Dammit, man! I'm a Doctor not a Physicist

This weekend, I went and saw Star Trek like millions of other people, but I believe I may have gotten something more from it than 7.33333333456 percent of them.

The movie made me realize just how far technology has come in the last 40 years and how much it will continue to evolve.

Watching the amazing graphics, intense explosions, and green skinned alien women, I remembered the original series. You used to be able to see the string piloting the model ship when they flew through space, explosions were tiny if there at all and where mostly sparks, and let’s just say the green skin was less than believable. Although at the time, the graphics didn't seem that poor, even if they were still ridiculous sometimes. They became a part of the show. The fact that all of the alien races were just humans with a couple of prosthetics was something people came to love.

Graphics now are so much more advanced than they use to be. We can create things beyond our wildest imagination and put them onto the screen. This allowed the new Star Trek movie to create a world you could really believe in; an earth that could be our foreseeable future. It isn't so hard to believe when the green skinned aliens actually look like their skin is meant to be as such.

Thinking about our future and Star Trek brings up all sorts of ideas. Will we be able to time travel? Will we explore the far reaches of the universe in manned spaceships? Will we ever learn to 'warp' or 'beam' ourselves?

I don't know if technology will ever go that far, but one aspect of the movie's technology did make sense to me. In one scene, the Vulcans are seen learning in half sphere like areas, comprised of screens and 3D displays. They are taught via computer in a separate area from their peers, sectioned off so as to promote faster, better, and more specialized learning.

Will we one day learn like that? Will we sit in a circle and learn from a computer while our peers do the same far from us. As we talked about in class, Phoenix University is the most popular college in the US, and that is essentially what its students do. In the future will all schools functions as such. Would it even be a good thing for such a thing to happen? Who Knows...all I know is that I'm not a physicist and neither is McCoy.