Too Futuristic?

There are a lot of things that sci-fi writers have used or put into their stories that have actually ended up in present day reality. I am not just talking about devices from books but from movies and some cartoons even as well. The best example that I have that will resonate with the most people are the communication devices used in Star Trek. People often looked at these on screen and thought that it was a far-fetched idea to have something so small yet so capable that it could communicate with anybody, anywhere, and so quickly. With that said, I ask.. does that device resemble our modern day cell phones? I think so.

We often have a sort of disconnect with items that appear in stories. Because we are required to utilize our imagination so strongly in order to put the story into our minds eye it often puts ideas from those stories into a certain place within our minds. This "place" in our mind is sort of like a place where ideas are able to be understood and we can interact with our memories, but it seems that items or devices that we think of from this "place" are automatically deemed a work of fiction. This is my opinion anyway.

This being the case we need to work at moving these ideas from that place in our minds into our current reality. Take any device today that seems a bit out there. For example, the PoNS device. This is a device developed by neuro-researchers working with military patients who have suffered brain injury. The device works on a simple (yet complicated) premise. They place the device into their mouth where a plastic piece with sensors rests on the tongue. The device sends out signals and impulses through the tongue and into the brain in order to stimulate previously severed nerves and connections. The idea is that it will, over time, repair those once broken connections. Seems a bit like something from a science fiction story does it not?

Point here is this. There are often things that we read about in a story of that we see in a movie  that we automatically think, "this is too far out, it will be a very long time before we see something like that. Even then this particular device might be too much of a stretch." To be honest, in some cases it is very easy to think that. However, we must realize that there are plenty of things already out there that we might not know exists or that the research has been being done for years already. Just because society in a way dictates that something is maybe too futuristic does not mean that it is not possible. Most things today are possible, we just need to have the imagination and the drive to make them into a reality.