Star Trek TNG – The Start of My Fascination with Technology 

Star Trek TNG is a show I was destined to watch. My fascination with all things technology and space started at a very young age. Computers were, and still are, something that gets me excited about how far humans have come and how much potential there is still to encounter. Yes, playing around with my family’s first desktop computer containing a 5.25” floppy drive, 25 Mhz processor, and 40 MB hard drive paved the way to my future profession, but it was actually one television show that made an even bigger impact on me: “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

Why I was destined to watch this show. My dad could affectionately be called a “Trekkie.” Every night it came on during the late '80s/early '90s, I would sit down and watch it with him, marveling at what I saw. Of course, I thought Captain Jean-Luc Picard (the magnificent Sir Patrick Stewart) was wonderful, but the thing that entranced me the most was the technology and space innovation they had on Star Trek TNG. How neat was it that they could travel through space at lightning speed, visiting planets and encountering alien species that one could only dream of? How fun would it be to work as one of the operators that got to use the touch-screen computer equipment that helped fly the spacecraft, or talk to someone who was located on another ship and see them at the same time?

It is neat to see, thought to be many years out of reach during the airing of this show, how close we really are to creating these innovations, or how we have already made these technologies a reality. Although we may not be able to travel at lightning speed to other planets, we now are sending satellites and launchers to other areas of the universe to get a better idea of what is out there beyond our solar system, searching for other forms of life. We may not be able to transport anyone by “beaming” them up like on Star Trek TNG, but we do have touch screen instrument panels in the form of tablet computers and web cams that can display video and audio conversations seamlessly around the world. It will only be a matter of time before we are able to send humans to Mars or use “light speed” to fly to further reaches of the Milky Way. 

Kristen Mitchell, Dynetics

 

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