10 Times Star Trek Predicted The Future
5. Transporters
Transportation and teleportation have existed in the human imagination for centuries. Shakespeare wrote about teleportation in The Tempest and it features in 1001 Arabian Nights. So, what is it doing on this list? Simply put, Star Trek made the transporter mainstream - and it did it to save money.
The transporter was a plot device that allowed the crew to travel to different planets each week without having to build shuttle sets - even though some crafty production crew found a way around this.
Unfortunately, the transporter as envisaged in Star Trek is still within the realm of science fiction - thanks to the rather annoying existence of quantum mechanics. Without those, it would be a breeze!
As it stands, the human race is capable of transferring the quantum information of a particle from one location to another. This is the first step is transportation. What would be required for a transporter itself to exist would be the ability to encode the quantum information of every particle in one object and then be able to recreate that object in another location.
However.
As it stands, that would allow the second object to be created (if the human race had the technology to do such a thing) - thus creating a duplicate of the original. Thomas Riker and the evil version of Kirk are both a little closer to the idea of the current theoretical level of where we are at.
But it is not all bad news - that first step has been made. While there may be many years left before a working transporter is available for use, with enough imagination, innovation (and disregard of quantum mechanics!), who knows?