Friday, March 29, 2024

FROM THE RIDGE: Maybe I was weird but I was right

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I don’t recall being a weird kid but my family thought I was and let me know it. Just because I watched Star Trek, Dr Who and Lost in Space.
Reading Time: 2 minutes

They would scoff and laugh at my programmes and the gadgets waved about by the characters as they battled aliens and sought to survive in the far-flung reaches of the universe.

But who is laughing now?

Captain Kirk and his mates would get beamed down onto some alien planet. If an emergency happened, and they always did, they’d whip out their communicators and call for back-up from the Enterprise.

There are not many reading this who don’t have their own communicator tucked into a pocket or charging on the windowsill. There are nearly five billion cell phones in use and these modern-day communicators do a heck of a lot more than just being able to dial up for help.

Bones used to give someone a shot most episodes because you are going to need an awful lot of vaccines when encountering new worlds. He used his trusty hypospray hypodermic injection, which used high-pressure air to squirt the meds through the skin.

They are now called jet injectors and mean you don’t need needles and can do lots of people in short time.

The crew of the USS Enterprise all carried phasers when going down onto an alien planet. Which was a good idea because it was a rare episode when they didn’t have to be used. But Captain Kirk was no imperialist invader and just about always instructed the crew to set them to stun, unless Klingons were involved.

Our own police force carries these things now but has been instructed not to call them phasers but instead Tasers.

How on earth, or not on earth, were Kirk’s crew going to understand beings whose first language wasn’t going to be English? Or any of the other 7000 languages we have on Mother Earth.

Cue the universal translator. They held it up to the half stunned local and got a pretty good idea what he was saying and where he was telling them to go.

Oh yeah, my cell phone has an app that lets me do that into other languages, not to mention the voice recognition on my PC.

When Mr Spock finally got killed his mates fired him out of the torpedo bay in a coffin-shaped casket to fly through space for all eternity.

In November 2014 the ashes of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry were blasted off into space. His remains were joined by those of Scotty (James Doohan) and the great science fiction writer Arthur C Clark. All three going where no man has gone before.

The Star Trek crew could talk and see each other from great distances on big screens. Basic teleconferencing now but a pretty unlikely idea back in the 1960s.

Spock would wander around a new planet with his trusty tri-recorder, which measured all sorts of useful information such as whether there was enough oxygen to breathe, were there nasty bugs floating around and was that thing over there worth eating.

Even Dr Who foretold future devices. The nasty Daleks were vulnerable little creatures that could use their minds to move their robotic outer shells around in order to exterminate anything that got in their way. This technology is just beginning to help people with disabilities to control bionic legs.

The Daleks voice synthesizers are now standard fare though not nearly as scary. Stephen Hawking used one for decades.

So, you have a weird kid watching something very odd?

You better be nice to them.

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