Are we Trek yet? – A guide for how close we are to Star Trek technology
78 comments
·July 23, 2025kmacleod
The technologies I’d like to see tracked include post-scarcity economics, resource-based distribution, and needs-based allocation systems.
bnpxft
We'll never be Star Trek without these because the tech of Trek will just be used by the powerful to exploit and repress us.
g-mork
I think The Expanse did a much better job of modelling the reality of future economics than trek ever got close to. Everyone living on hand outs is the road to hell
dinfinity
> I think The Expanse did a much better job of modelling the reality of future economics than trek ever got close to.
That is because The Expanse does a lot of "the stuff that happen(s)(ed) on Earth, but in space!". Don't get me wrong, it also does a lot of great scifi stuff, but the factions and people are quite one-dimensional unimaginative analogues of known factions.
This approach makes it relatable (and commercially more successful) but not necessarily more realistic. It's like predicting flying horse carriages and flying cars versus helicopters, planes, and rockets.
Related: IMHO, one of the worst things about the 'relatable extrapolation of the present' aspect is that it limits popular scifi enormously. There's usually some special space carved out for humans or very human-like creatures doing very human things with the environment pretty magically being incredibly Earth-like all the time for hundreds or thousands of years in the future, even though the lives of humans today are already incredibly alien compared to those of humans just 200 years ago.
bitmasher9
They depict two very different economies.
If food, energy, medical care and transportation was as cheap as it is in Trek then it might actually make it to post scarcity. One thing that makes Star Fleet such a successful organization is combination meritocracy and diversity. I think any organization that nails that will be very successful.
In The Expanse the economies are much more relatable ones of exploitation, poverty, and extreme scarcity. Specifically watching the nationalist Martian society collapse was very interesting and felt realistic.
delichon
I agree, and one reason is that it didn't dally with the post-scarcity fantasy.
XorNot
The Earth of the Expanse has a much higher standard of living then the Earth of today.
This is similar to when people call The Sprawl a dystopia: conditions in it are far better then what most people live in today.
gmuslera
That is a 1st world country point of view. Reality is that we don't have an unified, global living standard now, and neither probably by the Expanse point of time.
And if a critical amount of people decided to try luck working on asteroids, it might mean that they didn't had a comfortable way of life down here at the start of the process, and probably by the end of it too.
insane_dreamer
That's because today's Earth poor are the Outers in the Expanse -- and they're as bad off or worse than today
lotsofpulp
Why do you need these
>resource-based distribution, and needs-based allocation systems.
if you have this
>post-scarcity economics
bryanlarsen
Land, labour and dilithium crystals are still scarce in the Star Trek universe.
And AFAICT even energy and material goods are scarce in the economic sense. The replicator can replicate replicators so that and any goods that a replicator can create seem not scarce, but the replicator still requires energy to run. Energy is crazy cheap and abundant in Star Trek, but it's not unlimited.
Henchman21
After Khan wiped out the population of India and China, land was not scarce.
mandmandam
> Land, labour and dilithium crystals are still scarce in the Star Trek universe.
Land can't be that scarce. How many times did we see an entire planet colonized by like 200 people? Also, it seems like very few cities in the future have put hard caps on building height.
People have their own replicators, as you say; and cheap abundant energy. The need for labour is vastly reduced.
And dilithium, while 'rare' is not an essential commodity for anything except space travel.
> even energy and material goods are scarce in the economic sense.
Sure; but they are abundant enough that 'fair distribution' hardly matters, which I think was the OP's point.
baal80spam
> needs-based allocation systems
This one is a fantasy, which communism (that I lived in) had shown many times.
anonzzzies
Communism was never post scarcity; if there is basically infinite of whatever we need, nothing that we have seen before applies anymore.
sokoloff
If there’s infinite of whatever you need, you don’t need needs-based allocation. It can be entirely wants-based.
bryanlarsen
Your communism didn't include replicators and cheap energy to run them.
Svip
Communicator
Communicate remotely between two arbitrary points.
fouronnes3
My favorite game watching TNG is trying to figure out how the communicators somehow always perfectly know when the user means to use them. It's very common for a character to tap it to initiate the conversation, but then the back and forth is magically seamless, as well as the end of the communication. All while being mixed up with talking to other characters mid conversation.
teraflop
According to the TNG Technical Manual (which is not entirely canon, but whatever) it's all handwaved by a context-sensitive AI that figures out who you're trying to talk to from context clues.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/55156/why-is-there...
MisterTea
Obviously it's all handled by the AI running on the TPU in the communicator powered by a miniature matter-antimatter reactor.
null
XorNot
"<number> to beam up" drives my wife nuts and she's right: how the heck does the transporter tech know who they're targeting?
Like sure I guess you could infer it by grouping I guess but how does that selection UI work?
(Though that's far less infuriating then the question of why transporter pattern boosters exist, can be transported, and yet numerous episodes exist of beaming into an environment and not being able to beam out. Why is standard protocol not to always send down a signal booster?)
Svip
The '<number> to beam up' line is an instruction to the transporter operator; since they can detect life signs, they can guess by proximity. It's thus not the computer making the call, but a human operator.
jerf
Satellite phones fit the bill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_phone
They're not communicator sized yet as far as I know, but they've shrunk a lot.
You can't make blanket statements about a massive franchise written by dozens if not hundreds of writers over decades, but generally the communicators are not depicted as being able to communicate much beyond orbit either, so it's not like we need to match some sort of cross-system communication.
The orbital parameters the ships go in to for their "standard orbit" are also very hazy, but given the power the ships are demonstrated as having in both tech specs and visual representations it's very believable that during important missions the ship can linger within visual range of a given spot on an unexplored planet indefinitely, not necessitating a ring of satellites be deployed or anything. This also explains the lack of "Beam me up" - "Sure, in five minutes when we come back over the horizon" conversations. So we probably only need to match line-of-sight communications.
Sharlin
Trek doesn’t have anything remotely resembling orbital mechanics, the ships are just assumed to "park" wherever needed (a planet may be shown to rotate under them because they’re supposed to do that, but that doesn’t really affect anything, it’s purely for show).
ozim
Growing up in 90’s I totally count my smartphone as something from StarTrek if not better.
orbisvicis
I'm going to need references for these claims, like a cloaking device. BAE and Northrup Grumman?
edit... Actually a lot of these are going to need evidence of progress beyond a mere website.
cainxinth
We also need another one for the alternative scenario: Are We Mad Max Yet?
hollywood_court
I think we're much closer to that than we are to Trek.
NoGravitas
Well, the 21st century of the Trek timeline included mass homelessness and WWIII, so we're pretty close to that.
Balgair
Depends on where you're sitting I'd guess. San Francisco Bay area? Nope. South Sudan? Been Mad Max for a while, near as I can tell.
mhogers
How close are we to building our own digital Commander Data with the current iteration of voice based agents? "In progress" according to the website - mind blowing that this is current reality.
Cool website. Would love to subscribe to status changes via email.
actionfromafar
Extremely far. Not very far from the ship computer. It doesn’t seem sentient but it has a voice interface to all operational data/stats plus a snapshot of all known knowledge at the time of departure from space port.
ajdude
When dealing with LLMs and prompt engineering to get CAI to do what I needed to do, I am reminded of the scene from TNG where Geordi is continuously rephrasing and readjusting his requests for the computer in the holodeck (especially around 3:30 timestamp):
actionfromafar
That episode is almost uncanny. So accurate seeming and foresighted.
mhogers
I had not considered the ship computer, indeed feels more close to current progress. Having said that, I started rewatching TNG recently and it is quite fascinating to compare Data to the current voice models.
actionfromafar
It's hinted at that Data has a voice model as subsystem. :) He allegedly can't use contractions IIRC. (Then of course he does eventually, because what actor could keep track of that, but anyhow.)
tonetegeatinst
When it comes to Gravity boots, I think using a force sensor to detect the user placing the foot on a surface is going to be essential.
From detection, activating an electromagnet or a material inspired by geko grip that is activated by a current would be a great start.
itisuseless
Won't load without JS. Was it absolutely needed?
digger495
I don't really see the point of this until we have abundant, virtually free energy. (Which I think we never will, thanks to climate change and capitalism)
ChrisArchitect
Dev left a note on a submission a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492750
jpm_sd
I think we're more or less on schedule?
patel011393
Now let's see this timeline for how close we are to Harry Potter tech. In some ways, we're closing the gap.
This is fun - although I think the scoring system could do with some weighting.
"Dematerialize matter from one location and then rematerialize it in a second location. "
is worth the same as "Automatic sliding doors"