Star Trek’s communicator became the flip phone. Its PADD tablet became the iPad. Its tricorder is now a real clinical device you can hold in your hand — I know, because I ran the XPRIZE that built it. That’s not a run of luck. Humans build what they first imagine, which means fiction is the R&D department of civilization. The problem: for two generations our most vivid, most-watched, most-loved fiction has been dystopian. We have been running a global simulation of failure and calling it entertainment. I think that’s a design flaw, and I’m working on fixing it.
Martin Cooper made the first handheld cellphone call in 1973. He was an engineer at Motorola. He has said, out loud and on the record, that the thing he was chasing was the communicator from Star Trek. He watched Captain Kirk flip open a little device, talk to his ship, and snap it shut, and he decided that object should exist in the real world. So he built it.
A piece of set dressing written to solve a screenwriting problem vs. the question ‘how do you get Kirk to talk to the Enterprise without a phone booth on an alien planet’, became the seed of a $500 billion industry. The flip phone was Star Trek fan fiction rendered in plastic and silicon.
It keeps happening. The PADD, the flat glass tablet the crew carried around, showed up in 1987 on The Next Generation. Steve Jobs put the iPad in your hands in 2010. The tricorder — that handheld medical scanner Dr. McCoy waved over sick crew members — is no longer a prop.
In 2012 I launched the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE to make McCoy’s scanner real. Five years and 300-plus teams later, a family-run team out of Pennsylvania — an ER doctor named Basil Harris and his brother George, working out of their basement — won it. Their device, DxtER, could diagnose 13 medical conditions and monitor five vital signs, no doctor in the room. A brother-and-brother team beat the giants because they’d grown up wanting to build Star Trek. The prop became an FDA pathway.
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