To Boldy Go Where No One Has Gone Before

"We want to make Star Trek real" The words used by billionaire businessman and former advisor to the President of the United States, Elon Musk.

How amazing would it be to travel the stars on the USS Enterprise? This is one of many fantasies that every nerd wishes to be a reality, to become a Starfleet officer on the USS Voyager and so on, to voyage the stars and to boldly go where no-one has gone before, except it wouldn't be bringing Star Trek into a reality at all, well not at first!

To fully understand this, we'll have to go back to 1969, during when NASA's Apollo 11 mission took place, the very first moon-landing. To this day many people believe it to have been faked, I mean it does beg to question 'how did they manage to use an analogue film camera with no atmosphere?' Well, they didn't, but they did, the official equipment they used was the Ground-Commanded Television Assembly (GCTA), definitely and highly advanced for it's time you could say.

It was this very equipment that was used to film the famous shot of Neil Armstrong climbing down the ladders while uttering the line "One small step for man, One giant leap for mankind" and it was then, when the mission to travel the stars began, but why has it taken so long to get to the point we are now?

That question can't have a much more simpler answer, and that answer is, over 700 failed missions and launches from 1969 to now, however those launches and missions haven't included super advanced equipment such as warp-cores and impulse engines, which I'm no scientist, but that will take a hell of a lot of resources and money to create, and that is another prime reason to why it has taken so long to get to this stage in production, because not only is it going to use up billions in resources but, may cost lives to build such advancements, and is this something you'd want your taxes to go towards?

The warp-core, is the main power-source of a star ship from Star Trek, but to make one, would include a material called Dilithium Crystals, which is partly science-fiction, so that aspect of Star Trek would not become a reality at all, but I am sure scientists would have a way to create a power-source based upon Matter and Anti-Matter using the gas of Dilithium of which is formed with 2 lithium atoms. Impulse engines on the other hand, is some-what more easier to deal with.

Deuterium used for the impulse engines, is one of two stable isotopes in hydrogen, many do believe the gas to mainly be science fiction, primarily due to the factor that it appears in No Man's Sky and Star Trek, two titles created in the Science Fiction genre. But what if I told you that Deuterium is in fact a real life gas and can be found in the murky depths of the ocean, not only there but in our own bodies as well, and approximately 1 in every 6,500 atoms of hydrogen, so with that in mind, the step towards impulse engines on a star ship is not only just a step, but a marathon.

From what we have learnt, 'Star Ships' from Star Trek will most indeed become a reality at some point in the near or far future, but the actual show of Star Trek would sadly not become a reality, and that is primarily based upon the politics of the world today. In Star Trek, both the academies and star ships are crewed with not only human but also extra-terrestrial life, at a time where humans have learnt to co-exist with what they don't understand, and currently we live in a time were other human beings are treated as if they are not human beings at all, but over time, the possibility of such future, is not impossible!

So could we see a time were we will seek out new life and new civilisations? Perhaps, and hopefully we will treat them better, than we treat ourselves.