>> Of all the cool gadgets in Star Trek that could have seen reality, we end up with a crude version of the medical scanner. <<
We have built a starship with an Ion Propulsion System. The Warp Drive may take a lot longer. To the amazement of scientists, we’ve found a loophole in the Uncertainty Principle to allow us to construct a photonic teleportation device, even though it works only one cell at a time. We’ve built huge, flat, big-screen TVs, like Kirk was always watching from his Captain’s chair. We’ve got telecommunications devices as small and more versatile as the Next Generation’s. We’ve got doors that open automatically, and elevators that go on voice command.
Oops. One cell was supposed to read one atom.
I guess its not as bad as I thought. Other than the flat panel displays, I was sort of hoping phasers, transporters, and warp drive would have been priorities.
Of course, those got all the glory, but the real useful things would have been the ships’ artificial gravity systems (which presumably allow inertial dampening) and the matter/antimatter power systems.
You know its all Bush’s fault we don’t have these things...