Beam me up, Scotty

 

It's been nearly 55 years since Star Trek found its way to our television screens, and what amazing stuff it was to see.  It was science fiction, of course, none of it was real, and hardly any of it could ever possibly be real.  In 1966, we hadn't even landed on the moon, although we were on the way, and determined to give it one heck of a try.

Space travel was imminent.  Maybe not to the stars, but at least to the closest round rock that circled the sun along with us.  The other things though, all too commonplace aboard the Starship Enterprise, were far too fanciful to ever happen down here on earth.

Take for example the view screen that covered the wall in front of Captain Kirk's command chair.  Compare that to our 12" black and white tv screen of the day.  Not even close, but... not too toooo dissimilar to that big old 60" flat screen in your living room.

Then there was the computer which basically ran the whole ship and was an endless storehouse of needed information.  You just had to ask it something, like "Computer, how far is it to Romulus?"  Hmmm... almost like our saying "Alexa, how far is it to New York?"

What about those neat little communication devices that not only allowed crew members to speak to each other over vast distances, but also had the ability to tap into the information banks of the computer.  Sort of like... a smart phone?

Ok, ok, so maybe in time we did manage to catch up with those kind of things, but, "Beam me up Scotty?"  Teleportation?  Nah, way too far fetched, right?

Well hold on a sec, don't go telling that to the good folks at NASA, because they've just done exactly that with photons, and atoms.  Given, they are tiny little things that we can't even see with the naked eye, but they did it none the less, physically teleported something from one place to another.  At first, a few inches, then a couple of feet.  Their last attempt however landed one of those little critters 27 miles away.  Twenty Seven miles...

If you want to read about it, use the link below.

A lot of the words were too big for me though...

Link: BigThink.com

#scifi #startrek #teleportation

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