Is 'Star Trek' Our Future?

Are we turning our world into the futuristic, scientific reality we have already created in our own imaginations?

Sure, the computers in the original Star Trek series look painfully old fashioned and out of a sci-fi, black and white B movie featured on MST3K. Clunky and boxy and haltingly dull, the Enterprise's computer, voiced by the delightfully eccentric Lwaxana Troi before she was Lwaxana Troi, blurts out awkward statements of emergency and pseudo-scientific jargon and, in one episode, becomes titillatingly fresh with Captain Kirk. In the 60s, perhaps this did look futuristic and high-tech, though arguably the "futuristic" aspects of the show take second wing to stiff acting and incessant moralizing and The Shat's adorably chauvinistic grin. And now, so much of it just looks silly.

My first thought is that, well of course it looks silly! That stuff is the dreaming of writers and producers several decades ago, pounding out what technology MIGHT look like in the future. They've never gotten it right. I mean, where are my flying cars??? But then I went back to TNG and took a look at their systems. Though the show looks dated for various reasons, I would never confuse the computer on the bridge of the Enterprise or the silky blue warp core with any type of early 90s computer system (nor, I should also mention, do they look like anything that yet exists). All those colors and foreign symbols still look pretty new-age and futuristic, despite the over 20 years its been since its conception. More to the point, we've actually adopted some of the early computing characteristics from the Enterprise into our daily lives. Scientific surges in transporter technology (both to prove and disprove that it's even possible) have been seen every few years, merely because of Star Trek. Talking computers, stellar exploration, space tourism, more and more comfortable living quarters on space stations and shuttles, all because Gene Roddenberry said it was possible.

With TNG and beyond, we've managed to create a future that is so futuristic, it will never look "dated" the way the original series does (though surely many of the advances will never materialize... or will they?). Did we just get more creative in the last 20 years? Or have we reached a better understanding of technology that allows us to create a future that looks nothing like our present? And will we then create a future that looks like how our present imaginations render it? Are we creating walking, talking robots because we've seen them in sci-fi shows? Or would we have created them, regardless, had a TV producer not gotten ahold of the ideas first? Could we have gone a different route at all, or is the world of science fiction some kind of circular fate?

We've already named space shuttles "Enterprise" after the space ship of our geeky childhoods. If transporter technology and warp drive are ever discovered, we will call them thus, respectively, simply because that's what we've called them since we started to watch Captain Kirk or Captain Picard or Captain Sisko or Captain Janeway or Captain Archer back when our imaginations still worked... So where do we go from here?