Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

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The future of the Starship Enterprise

I’m a Star Trek fan and I like the new Enterprise format, mostly. Altogether it seems to be produced by film-makers rather than engineers, which makes it fun to watch in couch potato mode, but frustrating once you engage your brain. Let’s face it, the Vulcans haven’t been thought through properly, and it isn’t obvious how the transporter works, or the deflector shield, or how the phasers can have a stun and kill setting that is seemingly independent of the species they are fired at. Why do phaser beams travel slower than sound? And why aren’t there any sub-space phasers? Or sub-space soliton transporters? After decades of development, the warp drive still appears to be incorrectly mounted and has no vacuum energy input as its power supply. There are no Heisenberg resonators in the ship’s computer, which also appears to have no significant part in the crew, or even a synthetic personality, and most of the gadgets look more 1991 than 2151. In the pilot, none of the humans have been genetically enhanced, only a few aliens from the future who seem to have clearly got their definition of ‘upgrade’ from the same dictionary as Microsoft, and can manage time travel but not echo cancellation. Computer input seems to still be keyboard based. I didn’t see a single robot or android, and humans still seem to be smarter than their machines. But I mustn’t complain too much. Many of our new technologies have been inspired by Star Trek’s writers.

Of course, we may never have warp drive or teleportation. They are nice sci-fi shortcuts but we don’t know if they will ever be possible. But leaving artistic license aside, Enterprise is otherwise far too low tech, even for 2151. The technology of the Andromeda series was much more realistic for that period. It didn’t have teleport, and used wormholes instead of warp drive. There were no magical shields around the ship that keep out everything. It basically assumed advanced technology instead of simply wishing physics away. In general terms, the technological future of Star Trek is somewhere beyond even Andromeda, but will predate even Enterprise chronologically. As an example of how conservative Star Trek is, Commander Data, supposedly from the 25^th century has a performance specification that puts his computing capability around 2005 and his memory at around 2018, assuming a single memory chip!

By the end of this century, if we haven’t wiped ourselves out, we will probably have almost complete mastery of the biological world, able to tweak DNA at will, to redesign and implant genes, even new bases in our genetic toolkit. We should be able to work out what functionality we want, what we want it to look like, then push the button and collect the organism later after a suitable incubation period. Our nanotechnology should be able to convert asteroids into enterprises in a few days, and link our bodies to the gadgets around us, and to the information and processing of cyberspace. It should also be able to instantly fix our bodies when we are shot by a phaser. Our computers should be millions of times smarter than us, but we should be linked to them to harness their superior capabilities as effectively brain add-ons. They will have the use of visual characters with well adaptive synthetic personalities, probably even real personalities. They will certainly have emotions and be able to make very good, well balanced strategic decisions, much better then the humans around them. Robots and androids will do much of the routine work by then too. But these are just baseline advances, assuming we never invent anything again, simple extrapolations of research already well under way. The real future will be very much more exciting. There are more people alive today than have died in the whole of human history. Think of some of the dead people who made huge leaps in knowledge – Archimedes, Galileo, Da Vinci, Newton, and Einstein. There are more geniuses of that quality alive today than all of these. What will they do to push us forward even faster? And then realise that these people are puny compared to what computers will be capable of in a few decades from now. There is a real threat that we will wipe ourselves out this century by messing about with powerful technologies before we understand how to control them fully. If we survive, we will not need the Enterprise at all. We will be able to download our minds into tiny machines and send them out through tiny synthetic wormholes, using the same wormholes to stay in touch instantly and treat them as extensions to our minds back here. This would be far faster, safer and cheaper than trying to use a large spaceship with all the inertial compensators, gravity generators and other probably impossible technologies that the Enterprise needs to carry us bodily. Nanotech spaceships could carry ten thousand human minds in the volume of a pinhead, and a few assemblers could replicate us at the other end far faster than taking us there. We could all go now and again, rather than just a few heroes. And we could stay here at the same time.

In short, we might die soon. If we don’t, the world we live in will make anything on Star Trek look like the dark ages, and if the Vulcans on Enterprise are anything to go by, we will be giving them our technology, not copying theirs.