How much has humanity advanced since the first episode of Star Trek? And how far are we from the world depicted in the show?
This post tries to answer these questions.
54 years have passed since the first episode of Star Trek aired. Star Trek is set in an advanced future universe, a blissful Utopia full of scientific, technological and social advances. When it first aired, in 1966, many of the things it showed where mere dreams. But how far have we gone toward the Federation of Planets?
We’re going to assess how far we were in 1966 from the Star Trek universe, how far we are in 2020 and what has been our progress ratio, if any. Then we’re going to extrapolate it and deduce when will we arrive (if ever) to the promised world.
I know it’s a useless exercise, but it’s fun, so don’t resist: resistance is futile.
Our scale: From 1 to 5, being 1 the less advanced and 5 the most advanced state.
- Nah, that’s impossible.
- I could imagine that.
- We have walked a little toward it.
- It needs work, but it’s underway.
- We’ve done that.
Scientific advances
Warp drive. Since 1916 we know that wormholes are a possibility contemplated in general relativity. So this was almost a 2 when Star Trek first aired. In 1994 Miguel Alcubierre proposed the Alcubierre drive, a small step toward the feasibility of the warp drive. To read more about the Alcubierre drive, go here.
In 1966: 1,7
In 2020: 2
Teleportation. In Star Trek, teleportation was introduced as a means to save money in special effects. Had teleportation not been there, every time the Enterprise crew went to a planet, you would’ve needed some footage of a shuttle leaving the ship and landing on the planet. Expensive and repetitive. Teleportation is a much better narrative device.
No one really expects that a narrative device could turn into something real.
This happened in 1993, when Charles Bennet and others coined the term quantum teleportation. It’s a way to use one of the most important quantum phenomena, entanglement, to transmit information between two separated points.
It doesn’t work quite like Star Trek’s teleportation in the sense that you don’t need to disintegrate the original subject in order to avoid duplicates: it looks like nature doesn’t allow them.
While we are very far from transmitting something as complex as a human being, we have teleported some particles with great success.
1966: 1
2020: 2
Infinite energy. Well, maybe not infinite, but Star Trek is a universe of many riches, and that always comes down to one thing: very cheap energy. And very sustainable.
The sources of energy in 1966 were the same as in 2020: fossil fuels, nuclear fission and energy coming from the Sun in different flavors: photovoltaic, hydropower, geothermal, etc.
There have been a couple of attempts at harnessing nuclear fusion, the same energy source that powers the Sun, but they haven’t been fruitful.
So, while renewable energies are now more efficient than in 1966, the progress toward infinite energy hasn’t been too successful.
1966: 1
2020: 1,1
Alien life. We have looked for it, but we haven’t found any. Sure, some organic compounds in a comet, some microbes that could come from Mars, but nothing definitive.
At least we now know that our galaxy is teeming with planets, but we know nothing about life.
1966: 1
2020: 1
Medicine. Medicine has come a long way in the last 50 years. We have beaten many types of cancer, we are better at diagnosing with non-intrusive methods, we have eradicated several diseases from the planet, etc. In this page there are a lot of gorgeous charts to see how life expectancy has improved with time. In fact, we can track life expectancies in the world, and we find that in 1966 was 54.1 years and in 2020 is 74.5 years. That means that a person will live almost a 40% longer now. So if we measure 1966 as a 2, we have:
1966: 2
2020: 2,75
Advances in technology.
Talking computers/Artificial Intelligence. If you want to check how were computers back in 1966, you can go here.
They sure are far away from Siri. We have advanced a lot in vocal interfaces and in communicating with machines and they have become fairly good at interpreting what we want. Sure there’s still work to be done, but talking with artificial intelligences is a reality nowadays. Here we also include the Universal Translator, an essential Star Trek feature; there are apps nowadays that do a decent job translating the most common sentences.
1966: 1
2020: 3.5
Communicators. Another area we have really mastered. In 2020, not only Starfleet officers carry portable communications devices on them, but every single human being. Sure you need an internet connection for them to work, but it’s not difficult to imagine the Enterprise projecting some wifi connectivity over the visited planets.
1966: 1
2020: 4
Cloaking devices / Phasers / Shields / Scanners / general gizmos
I am grouping all these technical improvements in one paragraph for two reasons: first, each of them, individually, is not as important as the rest on this list, and second, we don’t want this post to be impossibly long(er).
Phasers is a no, shields is a no, scanner is a somewhat and cloaking device is an early experimental stage. So this is not a great success.
1966: 1
2020: 1,2
Replicators. Replicators are a fundamental piece in the Star Trek utopia. They are machines that can transform energy into any kind of matter. Coupled with a cheap source of energy, they are the foundation of a very wealthy world.
In 2020 we can’t transmute energy into matter, but recently some interesting devices have appeared that are presumably the first step toward replicators: 3D printers. The commercial ones can turn plastic into objects, but there are some experiments with other materials and even food. The replicator is far away, but we have begun to walk the path.
1966: 1
2020: 1,5
Advancement of society.
If you want a utopia, it’s not enough with technical and scientific advances. In fact, those alone will probably lead you to a dystopia. You also need social advances. Let’s have a look at a few social issues.
Democracy everywhere. The Federation of Planets is one big, unified democracy. Of course democracy is not a perfect system, but it’s the best one that humanity has found till now.
Here we can see the percentage of people who lived under a democracy in 1966 and compare it to 2020. In 1966, 39% of people on Earth lived under a democracy. In 2020 that percentage is 56%. We have progressed a little. Again, if the baseline for 1966 is 2, we have:
1966: 2
2020: 2,9
No money necessary. In a world where everyone is incredibly rich, money probably would lose its power. This is related to how much things cost, or, again, how cheap energy is. As with energy, we haven’t progressed very much in this area and today a world without money is as illusory as it was in 1966.
1966: 1
2020: 1
Gender equality. Sure things are better now than in 1966, at least in some countries. But how much? The OECD publishes a gender inequality index, and in this book we can find that their index has increased from 62 to 68, being 100 a perfect situation of equality. Not very much.
1966: 2
2020: 2,2
Racism. Well, I have looked everywhere and I haven’t found a racism global index, so here we’re playing by ear.
Since 1966, the year the Black Panthers Party was founded, a few important things have happened in the fight for racial equality. The most important is probably the election of a black president in the U.S., but there have been great setbacks, like the assasination of Martin Luther King or the rise of many political parties throughout the world with clear nationalist and xenophobic ideas.
So, while we’re going to say that we are slightly better, we’re also claiming the improvement has not been great.
1966: 2
2020: 2,2
Conclusion.
Overall, with all the parameters weighting the same, which is a wild assumption on top of a lot of wild assumptions, we have a final score:
1966: 1,36
2020: 2,13
If we crunch a little the numbers, we find that, if this progress ratio holds steady and we are able to solve the really grave problems that we have, we will arrive to the world of Star Trek (a 5 in all the categories) in 2230.
Coincidentally, this is the year in which Spock and Sulu were born. I swear the results aren’t doctored.
Maybe Gene Roddenberry was really a visitor from the future.
Disclaimer.
You can disagree with this post and its assumptions in so many ways that I’m not counting them. Are these good indicators? Where are the other things that are also important? Why the progress is lineal? What if we all die because of the climate change (or a nuclear war, or the zombie apocalypse)? Why the scale is 1 to 5, and not 0 to 100 or e to pi?
Yes, all those and many more are valid points.
But it doesn’t matter, or at least, it doesn’t matter as much as the fact of posing the question. That is what is really important, that and the hope that someday we can all live in a better world. It’s up to us.
Timeline of advancement of humanity compared with Star Trek