Quote: "everything you see in the Star Trek universe (including warp travel) is possible. "
lol, warp travel in the way they discribe is actually an impossibility. First you have a magical "warp field" that is supposed to reduce the whole mass of the starship. Secondly they are generating, in real time, anti-matter. Everything we do to gain energy harnesses matter. At 100% efficancy you will be able to convert every single tiny bit of the energy that matter is made up of, and use it as power. So to make 1 unit of anti-matter and 1 unit of matter (remember they never specify a fuel source merely the spontainous generation of matter and anti-matter) you would be using exactly the same amout of energy as a 100% efficant release of energy. So the ultimate you can achive is the constant making and breaking of both anti-matter and matter. The only point at which anti-matter would ever be useful, is to have massive reactors on earth or somewhere else, making it, and allowing ships to refuel with it.
So you make 1 unit of matter and 1 unit of anti-matter with 2 units of energy, then smash them together and get 2 units of energy, which is required to make 1 unit of matter and 1 unit of anti-matter.
The warping of space is possible I'm given to understand, using very, very powerful magnetic fields. So that bit is true, theoretically. But as you approch the speed of light, the ship mass goes up and up and up, meaning more and more and more energy is required. According to relitivity this means infinant energy is required to achive the speed of light.
The only way I can think of getting a ship to travel at faster-than-light-speeds is to make matter emulate the photon, no one really knows what it is, it's both a wave form and a particle, suggesting perhaps that there is a thrid state of matter between the two. Of cause what a human and ship would look like after undergoing transformation is the question. I think the best you could hope for, is to have two very large stations, one that converts and sends, and one that receives and converts.
So no, Star Trek may have predicted things like PDA's and mobile telephones (which by the way don't have anything like the power requred to reach a ship in orbit, only the closet repeater tower) and may predict other things in the future. But it is just fiction. For instance their usage of the word Tachyon, which is a threortical particle that exists in the water around at nuclear reactor. It sounds impressive but might not even exist. All the stuff they say sounds feaisable because it's moderately good writing, but at the end of the day, star trek is merely fiction, and should be treated as such.
I lay upon my bed one bright clear night, and gazed upon the distant stars far above, then I thought... where the hell is my roof?
