Treknology-Star Trek Tech 300 Years Ahead of the Future

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

uncorrected proof / not for public release 1.10.13

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OFBOXFIREPRESS

TREKNOLOGY

JUSTIN McLACHLAN

STAR TREK TECH 300 YEARS AHEAD OF THE FUTURE

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

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

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 permis-sion except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articls and reviews. For information, please contact Boxfire Press at http://boxfirepress.com.

Printed in the United States of America17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN 978-0-9827675-TK

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 wont hurt your enjoyment of the story. Thanks to chang-es in technology we can easily correct errors for future readers with your help. Contact us at [email protected].


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

for Craig

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

As with the first book, I have to thank Dr. Scott Sparks for an-swering 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 doesnt, 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.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

ContEnts

IntRoduCtIonxv

WE HavE aRRIvEd3300 Years Ahead of the Future

TRICORDER = IPHONE5

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING DEVICE9

TOUCHA TOUCHA TOUCH ME13

WHAT WOULD yOU LIKE TO DO TODAy?17

REFRIGERATOR, DO THy BIDDING24

500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR26

HERE, tHERE and EvERyWHERE29

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

Building a matter energy transporter

E = MC232

BITS AND ByTES, OR THE SUM OF US35

BIG THINGS IN LITTLE PACKAGES42

THE COMING RUST BELT48

PLACE yOUR BETS50

HoW to makE anytHIng InvIsIblE53

Cloaking devices

SHAKE, RATTLE AND ROLL57

ITS ALL META61

FRom tHIn aIR63Holodecks,

Holograms and Holodoctors

SUBTITLE69

THE FORCE IS NOT WITH US73

BUT ALL HOPE ISNT LOST75


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

tIn mEn79Artif icial life, in all its forms

BOTTOMS UP82

DEFINITION: PERSON?84

UHM, SKyNET ANyONE?88

DOMINION94

THE STATE OF THINGS97

SUBTITLE102

FastER tHan a sPEEdIng bullEt103

On the path to a warp drive

THIS GUy, ALBERT EINSTEIN106

THE LOOPHOLE107

THE ALCUBIERRE DRIVE116

NASA TO THE RESCUE118

ENGAGE!119

tHE EConomICs oF tHE FutuRE121

Money, Money, Money

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

A TECHNOLOGICAL CONSTRUCT128

THE BIG POOL OF MONEy133

IS THE TIDE TURNING?138

tHE FInal FRontIER141A conclusion, of sorts

aPPEndIxFoR tHE unInItIatEd145

A Star Trek Crash Course

REFEREnCEs and suggEstIons FoR FutuRE REadIng 149

glossaRy153

CHRonology161Key technological events in the Star Trek Universe

about JustIn mClaCHlan178


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

IntRoduCtIon

Growing 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 drivers 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 disap-pointment. 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 dont tell anyone. I was only ten.

My point is that when I say consumed, I mean con-sumed. TV preoccupied me so much that my dad eventually decreed that I could watch just one hour a day. The pretext was that Id go outside and play instead, but I usually spent

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

XVI

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 parents old, 19-inch television that theyd probably have just as soon thrown away, but it was a TV. In my bed-room. 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.

Id only vaguely heard of it. Id seen parts of an episode years earlier with my grandmother and Id asked to her ex-plain what a generation was. Even after a simple example (Im a generation, your mom is a generation and youre an-other generation, shed said) I still didnt quite get it. No matter. Something about TNG immediately captured my imagination and still hasnt 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 ep-isode 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.

1. Ill admit, I pale in comparison to true fansIll 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 dont want to be knifed because I chose the wrong word. And while Im an expert on the Next Gen-eration, there were still episodes of Voyager that I hadnt seen when I started writing and my knowledge of Deep Space Nine is more limited, though Ive 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 wont argue.


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

IntroductIon

XVII

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 werent part of the normal set. I bought the Star Trek the Next Generation Technical Manual and The Star Trek Encyclopedia, two books Ive 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-Ds 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 work-

ing 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

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 youre one of the people in the first note ready to pick up your knife. Heres 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 subse-quent 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 itll pop up now and then) so this seemed the most appropriate. I know this isnt a perfect solution, but I wanted you to at least know theres some logic behind it.

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

XVIII

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. Ill get to what it was later, in the first chapter, actually, but it got me think-ingin terms of Star Treks technology, whats here already and whats 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 grat-itude for its expertise, I dont 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 were 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 weve seen in Star Trek is already here, or well on its way. Ill 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 prob-ably 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 cant do or what wont ever be possible, as if the writers had crystal balls sit-ting on their desks. This was hard for me on a lot of levels. When someone, an expert in theoretical physics no less, wrote he didnt think wed ever have a transporter or repli-cator, 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 couldnt, no one told me it would never be possible. Today, I choose to take the same approach. The promise of Star Trek isnt just in its technology, but in


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

IntroductIon

XIX

the future it represents. Kill the dream of the technology, and you kill the dream of the future. Im not talking about holodecks and warp drive, Im talking about a world where mankind has evolved beyond our worst qualities. You prob-ably cant separate that evolution from the technology that makes it possible.

Thats not to say that I dont question our evolution. Weve been warning ourselves about the rise of the ma-chines 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 cant talk about building androids without talking about how theyd treat us in turn, and maybe even more importantly, how wed treat them as their creators. And Holodecks? You do know what goes on in a holodeck, right? Were just starting to scratch the surface of what computer-mediated communication means for our social development. Imagine when we dont even need real people for face-to-face interaction with other humans. What Im getting at hereand youll hear me say it a lot, so prepareis that theres more to the ques-tion 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 mat-ter 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 develop-ment or the newest bit of incremental research. Theres cer-

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

XX

tainly some of that in the book, though, it couldnt 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 oc-curs in a vacuum. Holodecks might be awesome for enter-tainment 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 its also a nec-essary 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 were going to achieve the kind of technology that we can only dream about today, itll 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. Ive not hesitated to point out the current challenges, of course, and there are many. Many, many, many. But if theres anything Star Trek showed us, there are few challenges that cant be overcome given time and determination (and some-times, maybe a little help from Wesley Crusher). We have all the determination we need, now its jut a matter of time.

Hope you enjoy.

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


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

Impossible is a word that humans use far too often.SEVEN OF NINE

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

WE HavE aRRIvEd300 yEARS AHEAD OF

THE FUTUREEnd of program

THE COMPUTER

Im about to make some of you very angry, but heres the truth. Our computer technology is pretty much already be-yond anything the crew of the Enterprise had. What we cant do today, well be able to soon.

Weve advanced so much so quickly that comparisons be-tween the shows and todays computers are difficult to make. Its not just that weve diverged in design and concept, its also scope and power and size. In the span of a few decades, weve gone from mainframes to desktop computers to mobile devices that rival anything we couldve 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-

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

4

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 Tricorderthe mobile computer the crew of the Enterprise usedwhen 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 doesnt 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 dont even really look alike. Tricorders flip open, and smartphones dont do that anymore.3 But the devices do have a ton of similarities and were going to have to reset our think-ing a little if were going to get through this book together in one piece. Im going to take some unusual approaches to comparing Star Treks future technology with todays, because while life imitates art and art tries to imitate life, were not us-ing mirrorsmore like, fuzzy watercolors. And when it comes to computers, were 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-

1. Liz Zyga, US Air Force connects 1,760 PlayStation 3s to build supercom-puter, Phys.org, December 2, 2010.

2. Or, to not offend anyone with a Blackberry or Android phone in their pock-et, just smartphones. I chose not to use that because it no more accurately de-scribes the device than iPhone does, but at least iPhone will get everyonesthe fanboys and the haters hearts racing, albeit for different reasons.

3. But alas, have you seen Star Trek: Nemesis? No hard feelings if you havent, but write me and let me know why this move was important for any discussion of a smartphone-Tricorder comparison.


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

We Have arrIved

5

stead start thinking that we can do and have done better. Youll be to be surprised not just how much everyday life already owes Star Trek, especially when it comes to computers, but also how much weve already left it behindor will.

tRICoRdER = IPHonE

Heres an example thats a lot more difficult to deny. The iPad. Think, think, think. Where have you seen these before? Cap-tain 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 (Di-saster, 5x5). On the show, they called them PADDs, or Person-al 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 Treks tech acknowledge in the Star Trek: The Next Gen-eration 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 Apples Newtonthe iPads predecessor and a spectacular failure in the marketplace. Guess we just werent ready.

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 Techni-cal Manual, (New York: Pocket Books, 1991).

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

6

But, do you see where Im coming from, now? Some of you dont. 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 Youre so in love with the Idea, capital I, of a Tricorder that youll never agree that its already here until you have a device, in-hand, with those lovely flashing Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta lights down the side. Well, Ill 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 isnt 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 sens-ing, 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? Whats a smartphone aside from a portable sensing, computing and data communication device? Our phones even add voice commu-nication, 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 worlds knowledge sources like Wiki-pedia, 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

6. Im not the only one whos 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.


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

We Have arrIved

7

me what constellations are overhead in the night sky. It knows what the weather is like, can convert currencies and do com-plex calculations, it can even help me find myselfphysically, not emotionally (though there might be an app for that, Ill have to check). It knows that if Im at Target, it should remind me to buy toothpaste. I could go on an on like this, but hope-fully youre seeing my point.

True, up until recently I had to mostly synthesize the in-formation for myself, but Apples latest iPhones come stan-dard with an app called Siri.8 Siri can understand complex plain-language queriesspoken, not just typedand find the information for me and even complete tasks. She mostly uses the same sources that I would if Im looking up information for myself, she just puts together whats the most probable cor-rect answer without me having to do the leg work. An unlike other similar voice-activated assistant apps, Siri maintains con-text 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 Ill 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 well see in a bit, its really a remarkable bit of computing in a tiny little package.

Siri is though, a work in progress.

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

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 Evis and Siris magic.

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

8

Siri: If you say so.

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 Wol-fram-Alpha mashup of the word tricorner instead. Thats a fruit fly gene, not a futuristic piece of mobile computing tech-nology.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? Its not a sensor per se, butin conjunction with one of those external data sources like Google Mapscan give us our real time, physical location pretty much anywhere in the world. And dont forget about the camera. It is a sensor. For ex-ample, 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 phones camera up to the road in front of me, over-lays 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

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


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

We Have arrIved

9

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. Im not ignoring her and that pesky medical Tricorder she carried around, with its little de-tachable sensor. Thats right. You got me. A little. Detachable. Sensor. We dont really have anything like that. Yet.

tHE InCREdIblE sHRInkIng dEvICE

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 inju-ries and illnesses in many different species.10 Emphasis here on the sensor part, because thats where the Medical Tricorders magic happened. One wonders what a doctor in the 24th Cen-tury 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, wed most likely build the tech into them, not add to their profiles with bulky attachments. We certainly wouldnt 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, weve shrunk enormous amounts of data down to

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

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

10

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, youd 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 dont see any indication that were moving away from integrated tech in our mobile devices and I cant imagine wed head that route with any new, ingenious sensors.12

Its all beside the point now, because the tech isnt here, but were working on it. Take, for example, so-called labs on chip, or LOCs. Theyre 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 ram-pant. 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.

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 doesnt hold true for third-party peripherals. They cant in-tegrate their tech into the iPhone, so it will always be an addon until Apple gob-bles them up and integrates it themselves. This seems a bit of a crapshoot, see the aforementioned lack of near-field technology in Apple devices.


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

We Have arrIved

11

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 youre allergic to Penicillin). Boom. Youre back on the road to healthiness.

Sure, this isnt exactly analogous to the way Dr. Crushers Tricorder worked, and LOCs are a far stretch from shrinking, say, an entire CT Scanner or MRI down to the size of some-thing that can fit in the palm of your hand, but theyre a giant step in the right direction. And computers and their parts get smaller over time. Thats kind of what they do. Before we de-veloped integrated circuitry, the Macbook Air sitting on my lap right now wouldve filled rooms and rooms with vacuum tubes and still not even come close to the Macs processing power. Experience tells us to expect our devices to become more com-pact, more efficient, and more form-friendly, so its not really a great surprise when they do.

Take Terahertz Spectrometers, for example, which produce T-rays, can detect a variety of biological anomalies. Were al-ready using them at airports in those controversial body scan-ners. Because T-rays are on the infrared end of the spectrum, they probably arent harmful like the X-rays used in hospitals. Earlier this year, a team of international scientists announced theyd 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 itll be before we see T-ray technology in a hand-held device? Talk about magical

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.

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

12

and revolutionary.Despite my solid belief that Im holding a Tricorder in my

pocket right now, the quest for something more like what ap-pears in the show is ongoing. Qualcomm is offering a $10 mil-lion 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. Thats the technology envisioned by this competition, and it will allow unprecedented access to per-sonal health metrics.14 One well-funded startup in California, Scanadu, has already built a prototype that relies onwait for itan iPhone and a peripheral that uses a spectral camera and a LOC.15 Pretty impressive.

After all this, if youre still not with me, you should head over to www.tricorderproject.org and talk with Peter Jansen, a cog-nitive science researcher whos created an open-source, more-true to the show version of the Tricorder. Hes already built the Mark II and while he scrapped the Mark III, (it departed too much from the philosophy of the Tricorder, he says) hes in ac-tive development on the Mark IV (through most of The Next Generation, the crew used Mark VII models). Jansens goal was to pack as many different kinds of sensors as he could into a small device that resembled the shows 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, youll see something familiar: an iOS-style keyboard, like the

14. see www.qualcommtricorderxprize.org.15. Ben Coxworth, Scanadu Developing Medical Tricorder, Gizmag, De-

cember 30, 2011.


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

We Have arrIved

13

one thats in my iPhone. Hmm.

touCHa touCHa touCH mE

The Enterprises computer touchscreens were, at the time, a bold, future-facing feature. Today, in the real world, theyre already ubiquitous. I mean, imagine our computers without them. If youre old enough to have lived through The Next Gen-eration in first-run syndication, then it shouldnt be too hard. There werent many around back then. But think about how many times a day you use them now, and the computers that wouldnt 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 dif-ferently, 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 its difficult to imagine them without that capability. Surely the Enterprise had a lot to do with that.

I know this seems odd nowmaybe even quaintbut 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 trans-parencies, I knew it was all just television magic, but Id never seen anything like them before. I dreamed of sitting on the Enterprise bridge, maybe at ops, my hands gliding over the controls. Id have no idea what any of them did, and might have accidentally dumped the warp core, but still, it wouldve been awesome.

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

14

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 didnt really see this much on the show, if, at all, but LCARS could reconfigure itself depending on the controls ac-tivated or the personal preferences of the user, according to the TNG Technical Manual.16 Okudas goal was to create a visual style that suggests an extremely simple means of organizing and controlling very complex processes and hardware.17 Its a bit of a shame that he doesnt get the credit he deserves for his influence on todays touch interfaces. And Youve already labeled me an Apple fanboy by now, so Im just going to say it: the original iPhones buttons-on-black-screen owe something to the scenic design of Star Treks computers. There was more than a vague similarity there. And look at Windows 8. Its min-imalist, sleek, designed for touch from the ground up. Hell, it looks like it couldve been on the Enterprise.

Recreating LCARS is something of a passion for fans and Ill admit, reluctantly, that I spent some hours as a kid recreat-ing the Conn from drawings in the Technical Manual in Paint-brush 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 thats trying to de-velop LCARS standards for things like app and screensaver development, like the World Wide Web Consortium develops HTML standards. Theres software that exists that can trans-form some Windows based computers to LCARS-style inter-faces and Ive tried several apps on my iPad that, while mostly aesthetic in function, give me a bit of that experience I longed

16. Okuda and Sternbach, Technical Manual, 39.17. Ibid.


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

We Have arrIved

15

for so much as a kid.Of course, we did have touch screens in the 90s, but they

were clunky compared to todays 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. Hewl-ett-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, some-thing 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, Ill see you in line for the iPhone 6well have a lot of time to stand there and talk about it), but were talking about the revolution and evolution of our computing systems, and fanboy or not, we cant deny Apples place. I know some of you will try, and you can argue that yes, my office looks like an Apple Store and Im therefore not objective. Well, Ill give you that, but at least you know my biases. And Ill go on the record saying I pushed my-self into a Microsoft Store recently just to have some hands-on experience with Windows 8. Im actually considering buying one. And dont worry, later chapters will cover androids and warp drives and transporters, and unless Cupertinos branch-ing out into some new industries I dont know about, this will be the most you hear about Apple in the whole book. Having written those words, Im now fearing an Apple exec say Oh, and one more thing at a company even just days before Tre-

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

16

knology is published, but for now were going to operate on the assumption that the company has no interest in interstellar travelyet. Google on the other hand

Heres the takeaway form all this. Apple not only helped push computers with touchscreens to the masses, they main-streamed a very specific type of touchscreen that most con-sumers had never encountered: one capable of registering more than one touch at a time. Sound simple? Its not. This is the key to the iPhones characteristic pinching and zooming, its flicking and scrolling.18 This is the magic. Apple didnt invent multitouch, though; the technology had been around in vari-ous 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 Ive tried to pinch the map in my Prius built-in GPS and then, fist in the air, cursed Toyota for its backward ways. Its also a telling sign that the United States recently rejected Apples bid to trademark mul-titouchas key as it is to iOS devices ease of useas too generic to warrant protection.20

And though we can probably agree that touch screens are a key piece of computer technology thats already moved from Star Treks small screen to daily life, theyre not necessarily the holy grail of human-computer interfacing. The Enterprises

18. Interestingly, we did see an example of multitouch technology in LCARS, specifically the console that controlled the transporters. Every time Chief OBrien 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-invali-dated

20. Jordan Golson.Apple Denied Trademark for Multi-Touch, MacRumors, September 6, 2011.


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

We Have arrIved

17

computer had one other feature that were actually still working on: the crew could talk to it, and itd talk backintelligently.

WHat Would you lIkE to do today?

Our computers are just starting to learn how talk with us. Theyre not great at it, yet. Weve established, for example, that Siri and I dont always get along. She has her moments, though.

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

Awww. Later:

Me: Siri, beam me upSiri: Energizing.

Damn. If only she could.22 My conversations with Siri re-minded 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.

21. More on this in the chapter on holodecks, because Siris response has raised a very important point about computer-mediated communication.

22. While she cant transport me yet, Siri does have some interesting thoughts on how much wood, exactly, a wood chuck could chuck, if a wood chuck could chuck wood.

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

18

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 its not.

The computer (voiced, as always, by Gene Rodenberrys 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.

And

Voyager Computer: Warning. Last chance to be a hero, Doc-tor. Get going!

Processing natural language is actually not that difficult any-more. 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 dont understand, though, responding gracefully is difficult. The

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.


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

We Have arrIved

19

situation requires human intervention in the code in the form of more and more input-response rules. You can imagine, giv-en the complexity of human speech and thought, that writing enough rules to cover even a fraction of possible interactions is virtually impossible. Thats why Siri sometimes responds with if you say so or some similar dismissive.

There is a better way than forcing a computer down a deci-sion-tree of rules, one were just starting to develop and experi-ment with. To understand how it works though, were 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 ma-chines like computers could think.24 This is obviously a nec-essary step, a thinking machine, if we want our computers to understand language and respond in turn without human in-tervention. 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 in-teracting with another human and not a computer, it passed. You encounter this in the reverse a lot on the web, even if you dont realize it. Turings 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, youre asked to type a series of letters, based on a distorted image, that are supposedly im-possible for computers to decipher, but easy for humans. More

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

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

20

often than not, I have to take several tries at Googles current CAPTCHAs, but that might say more about me than it does about the difficulty of their tests. Simpler, but less secure ver-sions ask you to add two numbers or answer a question like what color is the sky?25

Turing also proposed a theory thats the basis of next-gener-ation 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 youll 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 childs? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.26

Simple, right? But not easy. What Turings talking about is machine learning. More to the point, its what we think of as artificial intelligence. Machine learning is a key to not only cre-ating computers that can talk back like the Enterprises 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 its learned about that data (based on our translations and la-bels) and detect similar patterns in real world input it. Hope-fully, then, it can respond in an intelligible way.

Heres a more concrete example: Whats the weather like in

25. Early CAPTCHAs have already been cracked by ambitious programmers, and its a constant race to stay ahead of technology.

26. see note 23.27. Thats not to say that this is how the Enterprises computer process and

responds the crew, but it is our best hope for imitating the behavior.


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

We Have arrIved

21

San Franciso? To train the computer to understand this sen-tence, were going to have to label it. We want to give the com-puter as much information about it as we can so, we tell it the parts of speech (San Francisco is a proper noun and whats is an interrogative contracted from what is) and maybe give it context (San Francisco is a place, what indicates a ques-tion and indicates we want an answer, weather is the state of the atmosphere and so on). The key is that were 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 its heard words like raining or San Diego.

This is a pretty simplistic example, and getting from the Whats the weather like in San Francisco? to Is it raining in San Diego? will take a lot of training. But heres 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 interventionmore super-vised trainingsometimes not. Its Turings 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.

Heres another example of machine learning, one Im sure youve already encountered. Lets say I own an online video streaming service, and my revenue depends on keeping people engaged and watching more and more programming. The ob-vious way to do this is to recommend new shows to them, but the recommendations have to be good. I also dont want to have

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

22

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 Gal-lactica or even Fringe. And I want it to be able to do this even if the user has never given us the slightest indication theyre interested in those shows, because, for the sake of our example, they dont 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 Im 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 Penn-sylvania at Dickinson College. He received a PhD in computer visionteaching computers to recognize the vast amounts of information in imagesfrom the University of Oxford, and has worked in the research labs of Hewlett-Packard and Mic-rosoft. He says were 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 pro-cesses common to all living organisms. Computers dont grow, at least not yet. Is machine learning simply a matter of provid-


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

We Have arrIved

23

ing the computer with enough training examples, or is it more about better quality examples?

Its both, MacCormick said. The more training data you can get and the better that data is, the better your system is going to perform. Thats why, for instance, in this natural lan-guage processing that were 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, were going to talk about where that large corpus might come from in the future. But still, enough training ex-amples 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 MacCor-mick 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, Im 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. Elimi-nating that altogether is not possible using current techniques.

Lets bank on the word current.It is amazing how much the process really is like child rear-

ing. In many ways, we are a reflection of how were 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 comput-ers to do malicious things, like engage in cybercrime or steal identities.28 You have to wonder, if a thinking computer decides

28. Biggio, Battista; Nelson, Blaine; Laskov, Pavel. Poisoning Attacks against

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

24

to do something badwho 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 ac-tions on their own, so maybe a grown up computer would, too? Mom and Dad may have set bad examples for me, but they dont get thrown in jail if I swipe someones credit card.

REFRIgERatoR, do tHy bIddIng

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 todays technology. So, I tracked down Ilya Gel-fenbeyn, a 28-year-old transplant from Russia whos 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 Id downloaded Assistant on my iPhone earlier that morning but he warned me right away that the Android version, running on the mobile operat-ing system developed by Google, was much better because of limitations in Apples software. I took his word for it, some-

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


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

We Have arrIved

25

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. Gelfen-beyn told me that Speak To It employs more linguistic scien-tists than it does engineers. The current version of Assistant understands not just English, but Spanish and Russian, too.

I wanted to know where were 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 ma-chine learning, but the majority of its learning capabilities are geared toward being more useful to its user. Assistant learns, for example, if youre 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? Re-member 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, Gel-fenbeyn 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. De-cades later and those who got there first in search, like Mi-

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

26

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 ubiq-uity 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 doesnt really matter to us what the client is. So its 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 soonmuch sooner than we probably thoughtit might just become the dominant way we interact not only with our computers, but the rest of our machines, too.

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

500 IntERnal sERvER ERRoR

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


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

We Have arrIved

27

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, were moving toward decentralized knowledge contained in millions of com-puters, accessible through connections like the Internet. Even basic computer functions are moving into what weve 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 dont 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 dont need an encyclopedia on your laptop, or on your bookshelf even, because you can get all the information you need online. Weve moved from wired con-nections through Ethernet cables and phone lines to wireless. As well talk about in the chapter on transporters, were 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 weve uploaded to cloud. Soon, were 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? Were 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 didnt ever have much rea-son to connect two different computers together. Even Data, arguably the universes most sophisticated computer, had to plug a cable into his head just to interface directly with the En-terprise. Id 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 Treks writers with the fictional world they crafted, its probably a lit-

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

28

tle bit of both. When The Next Generation premiered, things like the Internet and WiFi certainly werent in the national consciousness. But in terms of the fiction, maybe its just not conceivable that something like the Internet could operate ef-ficiently across light years or parsecs. Maybe it was more prac-tical and more risk-adverse to organize and store the universes information in a few computer cores on the Enterprise than it was to trust that the Enterprise could access Googles data cen-ters 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. Cant imagine thatd go over well.

Computer science is such a key component of the majori-ty of todays technology and the technology of Star Trek that Ive chosen just a few topics to cover in this chapter. Were not done with them, though. Ive not said much about speed, but advances here are almost a given. The Enterprise com-puter, though, operated at speeds faster-than-light, but were not sure thats physically possible. Well discuss it more in the chapter on warp drive. Were 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. Thats where it really gets in-teresting. Data was probably one of the Star Trek universes biggest technological achievements. They had warp drive for a couple hundred years, but they couldnt make another Data. The question is, though, will we ever make a first one? Lets find out.

Onward.


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

HERE, tHERE and EvERyWHERE

BUILDING A MATTER ENERGy TRANSPORTER

...from what Im told, [Captain Archer] wouldnt even put his dog through this thing.

TRAVIS MAyWEATHER

I never really understood why Star Treks 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-uni-form-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.

Heres 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 subatom-ic 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

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

30

and uses the scan it created of you to turn that stream back into bonded matter, reassembling you into a whole person, presum-ably still alive. This bears repeating, but Star Treks 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):

Ensign Sato: Your molecules get pulled apart. Commander Tucker: Then they get put back together again. Ensign Sato: Do you know how many molecules youre

made up of? Commander Tucker: Lots. Ensign Sato: All right, how many? Commander Tucker: A-a-a few trillion. Ensign Sato: Thats a pretty big jigsaw puzzle! What if some

of the pieces get put in the wrong place? You know, I bet a lot of them look real similar.

The transporter is a brilliant dramatic device for stories that take place between starships and planets but its also a little god-like, which can lead to a little too much power in the hands of a wayward writer. The producers put limitations on this, though, giving the transporter a range of 40,000 kilome-ters.1 That doesnt sound impressive, but to put in perspective, thats more than enough to send you from anywhere on earth

1. This range grew dramatically in the hands of J.J. Abrahms, the executive pro-ducer behind the 2011 Star Trek reboot. Remeber the scene where future-Spock tells Scotty all about the equation for transwarp beaming hes 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? Id love to hear your thoughts on this one.


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

Here, tHere and everyWHere

31

to anywhere else on earth youd want to go, all in about eight seconds. Also, if you find yourself on a starship in the future, the transporter doesnt function while traveling at warp, unless the ship and the destinationpresumably another shipare moving at the same speed. You cant beam through shields, ei-ther. And, theres a key difference arbitrarily forced between the transporter and a replicator that eliminates a pesky story problem: if we can transport living beings, why cant we just replicate them? In the Technical Manual, Sternbach and Oku-da 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 Its 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, its impos-sible 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 wouldve been upset about Tasha Yars senseless death in the first season of TNG if they couldve just ordered a new Tasha back aboard the Enterprise. The need for dramatic storytelling with life or death consequences requires this limitation, even if its logically fallible. In real-life, if wed have the ability to recouple a matter stream that was once a whole human being, itd 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 wont be too soon. building a transporter would

2. page number

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

32

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

Thats 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. Its not like us humans to think weve got everything figured out until someone smarter comes along and, literally, upends the equation, right? Right.

E = mC2

The basic idea behind the transporter isnt that out there. Keep in mind I said the basic idea. Einstein theorized that matter and energy were intrinsically connected all the way back in 1905 when he proposed the equation that energy equals mass multiplied by a constant squared, in this case the constant be-ing the speed of light.4 You know this as E = mc2 and it shows us how things like mass, light, radiation, etc., are all just differ-ent facets of the same underlying concept. Matter and ener-gy are, in some sense, the same thing, and can turn into each other, Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist and author of the

3. Krauss, The Physics of Star Trek.4. Einstein, A. (1905), Ist die Trgheit eines Krpers von seinem Energiein-

halt abhngig?Annalen der Physik18: 639643,doi:10.1002/andp.19053231314. See also the English translation at http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/E_mc2/www/


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF


33

book the Physics of the Impossible says.5 E = mc2 was almost something of an afterthought, a footnote

even. Einstein didnt 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 unit-ed 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, Einsteins equation6 shows us that an object in motionand at a basic level, thats a good way to think of energy, as motiongained in mass the faster it moved. Well talk more about this when we talk about faster- than-light travel (Einstein would say its 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 theres 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. Its that kind of in-terchangeability thats at the heart of Star Treks 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 ratedictated by the speed of lightbetween mass and energy is constant. According to him, this is more than just

5. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/expe-kaku.html6. This equation is so elegant that what it tells us about the nature of our uni-

verse isnt 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 cant change one without changing the other in some way.

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

34

an esoteric bit of science.Our survival depends on Einsteins equation, since the suns

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 isnt going to be around forever. It has a finite amount of fuel to convert to the energy that sustains life on earth. So Einsteins equation might be leading us to-ward 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 Einsteins equation to provide humanity with an essentially limitless sup-ply of energy.7

Weve seen this already, in a less than controlled or safely harnessed way. Einsteins 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 mat-ter. Thats 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

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.html9. Krauss, 88.


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF


35

Still, particle physicists convert energy to matter all the time in laboratory settings. They take ordinary particles, acceler-ate 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 usu-ally exist only for a very short time. We just cant collect and assemble them into anything remotely meaningful, let alone a full-fledged human being. The new particles are so unstable that they dont even exist in everyday life, so this is the only way that scientists can study them. But, lets be clear here. No new matter is being created. The way we understand our universe (in no small part thanks to Einsteins equation) says that cant happen. Energy is being converted to mass. It gets even more complicated because other rules say that the electrical charge cant 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 do-ing with particle accelerators around the world, like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, theyve ended up with a rela-tively small amount of converted matter.

bIts and bytEs, oR tHE sum oF us

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

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

36

by-quark. That might actually be the least of our problems. Remember Krauss list? Not only are the energy requirements prohibitive, but we dont 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 Lets 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 Hes right. We dont have a storage device capable of holding that much informationyet.

Star Treks writers made it intentionally impossible to com-pare real-life orders of magnitude in computers with those used in the show, but thats okay. Were looking at this in real-life terms. Again, back in 2007, the largest hard drive available was one terabyte, or about 1,000 gigabytes. Thats 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. Lets not forget theres nothing that says that a trans-porter would be limited to commercially available storage op-

10. In the newest version, Krauss says the hes 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 wed 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. Im 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.


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF


37

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 thats 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 to-day. IBM shipped the first hard drive in 1956, it was the size of two refrigerators and held just five megabytes. Thats barely enough to hold a single MP3, but it wasnt 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 humans pattern. Today, though, accounting for the fact that we can string a series of hard drives togetherdata storage solutions that will become more and more common as we move more information into the cloudwere actually only about 10 powers away, give or take a power. Krauss is also con-servative on his estimates of how long itd 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 chal-lenge of the transporter. He assumed about ten years for one power of advancement. Weve gone about nine powers in six.

Theres still another computer issue. The typical transporter cycle on Star Trek takes about seven or eight seconds. Krauss estimates are probably off and well most likely have the capac-ity to store a humans pattern within our lifetimes. The bigger question though, is if well have a computer that can handle that much information that quickly.

Maybe we wont have to, you say. Thats not a bad assump-

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

38

tion. The speed of the transporter was probably more a dramat-ic 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. Theres nothing, though, that says our real-life transporters couldnt take thirty seconds or even five minutes. An hour? Wed probably take that over a 24-hour intercon-tinental plane ride, right? There is some suggestion, however, that even Star Treks transporters couldnt hold on to a pattern for very long without it degrading. Stay in the pattern buffer too long, and thered 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. Itd been there for seventy-five years, but oddly, is still drawing power through some of its systems.

LaForge: The transporter is still on-line... its being fed power from the auxiliary systems.

Riker: The rematerialization subroutine has been disabled.LaForge: Thats not all, the phase inducers are connected to

the emitter array, the override is completely gone and the pattern buffers been locked into a continuous diagnostic cycle.

Riker: This doesnt make any sense. Locking the unit in a di-agnostic mode just sends inert matter through the pattern buffer. Why would anyone want to

LaForge: Theres a pattern still in the buffer.Riker: Its completely intact, less than point zero zero three

percent signal degradation. How is that possible? LaForge: I dont know... but Ive never seen a transporter sys-

tem jury-rigged like this.


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF


39

Riker: Could someone survive in a transporter buffer for sev-enty-five years?

Geordi: I know a way to find out.

Geordi energizes, and out pops Montgomery Scott. Inciden-tally, Scott went into the transporter with another surviving crewmember, but his pattern degraded too much over the years and he didnt make it. Mr. Scott notwithstanding, lets assume theres a good reason why a standard transporter scans, dema-terializes, beams and rematerializes all in a few seconds. When will have a computer fast enough to pull this off?

This isnt 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 militarys big calculatorsthe first com-puters, actuallynoting 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 wouldnt have to be output to the end user immediately after calculation. Popular Science called this remarkable development memori-zation, and the writer actually put memorization in quotes.12

I guess its not that hard to understand why this memori-zation amazed them. How could a machine memorize any-thing? Back then, crude mercury tanks along the same concept

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

UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF

TREKNOLOGY

40

lines as todays thermometers handled data storage, if one could even call it that. You dont need training in computer science to understand how far weve 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 for-eign 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 ex-pert 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 wed be required to read to reassemble a human from the transporters matter stream. Are we any good at this? Is it a challenge?

Thats 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. Its very application-dependent of course, as Im sure you know. It is possible, most actual data you can go to an index for it, so that you can find anything youre inter-ested in very quickly. If you have something that doesnt have an index, then of course it is going to take a long time to go through it.

The Technical Manual doesnt 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 its proba-bly 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


UN

CORRECTED PRO

OF


41

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, youre accessing one of the worlds largest indexes.

I want to take a moment, actually, and look at little closer at how Google works. Well see why in a moment. Google uses a bit of software called a bot or spider to crawl through the Internets data by following links. These bots record various details of the Internets pages and their structure. Each page is given a number and each part of the page, say every word, is given another number (thats 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, itd be given a number, say for examples sake, 1 and the word Technical would be given the num-ber 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? Its 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. Were half way there already, right?

No. Im not saying that because weve built Google we should be capable of building

Documents

Treknology-Star Trek Tech 300 Years Ahead of the Future