Which classic of television Sci Fi is your favorite? So many to choose from, many of which you youngsters in the audience may not have even heard of. “Captain Video,” launched the genre in the US, and spawned a number of knock-offs. For the purposes of this article I am leaving out such anthologies as “Tales of Tomorrow,” and “The Outer Limits” because they do not create a cohesive world of their own. The next landmark in TV SciFi would likely be “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” notable also for being one of the first series to be a television adaptation of a movie released in theaters.

Then came “Star Trek” which ignited the fans imagination and appreciation so much that when the network announced they were cancelling the show, for the first time in the history of the media public outcry successfully demanded its return. At least for a while. Science Fiction waned from the eventual end of “Star Trek” until the late 1970’s when “Battlestar Gallactica” won the public back. Now many of you are back on board with the history and know much of the rest.

But Sci Fi is not limited to American Television. British BBC fans will have heard of “The Quartermass Experiment” and “Pathfinder” series. Some few of you may have even heard of “Star Maidens.” But by far the most popular series of the genre to come out of Britian, and the longest running Science Fiction series ever, and in the top 30 series of any kind is “Dr. Who.”

“What…” do you ask “does this have to do with Ghost Theory?”
It has to do with us, for one thing. What fascinates us about these stories is the exploration of our own curiosity. That same curiosity that leads us to explore the ideas of what is out there in space, also lead us to in fact explore what is out there in space, and from there to look for explorers to find us. In short, to look for UFOs with such intensity that we see them everywhere we look, whether they are there or not. An answer I do not propose to know.

Still you ask, “What does this have to do…?”
Persistent, aren’t you.

Well, that same curiosity has now lead us to make fiction reality. Or to take the steps to make it reality. Does our ability to approach that reality lend credence or support to the idea that others have done the same, surpassed us into what we consider the impossible?

Two recent developments in technology:

From Future of Tech at MSNBC.com

John Roach
Star Trek-like open-source tricorder sees magnetic fields and more
via Future of Tech

Meeting the people and exploring the inventions that are shaping our horizons.

An open-source science tricorder could help people visualize the world around them.

Know the near-magical handheld analysis gadgets known as “tricorders” that everyone carries in Star Trek? A cognitive science researcher has created a real-world version.

“The open source science tricorders that I’ve developed are very much a way to help people explore and feed their curiosity for the world,” Peter Jansen, who created and built the gadget, told me today in an email.

Jansen recently earned his Ph.D. in in cognitive science from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada where he taught computers to learn language like babies do. He is currently at the University of Arizona working on high-tech sensors.

A person with that level of smarts, apparently, has enough brain power leftover in his spare time to invent tricorders, not to mention the greedlessness to share the blueprint with DIYers who want their own. Instructions are available from his Tricorder Project website.

Like the Trek devices, Jansen’s gadgets will measure the environment, things such as ambient temperature, humidity and magnetic fields, as well as take spatial readings for distance, location and even motion. They won’t, however, identify aliens for you.

The idea is to “help kids learn science at a conceptual level and ground abstract concepts like magnetism or polarization by providing a way to intuitively visualize them long before kids learn their mathematical formalisms,” he said. (That’s the uber-academic term referring to the logic and structure of math.)

“My hope is that someday every household and every kid who wants one will have access to this device that they can keep close in a pocket or bag and really pull out when curiosity strikes,” he says in the video.

While Jansen’s tricorder is intended to help people visualize invisible aspects of the natural world such as magnetism, he said he is “very interested” in working on a medical tricorder that would qualify for the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, a $10 million contest to develop a wireless, handheld device that monitors and diagnoses health conditions.

“Developing a medical tricorder has the opportunity to positively change so many lives,” he said. “And I’d love the chance to work on it if the opportunity presented itself — say through a grant or joining a team.”

Plenty of teams are hard at work on the medical tricorder, my colleague Alan Boyle notes in a post about the X Prize contest, calling it “an idea whose time has come.” Check out his post for a roundup of what folks are working on.

And if that were not enough,

John Roach
Scientists create working ‘sonic screwdriver’
via Future of Tech

Meeting the people and exploring the inventions that are shaping our horizons.
Image

BBC

British scientists have created a real-world sonic screwdriver like the one in the sci-fi series Doctor Who.

Fans of the British sci-fi series Doctor Who go gaga over a gadget called the sonic screwdriver, a fabulously multipurpose tool, akin to Star Trek’s equally famous tricorder, that can do everything from pick locks and detect land mines to scan for diseases.

Now, British scientists have created a real-world working version of the futuristic screwdriver.

Their fictional device, seen in the image above, is much cooler than real one shown in the video below, which uses ultrasound to lift and rotate a rubber disc that’s floating in a tube of water.

The tool may sound mundane but it offers some key life-saving functions. The control over ultrasound beams can “be applied to non-invasive ultrasound surgery, targeted drug delivery and ultrasonic manipulation of cells,” Mike MacDonald, of the Institute for Medical Science and Technology at Dundee, said in a press release.

Dundee University explains the researchers used energy from an ultrasound array to form a beam that can both carry momentum to push away an object in its path and, by using a beam shaped like a helix or vortex, cause the object to rotate.

He and colleagues describe their real-world sonic screwdriver in the American Physical Society’s journal Physical Review Letters.

No, the team isn’t the only one working on real-world sonic screwdrivers. Another team at Bristol University is on a similar path, though, when we reported on it, they had yet to spin ultrasonic waves to create a twisting force. The Dundee team appears to have the twist down.

In 1865 Jules Verne gave us “A Trip to the Moon” and set the imagination on a path that would take a little more than a century to make reality. We have reduced that turnaround time to the range of 60 years. What are we thinking of today that will be reality in 30 years? 20? Our life time? Will these tools help us to discover the truth behind UFO fiction or reality? Are we learning the secrets that “They” discovered and now use to investigate us? Or will that knowledge allow us to become the explorers, the UFOs that taunt and tease out the secrets of other civilizations?