‘What more can you ask: tractor beam, warp drive, holodeck?’
FOR an object to remain truly transparent to an illumination wave, a cloak must restore the exact spatio-temporal profile of the wave, including both amplitude and phase variations across the entire illumination frequency spectrum, i.e., the full field… we propose a new conceptual approach to the problem, enabling the realization of full-field broadband invisibility, experimentally demonstrated here for the first time to the best of our knowledge. This involves a customized and reversible redistribution of the illumination frequency content, allowing the wave to propagate through the object of interest while preventing any interaction between the wave and the object. We report the experimental concealment of a broadband optical filter from detection with a phase-coherent light pulse of 500 GHz bandwidth, showing full restoration of the complex temporal and spectral profiles of the pulse.” [Luis Romero Cortés, et.al., Optica, Vol. 5, No. 7, July 2018]
Translation: The Romulan cloaking device may soon be possible in 21st century Earth.
“Realistic 3-D projections could not be formed before, mainly because it requires back-to-back projection of a very large number of 2-D images to look realistic, with potential crosstalk between images. We use a corollary of the celebrated central limit theorem and the law of large numbers to successfully eliminate this fundamental limitation.” [https://phys.org/news/2019-03-physicists-star-trek-style-holograms.html]
Translation: The illusion in Jules Verne’s Le Chí¢teau des Carpathes (1892) is now our century’s hologram: “By means of glasses inclined at a certain angle calculated by Orfanik, when a light was thrown on the portrait placed in front of a glass, La Stilla appeared by reflection as real as if she were alive, and in all the splendor of her beauty. It was by means of this apparatus, taken for the night to the bastion platform, that Rodolphe de Gortz had made her appear when he wished to lure Franz de Telek into the castle; and by its means the young count had seen her in the room of the donjon, while her fanatic admirer was in full enjoyment of the voice reproduced by the phonograph.”
“The inherent scalability of this beam combined laser system has allowed us to build the first 60kW-class fiber laser for the US Army. We have shown that a powerful directed energy laser is now sufficiently light-weight, low volume and reliable enough to be deployed on tactical vehicles for defensive applications on land, at sea and in the air.” [https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2017-03-16-Lockheed-Martin-to-Deliver-World-Record-Setting-60kW-Laser-to-U-S-Army]
Translation: Starfleet Type-3 phasers (16 power settings, fully-autonomous recharge capability, multiple-target acquisition, gyro-stabilization) will be in the hands of First World soldiers in the Third World War.
We note this trio of possibilities in our near future in the wake of a recent anomaly: “Newquay, United Kingdom (10 January 2023) – The historic first attempt to launch satellites from British soil reached space late last night, but ultimately fell short of reaching its target orbit. After successfully taking off from the runway at Spaceport Cornwall (which just a few weeks ago was transformed from a mere slab of empty cement at a commercial airport to the world’s newest space launch operations center) and traveling to the designated drop zone, Cosmic Girl, the customized 747 that serves as the LauncherOne system’s carrier aircraft, successfully released the rocket… quickly going hypersonic and successfully reaching space. The flight then continued through successful stage separation… However, at some point during the firing of the rocket’s second stage engine and with the rocket traveling at a speed of more than 11,000 miles per hour, the system experienced an anomaly, ending the mission prematurely.” [https://virginorbit.com/the-latest/historic-uk-mission-reaches-space-falls-short-of-orbit/]
Translation: The Space Race is heating up with more participants: “The head of Nasa has warned that China may attempt to claim territory on the Moon if it beats the US to setting up permanent bases on the lunar surface. Bill Nelson, who took over the US space agency in 2021, said the US is in a new space race with China and that geopolitical tensions between the two countries on Earth could extend to the Moon.” [https://www.yahoo.com/news/nasa-chief-warns-chinese-land-115643335.html]
There is a powerful, portable sequencing device called MinION (Oxford Nanopore Technologies) that can be used for DNA and RNA sequencing (recognize the Ebola virus, genetically profile tumors). Another device called GENE-Radar (Nanobiosym) can identify, within minutes, a range of illnesses, including AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and cancer. [https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/nanobiosym_genes] Gadget No. 3 (tested by the Canadian Space Agency on the International Space Station in 2013) is a miniaturized version of a flow cytometer (a common research or clinical laboratory instrument used for a range of bioanalysis and clinical diagnoses) that can spot cells and biological molecules rapidly by using fibre-optic technology, a portable Canadian technology that analyzed hormones in blood or other biological samples. [https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/sciences/microflow.asp; https://intl.startrek.com/article/what-do-trek-canadian-space-agency-have-in-common]
Translation: Medical tricorders issued to Starfleet physicians (Leonard “Bones” McCoy, Beverly Crusher, Phlox) should be available before the next pandemic strikes.
Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers have pushed for universal translation devices (Boundless Operational Language Translation can understand foreign slang, Robust Automatic Translation of Speech knows the difference between speech that needs translating and background noise to discard). “DARPA’s Multilingual Automatic Document Classification, Analysis and Translation program has developed capabilities to automatically classify, analyze and interpret foreign-language text in document images…(then) recognize text in scanned hardcopy, or imaged scenes (e.g. signs, graffiti or televised text images), then translate the text into English for use by English-speaking military personnel and analysts.” [https://www.wired.com/2011/04/psst-military-theres-already-a-universal-translator-in-the-app-store/; https://www.darpa.mil/program/multilingual-automatic-document-classification-analysis-and-translation]
Translation: Starfleet’s Universal Translator (scanning brain-wave frequencies to create a basis for translation of spoken languages in real-time communication) should arrive soon to help the United Nations win the Global Wars on Terror and Organized Crime. [https://intl.startrek.com/database_article/universal-translator]
What more can you ask: tractor beam, warp drive, holodeck?
