This is the kind of memory that doesn’t get erased when you take the power away,” Dr. MacCormick told me. “That’s what has enabled a lot of things, like very small smartphones and iPods and so on, to sort of have good performance without needing to have a hard drive that spins around inside them. Hard drives themselves have parts that actually move. As soon as you have parts that move, there’s limitations on speed that you’re not restricted to when you have a purely electronic system.” There are other storage media on the horizon, too, that promise extraordinary speed and extraordinary capacity. In tests, holographic storage techniques, and we’ll talk more about holograms in a later chapter, have achieved write speeds that match what it currently takes to burn a Blu-ray disc, but with nearly 1,000 times the amount of data. And that brings us all the way back to Krauss’ original issue. Remember, the 10 with twenty-six zeroes following it? He believes the sheer amount of data that a human being’s transporter pattern would take up will be prohibitive for a long while. But I couldn’t help but think about my collection of Blu-rays, and the Netflix stream constantly transmitting video to my computer as I work. It seems like we’re already dealing with impressively large amounts of complex data, and doing it pretty well. I asked Dr. MacCormick to weigh in. “The easiest way to think of this is there’s two types of data,” he said. “There’s data that is fundamentally text characters, it could be English language or a computer program or some-

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thing like that, and then there are multimedia types of data, video, audio and photos. That first category, which I’ll just call text, even though it could be things a bit more general than that, is tiny compared to the second category. The entirety of the works of Shakespeare is smaller than one high-resolution photo that you take with a digital camera. We’re kind of at the point now where all of the textural information that’s ever been produced by anyone can be stored on a single machine and indexed and accessed. “In some ways, that’s arguably also the most interesting and easily processed data because it is in a form we think computers understand, which is text, whereas images and video and audio are much more difficult. We are starting to get to a point now where there are some good automated ways of analyzing those data formats, but it is obviously much less reliable and accurate and less fast than the analysis of text. Yeah, the high level point is those types of data take up far more space than anything else, but it is in kind of a different category since we don’t know how to process them as efficiently anyway.” We’re learning how to process them efficiently, though, and we’re learning pretty quickly. Standard DVDs have already given way to Blu-ray discs, streaming video is not only affordable for the masses, but probably the next disruptive force to hit entertainment industry. Even face recognition technology, once a high-security application, is now a part of iPhoto on my Mac. One thing that the transporter has going for it is that a human being, or any other object, really, can probably be encoded mostly in data similar to text. Large portions of it, anyway. For example, we’d need to know positioning of different types of quantum particles, x, y and z coordinates. There’s nothing horribly complicated about storing or processing that information, at least when compared to the type of multimedia informa-

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tion MacCormick is talking about above. Much of our genetic information is already stored this way, in sequenced pairs of nucleotides that we simply refer to as AC or CA, or TG or GT. We’re more than the sum of our DNA of course, a lot more. But the point remains the same. An AC base pair in our DNA, adenine and cytosine as they’re called, is going to be the same across all humans. We don’t necessarily need to record nucleotides down to the quantum level. We only need to record the information that’s specifically unique to each person. Everything else would be redundant and could be eliminated from the data we’d have to store or process. We do this all the time, every day. My Blu-rays and Netflix stream depend on it, actually. We call it compression. Cue Dr. MacCormick again. “One of the ways of viewing compression is that you take something that isn’t very random and you make it appear a lot more random. For instance, an easy way to compress something that just is ABC, ABC over and over again, is just to, say, write down ABC nine times. As soon as you do that, there’s a lot less redundancy in the data.” There’s a lot less redundancy and the compressed data takes up a lot less space, too. There are, of course, huge possibilities for error. Imaging encoding a string of AC basepairs in a person’s DNA as thirty units long when, it should’ve been, for example, thirty-one. That error, while it seems small, could have a devastating effect on the person we’re trying to piece back together. Turns out, already have a way of detecting and even sometimes correcting errors in transmitted data like this, whether it’s compressed or not. And like many of the concepts we’ve talked about in this chapter, you’ve already come across this in everyday life. This book is an example. Turn to the back cover. The barcode on the bottom corner has a thirteen-digit number called an ISBN. That stands for

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International Standard Book Number. Every book has one, and they’re unique to every book and every format of the same book. The last number is a check digit, it’s used to detect errors in the digits that come before it. If you have the paperback version, the ISBN for Treknology is 9781938191022. The last digit, 2, is our check digit. It’s how we’re going to figure if the ISBN is valid, or if it contains an error. The first step is to break the ISBN apart. We’re going to leave every odd digit from left to right, except the check digit, alone. Every even digit, we’re going to multiply by 3. Then we’re going to add all this up. It looks like this: Odd digits 9, 8, 9, 8, 9, 0 Even digits 7 x 3 = 21, 1 x 3 = 3, 3 x 3 = 9, 1 x 3 = 3, 1 x 3 = 3, 2 x 3 = 6 So, 9 + 21 + 8 + 3 + 9 + 9 + 8 + 3 + 9 + 3 + 0 + 2 = 88

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The next step is to take our result, eighty-eight, and do a modulo 10 division. It sounds complicated but it’s just dividing two numbers and taking the remainder as the result. So 88 mod 10 = 8 (or 8 remainder 8). Finally, we take that result, eight, and subtract if from ten. The answer is two and our check digit is also a two. Hooray! We have a valid ISBN. If the number had come out to be anything but two, we’d know that there was an error. While an ISBN is self error-detecting, as demonstrated above, it’s not error correcting. If the check digit hadn’t matched, we wouldn’t have a reliable way of fixing the corrupted number other than going back to the source, in this case the agency that issued the number. We can, however, do some error correction on streams of data, if they’re transmitted in the

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right way. A common scheme uses a special pattern of redundant data to make it possible for the receiver to fix any issues that might arise during transmission. I know we just got down talking about compression and how it’ll probably be necessary to reduce a transporter pattern to a manageable size, but in this case we’d sacrifice a little bit of compression to make sure the data was error-free. Here’s how it works. At its basic level, all digital information is made up of just two things: a 1 or a 0. To make sure our receiver, another computer, gets the information we’re trying to send correctly, we’re going to transmit each 1 or 0 three different times. This is called a (3,1) repetition code. The other computer will translate our redundant data by majority vote. Say I send the code 000. There aren’t any errors in that data, so the computer will interpret it as a 0. But say I mean to send a 000, but in the process, an error is introduced and it’s sent or received as 001 or 010 or 100. The majority rules, and because there are two 0s to one 1, the computer will still interpret that as a 0. The data is self-correcting. The same holds true on the other side. If I want to send 111, the computer will interpret it correctly even if an error is introduced and it receives 011 or 101 or something similar. This scheme can’t correct all errors, of course. In my last example, if I send 111 and the transmission is badly garbled for some reason and comes out as 001, the computer will detect the error, but correct it as a 0. That’s a problem. There’s also the efficiency issue. We’re not only sacrificing our compression by introducing redundant data, we’re increasing the amount of processing power needed to read it by a factor of three. There are more sophisticated error correction schemes, but I think you probably get my point. Our ability to handle data is already extremely sophisticated, and we’re only going to get

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better. Of all the challenges we face building a transporter, data is probably not one we’re going to have to worry about for long.

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The Coming Rust Belt

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When it comes to advances in computer technology—and we must advance if we’re going to build a transporter—we are going to face a big hurdle in the near future. In 1965, Gordon E. Moore, cofounder of Intel, the company that makes the majority of chips running personal computers today, wrote an article in the trade journal Electronics that predicted exponential advancement in computer processors. “The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year,” he said.16 What he’s getting at is that he believed better and faster chips would come along every two years because not only were costs coming down, but also we were getting better at building processors. His prophecy, a self-fulfilling one that the computer industry has used as benchmark for progress, has pretty much held true since the time it was published. He thought, at the very least, the trend would hold steady for ten years. We’re going on fifty years now, and Moore’s Law, as it’s called, is still the de facto standard. Already, we’re measuring the layers in computer chips as how many atoms thick they are. At some point though, quantum mechanics will kick in and prevent us from getting any smaller. You’ve probably heard of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. For a long time we’ve believed that observing quantum particles changes them so that our observations are never quite Electronics, Volume 38, Number 8, April 19, 1965.

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correct. We’ve also always thought that if we just had better ways of measurement and observation, this problem would disappear. Newer research, though, suggests the uncertainty principle might not have anything to do with observation, or at least, not everything to do with it. It is true that our current observation techniques affect quantum particles, but it may also be true that uncertainties about them are inherent, observed or not. I know that’s pretty difficult to wrap your head around and it’s a little like asking if a tree falls and no one hears it, does it make a sound? But the takeaway is this: when components shrink to a certain size, we begin to lose track of the speed and position of their particles. When that happens, we can’t effectively work with them. So it seems the universe has, so far, imposed a size limit on our ability to produce computer chips, a limit we’re rapidly approaching. “At that point, the computer revolution and Moore’s law will hit a dead end because of the laws of quantum theory,” Michio Kaku says in Physics of The Impossible.17 He even puts a deadline on Moore’s Law, one shared by experts around the world. 2020. That’s just seven years from now. “Sillicon Valley could become a Rust Belt,” he says. But! As dire and alarmist as that sounds, scientists are already working on the post-silicon era, so no worries. Here’s Kaku again, in the Physics of The Impossible: “… a variety of technologies are being studied that may eventually replace silicon technology, including quantum computers, DNA computers, optical computers, atomic computers, and so forth.”18 One of those should jump out at you: optical computers.

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Physics of the Impossible. Physics of the Impossible

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17. 18.

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The Enterprise’ isolinear chips—the computer’s main storage media—are optical devices. The main computer itself was optical in theory. Kaku also mentioned DNA based computers. Voyager introduced us to Bioneural gelpacks, replacements for isolinear chips that were made of organic components. They were more like replicas of human brains than DNA based, but that brings us to an interesting concept, and one that we have to grasp when we’re talking about the future of computing. The most advanced computers, the most advanced machines, if you will, exist within the known laws of the universe. They’re us. So who’s to say then, that we can’t build the kind of computer a transporter would need? No one, if you ask me.

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What does all this mean in context? When are we going to have a working transporter? I’m going to disappoint you and say not for a very long while. Despite everything I’ve talked about, if it comes in our lifetimes, I’ll still be surprised. Given the challenges, while certainly surmountable, I’d sooner bet on warp drive than I would a matter-energy transporter. Even in Star Trek, Starfleet launched the first Enterprise with just one transporter on board—and even then the crew had to practically be bribed to use it. They spent the majority of the show traipsing between starships in shuttlecraft. I’ve also consciously avoided another pesky transporter challenge: the soul. I can’t quantify or even qualify life for you. I’m not sure anyone can. I also think there are some questions that science is ill equipped to deal with, and this might be one of them. No matter if you believe in a soul or not, you have to

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admit there’s something unique about human existence. There’s no telling if that uniqueness will travel alongside a decoupled matter stream and come out intact on the other side. But we won’t know the answer to that question until the first human steps on the transporter pad. So while I think it’s something to ponder, it’s also moot—for now. Have I rained on this parade enough? I did promise you in the beginning that my outlook would be positive, so take heart. I think we’ve done a thorough takedown of one of Krauss’ big objections to the transporter, computer science. It won’t take us 200 years to have the necessary computing power as he predicts, that I can promise. Krauss’ other objections are all based in the state of current technology, too, not the theoretical underpinnings of the universe. That’s a good sign. It’d be one thing to say that the laws of physics as we understand them preclude the very idea of a transporter, but they don’t. Just because we don’t have sensors that can scan on the quantum level or match a 40,000 kilometer spread doesn’t mean we won’t some day. Just because we can’t effectively control the chaos created by converting matter to energy and back (and our best attempts level entire cities) doesn’t mean that will always be the case. Everything’s impossible, until it’s not.

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How to make anything invisible

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Cloaking devices

“Our people are scientists and explorers—they don’t go sneaking around...” —Gene Rodenberry

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almost didn’t write this chapter. I made a conscious decision when I started Treknology that I’d avoid, as much as I could, military technology. That’s why there’s no chapter on phasers and photon torpedoes. Trust me, I do love phasers and photon torpedoes. Sometimes, when I’m driving, I imagine my Prius can blow the all idiots in front of me off the road just by me calling out “fire!” At the very least I’d be able to knock the cell phones out of their hands. Still, I wanted to focus Treknology on stuff that didn’t kill people, intentionally anyway. I do understand the need for a strong national defense. I’m not anti-military. My dad was in the Air National Guard for twenty-five years. I appreciate the sacrifice of the men and women who fight for us and the things we believe in as a country. I’m ecstatic that the United States

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finally ended the institutional discrimination against gay soldiers. When I was picking a college so many years ago, I took a serious look at some of our military academies. I just think that when it comes to technology, if we’re honest with ourselves, we might regret, a little, inventing bombs that can destroy cities and kill millions. Bombs we now have to keep out of the hands of dictators and terrorists. I know hindsight is supposedly twenty-twenty, but maybe we should’ve seen the problems coming. Just sayin’. So what does this have to do with cloaking technology? I’m using the Star Trek cannon as a filter here, and the cloak was primarily a weapon on the shows. You cloaked your ship to hide from your enemy or sneak up on them. Still, maybe you think comparing a cloaking device with a nuclear weapon is a bit of hyperbole? I don’t. An invisible military force could wreak havoc. We have trouble protecting ourselves from forces we can see, what’s going to happen we can’t see them? Indeed, a lot of the research in this area right now is focused on making already stealthy jets even stealthier, by coating them with sophisticated radar-absorbing materials.1 Research at Duke University that led to one of the first real-life, proof of concept cloaks was even sponsored by The Office of Naval Research and the Army Research Office. 2 Duke’s technique, one of the most promising, uses so-called meta-materials, synthetics that have properties often not found in nature, to bend light waves around objects and render them invisible to the eye. The biggest problem initially was that the

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1. David Hambling, What We Know so Far About the Successor to the B-2 Stealth Bomber, Popular Science, http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-12/successor-b2-stealth-bomber, January 4, 2012. 2. Richard Merritt, “Making a Better Invisibility Cloak,” Duke News Release, http://www.pratt.duke.edu/news/making-better-invisibility-cloak, November 12, 2012.

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way the cloak scattered light, it left reflections, similar to what you might see looking through a curved piece of glass. But in late 2012, the school managed to improve the design of their light bending metamaterial to eliminate those reflections, at least for two-dimensional objects. They’re hoping to refine their techniques, so I don’t think it’ll be all that long before we see this in practice, especially in a military context. Their research could have wider applications, too. The same techniques could be used to smooth out fiber optic transmissions, which are sensitive to twisting wires, for example. Let’s not kid ourselves, though. The military isn’t pouring money into this tech to get better FiOS connectivity at the Pentagon. And Starfleet of course, didn’t even use cloaking technology. It would’ve killed the dramatic tension if all the Enterprise had to do was cloak to avoid a Borg cube, so the writers came up with the idea that the Federation was prevented from using cloaking devices legally because of a treaty to keep the peace with Romulans. That was good way to solve the storytelling problem, but in real life, it would’ve probably put one side of opposing forces at an untenable disadvantage—one I can’t imagine many politicians tolerating. But nonetheless, it worked in Star Trek.3 Even the writers broke their own rules, though, letting the Federation experiment with an illegal cloaking device in The Pegaus (7x12) on The Next Generation. It went way beyond manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum, however, to actually pushing entire ships out of phase with our spacetime. It came

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3. There’s some indication that the Federation’s lack of cloaking technology also had something to do with Starfleet policy, born from future human’s evolved sensibilities. I opened the chapter with a Rodenberry quote from the Star Trek Encylopedia, and Denise and Michael Okuda said this was their assumtpion, too (79). Look at it this way, though we don’t know why for sure, even the Bajorans outlawed cloaks. (Deep Space Nine, Profit and Loss, 2x18).

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in handy when the Enterprise was trapped inside an asteroid thanks to some suspicious and wily Romulans.

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Picard: How can we use the cloak to escape the asteroid? Riker: It’s more than just a cloak. It changes the structure of matter… in theory, a ship using this device would be able to pass through normal matter. Picard: [to Admiral Pressman] That’s why you were so eager to find it… Pressman: Can’t you see the potential here? The phasing cloak could be the greatest breakthrough in weapons research in the last fifty years. Picard: Except it’s illegal… it’s a violation of an agreement the Federation signed in good faith.

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Captain Sisko got to play with a legal cloak, too, on Deep Space Nine. Fast forward a few years after the incidents on TNG and the Romulans actually lend a cloak for use on the U.S.S. Defiant, the Federation’s first warship.4 But that was only when the entire Alpha quadrant feared an invasion by the Jem H’dar. This act of charity was more about putting differences aside to band against a new and common enemy than it was any kind of new understanding between species. And besides, breaking the rules in these instances served the story more than it hurt. Who didn’t love that Captain Sisko could have a cloaking device? It made the Defiant one the most interesting ships to come along in Star Trek in a long time. Let’s not forget, either, when Commander Riker turned Lursa and B’Etor’s defective cloak against them and caused

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4. Even then, it was only allowed to be used in the Gamma Quadrant and then only as long as Starfleet agreed to share all its intelligence on the Dominion with the Romulans, according to the Star Trek Encyclopedia (page number).

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their shields to drop mid-battle (lucky for Riker, defensive shields and cloaks can’t operate at the same time) in Star Trek: Generations. One well-placed photon torpedo and that was end of trouble-making Klingon sisters, but not before they had effectively destroyed the Enterprise-D.5 Of course, Lursa and B’Etor were total bitches, so they got what they deserved. But it doesn’t change the cloak’s reputation, in my mind anyway. Or Admiral Pressman’s, apparently. So, then, why are you reading all about cloaks, with my misgivings about the technology? Well, an earthquake hit Washington D.C. and I started thinking. That’s never a good sign.

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I’ve been in a few earthquakes in my life. Most often, it was nothing more than a gentle swaying, a feeling in the floors that you’d probably sooner chock up to vertigo than an earthquake. Other times, I’d feel a rumble and then a sudden jolt as my desk and chair bounced into the air, but nothing more. I did experience a bigger and scarier quake back in 2010, in San Diego. I was taking a nap actually, until some shaking closet doors woke me up. The shaking turned to a rumble, and a few seconds turned to ten, then twenty. I started to wonder if my

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5. Before the Enterprise destroyed their Bird of Prey, they damaged the ship enough to cause a warp core breach, the first in the show’s history that the crew wasn’t able to fix at the last possible. They did manage to evacuate to the saucer section and separate the ship, but the resulting explosion caused it to crash land and then be shredded to pieces in an alternate timeline. Either way, it was the end of the Enterprise-D but Captain Picard reminded us not to worry, because there were plenty of letters left in the alphabet. Indeed, we saw the decks of the Enterprise-J (and a small shot on a computer screen of its exterior) fighting an interdimensional war in the far future on Star Trek: Enterprise (Azati Prime, 3x18).

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building was about to come down. That was probably a bit dramatic, but at the time, clinging to a rocking doorframe, it was a real enough concern in my mind. My last earthquake started much the same way. I was in bed, reading, when the characteristic rumbling began. I thought, “oh, earthquake.” Then I realized I was in Washington, D.C., 2,500 miles away from Southern California. At that point I thought, with somewhat more of a rising sense of panic, “oh, explosion.” I figured I’d know either way in a few seconds, so I stayed on the bed to ride it out. Eventually, the shaking subsided—I settled on earthquake over explosion—and I got up to survey the damage. There wasn’t any. But when I looked out the front windows of my apartment, I saw half the people in my building had managed to evacuate our twelve floors and rush outside in the span of about sixty seconds. I was impressed with their speed, but not their wits. It’s usually safer to shelter in place during an earthquake, not to mention the fact they were all standing on the sidewalk in front a building with a full glass façade. In the Long Beach earthquake in 1993, many of the people who died were killed by falling debris from buildings they were trying to escape.6 The DC quake wasn’t really that big. Back in San Diego, we’d barely have even noticed anything happened. Here in DC, half the city shutdown and everyone got the rest of the day off, snarling traffic. All I could think was I’d hate to be stuck in the 395 tunnels under the National Mall in an aftershock. Even the Senate decided to meet outside of the Capitol in a nearby

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6. See http://www.ready.gov/earthquakes. One unfortunate person in the 1994 Northridge quake in Los Angeles was even crushed to death by a stampede of people trying to escape the same building. Corinne Peek-Asa, et al., “Fatal and hospitalized injuries resulting from the 1994 Northridge earthquake,” International Journal of Epidemiology 27, no. 3 (1998): 459-465. doi: 10.1093/ije/27.3.459

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building, the first time that’s happened in oh, 200 years.7 Still, I get it. It was scary. I tried to not be one of those “insufferable” Californians Gawker wrote about after the quake, but I did nonchalantly suggest everyone come back inside away from the giant wall of glass when I went downstairs to check my mail a bit later.8 Construction techniques in California have improved so much that there, you barely feel anything under a 3.0. Washington, on the other hand is another story. I watched a terrifying video of what it was like to be at the top of the Washington Monument during the quake and The National Cathedral took heavy damage that they’re still fundraising to repair.9 Where in California when things start to shake and rattle, the buildings roll—literally, many of the buildings are on a kind of earthquake roller—in D.C., they just crumble.10 I remember thinking that day, though, about how earthquakes are just waves of seismic energy, and how so much force is packed into them. We disperse waves all the time, right? A few weeks earlier, I was in Best Buy trying on a $300 pair of headphones that did a tremendous job cancelling out all the sound waves around me. I wondered why we couldn’t do the same thing for seismic waves produced by shifting earth. Turns out we almost can. “Five or six years ago scientists started with light waves, and

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7. Amanda Terkel, “Senate’s Earthquake Off-Site Session Makes History,” The Huffington Post, August 24, 2011. Incidentally, when I was googling for a source for this fact, I typed “DC earthquake” and got an autocomplete suggestion for “DC earthquake conspiracy” — turns out my first guess was right. Explosion. 8. Adrian Chen, “Californians are Being Insufferable About This Earthquake,” Gawker, August 23, 2011. 9. For the video, see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/26/new-videos-washington-monument-earthquake_n_981955.html, and yes, you can get to the top of the Washington Monument—at least you will again when repairs are finished. 10. Here’s an example of the “roller” system: http://science.howstuffworks.com/ transport/engines-equipment/bearing4.htm

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in the last few years we have started to consider other wavetypes,” Dr. William Parnell, a mathematician at the University of Manchester, said in Proceedings A, a science journal.11 His technique is a little different than what the researchers at Duke did, though. Instead of creating a metamaterial, he’s relying on innate properties of a naturally occurring substance: rubber. By “pre-stressing” the rubber, he thinks he can control and shape a seismic wave so it essentially rolls around a protected structure instead of hitting it head on. This leads to a “cloaking effect.”12 It’s like the object being cloaked isn’t even there. “If the theory can be scaled up to larger objects then it could be used to create cloaks to protect buildings and structures, or perhaps more realistically to protect very important specific parts of those structures,” Parnell says.13 If it becomes reality, not only could it save billions of dollars in property damage, it could even save lives—either directly, or through the protection of critical infrastructure like nuclear power plants and dams. For now, though, Parnell’s technique is just a series of equations and formulas. It’ll be years before it can be put into practice, and even longer before we see the first new buildings built or old ones retrofitted. That’s assuming he’s correct, and it can be adapted for use on large-scale objects. Two other scientists, one in South Korea and the other in Australia, are taking the metamaterial approach to earthquake cloaks. They think that if they surround a building’s foundation with concrete cylinders drilled full of small holes at just the right sizes, with the right spacing and the right patterns, they could manipulate the seismic waves enough to make it

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11. W. J. Parnell, “Nonlinear pre-stress for cloaking from antiplane elastic waves,” Proceedings A, written October 19, 2011, published March 15, 2012. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.3246.pdf 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid.

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as though the building wasn’t even there. As Dr. Parnell put it in his paper, though, creating such metamaterials is “non-trivial.”14 It’s all matter of engineering, but one that takes a lot of research, funding and time to overcome.

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Star Trek’s writers probably didn’t have earthquakes in mind when they invented the cloaking device. No matter. We tend to take their ideas and go a few steps further, anyway. This is just one of many examples. And I have no doubt that, yes, a cloaking device like those used by the Romulans and Klingons will show up on some stealth jet in the near future, fully realized. Some enterprising researcher will eventually figure out how to make a metamaterial that can bend light, radar and anything else thrown at it. I’d hope that such a device would be used more for defensive measures than offensive ones, but I’m not optimistic about it. That aside, there are more good uses for metamaterials than hiding things. Some researchers have developed ways to use metamaterials as biosensors (changes in the material reflect molecular-binding events that occur when the material comes in contact with certain substances) and the military is investigating if they can use the technique to detect biological and chemical weapons. Our cell phones and Wi-Fi devices rely on antennae to work, but the effectiveness of typical designs cor-

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14. Ibid. Scientists really like this phrase, it’s the same thing Dr. Krauss said and I quoted in the previous chapter on transporters. Incidentally, when we’re strictly talking math, my dictionary says “non-trivial” usually refers to something that has variables or factors that are not equal to zero or an identity.

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relate with size. The bigger they are, the more powerful. Metamaterials invented by a company in San Diego might actually make antennae not only smaller, but stronger at the same time, boosting range and reliability while cutting down on battery drain. That’d be a big boon to mobile devices. Then there’s University of Maryland engineering professor Igor Smolyaninov. A few years ago he came up with the idea of creating a “toy big bang” using metamaterials that are mathematically similar to conditions of the real-world big bang.15 Trust me, physicists trip over themselves at the possibility of that one. Metamaterial science is still new. It covers a wide-array of disciplines, from physics to engineering, depending on the application. In the next few years, we’ll see where it takes us. Or, maybe, we won’t see… by design.

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15. Molika Ashford, “Custom-Made metamaterials could show scientists a table-top big bang,” Popular Science, August 24, 2009.

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Holodecks, Holograms and Holodoctors

“It’s... it’s just more comfortable... when I’m in there.” —Lt. Reginald Barclay, about the Holodeck

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ew things captured my imagination more than the Enterprise’ holodecks. Empty rooms that could become any place, any time at the push of a few buttons? Sign me up. At the time, holodecks seemed unfair. Was there any luxury people in the 24th century didn’t have? First sliding doors and then holodecks? The best my door could was swing open. And these were the dreams of an adolescent boy. Imagine the eye-opening when I was a teenager watching Deep Space Nine and it suddenly occurred to me that the people using Quark’s holosuites were doing more than reliving the stories of Sherlock Holmes or playing at hard-boiled detective mysteries. The shows never got that explicit, but holodecks were clearly the future’s answer to safe sex. What if Deep Space Nine had aired on HBO instead of going straight to basic cable syndication? We might’ve seen

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the more realistic side of a room that could not only recreate any location practically indistinguishable from the real thing, but any person nearly indistinguishable, too. Sure, there’d be other fun stuff to do with a holodeck but… we’re not going to kid ourselves about where, faced with the possibility of creating any fantasy, most adult minds are going to go. There’s really just one direction. While the shows also kind of winked and nodded around this, they did reinforce the idea. It was a crime, after all, at least on Deep Space Nine, to break into a holosuite while another was using it (Our Man Bashir 4x10). What could necessitate so much need for privacy if it wasn’t sex? Most states already prosecute the real-world, low-tech versions of invasion of privacy in today’s time, so it’s not surprising that our future selves would do the same. Looking at it from the other side, we don’t, however, prosecute spying on groups of people live-action role-playing medieval battles in parks, so it’s hard to imagine the people of the 24th century worried about protecting the privacy of person in a holosuite pretending to be World War II spies, either. I don’t think I’m blowing anyone’s mind here, right? Sure, my naïve 10-year-old self didn’t get. But us adults, we have to admit what the holodecks were really all about: sex, sex, sex. Sure, there were other less prurient purposes. When the Enterprise was caught up in an ancient booby trap that drained power from the engines and bombarded the crew with deadly radiation, for example, Geordi LaForge used the Holodeck to recreate a drafting room at Utopia Planitia (Booby Trap, 3x6). That’s where the Enterprise’s engines were built, and he wanted to “turn them inside out” and figure out what was wrong. In the process, he also accidentally recreated the holographic image of Doctor Leah Brahms, an engineer with the Theoretical Propulsion Group who worked on the design of Galaxy Class

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starships like the Enterprise. Together, they figure out a solution and save the Enterprise, but look where this goes, almost right from the start:

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LaForge: Computer, did I ask for a simulation? Enterprise Computer: Affirmative. You asked Doctor Brahms to show you which system could accept reactants at a faster rate. By accessing available imagery [of Doctor Brahms], an adequate facsimile was possible. LaForge: I did do that, didn’t I? Okay.. Leah… good to see you… real good.

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Real good? Horn dog. At the end of the episode, LaForge and Brahms even kiss. If that’s not Star Trek code for hot holographic sex, I don’t know what is. In another episode though, the real Doctor Brahms shows up on the Enterprise, and to Geordi’s surprise, she’s a total ice queen. Luckily, a space-dwelling alien starts suckling the Enterprise of energy (it thinks the Enterprise is its mother, Galaxy’s Child, 4x16) and the crisis forces the real Doctor Brahms and Geordi together to save the day. She stumbles across his Utopia Planitia holodeck program, though, and while at first she’s impressed with his initiative—a program that contained a simulation of the prototype engines would give him a baseline to compare with his own modifications—she runs into the holographic simulation of herself:

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Holo-Doctor Brahams: I’m with you every day, Geordi. Every time you look at this engine, you’re looking at me. Every time you touch it, it’s me.

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Awkward. Geordi stumbles in to stop her, but he’s too late.

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She flips, and rightfully so. “I am outraged by this. I have been—invaded. Violated. How dare you use me like this? How far did it go, anyway? Was it good for you?” Guess I got that hot holosex thing right. Geordi, for his part, insists nothing like that happened, blah, blah, blah, professional collaboration, with touching and kissing, blah, blah, blah. Brahms doesn’t buy it, and I’m not sure I do either. In the alternate timelines we see in the series finale, All Good Things, Geordi and Brahms are actually married with kids… so… there’s that. It does all work out, they’re friends by the end of the episode, but am I the only one who felt a little creeped out by Geordi after all this? The political, philosophical and spiritual implications here are pretty vast. Even in the 21st Century we quarrel over what people do with real people in their bedrooms, I can’t imagine more of a target for the religious right or a conservative politician than technology that allows a level of fantasy (or deviance, depending on your view) literally limited only by one’s imagination. Oddly, the Star Trek cannon is light on these moral-philosophical issues. We do though, in between Geordi’s foray and the real Doctor Brahms showing up, actually get a holodeck themed episode that digs deep into a troubled psyche, with sexy results. Sort of. In Hollow Pursuits (3x21), we meet Lt. Reginald Barclay. He gets into some trouble for recreating other crewmembers on the holodeck. He casts Counselor Troi and Dr. Crusher as lovesick vixens and Commander Riker as a doofus, for example. We learn, though, that he has an illness known as holodiction that sort of caused him to do it. Can we seriously blame him? I’d not only have holodiction, but they probably would’ve named it after me. Even Counselor Troi is on his side, at first. “There’s nothing wrong with a healthy fantasy life, as long as it doesn’t take over,” she tells a very peeved Commander Riker.

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She thinks they can learn more about what’s troubling Barclay by exploring the world he’s created for himself. Sounds reasonable. “This is not without its element of humor,” she says. Then she stumbles across Barclay’s holographic version of herself.1

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Holo-Troi: I am the Goddess of Empathy. Cast off your inhibitions and embrace love, truth, joy... LaForge: Oh. My. God. Holo-Troi: Discard your façades, and reveal your true being to me. Troi: [indignantly] Computer, discontinue... Riker: Computer, belay that order! [to Troi] We want to get more insight into what’s been troubling this poor man, remember? [to La Forge] Quite a healthy fantasy life, wouldn’t you say? LaForge: [agreeing] Mm.

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I almost wished they’d played this up throughout the show a little more. We do see, later in Voyager, when Barclay’s left the Enterprise and is working the Pathfinder Project at Starfleet Command, that holodiction remains a struggle for him (Voyager, Pathfinder, 6x10). Trying to figure out a way to bring Voyager home from the Delta quadrant, he recreates the ship and the crew on the holodeck and turns it into his own little version of Cheers. Everyone there seems to know his name, and they’re always glad he came. The only missing was that no one shouted Barclay! when he walked through the door. He even slept there.

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1. There’s an obvious point to be made that while Deep Space Nine made it clear breaking into another’s holosuite would be illegal, the same probably doesn’t hold true on the Enterprise. There commanding officers, following a more militaristic code of conduct and looking for a wayward subordinate, walk right in, and no one even thinks twice about it. Probably just the cost of being in Starfleet.

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I don’t think I’m too off base assuming such fanciful technology would be an issue for us 21st century mortals the way it is for the weak-minded Barclay. It’s interesting that Star Trek’s writers chose to imbue a recurring character with this problem, as opposed to one of the regulars. Maybe that’s why they had such trouble dramatizing the seedier side of the tech, and therefore didn’t do it often. It was regulated to the sidelines because admitting someone like Riker or Picard could be addicted to the holodeck would put a big crack in the façade of the evolved sensibilities of 24th century humans. We do have to give them credit for tackling it as much as they did, I guess. Someone had to lay the groundwork for the kinds of scifi stories we do, thankfully, see today. I also don’t think the implications are as lost on us in the real world as they were on my 10-year-old self. We’re already wondering if some people spend too much of their time absorbed in Facebook and Twitter, and both of those are way less interesting than a holodeck. Some research suggests we develop addictions to these kinds of computer-mediated communication channels because we can control them more than we can the low-tech, face-to-face interpersonal kind. One Facebook addiction study says “people scoring high on narcissism tend to be more active on social network sites, as social network sites provide an opportunity to present oneself in a favorable way in line with one’s ideal self.”2 Imagine the havoc technology that not only lets you shape yourself to be anyone you want to be, but lets you shape other people, too, like Barclay did with Troi and Riker, could wreak. Trouble communicating with your wife? Make a holowife who

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2. Cecilie Schou Andreassen, et al., “Development of a Facebook Addition Scale,” Psychological Reports 110, no. 2 (2012):501-517

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just gets you a little better. Boss riding you too hard at work? Turn him into a Robinhood-esque merry man and kick his ass at fencing, or something like that.3 The author of that Facebook study told the Huffington Post that younger people seem to be more susceptible to this kind of addiction, but so are those who find life a little too intimidating, for one reason or another. “[P]eople who are anxious and socially insecure use Facebook more than those with lower scores on those traits, probably because those who are anxious find it easier to communicate via social media than face-to-face.”4 That’s Barclay, almost too a tee. Some research even suggests that the lure of entertainment like social media may even be harder to resist than our desire for sex.5 Technology that combines the two the way a holodeck does? Resistance might just be futile.

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While we don’t have holodecks, holograms are more a part of our everyday lives than you might realize. Pull out your wallet. If you’re like me, you have a half-dozen or so holograms stuck on your bankcards and driver’s license. These kinds of holograms are “reflective,” but are born from the same process as “transmission” kind we most often think of. Surprisingly, the images we usually call holograms, like slain rapper Tupac

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3. This was Barclay’s fantasy, in Holo Pursuits. 4. Jacqueline Howard, Facebook Addiction: New Scale Gauges Social Media Dependency, The Huffington Post, May, 8 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2012/05/08/facebook-addiction-scale-social-media_n_1499738.html. 5. Study finds lure of entertainment, work hard for people to resist, UChicagoNews, Januar 27, 2012, http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2012/01/27/studyfinds-lure-entertainment-work-hard-people-resist

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Shakur’s performance at Coachella in 2012, aren’t really holography at all. Instead, they’re just a two-dimensional image projected on some glass or another substrate. The effect is popular with theme park rides, like Disney’s Haunted Mansion and Tower of Terror. Even CNN got in on the act during the 2008 election. This kind of projection gives that hazy, glowy, supernatural holographic-like look, but the images lack some defining characteristics of true holograms, like redundancy and three dimensions. Take that Tupac image. While it simulated three dimensions, the problem is that if two of us look at it from different angles we’d see the same simulated perspective regardless of where we were standing. With a real hologram, if we looked at it at the same time from different sides, we’d see different perspectives, as if the object was physically in the space with us. Creating a true hologram is done in two basic steps. Make a recording of a three-dimensional object and then, using light, recreate the three-dimensional object from the recording. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? It’s not. With a few inexpensive tools, like a laser pointer and some mirrors, you can create your own holograms at home. The first step is to pass a laser through a beam splitter. A beam splitter is pretty much what it sounds like, a device that uses mirrors and prisms to split the laser into two separate beams: a reference beam and an object beam. After being split, each beam is routed via mirrors through special lenses that scatter them into wide swaths of light. The object beam hits the three-dimensional object (another mirror is probably required to angle it properly) and bounces onto a piece of holographic film. The second beam, the reference beam, passes through its lens and straight onto the holographic film. It never touches the object being recorded, but the way it interacts

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with the light from the object beam is important—it’s this interaction, or interference, that actually results in the recorded information. Remember, while light is made of particles called photons, those photons actually behave like waves. Waves have high parts and low parts, peaks and troughs. When two waves collide, like they would when the reference beams and object beams hit a holographic plate, if the peaks meet each other they amplify, or make each other stronger. This is called constructive interference. If a peak meets a trough however, they cancel each other out. This is called, you guessed it, destructive interference. When the object beam and the reference beam collide, what you’re left with is the interference between the peaks and valleys of these two light waves. The result is a kind of code called “interference fringes.” To the naked eye, they don’t look like much, but hit them with the right kind of light and you’ll get your hologram. The reflective holograms we talked about earlier, the ones that are a staple of credit card security, produce images with just plain old, ordinary white light. Ever notice how the hologram disappears if the card is held at the wrong angle? That’s because without properly reflected white light, all we see are those interference fringes. The second kind, transmission holograms, work the same way except light—usually a laser of the same color used to create the recording—is passed through the holographic plate, instead of bounced off it. Both kinds give you a characteristic three-dimensional representation of the recorded object. Aside from true three-dimensions, there’s another aspect present in all true holograms: redundancy. Thanks to the interference between the reference beam and the object beam and the physical laws that govern the way light is reflected and scattered, every part of the holographic film contains informa-

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tion about the entire recorded object. That means if you cut a hologram in half, you could still see the whole hologram in each half. In fact, you could break the holographic plate into a dozen pieces, and you’d still see the entire hologram in each piece. This might sound like a byproduct, but think of it this way. If you have a damaged holographic disc, it’s easy to recover the data because every part of it contains the whole. Entire organizational concepts have been based on this idea. Just type “holonomic organization” into Google and you’ll see what I’m talking about. For all this talk of the future, holography is actually quite an old science. In 1971, Dennis Gabor was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for his invention and development of the holographic method,” described above, based on work he’d done in the 1940s.6 We’ve come a ways since then. Today, his process, a very systematic analog recording, is done almost completely by computer. Thanks to sophisticated 3D modeling software, we can create holograms from objects that only exist in a computer file, or would be too large to record with actual lasers. Software algorithms calculate the interference fringes and we print them out to holographic plates. The military uses applications like this a lot, already. Satellite images are turned into holographic sheets that they can lay out on tables to better visualize on the ground troop movements and combat situations. Instead of looking at flat maps, commanders get a three-dimensional, full-parallax viewpoint of what soldiers will face in the field, all thanks to some reflective holograms.7 How that gets us to a holodeck is still a question. We can’t even be sure that what Star Trek calls holograms actually have much if anything to do

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6. The Nobel Prize in Physics 1971, Nobelprize.org, http://www.nobelprize. org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1971/ 7. see http://www.zebraimaging.com/

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with current holographic science. The similarities are slim, to say the least. That’s not to say we’re on the wrong track. There’s nothing that says our holograms wouldn’t work in a device like a holodeck, but there’s still more work to do.

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Today’s holograms are three dimensional, but they’re mostly still contained in a surface, like a piece holographic film or transmitted onto glass. Projecting 3D images, or any image, hologram or not, into the air is a challenge we’ve just started to overcome. One company in Japan has figured out how to use lasers to cause a reaction in the oxygen and nitrogen in the air that results in a dot of light. Do this at a high frame rate and with enough dots-per-inch, and you get a realistic 3D image. It can even move. Combine red, blue and green lasers and you have a full spectrum of color at your command, all out of thin air. This isn’t necessarily holography, at least in the traditional sense we’ve already discussed, but it’s our closest step yet toward the kinds of projections the holodeck probably uses. They’re not photo-realistic, though. They look very much like projections. Even if they were realistic enough to fool you, the illusion would fade as soon as you tried to interact with it. Even a true hologram projected into air is just light, and our physical bodies pass through light with no restrictions. Star Trek obviously solved this problem. They wrapped their holodeck holograms in force fields that not only provided structure and physical presence, but also tactile sensations. A rock in a holodeck not only looks like a rock, but if you touch it, an electromagnetic field provides the sensations to make it feel

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like a rock, too.8 Force fields also added a sense of movement. According to the Technical Manual, force fields trap the user in a kind of perpetual treadmill. As the user thinks he’s walking, he’s actually held in place while images on the walls scroll by and “omnidirectional holo diode clusters” project the appropriate images into his field of view. Today’s force field technologies, though, are limited, as in almost non-existent. We haven’t yet developed force fields that can provide any safe tactile feedback, let alone the nuances of seemingly unlimited materials and surfaces. Some current research is focusing on charged plasma clouds to protect ships and satellites in space, but this approach still requires a physical wire mesh to contain the energy. It’s probably not an adaptable technique for a holodeck. A few years ago, the British Ministry of Defence announced a method to use supercapacitors in tank armor to generate a brief, but powerful magnetic field that could deflect grenades and bullets. While work is ongoing, most of it’s geared toward these kinds of defensive applications. We obviously have a good deal of work to do before we can manipulate force fields with the kind of sophistication and complexity that a holodeck would require, and sadly, it might not be on anyone’s list of priorities. Even on Star Trek, humans had both transporters and warp drive before they invented force fields. The Enterprise NX-01 didn’t even have shields. Instead, they relied on polarized hull plates to protect them from weapons fire.9

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8. Actually, the rocks are probably real. The holodeck used a combination of holograms and replicated items to simulate reality. 9. That’s not to say we weren’t at work on the technology. On Enterprise, Malcolm tells T’Pol Starfleet had been working on what he called a “stable EM barrier” for some time, and that he believed he could build one. (Vox Sola, 1x22)

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But all hope isn’t lost

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While there’s probably no substitute for a real holodeck, we do have some technology that allows us to immerse ourselves in virtual environments. Think about the last time you saw a true IMax movie, the kind that fills your field of vision. If your project the images the right way, say with deep depth of field so that objects come out as crisp as they would in real life, you could actually fool the brain into thinking it’s someplace it isn’t. Several companies in Europe and the United States have developed environment simulators that work on these principles, mostly for training. While these virtual environments work well as flight simulators or as road tests for cars, they fall short when there’s no barrier separating the user from the image. There’s also obviously no physical interaction, you can’t touch the images, for example, so that’s another shortcoming. In 2012, Microsoft received a patent for an “immersive display experience” that would project “a peripheral image onto environmental surfaces around the user,” like the walls and chairs in your room (Fig. 1). “The peripheral images serve as an extension to a primary image displayed on a primary display.”10 It works with a tracking device, like Microsoft’s infrared Kinnect sensor and a proposed “depth camera” that could gather three-dimensional information about the room and properly configure projected images in a way unique to its environment. It’s not hard to see how this might also begin to make holographic user interfaces plausible. Kinnect already features hand tracking. Whenever I want to log in or select a game menu, I just raise my arm. Combine this with our still nascent ability

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10. Gritsko Perez. Immersive display experience. US Patent 20,120,223,885, filed March 2, 2011, and issued September 6, 2012.

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to project images in the air, and you have something even Star Trek didn’t do.11 This kind of user interface would benefit greatly from some tactile feedback, so our lack of force fields might hold it up. Maybe, though, someone will come up with a better idea. Ultrasound, for example, might work.12

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FIG. 1 In this patent drawing by Microsoft, a device projects images on to the walls and furniture in a room for an “immersive display experience” that many believe harken a holodeck.

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Holograms might also prove useful in data storage. The tech isn’t as sexy as a holodeck, and attempts to bring even it to

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11. I couldn’t confirm this story with anyone in the know, so it may be apocryphal, but apparently, Minority Report-style holographic displays were suggested for the Enterprise when The Next Generation was in pre-production. Gene Rodenberry, though, reportedly couldn’t conceive a way for them to play well on television, so he opted for the shiny black touchscreens instead. I guess some things were just too futuristic, even for him. 12. Takayuki Iwamoto, Mari Tatezono, and Hiroyuki Shinoda. “Non-contact Method for Producing Tactile Sensation Using Airborne Ultrasound.” In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Haptics: Perception, Devices and Scenarios (EuroHaptics ‹08), Manuel Ferre (Ed.). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 504-513. doi10.1007/978-3-540-69057-3_64

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market have so far failed. The first startup to demonstrate a prototype all the way back in 2005 went bankrupt after burning through more than $100 million in funding. A new company picked up their plans, but they’ve already missed initial ship dates. We still might see something in 2013, but not on the consumer end. It’ll probably be marketed to big companies with special data archiving needs. What’s so special about holographic storage? Holographic discs promise huge capacity at amazing speed. They’re an optical media, like today’s CDs and DVDs, using light to read and write, but current technology holds data in just two dimensions. Holographic storage has three, at least when you hit it with light. All of this is to say nothing of Voyager’s Doctor, an Emergency Medical Hologram who takes over when the real-life doctor is killed. We’ll talk more about him in the chapter on artificial life forms—the real secret behind him is artificial intelligence—but his physical presence is created the same way as any other holodeck character, just with custom holoemitters built into key areas of the ship, like sickbay. When we finally do tackle the holodeck challenge, we’ll probably have the ability to create him as well, or at least something a lot like him. Until then, we’re going to have to settle for the real-thing when we want… a close approximation of the real thing. Maybe that’ll always be better, though. Maybe we’ll find that a simulation made of light and energy, no matter how real it feels, will never match the actual, physical touch of honest-to-god flesh and blood. Please don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not anti-holodeck. I’ll be the first in line when these things become a reality and I’ll cut anyone who tries to take my place. But a little soul-searching won’t hurt, either. We’re curious creatures with strange predilections, and we can’t always be trusted to do what’s best for ourselves. When it comes to technological

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progress, I think an excellent question to always go along with “can we?” is “and should we?” Who knows? Maybe by the time the first holodeck shows up, we’ll have evolved to the point that we can handle the technology with a little more responsibility, with a conscious nod toward our own emotional well being. Maybe we’ll decide the benefits, like truly safe sex, outweigh the risks.13 And there are other applications beyond entertainment: training first-responders, soldiers, doctors. Physical rehabilitation. Prototype design. The list just goes on and on. Someone out there reading this might just be the person who actually has to grapple with all the questions. You might be one who brings us this revolutionary piece of technology, first imagined decades earlier on a television show. I’ll leave the answers to you, just don’t forget my invite to the launch party. End program.

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13. I suppose holographic viruses might be just as dangerous as their real counterparts, though. We’ve seen holographic bullets kill and even holographic machinery so convincing it was mistaken for the real thing (The Next Generation, A Matter of Perspective, 3x14), so maybe we shouldn’t assume anything.

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Artificial life, in all its forms

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“There was a time I would’ve given anything to become flesh and blood… but I’ve come to realize being a hologram is far superior.” —The Doctor

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s Data human? I’m getting ahead of myself, because that question, asked over seven television seasons and several movies was one that never got a clear answer. It’s not even a question we can deal with yet, because we’re still asking “can we build him?” and not the more philosophical “what is he?” Data of course wanted to be human and in the end, I guess he took a very human step, sacrificing himself to save Captain Picard and so many others in Star Trek: Nemesis. Maybe that actually made him less human. How many of us would’ve had the courage to do what he did? Seems like it was an exceptional act to me, but then again, there wasn’t much about Data that wasn’t exceptional. He was a machine with abilities that surpassed us in everyway and yet, his biggest desire was to be more like… us. When Commander Riker met Data for the first time during the Farpoint mission, he called him Pinocchio (Encounter at

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Farpoint, 1.1). Two fake boys, each striving to be more than the sum of their parts. Data wasn’t the only android in Star Trek. There was, of course, Lore, Data’s evil twin. The Enterprise crew discovered Lore on the same planet where Starfleet had found Data years earlier, but as the episodes’ Netflix description happily tells me, that when assembled, Lore was not much like Data (Datalore, 1x13). He was, in fact, an earlier model, one their creator—Noonian Soong—deemed irreparably broken and had disassembled. Lore’s exploits over the years would bear that out. He was a total dick. Then there was also Lal, whose name in Hindi means “beloved.” Data created Lal after coming back from a cybernetics conference where he learned about an “advance in submicron matrix transfer techniques” that’d make it possible to use his own neural networks to create new ones (The Offspring, 3x16). He was successful, but just briefly. Lal surpassed Data’s programming within a matter of days, mastering contractions and even, it appeared, human emotion, but she died when her positronic brain eventually failed. There was also Data’s mother, who was so perfect a human replica that she didn’t even know she wasn’t human. In Nemesis, we met B-4, a failed prototype Soong built before Lore. Though Data transferred all his memories to B-4, and it appeared that B-4 might’ve started to evolve in the last scenes of Nemesis, his future is still a mystery, and probably always will be. When we think about machines like Data and whether or not we can actually build one, we tend to think very specifically about the mechanics. Can we construct a machine that looks and acts like a human? Can we make it capable of intelligent conversation? Will it be able to think? To Learn? In Datalore, though, after the Enterprise crew reassembles Lore, Captain

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Picard notes the difficulty everyone seems to have being reminded that Data—as good a replica as he is—was still really a machine. Picard notes, correctly, that we’re machines too, just made of organic parts instead of mechanical ones. Is that the key to life? Biology? Could the term artificial life be a misnomer? But then, Data didn’t have a bit of organic material in him and I think we can all agree that he was alive. He was self-aware, at least—sentient even—and sometimes, seemed to understand us better than we understood him. Just… don’t call him a robot (Deja Q, 3x13):

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Guinan: You could learn a lot from this one. Q: Sure, the robot who teaches the course in humanities. Data: I am an android, not a robot. Q: I beg your pardon.

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Robot, android, potato, po-taht-o. Maybe not. Today, most scientists view the terms interchangeably. Generally, though, we can assume based on the way things have played out in Star Trek that a robot is a mindless automaton, a slave to its programming. An android possesses an artificial intelligence, sentience—maybe even a conscience. No amount of math or theory or paper writing is going to tell us if Data is actually possible in this case. He’s probably one of those we won’t know until we try scenarios and despite the uncertainties, it looks like nothing will stop us from doing just that. Building our own android, though, would have to be a true multi-disciplinary accomplishment. We’re not just talking about the nascent field of robotics but burgeoning computer science areas that deal with artificial intelligence and natural language processing, the latter of which we’ve already discussed. When and if we do build a machine as smart, fast, and

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as self-aware as Data, making it look and act human proposes a whole other set of problems, especially if it does it too well. More on that in a bit. First, we need to start at the beginning.

BOttoms Up

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In The Physics of the Impossible, Kaku says some scientists think “…the very idea of artificial intelligence is silly. There are critics who say that it is impossible to build machines that can think. The human brain, they argue, is the most complicated system that nature has ever created, at least in this part of the galaxy, and any machine designed to reproduce human thought is bound to fail.”1 You know how I feel about such naysayers. They lack vision and are mired in their finite views of what’s possible, especially if the “what” will take some time to achieve. Still, there are issues to contend with. “The basic laws of intelligence are still shrouded in mystery,” Kaku says. There is a lot we don’t understand about the human brain. We don’t generally know how it works, and when it breaks, we don’t really know how to fix it. Humans still suffer from basic neuro-chemical imbalances that suck away the quality life, like depression and anxiety. Autism and Parkinson’s have no cures. Brain trauma from a stroke or car crash can devastate a person in the time it takes to snap your fingers. And those are all problems we have with real brains, designed by nature. When it comes to robots, we’re still trying to create thinking structures that can be taught the basics of cognition that humans pick up automatically as in-

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1. Physics of the Impossible.

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fants. We’ve tried, and failed, to teach our robots key tasks like pattern recognition and common sense. “Robots can see much better than we can,” Kaku says. “But they don’t understand what they see. Robots can also hear much better than we can, but they don’t understand what they hear.”2 The issue might be that we’ve been taking the wrong approach. We’ve been moving from the top-down instead of, as Alan Turing would’ve done it, from the bottom-up. Instead of teaching our robots, we impose programmable tasks on them. This, though, is a lot like programming if-then rules for conversation. We can’t create enough rules to cover every possible real-world scenario, so our robots are limited. Even a task that seems simple to us can require complex code that quickly becomes unwieldy and difficult to maintain. But when start from the bottom-up, when we create the robot equivalent of a newborn and let it grow up, we have more success. Kaku again: “At MIT, walking robots were notoriously difficult to create via the top-down approach. But simple buglike mechanical creatures that bump into the environment and learn from scratch can successfully scurry around the floor at MIT within a matter of minutes.” Another problem is that we created computers to handle tasks that are hard for us, not to be us. There’s a difference, and if we want to create more advanced, intelligent machines, it might require more of a paradigm shift than even from the top-down to the bottom-up. We might just have to stop thinking of artificially intelligent machines as machines, and we’ll definitely have to stop thinking of computer as just big calculators. Kaku, once again, sums this up nicely:

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2. Ibid.

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The supreme irony is that machines can effortlessly perform tasks that humans consider ‘hard,’ such as multiplying large numbers or playing chess, but machines stumble badly when asked to perform tasks that are supremely ‘easy’ for human beings, such as walking across a room, recognizing faces, or gossiping with a friend. The reason is that our most advanced computers are basically just adding machines. Our brain, however, is exquisitely designed by evolution to solve the mundane problems of survival, which require a whole complex architecture of thought, such as common sense and pattern recognition. Survival in the forest did not depend on calculus or chess, but on evading predators, finding mates, and adjusting to changing environments.

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Remember Captain Picard’s observation that I mentioned earlier? He noted we’re just machines, made of carbon-based cells instead of silicon chips. Something in us, though, sparks unique abilities: reasoning, problem solving, pattern matching. Even among the life forms on earth, we’re unique in our level of intelligence. Dolphins might give us a run for our money, but I haven’t seen one driving a car recently. Recreating a human’s capacity for thought in a machine is not going to be easy. As advanced as humans are in Star Trek, even they couldn’t build another Data. Even Data couldn’t build another Data. The closest they came was the Doctor on Star Trek Voyager, an emergency medical hologram whose evolution into artificial life was an accident.


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Definition: Person?

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The Doctor was designed as a short-term replacement for the ship’s real-life physician, but after Voyager was stranded in the Delta Quadrant, he was left on for years. His program had already been imbued with the sort of things we struggle to give machines now, like common sense and pattern matching. But, in sort of a bottom-up approach, he spent his years on Voyager learning about life, about love and about being not just a member of the crew, but a person, too. Interestingly enough, though, when the question of personhood is taken head-on, it turns out much differently for the Doctor than it did for Data. In the TNG episode The Measure of a Man (2x9), Commander Maddox, a Starfleet cyberneticist wanted to disassemble Data in hopes of reverse engineering him. Data doesn’t believe Maddox has the technical skill to ensure he’d survive the process, and attempts to resign from Starfleet to avoid being forced into it. Maddox, though, says Data can’t resign. He’s property, and has no rights. Captain Picard eventually convinces the Judge Advocate otherwise, and she rules that Data is not only sentient, but that he’s not property and can resign if he so chooses. A similar situation arose on Voyager when the Doctor wrote a holonovel called Photons Be Free that contained a less than flattering depiction of Voyager’s crew and their treatment of its extraordinary holographic physician (Author, Author 7x20). Though he meant no harm, the novel was supposed to be a social commentary on holographic rights, it rings far from the truth and upsets the crew. When the doctor he realizes how he’s offended them, he agrees to give up his publishing plans back on Earth. However, things can’t go right of course and the novel is accidentally transmitted to the publisher anyway. It becomes an instant hit, and despite the Doctor’s pleas to have it recalled, the publisher won’t budge. This doesn’t sit well with

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Captain Janeway.

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Janeway: I don’t see that you have a choice, Mr. Broht [the publisher]. Authors have rights. Arden Broht: Not in this case. The Doctor: What do you mean? Arden Broht: The Doctor is a hologram. The Doctor: So? Arden Broht: According to Federation law, holograms have no rights.

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Just like Captain Picard did for Data in The Measure of a Man, Janeway takes on impassioned defense in arbitration:

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Janeway: Centuries ago, in most places on Earth, only landowners of a particular gender and race had any rights at all. Over time, those rights were extended to all Humans, and later, as we explored the galaxy, to thousands of other sentient species. Our definition of what constitutes a person has continued to evolve. Now we’re asking that you expand that definition once more, to include our Doctor. When I met him seven years ago, I would never have believed that an [emergency medical hologram] could become a valued member of my crew—and my friend. The Doctor is a person, as real as any flesh and blood I have ever known. If you believe the testimony you’ve heard here, it’s only fair to conclude that he has the same rights as any of us.

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They get a good ending for the Doctor, but probably not the exact one either he or Janeway were hoping for.

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Arbitrator: The Doctor exhibits many of the traits we associate with a person. Intelligence, creativity, ambition, even fallibility, but are these traits real or is the Doctor merely programmed to simulate them? To be honest, I don’t know. Eventually we will have to decide because the issue of holographic rights isn’t going to go away, but at this time, I am not prepared to rule that the Doctor is a person under the law. However, it is obvious he is no ordinary hologram and while I can’t say with certainty that he is a person, I am willing to extend the legal definition of artist to include the Doctor. I therefore rule that he has the right to control his work and I’m ordering all copies of his holonovels to be recalled immediately.

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We’re already struggling with these kinds of personhood questions. In 2010, the United States Supreme Court decided in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission that a corporation, an artificial construct created by law, had the same First Amendment right to engage in protected political speech as any person.3 One has to wonder if the Doctor’s case would’ve been so complicated had Citizens United been decided before the episode was written. He was an artificial construct, too. The Supreme Court’s decision was split and it did generate a lot of controversy. How can a corporation stand on equal footing to a living person? It has no life beyond what we’ve chosen to give it with our laws. But as we progress so quickly toward machines with the qualities of life, will we argue that these new life forms are less deserving of the constitutional rights and liberties we afford ourselves, especially when we extend those protections to entities that only exist on paper?

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3. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010)

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And that brings me to another point, but what happens when our creations misbehave? Let’s put aside the legal questions for a moment and wonder how, exactly, we’ll keep a thinking machine under control. That would never be a problem, right? No… never.

UHM, SKYNET ANYONE?

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Back in the 50s, at the dawn of our leap into the computer age, a writer in Nation’s Business described a new trend in manufacturing this way: “By scheduling and controlling every step of any mass production process, these fateful engines can switch out the human element and make assembly lines automatic. Sound far fetched?”4 Yeah, does it sound far fetched? Of course, it doesn’t to us, but he’s talking about robotic assembly lines, an innovation that ushered in an era of mass production. In 1951, when that was written, the very idea of robots building cars or chairs or making candy was almost so absurd that the magazine thought it a good idea to devote a whole article to just how close this was to being a reality. I’m not saying that just because we’ve done one thing and done it so well that we can necessarily do another thing like, create an artificial life form. I’m just saying that we’d be foolish to discount what we’re capable of given enough time and motivation. We always want to ask “can we?” and it seems there’s usually someone waiting around to say “no”—whether they’ve given it much thought or not. Despite the challenges, no one can say that we won’t create our own Data, someday. I

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4. Karl Lagerman, “If Robots Run the Works,” Nation’s Business. 3/51, p. 31.

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also hope we think it through, thoroughly. Data turned out okay… most of the time. Lore, though, he’s a cautionary tale. How many times did he almost destroy the Enterprise? Didn’t he hasten his own creator’s death? Didn’t he scare the colonists he lived with? Didn’t he bring a sense of rage to the Borg, making them more dangerous than they already were? Yeah, Lore did all those things and we never really got a good sense of what, exactly made him so bad and Data so good. In the TNG episode Brothers (4x3), we learn that Soong thought that Lore never really got the chance to prove himself good, as Data had. Functionally, though, they weren’t too different, even though Lore had Data convinced that he was the less-perfect, less-human version.

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Soong: The last thing you should think of yourself, Data, is less perfect. The two of you are virtually identical, except for a bit of programming. Data: It was a lie. [To Lore] Another Lie? Lore: I would’ve proven myself worthy to you if you’d just given me a chance… but it was easier just to turn your back and build your precious Data. Soong: You were the first. You meant as much to me as Data ever did. But you were unstable. The colonists were not envious of you, they were afraid of you. You were unstable. Data: I am not less perfect than Lore. Lore: Why didn’t you just fix me? It was within your power to fix me. Soong: It wasn’t as easy as that. The next, the next logical step was to construct Data. Afterword, I planned to get back to you, to, to fix you. Lore: [Laughing] Next logical step. Data: I am not less perfect than Lore.

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Lore: [Mocking Data] I am not less perfect than Lore.

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Ah, so it was all about “basic emotion.” That’s something Data didn’t have, at least until later on and it proved disastrous, at first. Data’s newfound emotional awareness paralyzed him with fear, allowing Dr. Tolian Soran to kidnap Geordi in Star Trek: Generations.5 Eventually Data learned to adapt, far better than his brother did and this turned out to be one Data’s biggest leaps toward humanity. Star Trek, like a lot of science fiction, views emotions as a key to life. “But the scientists working on [artificial intelligence] and trying to break down emotions paint a different picture,” Kaku says In the Physics of the Impossible. “To them emotions, far from being the essence of humanity, are actually a by-product of evolution. Simply put, emotions are good for us. They helped us to survive in the forest, and even today they help us to navigate the dangers of life” Would the same be true for machines? Kaku and a lot of other scientists think so. They believe emotional awareness is

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5. Data’s emotion chip actually set the Enterprise’s destruction in motion. He allowed Geordi to be kidnapped, and Lursa and B’Etor then used Geordi’s visor to spy on the Enterprise and learn the frequency modulation of the ship’s shields. They adjusted their torpedoes to match, and were able to inflict some mortal wounds.

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neither a bonus for artificial life forms like it was for Data nor the path to malevolence like it was for Lore, but a necessity if they’re going to be able to make decisions. There’s evidence of this, at least in humans. According to Kaku, scientists working with people with traumatic brain injuries, the kind that have left reasoning abilities in tact but not the person’s ability to experience emotion, find them plagued by indecision. Something as simple as picking out a cereal becomes impossible without emotional response to guide the choice. These people can’t decide which they want, because without emotions every cereal seems the same. Kaku thinks this would repeat in any artificial life forms we’d create if we can’t give them emotional awareness. “As robots become more intelligent and are able to make choices of their own, they could likewise become paralyzed with indecision. To aid them, robots of the future may need to have emotions hardwired into their brains,” he says.6 We’re left here in a kind of a no-one-knows void. How much could we trust an artificial life form free to make its own decisions? In Star Trek, emotions were elusive to Data for most of his life and handled so poorly by Lore that they seemed to turn him bad. An entire species, one more evolved than humans, the Vulcans, thrived on sheer logic and the absence of emotion—the exact opposite of Kaku’s ideas about emotional awareness as a lynchpin in our decision-making ability. Would emotionally aware robots be more or less dangerous than Vulcan-like robots, the kind that would arguably be a bit easier to create? We don’t know, but it’s a problem worth thinking about. I’m probably starting to sound like a skipping CD, so take it from Dr. Ian Malcom, in Jurassic Park: “…your scientists

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were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Maybe my fear is blown out of proportion, at least a bit. I can’t help but thinking how much I sound like Krola, the Marconian Minister of Security in the TNG episode First Contact (4x15, not to be confused with the film of the same title). He was so scared of technology and what the Enterprise represented that he was willing to become a martyr—albeit a slimy, fake one—to get rid of extraterrestrial influence on his world. I don’t want to be that guy, the one who shoots himself to stop the proliferation of ebooks and streaming video, for example. But it’s not just science fiction to point out that intelligent machines could be dangerous. They wouldn’t even have to be that smart. Anything self-aware enough to create its own agenda could pose problems.7 We saw this in the Voyager episode, Prototype (2x13), when the crew came across a robot drifting in space. Lt. Torres beamed it aboard, fixed it up and then it promptly kidnapped her and forced her to do its bidding. The robot, or Automated Personnel Unit, was one of many created by two warring races, collectively known as the Builders. When B’Elanna is kidnapped, she’s drawn into the conflict.

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Torres: Has anyone in all these years ever tried to stop this war? APU 3947: The Pralor and the Cravic called a truce. Torres: Wait a minute. If both sides called a truce, then why didn’t they stop you from fighting? APU 3947: They attempted to do so. Torres: And?

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See what they did there? They terminated them. Why? Well the APU’s were built because of the conflict, and ending that conflict would change their existence. That meant they suddenly had a new enemy, their Builders. Programmed to destroy their enemies, they did exactly what they were programmed to do. Though it’s rare in Star Trek, this theme of intelligent machines that turn on their creators is actually a common science fiction trope. The Cylons were such human-like machines that some of them didn’t even know they were Cylons. The Red Queen had it out for humanity in Resident Evil. Remember Skynet? If all went according to plan, it probably came online last year and will be sending the Terminator back our way any day now. Maybe that’s why Isaac Asimov, the man behind the positronic brain, the man who brought the word android into the vernacular, went to lengths to make sure our Data’s stay Datas and not Lores.8 Except for a few details here and there, sprinkled over the course of the The Next Generation, its films and in companion books like the Star Trek Encyclopedia, we know very little about how a positronic brain would work. What we do know doesn’t exactly jive completely with Asimov’s vision. Take his three laws of robotics. These controlled an android’s behavior, protecting humans and ensuring that a robot did as it was told. The third law also made it clear that a robot was to protect itself from death, as long as it didn’t violate the first two laws.9

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8. Lieutenant Yar even said at one point that Data’s brain was Asimov’s dream (Datalore, 1x13). 9. It was these laws, too, that dictated the size of the positronic brain, at least in Asimov’s world. Lower worker type robots, those of little value for example, weren’t programmed with the third law because they weren’t worth the effort of self-preservation. This cut the size of the android’s brain by half.

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Data, though, while he has an ethics program and is often beyond reproach, especially compared to most humans, doesn’t seem to be driven by the three laws at all. If he is, they’re never referred to that way. And Lore, well, Lore was homicidal, megalomaniacal, devious, selfish, I mean, the list could go on. No three laws for him.

Dominion

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While we might have a lot to worry about when it comes to the risks posed by artificially intelligent machines, we also have to ask if they’ll need to worry about us. We don’t often treat each other very well. That doesn’t bode well for a race of life forms we actually create. Even a machine as human-like as Data, in a society that had supposedly moved beyond the petty prejudices that plague us today, still faced people who thought very little of him, at least until proven otherwise (isn’t that the way so many prejudices go?). The vexing Dr. Pulaski called Data “it” for quite some time and even seemed to take some outside pleasure in his crushing defeat to Sirna Kolrami in a game of Strategema (Peak Performance, 2x21). When Data was given temporary command of the U.S.S. Southerland (Redemption Part II, 5.1) Lt. Commander Hobson, the ship’s second officer, tells Data he wants a transfer because he can’t imagine serving under an android. “I wouldn’t be a good first-officer for you,” he tells Data. Their relationship remains rocky, with Hobson barely able to hid his disdain, through to the almost very end:

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Data: “Mr. Hobson! You will carry out my orders or I will relieve you of duty!” Hobson: “...Yes, sir.”

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And later…

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Hobson: Another message coming in; it’s Captain Picard Picard (VO): Mr. Data, you were ordered to rendezvous with the fleet at Gamma Eridon. Acknowledge. Data: Stand by, Captain. Mr. Hobson, prepare to fire. Hobson: Didn’t you hear?! Captain Picard wants us— Data: Fire. (Hobson stares at Data. Data looks back at him) Fire!

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They only seemingly come to terms after Data’s plan, and his disobedience to Captain Picard’s orders, detects a cloaked Romulan fleet trying get through a tachyon detection grid. It’s hard to imagine anything so dramatic as to convince 21st century humans to get along with our robotic counterparts. Seeing that we’ve had marginal success in convincing people to set aside differences in race, gender and sexuality, and that not less than 150 years ago Americans thought they could own other people based on the color of their skin, we’re likely to encounter some human-robot relations issues. In our history, humans have exercised dominion over others with a far more perilous claim to ownership than we might have over an android like Data, and with disastrous consequences. Remember that episode of Voyager about the holonovel that the Doctor wrote? It ended with one of the most chilling scenes I think I’ve ever scene in Star Trek, at a Federation Dilithium Processing Facility in the Alpha Quadrant. It’s filled

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with holograms that look exactly like the Doctor, slaves if you will, processing Dilithium ore. For all the so-called evolved sensibilities of 24th century humans, they apparently weren’t above forced labor of machines that, with the Doctor as an example, were capable of extraordinary evolution. The very last line is one of the holograms suggesting to another that he read the Doctors holonovel, Photons be Free. “It’s quite provocative,” he says. Another struggle over the treatment of intelligent life took place aboard the Enterprise in the seventh season when the crew arrives at Tyrus VIIa to help with the Particle Fountain Project, a sort of space-based drill that could lift matter from a planet’s surface (The Quality of Life, 6x9). Dr. Farallon, a Tyran scientist and head of the Project, developed small tools called Exocomps to help make repairs. The Exocomps could fly and could replicate any tool they needed for the situation at hand. Data was the first to notice something odd about the Exocomps when he tried to send one in to repair a plasma conduit, a task he’d done some nineteen times already. The Exocomp returned without completing the repair, and when Dr. Farallon tried to send it back in, her control pad overloaded. A few second later, the plasma conduit exploded. Apparently, the Exocomp detected the imminent explosion, and decided it didn’t want to be destroyed. Data takes this as a sign of life. He believed the Exocomps evolved and developed sentience. Dr. Farallon thinks this is ridiculous, they’re just tools. Quite a debate rages and eventually, Data takes steps—disobeying direct orders—to protect the Exocomps. He endangers the Enterprise in the process, but as they usually do, things worked out in the end. Dr. Farallon agreed to not force the Exocomps to do anything they didn’t want to (actually, Data gave them the choice to save the Enterprise and they willing chose to do so.

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One even had to sacrifice itself in the process). Later, Data tried to explain to Captain Picard why he chose to protect the Exocomps over the Enterprise. He tells the Captain that when Commander Maddox challenged his own status as a life form, the Captain defended him. But the Exocomps, he said, had no such advocate. Had he not stepped in, they would’ve been destroyed and that he couldn’t have allowed that to happen. “Of course you couldn’t. It was the most human decision you’ve ever made,” the Captain says.

The State of Things

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I wanted to understand what we know about how we interact with robots now. I thought maybe it would shed some light on how we might interact with robots later, when they’re more like us than not. So, I turned to Dr. Cory Kidd, a robotics expert. He earned his Ph.D. in the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab and his work combines ideas from human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, psychology, and social psychology “to create sociable robot systems.” He believes robots can assist humans in a variety of areas, like health care, for example. His Ph.D. thesis was about Autom, a robotic weight loss coach that he built to study long-term human-robot interaction. Dr. Kidd’s work is at the forefront of this field, and his company will probably be one of the first to bring a truly interactive robot to the consumer market, probably just before this book goes to print. While the field is nascent, he is studying how to get humans to be more accepting of robots in every day life. Via Skype from Hong Kong, a twelve-hour difference that

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had us speaking on two different days at the same time, he told me we’re already building Data-like robots. Not androids in that while they’re remarkably sophisticated, they’re not artificially intelligent. Still, they’re extremely human-like in appearance.10 “If you look at, a lot of this work is going on,” he said. “A lot of these robots, every year, they’re looking more and more human-like. I think some of them are to the point where you saw them or a picture of them, you could mistake them for a human. If there’s still a point where if you’re close up or the second you see it move you know it’s not human, right. … I would think that we’ll get there, definitely in our life and maybe in a few years to make something that you couldn’t mistake for a human. But it takes patience. With the kind of thing we’re doing, I think you certainly don’t need that complexity of a human to make it successful at interaction.” Working on his Ph. D., Dr. Kidd tested a theory that human subjects would be more engaged and more likely to say, stick to a diet plan, when coached by a robot that had physical presence, as opposed to a piece of software on a computer screen. To test his idea, he used Autom to coach a group of participants. Another group, though, only interacted with a software-based version of Autom, brought to life through animation on a computer screen. The group that interacted with Autom had far better results than the group that just interacted with the animated character. Dr. Kidd explains: “If that information is coming from a physical thing, it seems more credible and more informative. The character, itself, is seen as more

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10. There comes a point, actually, when machines look too much and not enough like us all at the same time. Scientists call it the “uncanny valley” and it makes us humans extremely uncomfortable around our robotic counterparts. Data was on the far side of this valley, many of our present-creations are in it.

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credible, more trustworthy.” This isn’t actually a new idea, and it parallels what we already knew about human psychology in terms of interpersonal communication and interaction, according to Dr. Kidd. “We would prefer to be face to face,” he said. “Like we’ll have a different kind of conversation, depending on the medium. Even though we can see each other here, the mediated conversation through the video is definitely different than if we were sitting in a coffee shop or across the table from each other.” I asked Dr. Kidd what it was, exactly, about the robot versus the computer simulation that made it easier for study subjects to lose weight. The computer simulation, after all, isn’t that much different than the kind of weight loss tools that are in vogue now, particularly the kinds I keep on my iPhone to help me track calories and chart my weight, for example. “There are a lot of pieces to it, and I think at this point, there’s still a lot of research going on to understand exactly which pieces contribute to the effect,” Dr. Kidd said. “Part of it’s the fact that it’s physically there with you, right, so it’s a real thing as opposed to a virtual thing. It can have the same character on the screen, and when I turn off the television, or turn off my phone, or the computer or whatever, that thing is not. It no longer exists.” The robot, on the other, is a little different. Sure, it can be turned off like any other gadget, but its physical presence remains. There’s more to it though, more subtle things like the fact that thanks to a camera embedded in her eye, Autom is able to make and maintain eye contact with whomever she’s speaking to. Even a virtual character on a screen can’t do that the same way something with a physical presence like a robot can do. “Imagine that you’re in a crowded room,” Dr. Kidd said.

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“You’re at a party or something. If someone across the room looks at you and makes eye contact with you, you can tell. You know exactly if that person is looking into your eyes versus your forehead for example. We as people can do this at a great distance. A lot of animals can do it very well, also.” Aside from her eyes, Autom can hold a good conversation, too. She’s no Data, but Dr. Kidd brought up something very interesting, at least from the point of making quasi-socia-slash-service robots (or “single purpose” robots, as Dr. Kidd calls them) like Autom achieve their goals. They don’t necessarily need to be able to fully converse on every topic under the sun, just the really important topics. It’s about creating “the right combination at the right time,” he said. Sometimes that’s as simple as choosing good morning versus good afternoon or good evening. Sometimes it’s more complex. “In the case of Autom,” he said, “we ask people to interact with her every day, so if they do that, she’ll act one way. If they miss a few days, they’re not very regular, she might ask about what they’ve been doing. The more interesting parts happen over the course of the relationship. So how far along are we in developing this relationship, how are we getting along now, how good a job I do at my goals, that all impacts the conversation.” In other words, Autom follows a pattern of conversation every day, starting off with a greeting, a little small talk, maybe she gives some feedback or advice, then some more small talk and then a goodbye. But along the way, she’s slowly getting more and more information out of the user so she can customize her approach. It’s not open and free form conversation at this point, Dr. Kidd said, but it’s getting there. Recognize this? It’s the same concepts we’ve seen in machine learning over and over again. Provide the robot with

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training data so that it gets better and better at whatever task you’ve given it. Eventually, it can encounter unknown inputs— the kind it’s likely to get in conversation with a human—and devise its own responses without intervention from a human. These kind of interactions, not just the conversation but the eye contact we talked about earlier, are enough to make very powerful connections. Maybe this is just novelty at this point. Those connections are so powerful not because they’re familiar to us, but rather because they’re unfamiliar coming from machine. Maybe for the effect to work, we’ll have to build more and more human-like robots. Forgive the cliché, but only time and experience will tell us that. I was struck when talking with Dr. Kidd about Autom’s eyes and her conversation about how the relationship sounded a lot like the one I have with my dog, Magic. He’s a whippet, kind of a small grey hound, and he’s also a sort of demon, I think. He’s still young, so I have to forgive that he’s chewed the edges of my couch, eaten several of my hats and is responsible for quite a few sock disappearances. When he looks at me with those big brown eyes, though, we’re connected. I love him, despite his hijinks. Perhaps that bodes well for artificial life forms. If we can make the kinds of connections with androids that we make with other people, the kinds that we routinely make with our pets, maybe the better part of our human nature will take over. Maybe we’ll be inclined to treat them more as equals than slaves. This seemed to work in Data’s favor. Yeah, he had to fight for his rights sometimes, but he did have his champions. My dog does, too. Me. Then again, I lock him in a crate at night to sleep, force him to eat off the ground and tie him to a stake in the yard, so there’s that. Mixed bag, I guess.

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A truly intelligent machine, one that can learn and make decisions on its own, is still beyond our ability. Some think it will always be beyond our ability. I’m not one of those, though I can acknowledge the challenges. Aside from the technical issues we have to overcome, there’s a few moral and ethical issues to deal with. We wouldn’t be much of a species if we don’t treat our creations well, and then there’s the whole notion that they might just be capable of obliterating us, if they so chose. All that aside, we’ve come quite a ways in relatively few years, at least when the entire span of human existence is considered. Take the 1952 presidential election. A computer did, what at the time was considered impossible: it predicted the outcome of the election at 9:15 p.m on Election Day. “It’s Awfuly early, but I’ll go out on a limb. Univac Predicts— with 3,398,745 votes in— … That chances are now 100 to 1 in favor of the election of Eisenhower.”11 Systems Magazine called Univac’s prediction, something that occurred “long before anything like a definite trend could be seen by experts,” a “milestone in election analysis” that proved just how useful computers might be.12 Of course, Univac took up an entire room. Squeezing all that and more into something the size of a human head is the easy part. Getting it to think, to reason, to decide… to learn… that’s the next frontier.

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11. American History Museum Archives 12. A.C. Hancock, Systems Magazine, December 1952.

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On the path to a warp drive

“I’ve always looked at this warp core as something... beautiful... It never occurred to me that it might be—destructive.” —Geordi LaForge

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remember when I first watched the seventh season episode of The Next Generation, Force of Nature (7x9). It aired in 1993 and I was sixth grade. The environment was a hot topic, but then we were talking about a hole in the ozone layer and not global warming. I was a budding environmentalist and complained to my mom about the chlorofluorocarbons coming out of our refrigerator. She pointed out, though, how much I enjoyed the air conditioner in our car (we didn’t have one in our house yet) and that pretty much shut me up as far as the ozone layer went. But it’s not hard to see, given the time and the very real impact humans and our development have on the environment,

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why Star Trek’s writers wanted to dramatize an environmental issue. They just did it in a way that upended the Star Trek universe, limiting all federation vessels to Warp 6 except in an emergency because warp fields apparently damaged the fabric of subspace. And then, uncharacteristically for a show that seemed to value continuity above almost anything else, such a dramatic storyline was pretty much just brushed aside. My sharpest memory around this episode was reading a post on a nascent Internet message board after it aired titled “No WARP is the end?” Its writer was not happy. As it turns out, many of Star Trek’s writers weren’t either. Jerri Taylor, in the Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, said, “I’ve been on enough series and tried to do environmental issues to realize that they are so hard to dramatize, because you’re talking about the ozone hole and it’s so, so hard to make it emotional…”1 Well, I think they certainly made it emotional for a lot of fans, just maybe not in the way they wanted to. In Captains Logs: The unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages, Brana Braga said, “When you limit warp drive, the rug is being pulled out from under Star Trek. I wish more time had been spent with that, and less time with Spot and cat.”2 This was all handily cleaned up by the time Star Trek: Voyager premiered, though, when we saw that the Voyager’s warp nacelles changed their angle—called variable geometry warp nacelles—before speeding off faster than light speed. Indeed, a line in the unpublished Star Trek Voyager Technical Guide Version 1.0, an internal document used by the show’s writers, says, “Because Voyager employs a new folding wing-and-na-

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1. Larry Nemecek, Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, 3rd ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster 2003), 273. 2. Edward Gross, Mark A. Altman, Captains Logs: The unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages, (Little Brown and Co. 1995).

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celle configuration, warp fields may no longer have a negative impact on habital (sic) worlds, as established in TNG.”3 It was all muddled again in a season seven Voyager episode, Renaissance Man (24), when we learned that actually, yes, Voyagers’ warp drive was tearing away the fabric of spacetime just like the Enterprise’s did. I’m not sure what to make of how uncharacteristically and nonchalantly, given the amount of time Force of Nature spent dealing with Data’s cat Spot, the show handled this tearing down of one of mankind’s greatest achievements. Part of me likes to hope it’s the writers’ nod, even unconsciously, to what we know today about faster than light travel. Not only is it beyond our technical capability, a lot of what we know now tells us it might actually be completely impossible—at least the way most of us think of it (and not the way it was accomplished on the show). I know, I know I’ve spent the entire book telling you to ignore naysayers and assume everything is possible in time, but hang on, we’ll get to the possible parts. And remember, I said “everything we know now.” 500 years ago many in the world assumed the sun orbited the earth. Not long before that we assumed our world was flat. It was just a 100 years ago that we also assumed, wrongly, that space and time were separate things, each unaffected by the other. Once, we thought we had the universe figured out. Newtonian physics were not only the accepted and believed; almost no one challenged Newton’s explanations of the way things like gravity worked. Then this guy named Albert Einstein came along and in a few short years, upended everything. He not only answered the questions Newton’s ideas left behind, but also posed a whole host of new

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3. Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda, Star Trek Voyage Technical Guide 1.0, (1994).

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ones that we’re still trying to answer.

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THIS GUY, ALBERT EINSTEIN

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When Albert Einstein started publishing, we realized, as Brian Greene says, that Newton’s views weren’t necessarily wrong— he presumed time and space were fundamentally different things that didn’t really interact—but just an “approximate description of how nature really works.”4 Right now, Einstein’s description is the way we presume it does work. The chances, though, that technology will develop to allow greater experimental precision aren’t just good, they’re almost a given. Like Newton’s theories, complex as they were but still unable to explain how space and time peacefully coexisted, today we’re in a similar situation. On one hand, we have Einstein’s theory of general relativity that tells us maybe transporters are possible but traveling at the speed of light isn’t, there’s an emerging field of physics called quantum mechanics that pretty much doesn’t jive with many of Einstein’s ideas. That tells us that there’s something we don’t know about the universe, a so called “unified theory” that will bring the two fields together, much the way Einstein once reconciled the problems of space and time. Even as a write this, scientists may have discovered the elusive Higgs boson, a theoretical particle could might take us a long way toward that so-called unified theory. The jury is still out though. For all the conjecture, physical laws are physical laws until someone illuminates deeper understanding of the universe and

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4. Ibid, 83.

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we find out they’re wrong or don’t work. It’s happened before. So, while we’re going to explore why we can never travel at the speed of light, according to our current understanding, we are going to get a little more theoretical later on and figure how we can change space to effectively do it anyway. As it turns out, according to Star Trek and many people who are a lot smarter than me, you don’t actually have to travel at the speed of light to travel faster than the speed of light. One thing you have to remember is that in Einstein’s theories and his famous equations, c, the speed of light, isn’t just a random number chosen because it’s so big. It’s a special number, a universal constant. And according to Krauss, it’s the key to many questions. “Light displays the hidden connection between space and time,” he says. “Indeed, the speed of light defines the connection.”5 I know this doesn’t make much sense now. It will. But first, let’s turn back to the trusty Next Generation Technical manual to find out how the show’s warp drive actually works.

5. Physics of Star Trek.

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There are three basic parts to the Enterprise’s warp drive. The matter and antimatter reaction assembly, the power transfer conduits and the warp nacelles. While we’re never given a clear run down of exactly how the warp drive works, there are some clues in the show and some more specifics in the Technical Manual. Here’s the simplest possible explanation of the overall theory: instead of trying to propel the Enterprise across vast swaths of space, space itself is actually warped so that the dis-

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tance between two points becomes short enough to traverse, from an outside perspective, at speeds faster than light by a ship moving at what’s effectively, from a local perspective, still slower than light. “The idea is not to use any sort of rocket at all for propulsion, but instead to use spacetime itself—by warping it,” Krauss says.6 He thinks it a pretty straightforward idea, actually. “If spacetime can locally be warped so that it expands behind a starship and contracts in front of it, then the craft will be propelled along with the space it is in, like a surfboard on a wave. The craft will never travel locally faster than the speed of light, because the light, too, will be carried along with the expanding wave of space.”7 It is ingenious, because it uses a sort of loophole to sidestep some big problems. Dr. Krauss says “not only is it designed to avoid the ultimate speed limit—the speed of light—and so allow practical travel across the galaxy, but it is also designed to avoid the problems of time dilation, which result when the ship is traveling close to light speed.”8 Here’s what he’s saying. Space and time are so intertwined that an observed change in one, precipitates a change in the other. They’re relative, so much so that the faster we move across space, the slower time actually moves. This is the real trouble with faster than light travel. Everything we know says that as we approach the speed of light, time will slow to the point that we’ll never reach our destination. Eventually it’ll even stop. And that’s not all. Distances appear shorter or longer, based on relative motion. And the faster something travels? The heavier it gets.

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6. Physics of Star Trek. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid.

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We don’t notice this relativity in daily life, and Brian Greene tells us why in The Elegant Universe. We’re just too damned slow. “…our intuition is wrong—it is informed by motion that typically is extremely slow compare to the speed of light, and such slow speeds obscure the true character of space and time,” he says.9 Dr. Krauss said something similar in The Physics of Star Trek. “...the reason all these implications of relativity of space and time are so hard for us to accept at face value is that we happen to live and move at speeds far smaller than the speed of light.”10 He gives a good example. Going just half the speed of light, or just around a staggering 93,000 miles per second, our clocks would only slow about fifteen percent. That’s just nine seconds per minute, a difference most of us wouldn’t even perceive. “On NASA’s space shuttle, which moves at about 5 miles per second...clocks tick less than one ten-millionth of a percent slower than their counterparts on Earth,” Krauss says.11 More than 100 years ago, though, Einstein came up with a final, and maybe his most significant, theory. Here’s the short version: space isn’t flat, it’s curved. More than that, it’s matter and energy the cause the curvature. Here’s a good way to think of it, borrowed from Brian Greene in The Elegant Universe. Imagine space as a big piece of latex. Hold it out so it lies flat, and then drop something like a bowling ball in the center. Doesn’t stay flat anymore, does it? The bowling ball, with its heavy mass, sinks down deeply, forcing the latex to curve to its shape. Thanks to Einstein, we know that same thing happens in space, but instead of bowling balls we have planets and stars and black holes (which are really just stars that have collapsed in on themselves). Greene says, not

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9. Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe, 53. 10. Physics of Star Trek. 11. Physics of Star Trek.

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surprisingly, Einstein’s theory was radical at the time. “... space is not merely a passive forum providing the arena for the events of the universe,” he says, “rather, the shape of space responds to objects in the environment.”12This how the moon stays in orbit around the earth. More specifically, Einstein’s “radical” idea provided a mechanism for large bodies like to transmit their gravity. Think back to Greene’s bowling-ball analogy. He says that if we set something like a marble in motion around the bowling ball, it’ll circle the ball, trapped in the curvature of the latex. That’s the same thing that happens to the moon, and on an even bigger scale, all the planets in the solar system, including earth. We’re trapped in the sun’s orbit because we’re on that path in the curved space it’s created. “[Einstein] presented a radical revision of the concept of gravity … not as a force acting directly on objects, but as a consequence of the geometry of spacetime.”13 Here’s another way to think about it. Remember those coin-collecting fundraising things that were often in malls? You put a quarter in the slot in the top and watched as, instead of falling straight down into the container below, it circled and circled and circled first? The idea here is the same. In fact, the shape of the cone is sort of similar to the way a heavy object like the sun warps space. Of course, the dimensions are off. The sun exists in the three dimensions and our coin-collector and latex analogies are representations of the same idea with a just a single slice of space. There’s no “down” around the sun because space is warped all 360 degrees around it. So, what does this all have to do with warp drive? In years of watching Star Trek as a kid it never occurred to me that

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12. Elegant Universe, 69. 13. Ibid.

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the “warp” in warp drive was referring to how the Enterprise’s engines warp space to make the distance between two points shorter. I guess I wasn’t a very bright child. Warp drive is actually even something of a colloquialism in Star Trek. When Zephram Cochrane made the first faster than light trip, the engines were known as CDP engines, short for continuum distortion propulsion.14 And so again, like with the transporter we see that the basic idea behind the technology is in line with our current understanding about the universe. We know, thanks to Einstein, that objects with heavy mass exert gravity—that’s how we stay on the Earth and how the Earth stays in orbit around the sun—and that gravity is really just warped, or curved space. Think about a sheet of paper, laid flat. The shortest distance between its edges would be a straight line, unless we curve the paper to bring the edges closer together. This is what the Enterprise’s warp drive does, just in smaller bursts. It can’t, for example, warp space enough to pull the space between planets light years away so that it can travel between them instantaneously. Instead, it distorts space based on so-called warp factors, of which, at least post-The Original Series, ten is the theoretical limit. That means, even with warp drive, it still takes time for the Enterprise to travel great distances. When Captain Picard says “engage,” a warp field surrounds the ship and the space in the immediate vicinity, probably in front of and behind it, is warped or curved so that the Enterprise can skip ahead, propelled by the energy of interacting warp fields. Do this enough times over and over again and the ship can cross a single light year in a few hours, were normal sub-light propulsions would take a year or more. In fact, the ship itself, surrounded by warp fields, is left in

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14. Technical Manual, 54.

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normal space and isn’t traveling faster than light, or anywhere near light speed. It’s going at normal speeds, over what’s essentially curved or compressed space. To an outside observer, it appears that the ship is moving faster than light when, from the ship’s perspective, it’s just happily sailing along well within the rules that Newton and Einstein put down. It avoids, as the Technical Manual puts it, “undesired time dilation” effects and “effectively circumventing the limits of General, Special, and Transformational Relativity.”15 That’s all great in theory, but how can we actually accomplish this in real life? On the shows, this warp effect comes not just from one warp field surrounding the ship, but several layered on top of each other, created by firing the warp field coils in the engine nacelles in distinct patterns. “The coils generate an intense, multilayered field that surrounds the starship, and it is the manipulation of the shape of this field that produces the propulsive effect through and beyond the speed of light, c,” the Technical Manual says.16 The interaction between these layers of warp fields also have the happy effect of changing the gravitational constant of the ship, so that its relatively light mass can warp space in a way normally reserved only for things as heavy as planets and stars. This is no small feat, and was actually a piece of contention in the TNG episode Deja Q (3x13), when a planet is threatened by their own moon and the Enterprise is doing everything in its power to save it. Well, Q shows up—but as a punishment for being himself, the Continuum has stripped him of his omnipotence and made him mortal. He flees to the Enterprise for sanctuary (there are more than a few alien species in the

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15. Technical manual, 54. 16. Ibid, 64.

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universe that want to take advantage of his new mortality for a little bit of vengeance) and they ask for his help with the planet, which he happily gives… in his own way.

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Data: Can you recommend a way to counter the effect? Q: Simple. Change the gravitational constant of the universe. Geordi: What? Q: Change the gravitational constant of the universe, thereby altering the mass of the asteroid. Geordi: Redefine gravity. And how am I supposed to do that? Q: You just do it! Ow! Where’s that doctor anyway? Data: Geordi is trying to say that changing the gravitational constant of the universe is beyond our capabilities. Q: Oh. Well, in that case, never mind.

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Changing the gravitational constant of the universe might be out of their reach, but changing ship’s isn’t. They do it every time the Captain says “engage.” This is actually how the crew saves the planet:

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Geordi: You know, this might work? We can’t change the gravitational constant of the universe, but if we wrap a low-level warp field around that moon, we could reduce its gravitational constant. Make it lighter so we can push it! Q: Glad I could help.

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Again, on the shows, generating those warp fields starts in the matter and antimatter reaction chamber, the piece of equipment and the part of the engine most visible in Main Engineering on the Enterprise. Matter and antimatter annihilate each other when they come in contact, and the Technical Manual says this is a more efficient energy source than

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the fusion systems used by the Enterprise’s sublight impulse engine, and presumably the kinds of fusion reactors we use for power generation today. Above the chamber is a supply tank of matter, a substance called Deuterium. Below, another tank containing a supply of antimatter, or more specifically, antihydrogen. Both are injected into the engine core much the same way cars inject fuel into engines, but antimatter requires special handling. A lot of magnetic fields are used to keep the antimatter from coming into contact with other matter, specifically the components that make up the engine, until it reaches the core.17 There, Dilithium crystals control the matter-antimatter reaction so it doesn’t destroy the ship. Dilithium has unique properties, as it’s the “only material known to Federation science to be nonreactive with antimatter,” at least when subjected to electromagnetic fields that make it essentially porous.18 In other words, the antimatter passes right through without ever coming into contact with the Dilithium crystals. What’s left behind, apparently, is a stream of plasma that’s then sent into the power transfer conduits, one for the starboard nacelle and one for the port. This plasma energizes the warp coils, which in turn produce the warp fields necessarily to alter the ship’s gravitational constant and allow faster-than-light travel. Good news for us, antimatter actually exists. We know, again, in large part thanks to Einstein. Let’s jump back to his E = MC2. Remember, that’s the theory that essentially says, energy = mass and mass = energy. We explored the idea when we considered in if a device like the transporter, which converts

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17. When we talked about holography, we noted that the Enterprise’s holodecks required force fields to make them work. The first Enterprise, the NX-01, had warp drive before humans had perfected force field technology. One has to assume, I guess, that they managed to protect their matter/anti-matter supplies from interaction in another way. 18. Technical Manual, 64.

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matter to energy and back, is theoretically possible. Turns out is, as least as far as Einstein’s concerned. But if you’re any good at math—okay, maybe really good at math—you’ve probably already noticed that there are two ways to solve Einstein’s equation. This might help. While E = MC2 is the version that’s become famous, it’s actually a reduced form of a bit more complex equation: E2 = M2C419*. In some situations, according to theoretical physicist and founding father of quantum mechanics Paul Dirac, E2 was a more important component in Einstein’s equation than just the E we normally see.20 Why? Well when you take the square root to find E, there are, again, two solutions. I was never that good at algebra though, until I took calculus and then I was okay at algebra and really bad at calculus, so let’s make it even simpler. 2 x 2 = 4. Two is the square root of four, but then, so is negative two, right? -2 x -2 also equals 4. Based on these two sides of the equation, if you will, a positive and a negative, Dirac proposed the existence of the antielectron, or what we call antimatter.21 And just like scientists convert energy to matter everyday in particle accelerators, they create antimatter, too. But of course, having antimatter and using it to create a warp engine are two different things, entirely. Remember, matter and antimatter annihilate each other when

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Actually, E2 = M2C4 is still a simpler form of the equation that assumes most objects in the universe are usually moving and not entirely still. That equation is E2 = M2C4 + P2C2, where P is the particle’s momentum. 20. Paul Davies and John Gribbon, The Matter Myth: Dramatic Discovers that Challenge Our Understanding of the Physical Reality (New York: Simon & Schuster 1992), 150. 21. I’m simplifying a lot here, it was more than just the math but an attempt to reconcile various theories and experimental results. Also, as it usually goes, more than just Einstein and Durac deserve credit for the discovery of antimatter—but it was Durac’s published ideas that ultimately proved its existence. P. A. M. Dirac, “Quantised Singularities in the Quantum Field”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A 117 (1928), 610-624. doi:10.1098/rspa.1931.0130

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they come in contact, so we’d have to figure out how to do that safely. It may all be academic anyway, because we think we can create warp drives without antimatter. We just need something a little more… exotic.

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The Alcubierre drive

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In 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre published a paper titled “The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity,” in which he painstakingly laid out a bunch of math that proved the idea of faster-than-light travel was possible within the rules laid down by Einstein.22 I’ll spare you the equations because, trust me, they’re a little more complex than E = MC2., but his theory works almost just as it seems to in Star Trek. “By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible,” he says.23 In fact, because of some physical peculiarities, the ship inside Alcubierre’s warp bubble is in a kind of free fall, which means the passengers inside don’t feel any inertia. That’s a big deal, because one of the many problems with faster-than-light travel is the fact that the gravitational forces at such speeds would crush us. Think about when your car accelerates from a stop, how you’re pushed back into your seat. Multiply that by the speed of light and you’ll understand the inertial forces we’re dealing with here. There is, though, one big if with Alcubierre’s theory—it re-

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22. Class. Quantum Grav. 11(1994)L73-L77; PACS numbers:0420,0490; 0264-9381/94/050073+05; IOP Publishing Ltd. 23. Ibid.

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quires what he called in a letter to the journal’s editor “exotic matter” that “has a negative mass” to generate a field that could warp space in the way he describes. What he’s saying is that, essentially, the kind of warp drive he’s describing needs negative energy. We’re not talking about antimatter here (which actually has positive energy), but the idea that a region of space— space, being that thing that holds matter—can have less than nothing in it, and therefore an energy density that is less than zero. Classical physics tells us this is impossible, but quantum physics says—no, wait, maybe it is possible—under very special and precise circumstances. Those two are always at odds, and I’m obviously not the one to reconcile them. As hard as it is to understand how something can be both impossible and possible at the same time, let’s just take it on faith for the moment. When we allow for the existence of exotic matter and negative energy, all kinds of strange and amazing things suddenly aren’t so far-fetched. We’re talking not just warp drive, but wormholes and even traveling backwards through time. Still, assuming the existence of exotic matter, Alcubierre’s equations would require a lot of it to create a warp bubble that would enable a ship to travel faster than light. A lot. Almost an absurd amount, something equivalent to around 300 earths or the weight of Jupiter.24 And while quantum mechanics might be okay with the idea of exotic matter in theory, it places a “serious limitations on its magnitude and duration.”25 This led to physicists at Tufts University to conclude that Alcubierre’s warp field was either not possible, or would half to be very, very small, like the size of an atom.26 Even Alcubierre himself

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24. Alcubierre says 1.9 × 1027 kilograms, for those of you interested. 25. Michael J. Pfenning and L. H. Ford, “The unphysical nature of ‘Warp Drive’,” arXiv:gr-gc/9702026. 26. Ibid.

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admitted that, assuming we can overcome the energy problem, there still isn’t anyway to know if warping space would actually cause a starship to achieve faster-than-light speeds. Lucky for us, though, the guys at NASA are already working on it.

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NASA TO THE RESCUE

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Alcubierre’s equations required so much energy, most scientists wrote it off as unattainable. But in 2012, NASA physicists Harold White stunned the world when he said he thinks it would take just a few tweaks in the equations to reduce the energy requirement to something more like the mass of a small car. “My early results suggested I had discovered something that was in the math all along,” he said in an interview with Io9.com. “I suddenly realized that if you made the thickness of the negative vacuum energy ring larger—like shifting from a belt shape to a donut shape—and oscillate the warp bubble, you can greatly reduce the energy required—perhaps making the idea plausible.”27 Basically, he’s says taking the shape of Alcubierre’s warp bubble and making it a little curvier and thicker reduces the energy requirements dramatically, pushing the idea back into the realm of… not so far fetched.28 Since presenting the idea last year, White and a team at NASA have hit the lab, conducting small-scale warp field experiments with lasers to see if they can cause any actual distortion in spacetime. We’ll see what they come up with. Even

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27. George Dvorsky, “How NASA might build its very first warp drive,” Io9. com, November 25, 2012. 28. Matt Peckham, “NASA Actually Working on Faster-than-Light Warp Drive,” Time.com, September 19, 2012.

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if they succeed, it still might be a while before anyone straps a warp drive to a spacecraft—it took the humans in Star Trek something like a hundred years to progress from Zephram Cochrane’s first warp flight to a sustainable warp program.29 Still, a proof-of-concept experiment could be a defining moment in our history. There would be other obstacles, of course. A team of scientist at the University of Sydney pointed out in a recent paper that space isn’t an empty vacuum, and that a whole lot of things like dust and particles might get caught up in a warp bubble moving across the galaxy. When a ship arrives at its destination, all that stuff will have to go somewhere. Hopefully not into a nearby planet, though, because it would be “blasted into oblivion,” as the authors put it.30

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29. There was some suggestions the Vulcans intentionally held us back, deeming us unready for interstellar travel. Based on what we saw on Star Trek: Enterprise, they may have been right. 30. Brendan McMonigal, Geraint F. Lewis and Philip O’Byrne, “The Alcubierre Warp Drive: On the Matter of Matter,” arXiv:1202.5708.

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on the state of the science today, but I don’t like to make those kinds of predictions. I mean, after all, even NASA is doing experiments. Who’d ever have thought we’d travel to the moon sixty or seventy years before we actually did it? I’m sure there were a lot of naysayers, then—but where are they now. Still, and please hear that I don’t believe this yet I have to at least mention the possibility, we might one day find that faster-than-light travel is not just beyond our ability, but physically impossible. We still might find that Einstein’s description is more accurate than not, that’s it more law than mere theory. But we thought that once before. And, didn’t someone, somewhere once say, laws were made to be broken? Until then, let’s keep our eyes out for the next (or first, I guess) Zephram Cochrane.

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The Economics of the Future Money, Money, Money “We’re a constant reminder of a part of your past you’d like to forget.” —Quark

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riting Treknology, I’ve re-watched several hundred hours of Star Trek, from The Next Generation to Voyager and Enterprise. Along the way I’ve wondered a lot about what our own future will really look like, if it will resemble anything close to the utopia Gene Rodenberry envisioned. In Star Trek: First Contact, Troi tells Zephram Cochrane—the man who invented the warp engine—that earth’s first contact with aliens “united humanity like never before.” We realized we weren’t alone in the universe and that was enough to convince us to finally put aside our relatively small differences. First contact changed us, for the better. I can’t help but think that a naïve view of how we’d actually

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react if the Vulcans showed up on our doorstep. I’ve already pointed out that we have a long history of treating those different from us bad. For some, minorities are at best a threat to be marginalized and at worst, property to be controlled and disposed of at will. And if there’s one thing we’re very good at, it’s securing and preserving the power structures that allow such abuses. The United States had to go to war with itself to end slavery. In 2008, a majority of voters in California chose to strip gay men and women of the right to marry, a right they’d been given by duly elected lawmakers. Even now, despite widespread abuses by those entrusted with the care of the global financial market, attempts at regulation are met with fierce resistance. We don’t change easily, and change that upends the balances of power comes harder. Even in Star Trek, the writers thought it’d be more realistic for the human race to be torn down before it could evolve so spectacularly. The events of First Contact took place after a third world war in the latter part of the 21st century, a time when most governments had obliterated themselves along with a large portion of the planet’s population.1 That’s sort of

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1. Some interesting continuity issues here. The Star Trek Encyclopedia, by Michael and Denise Okuda, puts Cochrane’s first warp flight in 2063. World War III takes place ten years earlier, in 2053. Riker says in First Contact that while “there are very few governments left,” he never actually specifies the United States. I bring it up, because a second season episode of The Next Generation, The Royale, featured a NASA spacecraft with fifty-two stars on the flag. Riker says this version of the flag puts it between 2033 and 2079, according to the Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future (also by the Okudas), which suggest at least the United States survived through the war. However, an early version of the First Contact script says very specifically that the United States ceases to exist after the war. In the final version, Lily Sloan, on her first encounter with the Enterprise crew, wants to know what “faction” they’re with. That’s an odd choice of term if the United States was really still around. And then, on Enterprise, Ensign Sato says specifically that the Vulcans chose the U.S. over others for first contact—so it clearly still existed (Desert Crossing, 1x23). Have a theory about this? I’d love to hear it. And considering NASA’s started to experiment with warp technology almost right on schedule, it leads me to wonder exactly what other events in our future history Star

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where things got interesting for us as a species. First contact, precipitated by the first warp flight (and at least in some small part by a world war) led to all kinds of social progress. Poverty, disease, racism, money, all gone within the next 100 years. Yeah, I said money. We don’t know exactly how all this happened. There are some clues, and first contact was a big part of it, so we’ll start there. The original story is that Cochrane builds a warp ship, ten years after the third world war, and then makes the first warp flight which gets the attention of a passing Vulcan ship. The Vulcans become friends, mostly, and help us through the transition to our better selves. The Borg, though, a conquering cybernetic race still stinging from repeated defeats at the hands of humans, have other plans. They decide to travel to the past and assimilate the Earth at this exact moment, at a time when it couldn’t offer any resistance. This would prevent the first warp flight, first contact and humanity’s evolution into the only species for which resistance wasn’t futile. The Enterprise follows the Borg back in time and destroys their ship, but not before their attack on Earth leaves Cochrane’s co-pilot—Lily Sloane—sick from radiation poisoning. Dr. Crusher beams her to sickbay for treatment, but the Borg—ever wily— had secretly beamed aboard the Enterprise, too, and began to surreptitiously assimilate the ship. When a few drones try to break into sickbay, Dr. Crusher, Lily and the others have to abandon it through a Jeffries tube. Lily, understandably fending for herself, sneaks away and gets lost. She conveniently runs into Captain Picard, though, and together they try to make it back to the bridge. Lily is astonished at the

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Trek may have predicted. We can take some solace that the eugenics wars of the early 90s never happened, so maybe World War III won’t, either.

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size of the Enterprise-E. She asks the Captain how much a ship like it costs.

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Captain Picard: The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century. Lily Sloane: No money? You mean, you don’t get paid? Captain Picard: We work to better ourselves.

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If you’re laughing at that, you’re not alone. I can’t imagine many who’d find bettering themselves more motivation to create, work, and innovate than the power that comes with money, at least not in the now. It sounds almost like… socialism? Don’t panic. It’s not. There are a few key differences, at least from the kind of scary socialism that some conservatives use to frighten American voters. The truth is, no single definition covers every flavor of socialism. I only bring it up because if I don’t, I fear being accused of trying to hide the parallels between Star Trek’s moneyless economy and the ideas behind some social ownership systems. Honestly, I’m not advocating either idea, or variations thereof. I like money, and as we’ll see in a bit, it’s not a bad piece of technology. For some, the ideas behind socialism and Star Trek’s moneyless economy tread too closely together. Capitalism all the way, baby. If this describes you, I still don’t think you should be frightened by socialism. If you’re pragmatic, you realize things like fire and police protection are normal, not-so-scary everyday forms of socialism that the majority of American capitalist society readily accepts and even expects. Add public schools to that list, too. Subsidized student loans? How many of us have those? These good things all derive, on many levels, from socialist theories. My point is that when we say “socialism” we’re talking about a broad array of ideals. You’ve stuck with me so

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far; I don’t want you to jump ship just because you see a word some would prefer always be in scare quotes. Before we get too ahead of ourselves, though, let’s look at a crowdsourced (socialized?) explanation on Wikipedia that sounds something like the Star Trek economy, just so we can see how it really does differ:

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A socialist economic system would consist of an organization of production to directly satisfy economic demands and human needs, so that goods and services would be produced directly for use instead of for private profit driven by the accumulation of capital. Accounting would be based on physical quantities, a common physical magnitude, or a direct measure of labour-time in place of financial calculation. Distribution of output would be based on the principle of individual contribution.2 (emphasis added)

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That sounds a lot like the way Federation societies operate, doesn’t it? Human needs are satisfied, and the accumulation of capital is not a driving concern. As far as differences go, I’d probably chop off the last sentence, the part about distribution based on individual contribution, because that doesn’t really seem to apply. Star Trek’s moneyless economy is about unrationed distribution completely separated from contribution. Everyone has what they need, and what they want. They contribute for a greater good, not for the acquisition of basic needs or even material wealth. I also wonder how much “ac-

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2. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism — the nice part is that if you’re not happy with that definition, you can just change it.

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counting” matters in the Federation, since things like food and clothes pop out of replicators at will. What’s there to account for? Imagine being rid of Quicken forever. That can’t be a bad thing. I do get how this makes some people nervous, though. Even if you can separate the socialist undertones, people still like making and collecting money. The accumulation of wealth has been humanity’s driving force for a long time. In our society, wealth correlates with power and opportunity, to ease of life and to comfort. Any idea that threatens that can be really difficult to swallow, at least for those with the power and opportunity, the ease of life and the comfort. I think a large part of the problem is that the earth has always seen competing systems, capitalism and free markets on one end against communism and government control on the other. A money economy and a moneyless economy probably can’t peacefully coexist on the same planet, at least not with equal standing.3 Some countries can barely have two brands of Christians sharing the same continent. If all that weren’t enough, here’s how Star Trek really twists the knife in capitalism’s heart: the Ferengi. These short, bigeared aliens are portrayed as sniveling, backstabbing, deal-cutting machines driven by profit and only profit. They live life and do business according to 285 Rules of Acquisition that cover everything from greed to friendship. Like, Rule 109: “Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.”4 We learned Rule 211 when employees of Quark’s, a Ferengi bar on Deep Space Nine, tried to unionize in Bar Association (4x16): “Employees are the

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3. Some moneyless economies do exist on Earth, but we’re talking villages and tribes of people numbering in the dozens, not the millions in world powers like the United States or China. 4. DS9, Rivals

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rungs on the ladder of success. Don’t hesitate to step on them.” The Ferengi live to cut a deal, to earn a return and accumulate wealth. They’re the uber-capitalists of the alpha quadrant, the ying to the Federation’s yang. They’re everything humans aren’t. A poignant example that sums up everything we’ve been talking about played out in the Deep Space Nine episode In the Cards (5.25), which took place during the Jem H’dar war. Jake, Captain Sisko’s son, decides he’s going to buy his dad a mint condition 1951 Willie Mays rookie card at an auction in Quark’s. Jake and his dad are huge baseball fans, even though no one’s really played the game for centuries. The Jem H’dar war was hard-fought for the Federation and almost lost. At the mouth of the wormhole, Deep Space Nine was on the frontlines and that meant Captain Sisko took every fallen officer personally. Jake thinks the card will cheer him up. There’s just one problem. He’s human, and doesn’t have the money to buy the card. So he turns to his capitalist best friend and the only Ferengi in Starfleet, Nog, for help.

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Nog: No. Jake: Come on, Nog… Nog. No. Jake: Why not? Nog. It’s my money, Jake. If you want to bid at this auction, use your own money. Jake: I’m human, I don’t have any money. Nog: It’s not my fault your species decided to abandon currency-based economics in favor of some philosophy of self-enhancement. Jake: Hey, watch it. There’s nothing wrong with our philosophy. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity. Nog: What does that mean exactly?

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Jake: It means... it means, we don’t need money.

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Eventually, Jake guilts Nog into giving him the money he needs. Captain Sisko is, after all, the man who sponsored Nog’s entrance into Starfleet Academy and Nog does have five bars of gold-pressed latinum locked in a box under his bed (latinum can’t be replicated, so it’s a suitable currency).5 Later, though, with palpable distaste as he watches Jake retrieve the latinum: Nog: Hew-mons…

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That kind of says it all, right? Hew-mons, with their high-minded ideals about personal achievement and self-enhancement. Do we really even have the capacity for such notions? Maybe. Money is, after all, just a kind of technology. We created it to regulate trade and commerce, but technology goes in an out of vogue all the time. Betamax anyone? Tell me, when’s the last time you used a payphone? The scale is different, yes. Neither old videotapes nor public phones penetrate on such global levels like money does, but the basic point is the same. There’s nothing to say that we can’t someday evolve beyond money, assuming it would really be better.

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A Technological Construct

We created money, and now we try, sometimes with little suc-

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cess, to control it. In most countries, money is mostly paper. Paper. Not gold, silver, diamonds or even zinc, the primary material in U.S. coins. As I write this, there’s about $1.08 Trillion in paper floating around the United States, out of $1.1 trillion total.6 That means that one of the wealthiest economies in the world is running on 98 percent ink on dead trees, backed not by a precious metal or a universally valued commodity, but only the credit of the government. That’s only part of the picture. A lot of money doesn’t exist in coin or dollar form at all, but as zeros and ones in computers. Wired, in an article titled The Future of Money, said, “[m]oving money, once a function managed only by the biggest companies in the world, is now a feature available to any code jockey.”7 Paypal has allowed users to bypass banks for years, and its code base is now open. Industry giant Amazon.com offers its own payment processing service to developers and dozens of startups like mobile-processor Square are putting pressure on a declining credit card industry. Phones powered by Google’s Android operating system bypass plastic cards altogether, storing a user’s account information and transmitting it to a pointof-sale system via a near-field communication radio embedded in the device. Technology has disrupted legacy industries like publishing, movies and music and there’s no reason to believe that the same won’t happen to the financial sector. Wired says the current system, run by banks and credit card companies has “a massive inefficiency” just waiting “to be exploited.” Take my American Express card for example. Every time I use it to make a purchase, American Express imposes an in-

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terchange fee on the merchant that can be quite high, at least relatively. Visa, Mastercard, Discover—they all impose interchange fees, a sort of tax on the global financial system that doesn’t really make sense anymore. When credit cards came into existence, the computer networks that powered them were proprietary and expensive. But now, charging an increasing complex array of fees (Wired estimates hundreds of them, up from a few dozen just years ago) is a lot like cell phone companies charging $.10 a for a text message that really costs something like $.00001 to send. Inefficiency? More like greed, but often greed leads to just these kinds of inefficiencies as a way to maintain control and profit. Like we’ve seen in other industries, Wired predicts “an army of engineers and entrepreneurs” rushing in that will drive costs “to zero, undercut the traditional middlemen, and unleash a wave of innovation.”8 Can’t wait? Well, hang on. By its nature, disruption can’t be all-positive. And we’re not dealing with books or MP3s in this situation, we’re talking about a global system of money that’s integrated into our lives at the most basic level. Jack Weatherford, author of The History of Money, also predicts we are entering an age of technological disruption in the economy, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. He thinks this will lead to money to have more influence, not less. “Even though national currencies such as the dollar and the yen may continue to exist,” he says, “electronic technology is producing money in so many forms that, at least for a while, the state will not be able to control them. Once free from state control, money will play an ever more important role in our lives than it has in the past.”9

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8. The Future of Money 9. History of Money, 267.

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Take Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a digital currency that operates free of any central control. No one owns it and the software that runs it is open-source, maintained by an online community of developers. Weusecoins.com, a sort of Bitcoin portal, calls it a new kind of money. It is, in some sense, though Bitcoin does trade against the dollar. It’s defining characteristic is complete decentralization. There’s no payment processor between you and the person you’re trading with, no bank taking a cut. It’s completely distributed. “Bitcoin is very exciting to a lot of people and very curious and mysterious and worrisome to a lot of other people,” David Wolman, author of The End of Money, told me recently. “It brings this peer-to-peer transaction capability to a new level. That has people excited, people who are interested in privacy, people who don’t believe that the overseers of sovereign currencies will steer them well into the future.” Wolman knows a little about money. He spent a year cashless, relying entirely on credit cards and virtual currencies, with surprisingly few problems. He told me that the recent world financial turmoil has piqued interest in virtual currencies like Bitcoin and he pointed to a story in Canada’s Financial Post in the summer of 2012, about people in the Eurozone moving their money into perceived safer stores of value. “When people talk about a safe investment or a safe store of value the go to has always been things like US dollars, US Treasuries, Swiss Francs, gold, all this kind of shit,” Wolman said. “Now it’s Bitcoin.” The paper quotes the president of a New York company that trades virtual currencies into dollars: “We’re getting requests from people literally saying, can we mail you euros? We can’t do

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that legally, but they keep asking,” he said.10 “European volume has been skyrocketing.” What do you think? Ready to ditch your money market account for some Bitcoin? Does the rise of virtual currency and online payment processors signal an end to sovereign control over money? Technology is already outpacing government’s ability to keep it in check. In the summer of 2012, for example, an investment firm called Knight Capital developed a software trading program designed to exploit price differences in stocks the way only a computer could, executing thousands of trades per second by directly accessing stock exchange servers. It came online, and promptly went haywire, executing millions of errant trades. Scores of companies were directly affected and Knight lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. The New York Times said the incident “revived calls for bolder changes” to a financial market that had “been hobbled by its own complexity and speed.”11 This wasn’t the first tech problem in the markets. In 2010, the stock market crashed and then rebounded in just a few minutes time, thanks in part to the kinds of high-frequency trades Knight was hoping to execute with its new software. Nearly a quarter-century earlier, in 1987, computers designed to prevent losses in the markets also caused a crash after investors panicked and started selling off stocks the computers were trying to dynamically hedge with low-priced futures contracts. They pushed each other into a downward spiral and stocks plunged a record 508 points. The Times asked in a headline the next day, “Does 1987 Equal 1929?”12

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Fortunately, it didn’t. The next recession didn’t come for another two years, and it was mild compared to the global crisis that loomed.

The Big Pool Of Money

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Like any tech, money spurs more tech. Key advances in our recent history, for example, have been propelled by money. Jack Weatherford says in The History of Money that “[t]he economic boom of the nineteenth century gave the world new systems of railroads, steamships, telegraph and telephone lines, and electricity as well as architectural wonders from the Brooklyn Bridge and Eiffel Tower to the Suez Canal.”13 These were life-altering advances, innovations that changed the world. But, in a parallel that evokes recent memory, the economic boom in the 19th century also produced a wealthy class of capitalist bankers who lived a life of privilege unlike anything history had ever seen. “This greatly resented class lived largely above the law and manipulated politicians like puppets,” Weatherford says.14 Sound familiar? The Occupy Movement sprang into existence in 2011 as populist anger over financial inequality—perpetrated, at least according to the Occupy Movement, by a wealthy class skilled at using the markets to their advantage, namely, banks and bankers—exploded into months-long public protests in global financial centers like Wall Street. Why should, in the United States for example, one or two percent of the population con-

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Times, October 18, 2012. 13. Jack Weatherford, The History of Money, 161. 14. Ibid.

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trol so much of the county’s wealth? To them, the banks were the culprits behind a global financial meltdown. They weren’t wrong, but they weren’t completely right, either. The banks were at the heart of the financial crisis, but we have more than enough blame to spread. It all started with something This American Life coined as the big pool of money. Put another way, it’s all the money the world is saving right now: everything in your retirement account, the cash in Apple’s coffers and the money in my money market fund. It’s an unimaginable amount of cash being watched over, as This American Life said, by “armies of very nervous men and women,”—investment managers, whose job is to make sure that not only does that pool not shrink, but that it gets bigger, too. The traditional way to grow the pool was to invest in safe securities like bonds and treasury certificates (remember those safe stores of value?). But this worked almost too well, and the big pool of money grew a lot faster than it had in the past. In 2000, it was just about $36 trillion. By 2008, it had nearly doubled to $70 trillion.15 And while the pool had grown to a staggering amount, the number of safe places to put it hadn’t. “So that global army of investment managers was hungrier and twitchier than ever before. They all wanted the same thing, a nice, low-risk investment that paid some return.”16 To get that return, investors turned to the U.S. housing market. Here’s what happened. Let’s say I bought a house for $800,000—a not unheard of price here in Washington, D.C. I borrow the money from a bank and agree to pay them about six percent interest over the next thirty years. My bank, though,

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15. The pool is actually much, much larger. $70 trillion refers only to a subset of the big pool of money, something called fixed-income securities. 16. Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson. This American Life.

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looking to make a quicker return, sells my mortgage up the chain to a bigger investment bank on Wall Street. This bigger investment bank has bought thousands of mortgages just like mine and instead of selling each one to individual investors in the big pool of money, they sold pieces of each mortgage grouped into something called a mortgage-backed security. The idea was sound, in theory, because it seemed to spread out the risk among many different home loans. The big pool of money didn’t have to worry about one borrower losing their job and missing payments, because any losses on a single loan would be made up by the profits on others. Since each investor in the big pool only owned a small part of each loan, any such loss would be small. It was like we’d found a way to grow actual money trees. Then the banks got even more creative. Tech spurs tech, right? A mortgage-backed security is a share of many different mortgages. Well some of the mortgages in a mortgage-backed security were given to better borrowers, those more likely to repay, than others. The better the borrower, the less the risk, but also, the less the return. The big pool of money wanted a bigger return, and that meant they wanted to invest in the riskier mortgages. So the banks took those mortgage-backed securities and sliced them up even further based on risk, and then pooled all of those together into what they called a collateralized debt obligation, or CDO. The big pool of money had exactly what it wanted: pieces of home loans diced and sliced and grouped together by the level of risk or inversely, by the level of potential profit they could generate. CDOs were so popular investment banks couldn’t keep up with the demand. Investors wanted more and more, which meant we needed more and more mortgages. You probably know this part of the story. Adjustable rate

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home loans became common because their low initial payments meant more people could afford to get into the market and create more mortgages to satisfy the appetite of the big pool. Borrowers, knowing they couldn’t afford the higher adjusted payments that would come in a few years, thought that after proving themselves for a length of time, they’d be able to refinance their home loans into a more traditional fixed-rate mortgage. To keep things rolling and the cash flowing, banks even started offering borrowers unverified loans. Need half-amillion? Have a job? Okay, you got it. But the catch was no one asked anyone to prove their income or sometimes, even the existence of a job that would provide the income to repay the mortgage. Toward the end, one of the most twisted financial products to come out of the crisis was something called a NINA loan, or no-income-no-asset. It meant you didn’t need anything to get a mortgage. No job, no income, no assets. You know how this ends. Borrowers were given loans they couldn’t afford, and they started defaulting in massive numbers. Along the way though, while bankers and mortgage brokers were ignoring their gut instincts about how bad these loans were, they had a good reason—aside from huge commissions— to do so. Data. Complex software algorithms analyzed millions and billions of dollars worth of mortgages and predicted that everything the brokers and banks were doing was going to be okay. Turns out the data was bad, though. It was based on traditional loans with traditional borrowers, not on the kinds of loan products the financial sector had invented to pull in new ones. That’s to say nothing of the unknown behavior of borrowers who never would’ve qualified on the older, stricter standards. And collateralized debt obligations? Talk about an exotic security with no history to draw from. It was a piece of economic technology invented to fill a need. “It was the tri-

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umph of data over common sense.”17 The housing market collapsed as these new borrowers stopped paying their mortgages, sometimes as soon as when the first payment was due. They nearly took the global financial sector with them. International investment banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman brothers, along with insurance giant AIG, teetered on the precipice, and in the case of Bear Stearns and Lehman, fell over. AIG survived only with government intervention. Credit markets seized. Millions of people lost their jobs along with their homes. The ripple effects were felt everywhere, from the auto industry to the governments of Greece and Iceland. Today, we’re still being buffeted by an unstable economy, and our money continues to evolve in ways we don’t always understand. Weatherford predicted this more than 15 years ago, when he wrote The History of Money. “We are likely to see a prolonged era of competition during which many kinds of money will appear, proliferate, and disappear in rapidly crashing waves,” he said.18 Isn’t that exactly what happened? We created collateralized debt obligations from mortgage-backed securities, they proliferated and then disappeared in a tsunami that crashed the world over. Bitcoin? They’re just the latest kid on the block. Who knows how long they’ll survive. Wolman introduced me to Ithaca Hours, a local currency that only works in Ithaca, New York, that’s been around since 1991.19 European mobile phone company Vodafone is pioneering a mobile payment and money transfer technology called M-Pesa in Tanzania, of all places. It’s free. Facebook had a credits system that they’ve

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since abandoned. All these waves surely represent a rising tide.

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Is the tide turning?

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In The History of Money, Weathorford says that a “new global elite is emerging,” one “propelled and protected by the power of electronic technology,” and “without loyalty to any particular country.”20 Maybe that’s one of the reasons Star Trek abandoned currency so long ago. Maybe they didn’t like where it led them. Sure, we’re innovating some of the problems away with things like free money transfers in poor countries and decentralized currency systems, but the same technology transforming money into these good things has also led us off the fiscal cliff more than once. How many times has our greed pushed us into low depths, nearly taking the global economy with it? Maybe money is one piece of technology that’s just too dangerous. Maybe our evolved selves in the Star Trek universe realized this. Then again, maybe not. We are doing a lot of good things with money, so maybe that tide I was worried about in the last section is actually turning. “Money is an incredible human innovation,” Wolman says. “I don’t mean that like I want to go work for Goldman Sachs and be a shark and screw lots of people and be greedy. I mean as a tool for transactions and for spreading prosperity and access to social mobility, money is incredibly useful technology.” What a socialist. Kidding. I actually think he’s got a good point. Take the Occupy movement that sprang up during

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20. History of Money, 268.

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the last financial crisis. An offshoot is collecting donations— through Paypal, no less—to buy and then forgive distressed debt. Kiva.org is a nonprofit that connects donors to small businesses in poor countries through microloans sometimes as small as twenty-five dollars. In the United States, twenty-five bucks buys a t-shirt at American Eagle (if it’s on sale) bug in sub-Saharan Africa, that’s the difference between starving and creating a business that can provide for an entire family. Yes, money is co-opted too quickly for bad things, and we do have a problem of people hoarding cash for no good reason. Wolman says once you really understand what money is, accumulating insane amounts of it doesn’t stand up to logic. “And obviously an obsession with money, is shitty,” he says. But the big question here is if Star Trek’s way is really better? We’re talking about their technology, and in their future, this piece of tech disappeared for some reason. I guess if you limit yourself to comparing humans and Ferengi, you’ll probably fall hard on the side of money being the root of all evil.21 We don’t have to settle for such narrow visions, though. We have more than enough source material to learn from past mistakes and chart a better future. Maybe we can have our utopia and our money, too. Maybe we can work to better ourselves within the confines of a currency-based economy. Wolman thinks history suggests this will be the case. He says we don’t actually have to go very far back in our history to find a time when humans didn’t use money, and that it didn’t go well. “Human society was moneyless for a very long time and it was really hard,” he says. We lived under dictators who told us what we could and

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21. 1 Timothy 6:10, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”

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could not have. There was no trade, something Wolman thinks is probably wired into our DNA. Still, this doesn’t mean we don’t have work to do. “I think we could definitely do a better job of weeding out the really bad stuff associated with money and then amplifying the really good stuff,” he says. We may never be moneyless as Star Trek envisioned, but that doesn’t mean all hope for a better future is lost. It’s taken the worst recession in living memory to spur us toward change, but at least we’re finally talking about money’s problems. Some people are already doing something about them, too. It remains to be seen if their efforts will have lasting impact, but they’re a solid start. Hey, if we can fix even a part of our economic system without the need for a third world war, I’ll take it. I don’t know what the money of tomorrow will look like, but I’m going to bet there’ll be money tomorrow and for a long time after. My wager? How does ten Bitcoin sound?22


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22. At the current exchange rate, that’s about $111.

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A conclusion, of sorts

“All breakthroughs are hard to imagine before they happen…” —Doctor Phlox

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o boldly go… probably a lot sooner than we thought. Predictions are really hard. In my research, I picked up a copy of The Wonderful Future that Never Was by Gergory Benford and the editors of Popular Mechanics. It was about all the things smart people said in the magazine in the early part of the 20th century, about what was coming in our future. Think, visions of the Jetsons, a kind of retro futurism that makes us smile as much for its charm as it does its utter failure to predict what was coming. Reading it, though, I had visions of someone picking up Treknology ten, twenty years from now and smiling back at me, so, I tried to keep the predictions down to a minimum. I strayed from the near future only when the scope of the technology,

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like transporters and warp drives, required further reach than I was comfortable with at times. No one’s going to argue with me about the similarities between the iPad and the show’s PADD. They are, essentially, the same device. Star Trek just predicted them years earlier than they arrived. Maybe we can even say Star Trek precipitated them. Think about the race to create handheld medical scanning devices like Dr. Crusher’s Tricorder. The people involved actually use the term Tricorder when they try to describe what they want to build. I already think it’s here, in some form or another, and while you might argue my comparison is an apple to an orange, I’m pretty confident with that one. In fact, I’m broke my loose rule about predictions and said that in a few years, our smartphones will be better than anything we could’ve hoped for in a Tricorder. I believe that, but notice how vague I was with that “few years” there? That’s the way you make a prediction about technology. Nate Silver, founder of Five Thirty Eight and the guy who correctly predicted the outcome of both 2008 and 2012 presidential elections—maybe we should call him the new Univac—might think I’ve got a little too much trepidation. “Prediction is indispensable to our lives,” he says in his book, The Signal and the Noise. “Every time we choose a route to work, decide whether to go on a second date, or set money aside for a rainy day, we are making a forecast about how the future will proceed—and how our plans will affect the odds for a favorable outcome.”1 We’re better at some predictions than others, he says. Take the weather. Our ability to forecast something like the landfall of a hurricane, for example, has improved dramatically. On

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1. Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise, (New York: Publisher 2011), pp.

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the other hand, we can’t even see earthquakes coming a few minutes beforehand. We talked about the financial crisis in the chapter on the future of money. Silver called it a failure of prediction with catastrophic consequences. When we get it right though, we tend to get it right in a big way. English astronomer Edmund Halley correctly predicted the return of a great comet in 1705. “Halley had many doubters, but the comet returned in just the nick of time,” Silver said. Comets were once viewed as a product of divine intervention, inherently unpredictable. We now see it very differently.2 And Silver knows a little something about doubters, too. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC called him a “joke” because Scarborough didn’t and still doesn’t seem to have a clue about data modeling or statistics. In an op-ed, an LA Times columnist said Silver was running a “numbers racket” and that we were all paying homage to some kind of cult of big data and math. Maybe so. But do I have to tell you how it ended? His doubters have turned and tucked their tails between their legs. Silver’s model not only predicted Barack Obama’s 2012 win, it did it with startling precision. Silver’s also probably the first to say that there’s a danger on relying too completely on a model to predict the future, that they’re too fragile. That was the LA Times’ columnists’’ overall point, that if you start with the wrong assumptions, you’re going to get the wrong answer no matter how good your analysis. Our assumptions are always vulnerable, because they’re filtered through our biases. But there’s no model that I know of that can tell us when we’ll develop warp drive or a matter-energy transporter or any other kind of technology. That’s not the kind of thing mod-

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2. ibid,

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els are good at forecasting. There is one model, maybe, that can at least predict our efforts will succeed, given the time. Us. Our history is a kind of untapped source of big data. Looking at where we’ve been and how far we come, it’s easy to say that we’re about to go a lot further. I don’t need a computer to crunch that. If you start the other way, though, with the assumption that it can’t be done, that might just be the future we get. “Most of our strengths and weaknesses as a nation—our ingenuity and our industriousness, our arrogance and our impatience—stem from our unshakeable belief in the idea that we choose our own course,” Silver says. I can’t agree more. Hopefully, the course we chart will take us forward. There is a final frontier out there, and I don’t think we’ve reached it.

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For the uninitiated

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A Star Trek Crash Course

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aybe you picked up Treknology because you’re interested in futurism and science and the intersection of culture and technology—but you’re not that familiar with Star Trek. It’s okay, I forgive you and I even wrote this appendix just for you. It’s a bit of a crash course. The first thing you need to know is that we’re dealing with a large number of TV shows and movies, five and twelve respectively. I’m not going to say much about the latest films, Star Trek and Star Trek: Into Darkness, because they’re a reboot of the franchise that—despite having the same chracters as The Original Series—operate in a different timeline from everything that came before. That said, let’s dive in.

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Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG). The bulk of Treknology concerns this show, which featured Captain Jean-Luc Picard and

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the crew of the Enterprise-D, the sixth starship to bear the name. This show was on for seven seasons and spanned four movies of its own. It brought us such characters as fan-favorite Data—an android—and Geordi LaForge, who wore that thing on his eyes (called a VISOR). We also, for the first time, saw that the Federation and long-time enemies the Klingons had become friends—a Klingon even served on the bridge. The Enterprise-D was destroyed in the film Star Trek: Generations (which also featured William Shatner reprising his role as Kirk from The Original Series). Starfleet then built the Enterprise-E and it first appeared in Star Trek: First Contact, the second film to feature The Next Generation cast. Presumably, the Enterprise-E is still around.

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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9). This show premiered as TNG was wrapping up; it featured then-Commander Benjamin Sisko (the franchise’s first black commanding officer, later promoted to Captain) and a Cardassian built space station near the planet of Bajor. In the pilot, Sisko discovers a wormhole that leads nearly 30,000 light years away to the gamma quadrant and it features prominently in the show.

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Star Trek: Voyager (VOY). The first show to feature a woman captain, Kathryn Janeway, Voyager lasted for seven seasons. In the pilot, Voyager, a brand-new, Intrepid class starship (much smaller than the Enterprise-D, but still very advanced) is pulled from thousands of light years away to the Delta quadrant by an entity known as the Caretaker. He protects a race known as the Ocampa (they live just seven or so years) from a group of thugs called the Kazon—but he’s dying and so, kidnaps species from across the galaxy in a quest to find a suitable replacement. Captain Janeway destroys the Caretaker’s array to protect the

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Ocampa, but ends up stranding Voyager in the process. She and the crew—joined by a group of rogue Federation citizens and former Starfleet officers known as the Maquis (they were also kidnapped by the Caretaker)—spend the next seven years in the Delta quadrant until they finally trick the Borg into getting them home via a transwarp conduit.

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Star Trek: Enterprise (ENT). This show took place a hundred years after Zephram Cochrane invented warp drive, and more than 200 years before the events of TNG. It featured the very first ship to bear the name Enterprise, an NX class ship under the command of Captain Jonathan Archer that was part of Starfleet’s burgeoning warp program. This show answered a lot of questions left by the events of Star Trek: First Contact, when we learned that Vulcans were the first species to make direct contact with humans. It also showed the early development of key peices of Star Trek technology, not just warp drive but also transporters, too. The show’s four seasons eventually led us to the founding of a four species alliance between humans, Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarites—brokered by Captain Archer—that eventually became the framework for the United Federation of Planets.

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Star Trek (TOS). The show that started it all, unofficially dubbed The Original Series. It featured the Enterprise (with no additional letters), Captain Kirk and Commander Spock on a fiveyear mission. The 2009 and 2013 Star Trek movies both involve the same TOS, but the first film dramatically altered the timeline, presumably putting them on a different and uncharted path.

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References and suggestions for future reading

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Barad, Judith and Ed Robertson. The Ethics of Star Trek. Harper Perennial, 2001. Bormanis, Andre. Science Logs. New York: Pocket Books, 1998.

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Decker, Kevin S and Jason T. Eberl. Star Trek and Philosophy: The Wrath of Kant. Open Court, 2008.

Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe: Superstring, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York: Vintage Books, 2003.

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———. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of

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Reality. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.

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———. The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.

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Kaku, Machio. Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel. New York: Anchor, 2009. Krauss, Lawrence M. The Physics of Star Trek. Basic Books, 2007.

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Okuda, Michael and Denise Okuda. Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future. New York: Pocket Books, 1993.

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———. The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future Updated and Expanded Edition. New York: Pocket Books, 1999. Parsons, Paul. The Science of Doctor Who. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

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Randall, Lisa. Warped Passes: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Sternbach, Rick and Michael Okuda. Star Trek The Next Generation Technical Manual. New York: Pocket Books, 1991. Weatherford, Jack. The History of Money. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997.

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Wolman, David. The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers—and the Coming Cashless Society. De Capo Press, 2012. Zimmerman, Herman, Rick Sternbach and Doug Drexler. Star Trek Deep Space Nine Technical Manual. New York: Pocket Books, 1998.

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Antimatter. Matter that acts like normal matter, but composed of particles that have the opposite charge and spin. Antiparticle. Particles that make up antimatter, like antiprotons, antineutrons and positrons.

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Bioneural Circuitry. Advanced computer processing technology used on newer Federation starships, like the Voyager. They contained synthetic, neural fibers that could process information faster than the isolinear optical chips they replaced. Bits. The smallest possible piece of digital information, either a one or zero. Byte. A basic unit of digital information, usually about eight bits, generally large enough to hold any single character from a basic character set.

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Compression. The removal of redundant data to reduce the

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size of a digital information, like in a computer file.

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Data Array. A sophisticated network of data storage devices designed for extreme data capacity, often measured in petabytes.

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Dilithium. A porous crystal used in warp drives to regulate and control the explosive and energy generating reaction between matter and antimatter.

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Deuterium. A hydrogen-like fuel that made up the matter part of the matter/antimatter propelled warp drive on the Enterprise and other Federation starships. Antihydrogen was the antimatter component. Deuterium is also the primary fuel in Federation impulse drives.

General Relativity

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Error-Correcting Code. The use of a predetermined algorithm, transmitted with compressed data, to help correct any errors that might result from signal noise or degradation.

Gravity. See Gravitational Force.

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Gold-pressed Latinum. See Latinum.

Gravitational Constant. The amount of gravitational force generated by a specific amount of matter, or for the purposes of the Enterprise and its warp drive, the subsequent spacetime warping effect it creates.

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Gravitational Force. One of the four fundamental forces of nature, and also the weakest.

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Graviton. The smallest part of a gravitational force or force field, its messenger particle.

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Gigabyte. A unit of digital information storage equal to about 1 billion bytes or little more than a thousand megabytes. Most hard disk and solid-state drives today, including those in mobile phones, are measured in gigabytes.

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Higgs boson. A still-theoretical, subatomic particle predicted by Peter Higgs in 1970. Possibly detected by the Large Hadron Collider in the summer of 2012, would prove the existence of the Higgs field, and explain how elementary particles get their mass.

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Hologram. A three-dimensional image generated by the interference of light beams.

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Impulse Engine. Sublight speed engines, powered by fusion generators, on the Enterprise and other Star Trek ships. Speeds are usually measured in fractions (e.g. one-quarter impulse, one-half impulse). Index. In computer science, a lookup table for digital information that makes it easy to locate data quickly on high capacity storage devices, like hard disk drives and data arrays.

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Isolinear Optical Chip. A common information storage and data-processing device used in the 23rd century that,

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suggested by the name, relied on light transmission for reading and writing. Analogous in some ways to today’s SD cards.

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Large Hadron Collider. The world’s largest particle accelerator, built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), stretching 17 miles under the France-Switzerland border, near Geneva.

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Latinum. A rare silver liquid used as currency by the Ferengi and other non-Federation worlds. It can’t be replicated, and is often suspended with gold to form solid gold-pressed latinum of slips, strips, bars and bricks (in increasing order of value). Library Computer Access and Retrieval System. See LCARS.

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LCARS. Acronym for Library Computer Access and Retrieval System, the standard and distinctive graphical user interface for Federation starships designed by Star Trek’s TKTKTKT Michael Okuda.

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Megabyte. About one million bytes, and the standard unit of digital information most familiar to general computer users. Messenger Particle. The smallest piece of a force field, the piece that conveys the force.

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under development for decades, Apple introduced the concept to the masses with the iPhone and has even patented several multi-touch techniques, like pinching.

Navigational Deflector. A force-field generator on the Enterprise and many Federation ships that pushes aside space debris during travel.

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Particle Accelerator. A machine that uses electromagnetic fields to smash charged particles together at near light speeds to study the structure of matter.

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Pattern Buffer. A component in a transporter that briefly holds a transport subject’s pattern, while the system corrects for the Doppler effect, or differences between relative motion of the transporter and the beam down site.

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Petabyte. Slightly more than one thousand terabytes, or a million gigabytes. Today’s data arrays are often measured in petabytes.

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Photon. A light particle that carries energy, but has no mass at rest. It’s also the name given to matter/anti-matter torpedoes used by the Enterprise and other starships. Plank Length. The shortest measurable length, at least theoretically. In quantum gravity, it’s the length at which the building blocks of spacetime come under the effects of quantum mechanics.

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Positronic Brain. An artificially intelligent computer that provides the consciousness—a requisite quality of sen-

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tience—of an android, first theorized by Isaac Asimov in the early 20th century. Asimov’s positronic brain require the Three Laws to function, though this doesn’t seem to be the case in Star Trek.

Quantum Gravity. A theory that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics.

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Quark. Weak elementary subatomic particles. Also, probably not coincidentally, the name of Deep Space Nine’s Ferengi bar owner.

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Secure Digital. See SD.

Solid-State Drive. A data storage device that uses integrated circuits instead of moving parts and magnetic discs to store digital information.

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SD. An acronym for Secure Digital, a standard for small but high-capacity memory cards used in cameras, phones and an array of other devices, much the same way floppy disks were used in the 90s. They’re also not unlike isolinear chips.

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Spacetime. The fabric of the universe, created by the joining of space and time. The term came from Einstein’s special relativity.

Special Relativity. Laws proposed by Einstein that account for the operation of spacetime, but without the presence of gravity.

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Subspace. A space continuum that differs significantly from

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the normal spacetime one we inhabit. It’s used for communication at faster-than-light speeds, and is a key that makes warp drive.

Terabyte. Equal to about one thousand gigabytes. Today, consumer drives are available in sizes of 1, 2 and sometimes 5 terabytes.

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Three Laws. A set of unbreakable rules created by Isaac Asimov designed to keep control over artificially intelligent robots. They were introduced in his short story, Runraround, in 1942.

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Transwarp. An advanced propulsion technology most notably used by the Borg, that can exceed the traditional limit of Warp 10. Little has been revealed about it, but it seems to rely on traveling through conduits of super-compressed subspace.

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Warp Fields. A field generated by the Enterprise’s warp engines that created a bubble of subspace around the ship, reducing its gravitational constant and warping space and time much the same way a gravitational force would. Warp Nacelle. A component of the Enterprise and many Federation Starships that houses the plasma coils responsible for generation warp fields. Most Federation ships have two, though some classes feature more.

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Zeroth Law. An addition to the Three Laws created by Isaac Asimov that said a robot may not harm humanity, or allow humanity to come to harm by inaction.

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Key technological events in the Star Trek Universe

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I’ve consulted a variety of resources for this list, including the Star Trek Encyclopedia and the Star Trek Chronology (both fully referenced in the bibliography), as well as Wolfram-Alpha and some other sources. Sometimes, dates conflicted and I tried, in that case, to choose the most authoritive. Other times, no firm date exists. We know something happend around (~) a certain time, after (>) or before (<) so I indicated that when I could. It’s worth noting some of the things in our early future obviously didn’t come to pass, like a couple of devestating wars and we’re on track for a some of this technology much sooner Star Trek anticipated. Some others, not so much.

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1993 A group of genetically-engineered superhumans take over nearly the entire planet, and a series of wars leaves Earth on the verge of a new dark age.

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1996 Henry Starling ushers in Earth’s computer era after reverse engineering technology he found on a 29th century Federation timeship. The Voyager crew took a mobil holoemitter from Starling that finally liberated the Doctor from the confines of sickbay.

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2018 Long term sleeper ships are no longer needed for interstellar travel, as advances in sublight propulsion have made them obsolete. 2040 Television ceases to be a form of entertainment on Earth.

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2073 A third world-war anhilates most of Earth, leaving few governments intact. 2061 Zephram Cochrane takes the first warp flight and subsequently makes Earth’s first contact with an alien race—the Vulcans.

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~2150 Matter energy transporters become and acceptable form of travel in Starfleet, and they’re fitted standard on NX class ships like the Enterprise. ~2150 The universal translator is invented. In the hands of a linguist, it could decode alien languages in a matter of minutes.

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~2150 Starfleet begins development of the first force fields.

2151 The Enterprise NX-01 leaves Earth for the first time, under the command of Captain Jonathan Archer.

2151 Human encounter cloaking technology for the first time in use by the Suliban Cabal. 2151 Starfleet begins using phase pistols, that while similar in function, aren’t the same as phasers.

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2151 The Enterprise NX-01 becomes involved in the temporal cold war, a conflict that spanned centuries and threatened Earth. The war is a time paradox, and has no actual beginning. 2151 The Enterprise NX-01 encounters the Xyrillians, an alien race with technology very similar to the holodecks humans would develop centuries later.

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2152 Humans encounter replicator technology for the first time when the Enterprise docks with a mysterious, automated repair station.

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<2154 Despite growing evidence to the contrary, the Vulcan Science Council still believes time travel is impossible. >2200 Phasers are invented.

~2230 Tricorders come into wide use on starfleet ships, though they’re large and bulky.

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2233 In an alternate and current timeline, precipitated by a Romulan attack on Vulcan, the Enterprise NCC 1701 leaves Earth under the comman of Captain Christopher Pike, who is subsequently confined to a wheel chair. ~2045 The Enterprise NCC-1701 is launched.

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2264 The Enterprise NCC-1701 begins its five-year mission under the command of Captain Kirk, original timeline.

2271 Voyager 6 returns from the otherside of the galaxy after being modified by a machine planet, speculated to be the Borg homeworld. > 2293 Replicators are prefected for use on starships, and become common in the 24th century.

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~2335 Noonien Soong constructs data.

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2364 The Enterprise NCC-1701-D takes it maiden voyage to the Farpoint Station. <2364 Starfleet begins installing holodecks on its starships.

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2370 An artificial intelligence emerges from the Enterprise, and helped by the crew, flies off into space on its own, never to be heard from again (so far). ~2370 Starfleet develops the Mark I Emergency Medical Hologram.

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2371 The Voyager NCC-74656 launches. It carries bioneural gelpacks as replacements for isolinear circuits and has variable geometry warp nacelles. 2372 The Enterprise NCC-1701-E launches, after the destruction of the Enterprise-D in 2370.

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2378 More than 40 instances of time travel have been recorded. >2500 Historians make routine use of time travel.

>3000 Temporal agents travel back as early as 1944 to help save Earth and the Federation from a temporal cold war.

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A

also warp drive Apple 5, 7, 10, 14, 15, 16, 24, 26, 134, 161 Apple Newton 5 Apple Store 15 Archer, Captain Jonathan 128 artificial life 28, 77, 79–102 as property 85 controlling 88–102 dominion over 94–97 emotions 89, 90–91 intelligence 77, 81, 82, 84 bottom-up approach 83–84 machine learning 100 pattern recognition 83, 85 sentience 81, 85, 86, 92 the rights of 85–88 turning on its creator 93–94 uncanny valley 98 Asimov, Isaac 93 Assistant 24–28 assumptions 143 ATMs 13 atomic bomb 34 augmented reality 8 Autom 97, 98, 99, 100, 101 Automated Personnel Unit. See robots

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Abrams, JJ xvii airline check-in kiosks 13 Alcubierre Drive 116–118 Alcubierre, Miguel 116 algebra 115 Alpha Quadrant 56, 95, 127 Amazon.com 36, 129 American Eagle 139 American Express 129 American History Museum 40 Anderson, Richard Dean xv Android OS 24 androids 79–102, 93. See also robots construction of 80 multidisciplinary approach 81 different from robots 81 positronic brain 80, 93 animators xx antennae 61, 62 antihydrogen 114 antimatter 113, 114, 117. See

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calculus 84, 115 California 58, 59, 122 camera 8 Canada’s Financial Post 131 capitalism 124, 133 Capitol, the U. S. 58 Captains Logs: The unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages

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C

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B-4 80 Babylonians, use of indexes 41 banks. See money Barclay, Lt. Reginald 66–69 barcodes 8, 15 barcode scanners 10 Barrett, Majel 18 baseball 127 Batman xv Battlestar Gallactica xix, 22 Best Buy 59 Betamax 128 big-bang 62 bioneural gelpacks 50 biosensors 61 Bitcoin 131–133, 137, 140. See also digital currency; See also money trading 131 Blu-ray 36, 43, 44 bombs. See Personal Access Display Device Borg, the 55, 89, 123 assimilation by 123 Braga, Brana 104 Brahms, Doctor Leah 64–66 bridge 13

104 CAPTCHAs 19–20, 20 cell phones 53, 61 chaos theory xix charged plasma clouds 74 Cheers, the television series 67 chess 84 chlorofluorocarbons 103 Christianity 126 cloaking device 53–62, 95. See also meta materials for use in earth quakes 57–61 phasing cloak 55 the cloud 26, 27, 37 CNN 70 Cochrane, Zephram 120, 121 invention of warp drive 111, 119, 121, 123 communicator 6 communism 126 Computers 3 atomic computers 49 computer-human interaction. See human interaction computer-mediated communication xix, 17, 68, 99 DNA computers 49, 50 if-then rules 18–21, 21, 22, 25, 83 indexes 40–42 mainframes 3 on the Enterprise 28, 42, 65 processors 48 quantum computers 49 size 9 storage capacity 9 supercomputers 3 throughput 39, 40 touchscreens 76 computer vision 22 conscience 81. See also androids credit cards. See money

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Crusher, Doctor Beverly 5, 9, 11, 17–18, 29, 123, 142 Crusher, Wesley xx CT Scanner 11 cybernetics. See androids Cylons 93

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Data xx, 27, 28, 79, 79–82, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 105, 113, 136 emotions 80, 89 lack of three laws 94 mother, also an android 80 referred to as Pinocchio 79 data array 37 data compression 44–45 data handling challenge 35–52 data modeling 136, 143, 144 data recovery 72 data storage 76. See also holograms mercury tanks 39 decision-making ability 91 Deep Space Nine space station 126, 127 television show 56 defensive shields. See force fields polarized hull plating 74 delta quadrant 67 Delta Quadrant 85 depth of field. See holograms Deuterium 114 Dickinson College 22 dictators 139 digital currency 131–133, 138 trading 131 dilithium 95, 96, 114. See

also warp drive Dirac, Paul 115 DNA 45, 140 base pairs 44 coding for a transporter 44 Doctor, The 18, 77, 84, 85–88, 95, 96 dolphins 84 Dominion, the 56 Duke University 54, 60 DVDs 44 DVR xvi Dyson Sphere 38

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earth quakes 57, 58, 59, 61, 143. See also cloaking device 1933 Long Beach quake 58 1994 Northride quake 58 deaths from 58 in Washington, D.C. 57, 58 protecting buildings from 57–61 ebooks 92 economics 127. See money EDVAC 39 Einstein, Albert 32–35, 105, 105–107, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116, 120 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 102 elections 102 2008 122 2012 143 electromagnetic spectrum 55 E = MC2 32–35, 114, 116 Emergency Medical Hologram. See holograms EMH. See emergency medical hologram energy 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 50,

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TREKNOLOGY Renaissance Man 105 Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy 18

error correction 46 repetition codes 47 Ethernet 27 Eurozone 131 Evi. See Siri evolution xix, 84, 90, 96, 123 Excite 25 Exocomps 96, 97. See also artificial life exotic matter 117 extraterrestrial influence 92

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51, 59, 65, 74, 77, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 143 ENIAC 39 Enterprise, the. See ships Enterprise. See Ships Enterprise, the series. See series environment 75, 83, 103, 110 episodes Deep Space Nine Bar Association 126 Our Man Bashir 64 Rivals 126 Enterprise Acquisition 128 Azati Prime 57 Desert Crossing 122 Vanishing Point 30 The Next Generation All Good Things 66 Booby Trap 64 Brothers 89–90 Datalore 80 Deja Q 81, 112 Encounter at Farpoint 79 First Contact 92 Force of Nature 103, 105 Galaxy’s Child 65 Hollow Pursuits 66 Lower Decks 5 Peak Performance 94 The Pegasus 55 Redemption Part II 94 Relics 38 Remember Me 17 The Measure of a Man 85, 86 The Offspring 80 The Quality of Life 96 The Royale 122 Voyager Author, Author 85, 95 Pathfinder 67 Prototype 92

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Facebook 137. See also social networking Farallon, Dr. 96 faster-than-light travel 33, 104, 105, 107, 114, 118, 120 loophole 107–116 Federation, the 55, 56, 86, 95, 114, 125, 126, 127, 128 Ferengi 126, 127, 139 distaste for Hew-mons 128 driven by profit 126 Rules of Acquisition 126 films Star Trek: First Contact 121, 122 Star Trek: Generations 57, 90 Star Trek: Nemesis 4, 79, 80 The final frontier 144 financial crisis 133, 134, 139, 143. See also money collateralized debt obligation 135 mortgages 134, 134–138 adjustable rates 135

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mortgage-backed security

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Index 135–138

no-income-no-asset 136

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H Edmund Halley 143 Halley’s Comet 143 hard drive 36, 37, 41, 43 headphones noise-cancelling 59 Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle 48 Hewlett-Packard 15, 22 Higgs boson 29, 106 Hobson, Lt. Commander 94–95 holodecks xix, 17, 63–78, 114 environment simulators 75 holodiction 66 holoemitters 77 holograms 69–78, 114 as data storage 43, 76–78 as slaves 96 creation of 70, 70–73

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occupy movement 133, 138 The Big Pool of Money 133–138 financial markets 6, 122. See also money attempts at regulation 122, 132 crashes 132. See also financial crisis First Amendment 87 first contact 121, 123. See also Vulcans first warp flight 123. See first contact force fields 73–78, 90, 114 free markets 126 Fringe 22 fusion 114. See also impulse engines

gravity 109–110, 111 greed 126, 130, 138 Greene, Brian 33, 106, 109, 110 Elegant Universe, the 109 Fabric of the Cosmos, the 33 Guinan 81

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Gabor, Dennis 72. See also holograms Gamma Quadrant 56 Gawker 59 gay rights 122 Gelfenbeyn, Ilya 24–28 general relativity 106 global positioning system. See GPS Goldblum, Jeff xix gold-pressed latinum 128 Google 4, 6, 8, 16, 20, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 41, 42, 72, 129, 165 Google Maps 8 Gordon E. Moore Moore’s Law 48–52 GPS 7, 8, 16 gravitational constant 112–113

holonovels 85, 96 Microsoft Patent 75–76 privacy of 64 safe sex 63, 78 safety 78 holograms. See holodecks

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Emergency Medical Hologram 77, 85–88 holographic displays 76 projected in air 73–74 redundancy 70–71, 71–72 reflective holograms 71, 72 transmission holograms 71

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horizon scanning xviii housing market. See financial crisis the Huffington Post 69 human-computer interaction 16, 97–101 human existence, uniqueness of 51 human speech 18. See natural language processing

J Janeway, Captain Kathryn 86 Jansen, Peter Tricorder project 12 Jem H’dar 56, 127. See also Dominion, the The Jetsons 141 John Hammond xix Johnson, E. A. 15 Jupiter 117 Jurassic Park xix, 91

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Ian Malcolm xix, 91 IBM 37 IMax 75 impulse engines 114 Intel 48 intelligence. See artificial life interference fringes. See holograms internal sensors 8 international standard book number 45–46 as self error-detecting 46 Internet 27, 28, 41, 42, 104, 165 interstellar travel 16 Io9.com 118 iOS 12 iPad 5, 14, 142. See also Personal Access Display Device similarity to the PADD 5 iPhones 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 15–17, 16, 24, 25, 27, 99. See also touchscreens camera as a sensor 8 like Tricorders 4, 5–9 Siri 7, 17–24, 19, 24, 25. See also natural language processing iPhoto 44 iPods 43

I, Robot xix ISBN. See international standard book number isolinear chips 50

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Kaku, Michio 32, 34, 49, 50, 82, 82–84, 83, 90, 91 Physics of the Impossible, the 33, 49, 82, 83, 90, 91 Kidd, Dr. Cory 97 Kindle Fire 13 Kiva.org 139 Klingons 57, 61 Krauss, Dr. Lawrence xviii, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 43, 51, 61, 107, 108, 109 Physics of Star Trek, the xviii, 36, 109 theory on transporters 31–32, 35–42 Krola 92


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Index supervised learning 23 Maddox, Commander Bruce 85, 97 Magic, the author’s dog 101 Main Engineering 113 martyrdom 92 Massachusets Institute of Technology 83, 97 mass and energy, interchangeable 33–35 mass production 88 matter and energy, conservation of 35 Mays, Willie 127 McCoy, Doctor Leonard 29 mechanical brains 40 meta materials 60, 61, 62 as biosensors 61 use in cloaking devices 54, 55, 60, 61 Metro, D.C. subway 8 Microsoft 15, 22, 25, 75–78 Kinnect 75–76 Microsoft Store 15 military 53, 54, 55, 72 Air National Guard, the 53 Army Researh Office 54 British Ministry of Defence 74 gay soliders discrimination against 54 Office of Naval Research, the 54 Pentagon, the 55 technology 61 stealth jets 54, 61 minorities treatment of 122 MIT. See Massachusets Institute of Technology MIT Media Lab 97 mobile devices 3, 62 mom, the author’s 7

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lab on a chip 10, 11, 12 LaForge, Lt. Commander Geordi 5, 38, 64–67, 65, 66, 90, 103, 113 Lal 80 Large Hadron Collider 35 lawmakers. See politicians LCARS. See Library Computer Access and Retrieval System Library Computer Access and Retrieval System 14–15 life imitating art xviii, 4 light 32, 33, 34, 35, 42, 54, 55, 59, 61, 66, 70, 71, 73, 77, 97, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 118, 120. See also faster-than-light travel; See also warp drive infrared 11, 15 LOC. See lab on a chip Lore 80, 89, 90, 91, 94 The Los Angeles Times 143 Lursa and B’Etor 56, 57, 90 Lycos 25

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Mac 11, 27, 44 Macbook Air 11 MacCormick, Dr. John 22, 23, 23–28, 27, 40, 43, 45 Nine Algorithms that Changed the Future 22, 40 MacGyver xv, xv–xvi, xvi machine learning 20. See also intelligence training data 20–24, 27, 101 providing malicious data 23

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TREKNOLOGY experiments with warp fields 118–119, 122 National Cathedarl, the 59 National Mall 58 Nation’s Business 88 natural language processing 7, 17–24, 24–28, 81 naysayers 82, 105 near-field communication 8, 129 nebula 28 negative energy. See exotic matter Netflix 43, 80 neutrons 29 Newtonian physics 105, 106–107 Newton, Isaac 105 New York Times, the 132 Nobel Prize 72 Nog 127–128 non-trivial 36, 61 Noonian Soong invention of Data 80 Novosibirsk State University 24 nuclear reactors 34

Obama, Barack 143 O’Brien, Chief Myles 16 Occupy Wallstreet. See financial crisis Okuda, Denise 122 Okuda, Michael 31, 122 ops 13 ozone layer 103

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PADD. See Personal Access Display Device

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nanotechnology 11 narcissism 68 NASA 109, 120, 122

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money 123, 124. See also digital currency accumulation of 139 as technology 128, 128–133, 138 backed by paper 129 banks and credit card companies 129, 134, 134–138 cashless economies 131 computer trading 132 correlation with power 126 disrupted by technology 129–133, 130 free from state control 130–133, 131, 132 income inequality 133 innovation of 130, 138 interchange fees 129 interest 134 local currency Ithaca Hours 137 M-Pesa 137 moneyless economy 124–140, 125, 127, 139, 140 peer-to-peer transactions 131 recession 140 root of all evil 139 safe store of value 131, 134 Moonbot Studios xx Moore, Gordon E. 48 mortgages. See financial crisis movies. See films MP3s 37, 130 MRI 11 MSNBC 143

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Index Q Q 81, 112, 113 Q Continuum 112 Qualcomm 12 quantum mechanics 48, 106, 117 Quark Deep Space Nine character 63, 126 the particle 35 Quicken 126

R racism 123 radar 61 radio signals 8 recession. See money; See social networking Red Queen 93 relativity 112. See general relativity; See spacetime; See special relativity; See transformational relativity religious right 66 replicators 31 Resident Evil 93 Riker, Commander William 5, 38, 56, 66–67, 68, 79, 122 robotic assembly lines 88 robots 81, 82, 83, 88, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101. See also androids conversing with 100–101 effect of physical presence 99–101 three laws 93 Rodenberry, Gene 76, 121 Romulans 55, 56, 61, 95 Royal Radar Establishment 15

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Page, Larry 42 Parnell, Dr. William 60, 61 particle accelerators 115 Particle Fountain Project 96 patents 16, 75 Pathfinder Project 67 Paypal 129, 139 payphone 128 Pentagon, the. See military Personal Access Display Device 142 like the iPad 5, 142 petabyte 37 pets 101 phasers xvii. See weapons Phlox, Doctor 141 photons. See light Photons Be Free, the holonovel 85, 96 photon torpedoes. See weapons Picard, Captain Jean Luc 5, 28, 31, 56, 57, 68, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 95, 97, 111, 123, 124 The Pirates of Penzance 5 PlayStations 4 politicians 55, 66, 122 Popular Mechanics 141 Popular Science 39 positronic brain. See androids poverty 123 predictions 102, 141, 142, 143 prejudice 94, 95 Pressman, Admiral 56, 57 Prius 16, 53 privacy 64, 131. See also holodecks Proceedings A 60 protons 29 Pulaski, Dr. Katherine 29, 94

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rubber 60

J 57 NX-01 30, 50, 74, 114

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San Diego xvii, 21, 57, 58, 62 San Francisco 21 Sato, Ensign Hoshi 30, 122 saucer section, Enterprise-D’s 57 Scanadu 12 Scarborough, Joe 143 Scooby Doo xv Scott, Montgomery 39 search engines 25 security researchers 23 seismic energy 59, 60. See also earth quakes self-checkouts 13 Senate, the United States 58 series. See also episodes; See also films Deep Space Nine xvi, 63, 64, 126, 127 Enterprise xvi, 57, 121 The Next Generation xvi, 13, 15, 28, 31, 38, 56, 76, 93, 103, 105, 121, 122 The Original Series xvii, 111 Voyager xvi, 67, 104, 121 sex 63, 64, 65, 69, 78. See also holodecks Shakespeare 5, 44 Shakur, Tupac 70 Sherlock Holmes 63 ships classes Bird of Prey 57 Defiant 56 Enterprise 55, 56, 107, 111 D 31, 57, 64, 90, 96 E 122, 123, 124

Southerland 94 Voyager 67, 77, 85, 104 silicon 84 silicon valley 48–52 the coming rust belt 48, 48–50 Silver, Nate 142–144 Five Thirty Eight 142 Signal and the Noise, the 142 Siri. See iPhones Sirna Kolrami 94 Sisko, Captain Benjamin 56, 127 Sisko, Jake 127–128 Skynet 88 already online 93 Skype 24, 97 slavery 95, 96, 122 Sloane, Lily 122, 123 smartphones 4, 10, 43, 142, 169. See also iPhone Blackberry 4 Smolyaninov, Igor 62 socialism 124, 124–126, 138 social networking 68, 69 social psychology 97 solid-state memory 10, 43 SD cards 10 Soong, Noonian 80, 89–90 soul 50 effect of transporter on 50–52 Southerland 94 Southern California. See California spacetime 55, 105, 106, 108, 110, 116, 118 intertwined 33, 108. See also relativity Speak To It 25 special relativity 33, 112 spectral camera 12 spider. See web crawler

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Index Taylor, Jerri 104 television xv–xx Ten Forward 5 terabyte 36 Terahertz Spectrometers 11 Terminator 93 terrorists 54 text messages 25, 130 The Pirates of Penzance 5 This American Life 134, 137 ThunderCats xv time travel 66 Torres, Lt. B’Elanna 92 touchscreens 13–17 multitouch 16 Apple’s trademark loss 16 trading cards xvi transformational relativity 112 Transporters 28, 29–52, 74, 142, 143 matter stream 31 pattern buffer 38 range 30 size of human pattern 36 transwarp beaming 31 traumatic brain injuries 91 T-rays. See Terahertz Spectrometers trekkie or trekker xvi Tricorder 4, 27, 142. See also iPhones; See also smartphones medical Tricorder 9–13, 11 prize for 12 similarities to smartphones 5–9, 142 tricorner 8 Troi, Counselor Deanna 5, 66–67, 68, 121 Tucker, Commander Trip 30 Tufts University 117 Turing, Alan 19, 19–20, 22, 83

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Spot, Data’s cat 104, 105 Starfleet 50, 55, 56, 67, 74, 80, 85, 127, 128 Starfleet Academy 128 Starfleet Command 67 Star Trek Chronology, the 122 Star Trek Encyclopedia, the xvii, 56, 93, 122 Star Trek: Enterprise. See series Star Trek Magazine xvi Star Trek: The Next Generation. See series Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, the 104 Star Trek The Next Generation Technical Manual, the xvii, 5, 6, 9, 14, 31, 40, 107, 112, 113 Star Trek Voyager Technical Guide Version 1.0 104 statistics 143 Sternbach, Rick 31 stock market crashed crashes 132 Stony Brook University 10 Strategema 94 streaming video 92 Strepp throat 10 sub-Saharan Africa 139 subspace 42, 104 sun 34 Supreme Court 87 Citizens United 87 Surface 13 Systems Magazine 102

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tachyon detection grid 95 Target 7

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teaching computers 20. See also machine learning Twitter 6. See social networking fail whale 28

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Vulcans 91, 121, 122, 123

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Wall Street 133, 135 war 122 eugenics wars 123 World War II 64 World War III 122, 140 warp drive xix, 28, 65, 74, 103–120, 142, 143 core breach 57 curved space 109, 112 damage to subspace 104–106 engine nacelles 112 first warp program 119 invention 121 known as continuum distortion propulsion 111

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ultrasound 76 uncanny valley. See artificial life unified theory 106 United States 122 Univac 102, 142 University of Maryland 62 University of Oxford 22 utopia 121, 139 Utopia Planitia 64

matter and antimatter reaction chamber 113 plasma stream 114 power transfer conduits 114 requirement of exotic matter 116–120 variable geometry warp nacelles 104 warp core 13 warp fields 112, 114 warp speed factors 104, 111 Washington, D.C. 57, 58, 59, 134 Washington Monument, the 59 waves light 59, 71. See also light seismic. See seismic energy sound 59 weapons 61, 74 nuclear weapons 54 phasers 53 photon torpedoes 53, 57, 90 weather 7, 25, 142 Weatherford, Jack 130, 137, 138 History of Money, the 130, 133, 137, 138 web crawler 41 weight loss robot helping 99 White, Dr. Harold 118 Wi-Fi 28, 61 Wikipedia 6, 125 Windows 8 13, 15 Windows XP 15 Wired 129, 130 Wolfram Alpha 7 Wolman, David 131, 137, 138, 139, 140 End of Money, the 131 wood chuck 17 World Wide Web Consortium 14 writers 5, 27, 68, 104 use of deus ex machina devices

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ABOUT JUSTIN McLACHLAN

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ournalist. Writer. Superhero. Okay, maybe not that last one. My days can be lonely. It’s usually just me, the dogs, King of the Hill (or maybe American Dad) on Netflix and my keyboard. To make things interesting, I take frequent walks down the street to the convenience store just off the 15 freeway, because, well they’re the only people I know. To them, I’m “that guy who writes.” Occasionally, I’m also “that guy who comes in seven times a day to buy diet Dr Pepper and protein bars,” or “that guy who really likes diet Mountain Dew” and sometimes “that white devil who refuses to pay cash for anything.” I prefer the first. But, it makes me wonder, how does anyone know that I’m a writer? How do I know I’m a writer? Sure, I have that t-shirt that says as much, but truthfully, the guys at Steve and Barry’s used to sell those to anyone.

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About Justin McLachlan

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There’s this book, my shorts stories, and all the stuff I do for magazines, papers and Web sites like Wired, Popular Science, Sharelseuth.com, San Diego Citybeat, voiceofsandiego.org, etc. That’s probably good proof, too. Oh, and I’d love to hear from you. Find me on Twitter, I’m @ justinmclachlan, or Facebook at facebook.com/justinmclachlan. I also blog and post news of upcoming books and stories at www.justinmclachlan.com.

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ALSO BY JUSTIN MCLACHLAN

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Time Up. Book One in the Stations One Series. Life used to be pretty simple for Dr. Van Jacobs, until a dead guy rolled into his emergency room and didn’t have the courtesy to stay dead. From there, things get a little out of control when Van finds himself being recruited by a government agency that’s spent the last 100 years protecting something very important, and very strange under the water just off the coast of San Diego. They need Van’s help, but as time goes on and -- runs out -- it becomes clear to Van that they wanted him for far more than his medical expertise.

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Between the spacetime breaks and the wingnut cult ... and Ben ... Van is barely hanging on. Not that he was hanging on much before, just kind of existing. But now, he’s got a reason to exist - a purpose - just when it looks like all of existence might not be existing much longer.

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This Time Around. Book Two. Dr. Van Jacobs gave his life to save the universe... or so he thought. Instead, he awakes half-way across the world, floating in the middle of the Indian Ocean on an iceberg when he should’ve been dead. He’s rescued by the team at Station One, but when he finds out what they’ve been working on, and their plans for the future, he realizes they might fighting on the same side any longer.

www.boxfirepress.com


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