In the process of exploring the final frontier, the crew of Star Trek made use of technology born of the creator’s imagination. But much of that technology has been realized - at least to some extent - by the year 2019.
Communicators
Should you still have a flip-style phone in your possession, like I do, you have a piece of tech straight out of Star Trek. In fact, TrekMovie.com suggests "the modern flip-style mobile phone was inspired by the communicators from the original Star Trek.” As Oscar Wilde famously quipped, “Life imitates art.” This has proven true for our cell phones.
So back when Paramount was working on releasing its 2009 Star Trek movie, it partnered with Nokia and Verizon for a Star Trek-themed promotional campaign.
Europeans even had the opportunity to purchase a special Star Trek version of the Nokia 5800 (non-flip) cell phone, which threw in “some Star Trek-themed content.”
There must have been some really die-hard fans of the original series at Nokia. Back in 2008, they built 14 prototypes of a cell phone that looked exactly like the communicators used by Captain Kirk and his crew with the functionality of the Nokia N76 flip phone.
The universal translator
The fleet on Star Trek often has to communicate with aliens whose native language is not English, and once in a while, you do get to hear Klingon or another alien language. But most of the time, everyone is speaking in English. How does that work?
The Doctor Who series explains the same phenomenon by saying the Tardis automatically translates everything expressed by both humans and aliens; Star Trek attributes it to something much smaller known as the universal translator.
If you have any questions at all about how its function and evolution has changed throughout the different manifestations of the series, you can likely find it on the Memory Alpha site. It cites the original series’ creator, Gene Roddenberry who wrote the following:
“We establish a ‘telecommunicator’ device early in the series, little more complicated than a small transistor radio carried in a pocket. A simple ‘two-way scrambler;’ it appears to be converting all spoken language into English."
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