A WAGON TRAIN TO THE FUTURE

There was an article or two which came out last week announcing that scientists had had some success in creating a “tractor beam” which, incidentally, isn’t a large piece of steel that you attach to a piece of farm machinery, but a abbreviation of “attractor beam” which is the kind of electronic super-gizmo Captain Kirk used to use to drag bits of space debris, random shuttlecraft and long-lost super-criminals towards his spaceship at the click of a big switch or twelve.

This, I realised, would no doubt go some way towards creating a whole slew of tiresome articles (not unlike this one), claiming that the world is becoming more like “Star Trek” every day and what “visionary genii” were involved in creating that show fifty years ago, and perhaps quietly forgetting that the narrative needs of a TV show which was set-up to be basically a “Western set in Space” (or “A ‘Wagon Train’ to the Stars”) required the characters to talk to each other over huge distances, land on planets, and zap things with space guns ,and so they would probably have had to have such things anyway.

The cleverness of the designers of that show was that they came up with relatively practical (if a little chunky) designs which generally stand up to closer scrutiny today than one or two of the other props of the time, although I still recall Mr Scott effectively talking into a silver toaster festooned with Christmas lights in one early episode, so they didn’t get everything right.

The “chunkiness” can be forgiven because props needed to be practical and had to fit the quite frankly enormous batteries of the time in or around them somewhere, and, to be honest, most of the “designers of the future” back then failed completely to predict the miniaturisation of such things and the coming of wireless technology.

Of course when people claim that the ascendance of the mobile phone into our everyday lives was predicted by “Star Trek”, albeit in a world 200 years beyond our own, it’s a very easy analogy for them to make but, as ever, things are seldom that simple.

After all, if there had never been a single episode of “Star Trek” ever made, wouldn’t we still have had mobile phones anyway…?

I do suspect, however, that they might have looked slightly different. I have this sneaking suspicion that a lot of the people working in scientific R&D and in design studios across the globe are the sorts of people who might also be “Star Trek” fans, and that more than a few of them are rather keen to shape the world into its image so that they can fulfil their fantasy of growing up to actually live in a “Star Trek” universe.

Perhaps that is why they called that discovery a “tractor beam” in the first place...?

Okay, Warp Drive and Matter Transporters might still be some way off, but today you can have your Communicators, Tricorders and “Phaser Beam” generators if you choose to.

So, perhaps designers are Trekkies in disguise all wanting to turn the world into “Star Trek” but many of the aspects of the world we live in fail to live up to its standards, and our willingness to reach to the stars seems ever more diminished by modern financial limits, so that houses that could be built with all the modern environmental concerns (like built-in solar panels) are prohibitively expensive, and the short term economic thinking is that houses need to be cheap and affordable and such add-ons are unnecessary…

But this is always a problem when it comes to real people and their own personal needs and ambitions. We might all accept that it is in the long-term good for the economy that we don’t get a pay rise again this year, but our own very personal short-term thinking about pay is that we don’t like that idea all that much when we struggle to buy the season ticket or the petrol that actually gets us to work.

It’s a very hard sell to tell us that we’re going to have to start paying now for a High-Speed train which we might not be able to use until twenty years from now, by which time we might just have invested the first teleporters anyway.

Although I doubt it…

The E.U. seeing the wisdom of investing billions of Euros into research into the fabulous new discovery of the material we currently call Graphine might well mean that those vast spaceships might one day be able to leap off the drawing boards and head out towards the stars, but it’s hard to persuade people of what a miraculous material it might turn out to be until they start seeing some practical uses for the stuff.

Unless they’re “Star Trek” fans, of course…