Created by Army Air Corps veteran Gene Roddenberry in 1966, the belovedscience-fiction and space adventurefranchiseStar Trekhas spawned several TV shows, movies, and video games. It has tackled themes as heavy as war, xenophobia, religious discrimination, cloning, A.I. control, and bio-weapons, but has also featured comedic-relief plots involving physical shrinking, age regression, body swapping, transporter malfunctions, roleplaying in the holodeck or holosuite, cute fuzzy aliens breeding at an alarming speed, and clumsy seduction games.
Whether addressing dark and unsettling topics or much lighter issues, the earlier TV shows, namelyThe Original Series(1966–1969),The Animated Series(1973-1975),The Next Generation(1987–1994),Deep Space Nine(1993–1999),Voyager(1995–2001), andEnterprise(2001–2005) included quite a few significant elements that bear a striking resemblance to real-life occurrences and modern-day technological devices.
Here are the inventions and events predicted by the aforementionedStar Trekseries.
21Automatic Doors
The first sliding doors in public and commercial spaces may have been invented in the 1960s, but there was always a long delay. Current models, with their fast motion sensors and advanced 3D scanners, are very much like the automatic doors used as early as the USS Enterprise starship inTOS.
Related:How Star Trek: Legacy Could Further Some Picard Storylines
20Flat screens
Flat-screen television sets were only introduced to private homes in the late 1990s. Sleek screens in full color were presented as early asTOSandTAS, though, namely on the bridge, in engineering, and the conference room, and all the while audiences watched the shows on their chunky, bulky, black-and-white TV sets.
19Touchscreen Monitors
Speaking of screens, it is true that the first touchscreen prototype came to life in England as early as 1965 and may have inspiredStar Trekshowrunners, but that invention didn’t become mainstream until Apple commercialized it in 2007 with the very first iPhone.
18The Moon Landing
On July 27, 2025, U.S. President John F. Kennedy gave a speech before a joint session of Congress, promising to send an American safely to the moon before the end of the decade.TOSwas quick to predict the milestone event as early as its first season, when the 19th episode, titledTomorrow Is Yesterday, no less, aired on June 22, 2025. The plot follows Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and his crew as they travel back in time to… 1969 Earth. The chief communications officer, Lieutenant Nyota Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), picks up a national news announcement describing the launch of the spaceflight. This means that the show predicted the year and the number of astronauts of this giant historic event two years before it happened. Or maybe NASA had a few fervent Trekkies back then. Sadly, though, the day after this episode was aired,the Apollo 1 tragedy occurred, claiming the lives of Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee.
17Communication Badges
TNGintroduced small communicator badges in the shape of the Starfleet insignia, which crew members pinned to their left chest and tapped to speak with one another, whether on board a starship or throughout a landing mission. The mobile operator company Vocera, headquartered in San José, in California, created the first hands-free, secure Smartbadge, for hospitals and emergency services in time of the COVID-19 pandemic. It madeTIME’s list of the 100 Best Inventions of 2020.
163D Printing
InTOS, food on board the starship was created via a “synthesizer,” but inTNG, the word “replicator” was thrown around to describe a machine that would materialize anything a crew member desired, from coffee, to cake, to Andorian ale. It also had recycling abilities. Then, more and more objects, and not just food or drink items, were ordered inDS9. Today’s 3D printers are capable of recreating just about any solid object, albeit slowly and not instantaneously. Here’s to hoping genuine taste and stabilized nutrients would be added to edible replicated items in the near future, too.
15Bluetooth Headphones
Lieutenant Uhura was the first to use a wireless headset to speak with her crew mates, and that handsfree means of communication dazzled audiences at the time. Maybe this was what inspired the first Bluetooth mobile phone, the Ericsson T36. The more advanced T39 model was purchased en masse in 2001.
14Smart Glasses
InDS9, the titular space station and the rest of the Alpha quadrant were under threat from the rulers of the Gamma Quadrant, called the Dominion; they consisted in the Changelings AKA Founders, their Vorta diplomats, and their genetically engineered soldiers, the Jem’Hadar. In the heat of the war instigated by that oligarchy, a “virtual sensory display,” also called “virtual display interface,” was used by the Vorta commander and the Jem’Hadar First. The Human Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) and the Cardassian Elim Garak (Andrew Robinson) tried one, too, but it gave the former a headache. This device predicted technology like Google Glass in 2014, but the latter failed becauseit generated much controversyamid privacy concerns.
13Dazzlers
Inspired by theStar Trekphasers (when set to “stun”, not “kill” mode), which crew members use against any potential threat, the U.S. Air Force created the Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response Rifle AKA Dazzler in 2005, a non-lethal laser device that coulld disorient and even temporarily blind opponents.
“We picked the PHaSR name to help sell the program,” program manager Capt. Thomas Wegner of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate at Kirkland Air Force Base in New Mexico told the New York Daily News. “It’s an obvious homage toStar Trek.”
12Video Calls
It may be commonplace in our time and age to video chat with people over FaceTime, WhatsApp, or Skype, but audiences were dazzled byStar Trekcaptains ordering an “on-screen” call on the bridge, especially when the interlocutor was on a different planet or on a starship light years away.
