Last time, we took a look at current technology that would have been science fiction only a couple of decades ago. Here we go again in part two of our Star Trek retrospective!

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Do you want fries with those isolinear chips?
Everyone has their own favorite piece of Star Trek technology. Some people would give their left leg for a transporter. Others would love nothing more than to get their hands on a holodeck (let's be honest... who WOULDN'T want a holodeck?). Me personally, my favorite bit of Star Trek Tech has to be the replicator.

There's just something about being able to ask for something... ANYTHING... and have it appear in a shimmering light that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Whether it's a cup of Earl Gray (hot) or a replica of a 19th century English novel, your heart's desire is just a casual phrase away.

Well, I'd love to say we have replicator technology, just shelved and waiting to be installed next to the microwave in every home in America. But we don't. What we DO have is something incredibly close -- the right direction, anyway.

It's commonly referred to as the 3-D Fax or 3-D printer. At the moment, the only ones who use it are government contract types. Boeing, NASA and a few others have implemented this amazing and innovative technology into production.

The way it works, basically, is you have a reservoir of resin and a laser. The laser continuously draws the pattern of the 3-dimensional object you want to replicate and "builds" a duplicate using the resin. The result is a perfect duplicate of the SHAPE of the object.

The obvious down-side is that you couldn't replicate anything that was very complex, unless you did it in pieces. But the uses for a technology like this are almost limitless. Think about it... you do a 3-D scan of an object on one side, store it in a computer, and "print it out" when you need it later. There's a real solid use for this sort of technology in the field of space exploration. If a part needs to be replaced on the International Space Station, for example, they just print it out. If they need a tool -- print it out. And let's say that you want to send a probe to Mars in preparation for a manned mission later. You could have the probe build an entire community using the 3-D printing method, and when man first sets foot on the red planet he has everything he needs, already standing and ready to use.

We've come that far, and I don't think it's much of a stretch to go the next step and find a way to convert one time of matter into another. Sort of an "ultimate recycling" effort. In goes a rock, out comes a loaf of bread. Science Fiction? Maybe for now.


Beam me up...
But let's be honest -- the real Star Trek prize would be the transporter. Anyone who's sat through rush hour traffic has wanted one of these babies. You don't even have to be a Trek fan to imagine being able to bypass traffic jams and sit down to dinner in just a few seconds.

Transporter technology would seem to be a complete impossibility. The Heisenberg Principle has it that we can't track the location and movement of a particle at the same time without affecting it. Just by observing it, we change it. The implications of this are that even if you COULD break yourself down into an energy pattern, there'd be no way to put you back together again. And if you could, what came out might not be anything close to what went in.

But those crazy quantum physicists have trouble with words like "impossible." They went out and found a way to "teleport" a single particle using something called "quantum entanglement."

The basic idea behind quantum entanglement is that two particles can become "sympathetic," in that whatever happens to one will happen to the other. The crazy thing is, once two particles become entangled, they remain sympathetic NO MATTER HOW FAR APART THEY ARE! So, Particle A in Houston, TX is entangled with Particle B in China, and when we do something to one it happens to the other! It's also true that if we move Particle B to the Pegasus Galaxy, it's still entangled with Particle A.

Now, those crazy quantum physicists have gone and used this quirk of science to "teleport" a particle. Basically, they entangle two particles that are separated by great distance, faithfully duplicating the quantum state of one in the other. It's all highly technical and complicated, but let's just say the result is a perfect duplicate of Particle A.

The obvious problem here is that now we have two identical particles... but the original still exists! So to complete the teleportation process, Praticle A has to be destroyed (preferably after it has been removed from its entanglement with Particle B). We have disintegration down... we're good at destroying things. Putting things back together, that's a little out of reach at the moment. But we're working on it!

Ok, so we've done this with one particle (actually two particles). We've actually ACHIEVED teleportation on a quantum level. In theory, this could be done for all of the particles in a human being, effectively allowing us to "teleport" him or her to anywhere in the Universe. No distance would be too great. But the fact that this "teleportation" works on a principle of duplication and the destruction of the original raises all kinds of philosophical questions. Like, for example. if Kevin A steps into a transporter and is duplicated on, say, Mars, and then is destroyed on Earth, would Kevin B actually be the SAME Kevin or just a clone with the same memories? Did the original die on Earth? Was a whole new Kevin born on Mars?

Wiggy.

Warped Science
When you think of speed, you're actually thinking of time in relation to distance. How much time does it take to get from Point A to Point B? We Americans measure this in Miles Per Hour (MPH) -- our British counterparts have a much more universally accepted means of measuring it in Kilometers Per Hour (KPH). But the gist is that "speed," in and of itself, is a relative thing. Just ask uber-genius Albert Einstein. He had this whole "relativity" thing down. You know the theory... E=MC^2.

To define these variables -- E stands for "energy." M stands for "mass." C, for some odd reason, stands for "the speed of light." You square the speed of light in this formula (^2). So, Energy = Mass X The speed of light squared.

Beyond the mathematical gobbly-gook, one of the implications of Einstein's theory is that as we approach the speed of light time slows down "relative" to our own perception. The classic explanation is this: You board a space craft capable of traveling at just below the speed of light. You accelerate to top speed, leaving Earth behind. You travel this way for some months, then turn around and come back. To you, only a few months have gone by, but when you arrive on Earth you discover that several YEARS have gone by.

That's a problem for the common space traveler who just wants to visit his buddies in the Andromeda Galaxy over the weekend. It'd be tough to maintain any society, much less a Federation, if every time you jumped to light speed you were leaping ahead in time (there are also OTHER implications, such as increased mass, but I'll save those for another article!). So what's needed is a means of over-coming the speed-of-light-barrier without tripping over relativity.

In Star Trek, this is accomplished by a Warp Drive. The Enterprise generates a "warp bubble," a sort of invisible energy field that kind of folds space around the vessel and pushes it ahead at great speed. I'm no expert on the physics of warp travel, but I think the idea is that you're sort of skipping like a rock on a the surface of a pond, touching down on points in real space and skipping the whole relativity thing.

No one has a clue how to make this happen in the real world, which is a shame. But there may be a "loophole." Or, more specifically, a "worm hole."

Einstein and another fella named Rosen took the idea of relativity and space travel to a whole new level by suggesting something that's now called the Einstein-Rosen Bridge. Without getting too technical, the general idea is that there can be curved areas of space that can allow us to tunnel through from one location to another. So you bypass traveling at the speed of light by simply jumping from one location to another.

Think about a bed sheet being held at its four corners by a couple of burly guys. Now, put a golf ball on it. Its mass is enough to dent the fabric of the sheet, causing a slight curved impression. Einstein and Rosen postulated that the same can be said for space and celestial bodies. Planets make an impression, and more massive objects like stars make another. Now imagine that instead of a golf ball you put a bowling ball on the sheet. The great mass makes a greater impression. There's a definite curvature of space at this point.

The idea behind the Einstein-Rosen bridge is that you could curve space to the point where there's a smaller gap between two points. So if I'm a tiny little figure standing on the south side of the bowling ball's indention, I could (in theory) jump the gap and be on the north side in far less time than it would have taken me to travel without the indention.

Also, there's this idea of "wormholes." These are the indentions taken to their extreme. Basically, a wormhole would be the connection of two points in space. If you had two enormous gravity curvatures, for example, you could connect them, drill a hole through them and skip a long distance by going in one and coming out the other.

Of course, at the moment, the only thing we know of that might have the kind of gravitational power we'd need is a blackhole, and so far everything we know suggests you ain't comin' back out once you've gone in. But it's only a matter of time before we figure out a way to manipulate gravity or use some other means to artificially create these curvatures in space and jump from one place to another.

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Star Trek played with physics in a way that seemed almost like magic at the time. The idea of "Heisenberg Compensators," a short cut for bypassing the uncertainty principle, was pure fantasy back then. But how long until they're a reality?

The notion of using wormholes to bypass the light speed barrier has been explored in Star Trek, but it's far from the only conceivable way of moving from one place to another in a compressed time frame.

Here's the thing... if we can conceive of it, it can be done. We've proven that time and time again. So programs like Star Trek are just as much a call to future scientific advancement as a they are a means of entertainment. Who knows? Maybe some Trekkie will figure out warp travel while he's building his scale model of the Entreprise. More astounding things have happened.

J. Kevin Tumlinson is the Editor for ViewOnline. He holds a Masters of Education. He has worked in film and television production and owns his own production company, Hat Digital Media. If you'd like to e-mail him, you may do so at kevin@viewonline.com. He would like a cup of Earl Grey, hot.