4 Star Trek technologies that are almost here (and 3 that are really far off)

Want a piece of those incredible technologies from Star Trek? You’ve already got it. Those automatically opening doors existed when the first Star Trek episode aired 43 years ago. Cellphones (think Motorola StarTAC), and smartphones blow away the capabilities of the communicators of Kirk, Picard, Janeway and Archer. Bluetooth earpieces make Lieutenant Uhura’s look primitive by a parsec and a half, and today’s speech recognition could easily hold its own against the Enterprise computer’s.

Still, Kirk and co. have plenty of stuff that we can only dream about at this point. When you start talking about traveling many times the speed of light, holographic simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, replicating food inside an everyday appliance, and beaming quintillions of atoms from one place to another… those are a ways off.

Or are they?

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