Comment by Svip
2 days ago
Communicator
Communicate remotely between two arbitrary points.
It claims smartphones is that (though surely cellular phones would count then; why not list Motorola or whatnot?); but in Star Trek, the communicator works everywhere without cellular towers (well except when it doesn't for plot reasons). I wouldn't say a device like the communicator is available yet.
My favorite game watching TNG is trying to figure out how the communicators somehow always perfectly know when the user means to use them. It's very common for a character to tap it to initiate the conversation, but then the back and forth is magically seamless, as well as the end of the communication. All while being mixed up with talking to other characters mid conversation.
According to the TNG Technical Manual (which is not entirely canon, but whatever) it's all handwaved by a context-sensitive AI that figures out who you're trying to talk to from context clues.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/55156/why-is-there...
"<number> to beam up" drives my wife nuts and she's right: how the heck does the transporter tech know who they're targeting?
Like sure I guess you could infer it by grouping I guess but how does that selection UI work?
(Though that's far less infuriating then the question of why transporter pattern boosters exist, can be transported, and yet numerous episodes exist of beaming into an environment and not being able to beam out. Why is standard protocol not to always send down a signal booster?)
The '<number> to beam up' line is an instruction to the transporter operator; since they can detect life signs, they can guess by proximity. It's thus not the computer making the call, but a human operator.
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Obviously it's all handled by the AI running on the TPU in the communicator powered by a miniature matter-antimatter reactor.
Satellite phones fit the bill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_phone
They're not communicator sized yet as far as I know, but they've shrunk a lot.
You can't make blanket statements about a massive franchise written by dozens if not hundreds of writers over decades, but generally the communicators are not depicted as being able to communicate much beyond orbit either, so it's not like we need to match some sort of cross-system communication.
The orbital parameters the ships go in to for their "standard orbit" are also very hazy, but given the power the ships are demonstrated as having in both tech specs and visual representations it's very believable that during important missions the ship can linger within visual range of a given spot on an unexplored planet indefinitely, not necessitating a ring of satellites be deployed or anything. This also explains the lack of "Beam me up" - "Sure, in five minutes when we come back over the horizon" conversations. So we probably only need to match line-of-sight communications.
Trek doesn’t have anything remotely resembling orbital mechanics, the ships are just assumed to "park" wherever needed (a planet may be shown to rotate under them because they’re supposed to do that, but that doesn’t really affect anything, it’s purely for show).
Growing up in 90’s I totally count my smartphone as something from StarTrek if not better.