5 Star Trek Technologies That Predicted The Future

According to everything from Blade Runner to A Space Odyssey, we should already be zooming home from work in our flying cars, where robot butlers will serve us as we plan our next getaway to an orbiting Hilton. Trying to seriously predict the future is a losing battle, and for every supposedly eerie prophecy in fiction, dozens of stories have portrayed technological miracles or all-consuming apocalypses that never came to pass.

Sometimes, though, predictions do come true, even if they’re less about when we’ll start soaring through the stars and more about how we’ll live our lives on Earth. Star Trek has had a particularly notable track record, both because it takes its subject matter relatively seriously and because its longevity has given it a lot of kicks at the can. We’ll have to wait another 37 years to see if it was right about when we’d make first contact, but for now, here’s some Star Trek tech that looks mighty familiar in retrospect.

1. Tablet Computers

The PADD (Personal Access Display Device) was introduced in Season 1 of The Next Generation and quickly became a staple of the Trek era, subsequently appearing in Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, and throwback projects like Strange New World. (The Original Series also had a version of this, complete with an electronic pen, but the TNG PADD was a little more on-the-nose.)

Essentially a touchscreen tablet, PADDs are used for work, study, writing, and basically anything else you might use a modern tablet for, alongside some Trek-ier touches.

Ubiquitous, in one design or another, across both the Federation and nearly every species it encounters, the PADD has often been compared to the iPad. In 1987, though, it was more like a futuristic PDA; primitive personal digital assistants already existed when TNG debuted, and the technology would experience a boom throughout the ‘90s and early 2000s. Production designer Rick Sternbach has downplayed his apparent prediction, saying the PADDs he sketched up were merely extensions of a fairly obvious idea that had existed in sci-fi for decades. Still, it was the PADD that Steve Jobs cited when talking about the iPhone.

If there’s one thing the show got wrong, it’s the PADD’s capacity; many an episode has implied that someone is slammed with work by showing them struggling to hold half a dozen PADDs, or giving us a shot of PADD after PADD splayed across a desk. Then again, maybe Star Trek just predicted the ongoing RAM and storage crisis, too. If so, it might have also revealed what’s coming next: once the timeline jumped forward in shows like Discovery, the PADD had gone holographic.

2. Communicators

One of the few things PADDs don’t get used for is voice calls, and that, of course, is because Star Trek has always had the communicator. The Original Series’ communicator was designed as a futuristic anachronism; while Gene Roddenberry’s 23rd century would presumably be advanced enough to produce microscopic communications equipment, television audiences needed to immediately understand when Kirk and company were on the phone. The ships of TOS and its prequel, Enterprise, also sported wall- and desk-mounted intercoms, suggesting that communicators were a big deal if they were issued to landing parties.

And they were, as communicators flipping open and chirping at their users became one of the show’s iconic design elements. By the time The Next Generation rolled around, the idea of a button-sized comms device was deemed easier to parse, and the combadge became Trek’s new standard. But the communicator continued to fascinate both in-universe and without, remaining a staple of retro episodes, cosplay, and collectibles.

Today, your smartphone does pretty much everything a communicator does and more, except for send messages through subspace to orbiting vessels. A common urban legend is that Motorola engineer Martin Cooper was inspired by Star Trek when working on the first cell phone, but in reality, tech companies had long dreamed of such a communications breakthrough, and Cooper says that if any pop culture does deserve credit for the idea, it’s Dick Tracy and his two-way radio watch. Of all the sci-fi that tried to predict the future of telephony, however, Star Trek was among the most memorable, and it’s hard not to see similarities between Kirk’s communicator and the Motorola StarTACs and Razrs everyone was flicking open for a few years.

3. Video Calls

While Trek characters often chat away through their communicators and combadges, any important long-distance conversation is almost certainly taking place “on screen.” Whether you’re negotiating with a bloodthirsty Klingon captain in front of your whole bridge crew, or just calling Earth to offer Dad a quick life update, television’s visual nature means that these conversations have been taking place in video form since the show’s earliest days.

Technically, this was an example of reality inspiring fiction, as Bell Labs’ Picturephone debuted at the 1964 World’s Fair. And again, countless sci-fi projects dating back to the late 19th century had envisioned a future where phone calls had a visual element. What Star Trek hit on, though, was its application in the workplace. Couples and close family members certainly tend to hop on FaceTime just like A Space Odyssey foresaw, but video calls aren’t so ubiquitous that you’re fixing your hair and putting on a nicer shirt just to order a pizza, like a lot of other sci-fi predicted. These days, however, pretty much every white-collar worker gets pulled into a steady stream of Zoom calls, even if some of them could have been PADD messages. Whether you’re trying to stave off an enemy attack or just trying to get a marketing project across the finish line, our professional realities have become as video-based as Kirk and Picard’s were.

4. AI Addiction

We’re still far from enjoying something akin to Star Trek’s holodeck, but if that day ever comes, we should probably have mental health professionals on standby. While the downsides of the holodeck usually involve a program running rampant and/or hostile forces tampering with the safety protocols, the franchise has also touched on what you’d think would be a major problem throughout the Federation: holodeck addiction.

People have long escaped into video games and other hobbies beyond what’s healthy, so it’s not surprising that the troubled men and women of the future would get hooked on what’s basically the most incredible gaming system imaginable. But when Lieutenant Barclay used the holodeck to browbeat and seduce fictional versions of the Enterprise colleagues who made him terribly anxious, it’s hard not to picture the stories about real relationships getting blown up, or avoided altogether, by AI boyfriends and girlfriends.

Barclay wasn’t the only character to develop a holodeck problem; Geordi La Forge had a crush on a holographic version of a real scientist, and even Captain Janeway had trouble saying goodbye to her photonic Irish beau. But maybe the darkest prediction Trek nailed was when Quark tried to make Major Kira the nonconsensual star of a client’s erotic holosuite program; Grok and other major chatbots now offer a similar "service" on demand.

5. Computer-Assisted Flight

The mechanics of how the Enterprise and other Federation ships are flown have always been hazy; sometimes the helmsman is desperately whaling on their control panel while everyone stands amazed at their prowess, and sometimes they’re just plugging in a destination and sitting back to enjoy the ride. At the very least, we know shipboard computers crunch a lot of numbers for pilots, as Star Trek portrays complete manual control as a rare and desperate option.

And that, as pointed out by Ex Astris Scientia, was a groundbreaking idea for The Original Series to hit on. Go back a little further, to shows like Flash Gordon and Men Into Space, and spaceships were portrayed more like celestial submarines controlled entirely by hand, usually with the aid of a lot of knobs and levers.

But astronauts don’t head to the International Space Station by plotting a navigational chart and yanking on the throttle; SpaceX’s Dragon, NASA’s old Space Shuttle, and pretty much every other modern spaceship you can think of have all been fly-by-wire vessels that limit crew input to the absolute essentials. The most famous instance of astronauts having to go manual was Apollo 13, and that was sort of a big deal.

Experimental fly-by-wire jets predated Star Trek, but NASA declared its Lunar Landing Research Vehicle the first pure fly-by-wire aircraft when it debuted in 1968, while Apollo modules were controlled by a guidance computer that helped put men on the moon the same year The Original Series wrapped up. Before that, NASA astronauts on projects like Gemini really were yanking joysticks around, but Star Trek foresaw a future where computers would take over spaceship navigation — even if you occasionally have to call down to engineering for more power.