With the possible discovery of the Higgs boson particle, is the possibility of a Star Trek style future now on the horizon?

Are holodecks and replicators just a generation or so away?

when aliens land we'll need to shotgun them in the chest.

I do not think that this discovery will have many practical applications.

You mean a future in which mankind has become really stupid? Because that's the thing I take away from Star Trek. They forgot how to use circuit breakers, dead man switches and all other sorts of safeties and redundancies. Honestly, no self respecting engineer would ever sign of on any of their ship designs and don't get me started on them making up bull**** particles that just do what they need them to do to defuse critical situation of the week #775b.

I think it makes warp style travel more scientifically viable, replicators, holodecks, replicators, etc still will need alot more discoveries not related.... and does absolutely nothing to change the way people behave and conduct themselves, which is the biggest hurdle we have to over come as a species.

The higgs boson only confirms a great deal of standing particle theory. It doesn't make anything possible that we previously thought was impossible. We had a theoretical particle that should have to exist if our other models are correct (and those models are consistent with observation). We knew what it should do, we knew what it's parameters should have been, we just never observed it. Now we have (maybe). But the models already predicted enough about it that we know what it means for changing the boundaries of what's possible: Nothing.

The same challenge exists as antimatter. We've created only a few billionths of a gram of it, at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, and have no way to store it for more than a few seconds, so at any given time our entire civilization possesses an average of zero antimatter. Over fifty years and we're still optimistically two hundred years away from commercial applications outside of PET scans and the like, (which use antimatter produced by a natural process of beta decay, useless as a weapon or energy source).

Remember we've only made a few higgs particles, at fantastic expense (several hundred orders of magnitude more expensive than antimatter per weight), and they barely existed long enough that they could be said to have existed at all. And with only one collider capable of creating them and no plans to build one close to able, or to finish the abandoned facility in Texas, we'll be lucky if we can independently confirm the results in a generation.


Practical applications of stuff like this doesn't come in a lifetime. Nuclear fission took fifty years to reach practical use, and even longer for non-weaponized applications. Fusion's looking like it'll take another fifty years - nearly a century in full - to get where fission is now. We don't even have proof of concept of critical aspects of antimatter technology. And as for the Higgs particle, we might have to make an exception to the normal scientific process just to be able to call it confirmed, because independent confirmation on other hardware is literally impossible. Without that exception, it'll be another generation or more before we can call it confirmed, which would leave it where nuclear fission was around 1850.

And let's not forget things like:

Autodestruct failure
Warp core ejection failure
Starfleet Officers getting locked out of systems on their own ship(s)
Holodeck malfunctions

Sad thing is, technobabble is to blame for the above. An early, pre-technobabble, TNG episode 'Contagion' had Geordi saying words to the effect of "there are failsafes in place to prevent such system failures.

Anyway, I think it's too early to say what practical applications the Higgs-Boson could have at this stage.

What do you mean need to.. LOL on this planet we WILL Shotgun them in the chest

So true also. I am afraid we will be more Terran Empire than Federation unless something drastically changes our perceptions and behavors.

sounds good to me. *hums the in a mirror darly opener* ... then we need to leave a note for future generations... dont let vulcans screw up the empire.