Life Imitates Art / Star Trek

• According to G. Harry Stine in "To Make A Star Trek" (Analog, February 1968), the doors, diagnostic bed and McCoy's saltshaker tools were already in the works for real when the series premiered.
• Clamshell cell phones almost always come in designs reminiscent of the Original Series communicators, although communicators are of course a lot more powerful in terms of the communication part.
• Vocera's B2000 communications badge is inspired in part inspired by the combadge seen in the later Trek series. It also works the same way - tap & talk.
• Transparent Aluminum. First mentioned in Star Trek IV in 1986. According to Wikipedia, there are now (by 2008) different methods and brand products: Aluminum oxynitride (AlON) is a transparent ceramic composed of aluminum, oxygen and nitrogen that can apparently be produced in sizes large enough for windows; aluminum oxide, a chemical compound of aluminum and oxygen (Al2O3) is made transparent through a process of fusing fine particles; and transparent nanophase aluminum in various colors.
  • Al2O3 has been around a bit longer than Star Trek. It’s variously known as corundum, sapphire, or ruby.
• Fans of Star Trek wrote so many letters to President Gerald R. Ford, that eventually, he did name the first full-scale prototype Space Shuttle Enterprise instead of Constitution as planned. The shuttle subsequently appeared on murals in both Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as the opening credits of Star Trek: Enterprise, implying that in the Trek universe the starship was named after the shuttle which was partially named after the previous ships bearing the name Enterprise like the WWII U.S.S Enterprise carrier making this Art Imitates Life plus Life Imitates Art.
  • In one Expanded Universe novel, Kirk actually commanded the space shuttle Enterprise.
• The creator of the system to tag music was inspired by the Next Generation episode A Matter Of Time in which, as a throwaway gag, Data has ordered the computer to play him four symphonies at once. He ignored the gag and thought "hey, it might be a pretty cool to tag music files so that you actually could tell the computer to play you a specific artist or album", and the rest is history.
• Richard Branson has also named his first commercial passenger spacecraft the VSS Enterprise.
• Let's not forget how the ever-versatile Tricorder (and to a lesser extent, the thin computer pads of TNG) inspired the creation of Palm Pilots, PDAs, and - eventually - the iPhone.
  • Followed by the iPad, and the recent tablet craze - which of course, bears more than just a casual resemblance to those data pads.
  • In a case of Defictionalization glurge, Gene Roddenberry made it clear that the term "Tricorder" was public domain, available to anyone who could build a scientific instrument similar to the prop. The latest example of this is the Tricorder X PRIZE, announced in 2011, which will be awarded to the first portable medical tool that can provide instant diagnoses a la Star Trek's medical tricorders.
• The Captain's Log - voice and handwriting recognizing software/hardware.
• Not to mention all sorts of stories of Real Life celebrities looking up with admiration to Nichelle Nichols as Nyota Uhura, television's first female African astronaut— such as Dr. Mae Jemison, NASA's first female African-American astronaut.
• The mini-datatapes used on the Original Series bore more than a passing similarity to later datatapes, 3.5 floppies, and especially Zip Disks. TNG's isolinear optical chips can now claim a real life antecedent with flashdrives.
• And now we can add the Universal Translator to the list. There is an app currently under development for the BlackBerry called Polyglotz. Now while there are a ton of "type out a phrase and get a translation" websites and programs, this is one of the first "spoken translators". You speak a phrase into your phone and the translated version is played back. It is really new and has a ton of bugs, so your BlackBerry won't help you commiserate with a roomful of Klingons. Yet...
• The Original Series also made a surprisingly accurate prediction of when the first manned moon mission would occur. "Tomorrow is Yesterday", first broadcast in early 1967, was a time-travel story in which the Enterprise is sent back in time to the year 1969, shortly before the launch of the first moon mission, which is said to occur on a Wednesday. The only facts missed: the month (though no month is actually mentioned on screen), and the time given for the launch is a few hours off from when it would happen in real life.
• In 1994, theoretical physicist and Trekkie Miguel Alcubierre published a theoretical paper describing a possible warp drive. Today the Alcubierre Drive is considered one of the most potentially feasible forms of Faster-Than-Light Travel ever conceived. It's not actually feasible yet (it requires something called "negative mass" to work), but future generations may look back on Miguel Alcubierre as the man who made Star Trek a reality.
  • One episode of TNG dealt with an experiment into a new form of warp-speed travel, involving a ship riding on a "soliton wave". In 2021, new research by physicist Erik Lentz suggested that a soliton might potentially provide a viable mechanism for an Alcubierre drive.
• The Star Trek Franchise showed humans becoming so technologically advanced that they are able to live in outer space on spaceships and space stations with food, home comforts and entertainment; the first twelve Star Trek films are now 12 of the 533 Listed Movies and TV shows on board the International Space Station.
• Ever noticed that Siri, Alexa, and Cortana all have default female voices? Blame Star Trek's talking computers. Air Force pilot Roddenberry knew that fighter pilots responded better to female voices for the automatic warning systems ("pull up", "missile lock", etc.); also, a higher voice is easier to hear. Lately some very artificial-sounding female voices have been used on commercial airlines, so the pilots can tell this is the computer talking and not a female voice coming over the regular radio. Somewhere, Gene specified that the computer voice sounds like Majel because Number One (Majel's first role in the show) had installed the computer voice system for the Big E, and programmed it with her own voice.

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