Predictable

I have often opined that all the technology shown on Star Trek TNG is within our reach (except FTL travel, holodeck simulations and transporters, naturally.  We do have tactical lasers, however, so there’s that).  My phone does what their comm systems did minus Majel Barret’s  voice.  The iPad is pretty close to the little pads the actors carried around with them (Wil Wheaton said they were kind of cue cards).

In a further fevered hallucination, I pictured a time-traveller from the future inspiring the writers of STTNG to write about a future containing all these things, because inspiration is well known to come from science fiction. In the movie Trekkies, an apparently otherwise sane woman wears her ST uniform to work, where she likes to be addressed as “Commander”.

It’s a documentary.

Imagine a few thousand faithful steadily expanding influence over popular culture until the 23rd century.

Robert Heinlein invented the waterbed, after all.