10 Star Trek Episodes That Predicted The Future

Since its first episode aired in 1967, “Star Trek” has been predicting and inspiring the future, from tech to social progress. As the decades passed, everyday technology in the “Star Trek” universe became everyday technology in the real world. PADDs (Personal Access Display Devices), the touch pad interfaces Starfleet officers use for everything from reading literature classics to managing duty rosters, have manifested as devices like iPads. The voice interface Starfleet officers use to communicate with the computer has become another daily-use technology for many folks through smart devices like Alexa and Siri. We even have a pretty close approximation to universal translators, via Google translate and other tools. 

The influence of “Star Trek” on future tech has proven so profound that it’s the subject of the documentary “How William Shatner Changed the World.” Martin Luther King Jr. himself inspired actor Nichelle Nichols to stick with the series when she was thinking of quitting, because of his belief that the show would shape the future. Recalling his words to Neil deGrasse Tyson (a bigger “Trek” fan than he is “Star Wars”) on “Star Talk,” Nichols said King told her, “This man who’s written this, who has produced this, has seen the future, and we are there,” referring to Black Americans in space.

Some of the series’ most successful predictions are a case of intuitive writers with a keen eye for the relationship between humanity and progress. Sometimes they’re just really good guesses. From dramatic sociopolitical changes to troubling technology habits, here are 10 episodes of “Star Trek” that accurately predicted the future.

In early 1995, when “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” (“DS9”) aired “Past Tense,” the U.S. economy was looking pretty good. Most low-wage earners could still manage rent and bills, and poverty rates overall were declining. So when “Trek” writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe penned an episode imagining a near-future America where poverty and homelessness had gotten so bad the poor were rounded up and shoved into concentration camps, the storyline felt all that more dystopian. As it turns out, the predictions of “Past Tense, Part 1” — set in August 2024 — hit a little closer to home these days.

The first of a two-parter, “Past Tense, Part 1” finds three Deep Space Nine officers sent to 2024 San Francisco by way of transporter anomaly. Instead of hippies and Pride parades, two of the trio get rounded up to a walled-off sanctuary district where the homeless and destitute are stashed away out of sight and out of mind. At the same time, Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) ends up with a group so privileged they barely register the plight of the poor. It all feels eerily familiar from the real mid-2020s.

According to Axios, homelessness has been dramatically rising in the United States since 2017, reaching an all-time record high in 2024. This follows an equally dramatic disparity between America’s richest and poorest citizens. At the same time, there has been a rise in reports of tent cities getting destroyed by local authorities and, in some instances, their unhoused inhabitants rounded up and jailed for sitting outside in communities with punitive ordinances meant to curb even the sight of homelessness.

One of the wilder predictions in the “Star Trek” franchise pertains not to technology or sociopolitical events but plain old American baseball. It’s a big deal in the second half of the “Deep Space Nine” two-parter “Past Tense,” through a bit that was a meme in the 1990s. While the gag might be lost on younger audiences, anyone old enough to recall the 1980s or ’90s may have a vague recollection of jokes about the New York Yankees winning the MLB World Series. 

That’s because for a nearly 20-year period, following their back-to-back wins in 1977 and 1978, the Yankees faced a notorious drought. But in the second half of the “DS9” episode that also predicted the 21st century homelessness epidemic, “Star Trek” also predicted the Yankees would dominate baseball in 1999. And in doing so, “Trek” writers may have predicted the future.

Still stuck in Sanctuary District 1, Captain Sisko (Avery Brooks) and Doctor Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) get chatty with local cop Vin (Dick Miller), who happens to be a major league baseball fan. Vin proudly cites the ’99 Yankees as the best team ever. While that might have felt like a stretch for audiences watching in 1995, the real-world Yankees were about to see a complete 180 in their success, winning the World Series against the Atlanta Braves the following year. 

Just as Vin predicted, they would go on to dominate the Series for several years, with consecutive wins from 1998 through 2000, and again in 2009. Since that would mark the beginning of another long Yankees drought, they could probably use another “Star Trek” prediction about now.

For thousands of years, warfare was a bloody, intimately human experience. From antiquity through the medieval period, this often meant close contact and clashing swords. Even with siege warfare, and later, the advent of modern era war machines, combat still required soldiers to place themselves in harm’s way. It was against a backdrop of the chaotic Vietnam War that “Star Trek: The Original Series” emerged, a fact that adds even more meaning to the show’s warning about the possibility of sanitizing warfare as a purported way to mitigate casualties in “A Taste of Armageddon.”

The episode finds the Enterprise traveling to Eminiar VII with orders to establish diplomatic relations at any cost. But their overtures are rejected as the crew learns the planet has been involved in a bitter, centuries-spanning war with the people of neighboring planet Vendikar. This strikes Kirk (William Shatner) and his people as strange, given the lack of evidence that any war has taken place on the planet — there’s no rubble, no leveled city centers, just a modern, operational society.

As Spock (Leonard Nimoy) soon learns, this is because, in an effort to keep civilization as functional as possible, all warfare is fought by simulation. A computer runs the program, and the predicted casualties are ordered to report to a disintegration station where their lives are then ended — no muss, no fuss. For present-day viewers, this computerized warfare eerily predicts 21st century U.S. warfare, where surgical drone strikes are calculated to minimize casualties, and operated from thousands of miles away. It abstracts war from the human component, hiding the emotional cost. It’s far from the only time “Star Trek” got seriously political.

One of the most famous examples of “Star Trek” predicting the future relates to one of the few episodes that were so controversial they were banned. This episode, which finds the Enterprise-D crew caught up in a conflict between Rutia IV’s government and the planet’s violent separatists, the Ansata, finds Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) scrambling for a peaceful path to resolution after Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) is abducted by the latter while on a medical mission of mercy.

The prediction comes as Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner) riffs on the efficacy of terrorism with Picard, musing, “Much of their behavioral norm would be defined by my program as unnecessary and unacceptable,” with which Picard agrees. What Data finds puzzling, though, is how often the approach is successful, adding that “it appears terrorism is an effective way to promote political change.” Questioning whether terrorism might be acceptable if peace is off the table, Data lists out famous examples of “successful” terrorism from his database: Mexican independence from Spain, the Irish Unification of 2024, and something called the Kenzie Rebellion, presumably occurring at some unknown future point.

The line about Irish reunification might have seemed like a throwaway to viewers who don’t follow world news. But in 1990 amid Ireland’s “Troubles,” thesuggestion that terrorism could lead to the reunification of Ireland and Northern Ireland was so controversial that the “Star Trek” episode was prohibited from airing in the Republic of Ireland and censored in the United Kingdom at various points after its debut. While it hasn’t happened yet, support for reunification has grown tremendously over the past few years, surpassing what anyone expected when the episode aired.

Genetic manipulation has been baked into the “Star Trek” franchise since the “Star Trek: The Original Series” episode “Space Seed,” which introduced Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalbán) and the Eugenics Wars. It makes sense, as scientists of the 1960s were just beginning to unlock the mysteries of the human genome. Although advances in science would continue over the next decades, things would really start moving around 1990 with the advent of the Human Genome Project — the same year the first gene therapy trial launched. 

That makes it all the more fascinating that “Star Trek: The Next Generation” predicted genetic medicine in the 1989 episode “Unnatural Selection.” It’s a prediction that has proven right on the money. These days, genetic medicine is rapidly carving its way into mainstream pharmacology both through personalized treatments based on genetics and CRISPR gene editing trials.

Centered around Dr. Katherine Pulaski (Diana Muldaur), the “TNG” episode in question deals with a bizarre contagion aboard the USS Lantree, a ship that had recently passed through the Darwin Genetic Research Station on Gagarin IV. But rather than sniffles or a norovirus situation, this nasty bug caused rapid aging among its victims — which is weird, since the only person to show sickness aboard the ship had a benign case of Thelusian flu.

After connecting with the research station, Pulaski learns their research includes genetically engineering telepathic kids with beefed up immune systems to fight off illness. When their genes interacted with Thelusian flu, their bodies kicked off the super-aggressive airborne antigens responsible for the aging. Sure, the treatment had some gnarly side effects, but the “gene editing to prevent disease” prediction was certainly ahead of its time.

Gene therapy isn’t the only medical prediction “Star Trek” nailed. In terms of medical advances, the franchise has landed quite a few accurate predictions, from advanced scanning tools like 3D computer imaging to electronic health records. But it wasn’t until recently that the reality of one medical prediction, first appearing in a 1995 “Star Trek: Voyager” episode, came to light — that is, the use of artificial intelligence as a diagnostic tool.

Introduced in the series’ first episode, “Caretaker,” the Emergency Medical Hologram (EMH) — otherwise known as the Doctor (Robert Picardo, who turned down the job at first), springs into action when the Voyager’s assigned doctor is killed in the line of duty. Complete with a pre-programmed personality and adaptable to new system prompts, the Doctor is an artificial intelligence that uses a holographic projection to interface with his patients in sick bay (and later on, anywhere his holographic emitter lets him go).

The Doctor’s original database includes the whole of the Starfleet Medical Database and over 3000 cultures, including every Federation planet, more than 2000 additional medical resources, and the combined knowledge of 47 medical professionals. But he’s far more than just a database — the Doctor has the ability to listen, adapt, diagnose, and respond.

While it’s hardly mainstream and there are, as of yet, no AI doctor holograms to sing along with, AI doctors are already being tested in the world’s first artificial intelligence hospital, China’s Agent Hospital. According to MedTech World, the technology, which can treat 10,000 patients in days with 93 percent accuracy, has the potential to revolutionize healthcare. It’s still a simulated virtual environment without ‘real’ patients, but it’s a big jump towards a possible future.

When the Season 3 “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “Hollow Pursuits” first aired in 1990, you wouldn’t have been hard-pressed to find parents of Nintendo kids who acknowledged that video game addiction was a real possibility. But the idea of recreational technology becoming so all-consuming to an adult that it could interfere with their job would have been a leap — a far cry from the world today, where technology addiction is a well-documented and highly destructive psychological phenomenon. The addiction experienced by Enterprise engineer Reginald Barclay (Dwight Schultz) in “Hollow Pursuits” could be used as a teaching tool to warn against the rise in technology addiction facing society today.

Technology addiction, which can include social media addiction, online gambling, gaming, and NSFW activities, often manifests as an inability to regulate one’s usage, despite the negative impacts on that individual’s life. Emotionally vulnerable individuals are especially at risk, as their reliance on technology can become a coping mechanism for their problems, particularly their social woes. 

That’s exactly what happens to Barclay, who becomes so hooked on the holodeck that he can’t stop himself, despite being chronically late or absent from work and drawing the ire of his colleagues. The episode insightfully links the biofeedback loop that occurs when the lonely and socially awkward start to self-medicate through technology — and the holodeck makes a prescient analogue to the online spaces that so many find addicting today.

“Star Trek: The Original Series” was born in an era of Cold War optimism. Its vision of a future dotted with planets populated by Earth colonists didn’t happen in a vacuum — the Space Age was a time when Americans looked to the future and imagined people like themselves in it. Just a few short decades later, about the time we should have been laying out plans for our utopian space colony, the “Star Trek: Voyager” episode “Future’s End” came along with its eerily prescient prediction that good old-fashioned unchecked capitalism could crush that dream like a bug on a windshield. We can get to that Starfleet space utopianism, the episode warns, but not with greedy billionaires at the wheel.

“Future’s End” finds the Voyager crew sent to 1996 (present day to the episode’s filming). There, an absolute tool named Henry Starling (Ed Begley, Jr.) has reverse-engineered some space tech picked up in 1967, leveraging it into a cartoonishly huge wealth machine, Chronowerx Industries, that quite literally wrecks the future. That prediction of a wealthy narcissist at the top of a tech empire monopolizing space travel turned out to be awfully prescient.

Despite meteoric technological advances passing between “TOS” and “Voyager,” the midcentury dream of regular folks taking a jaunt to the moon seems absurd in the 21st century. The grim reality of how unattainable space is was driven home in 2025 when pop star Katy Perry joined four other women on a privately-funded 11-minute Blue Origin trip. As Perry peered into a spacecam, the world received her transmission loud and clear: Space travel is for the wealthy and privileged.

Long before artificial intelligence became what it is today, countless stories had already explored it from nearly about every angle, from tales of systems that took their commands too far and accidentally wiped out the human race to the vengeful, clinically depressed, or substance-addicted self-aware AI models. But one thing almost nobody considered was the possibility of an AI model that would straight up hallucinate information as it strives to provide users with exactly what they want — almost nobody, that is, except for the oracles penning “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

This all-too-prescient vision of AI slop was imagined in the “TNG” episode “Future Imperfect,” which saw Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) transported to an alternate reality he doesn’t recognize. When Riker wakes up to find himself in a version of his life that feels familiar but strange, he is told he was in an accident and that 16 years have passed — years in which he had a kid named Jean-Luc (Chris Demetral) and taken over as Enterprise captain.

Things just keep getting weirder — there’s chronic computer lag, and the amnesiac Riker is meant to be working a peace deal with the Romulans, something that seemed impossible in his time. When he hears the name of his late wife — Riker’s holodeck girlfriend “Minuet” — he realizes the whole thing is a ruse to get him to cough up information. Much like real-world AI, the Romulans’ system busted them by hallucinating information based on a bad prompt.

The 1991 Geordi La Forge-centered “TNG” episode “Galaxy’s Child” predicted yet another sociopsychological effect of technology — one that has been front and center in the news cycle in recent years — by imagining the deeply personal impact of deepfakes. In the episode, Enterprise Chief Engineer Geordi (LeVar Burton) has been working with a computerized version of Dr. Leah Brahms (Susan Gibney), the engineer who designed the Enterprise propulsion system. 

His relationship with the deepfake version of Brahms goes far beyond just asking questions about the ship’s engines. Geordi, who has a mostly nonexistent dating record throughout the series’ run, has programmed her to be a little too intimate while conveniently overlooking some basic biographical data — namely, the fact that she’s married.

After the real Brahms rejects his advances, she finds her creepy simulated doppelgänger and becomes understandably angry. Although the episode kind of drops the ball in contemplating the ethics of deepfakes in a creepy storyline that likely wouldn’t fly today, the prediction of individuals’ likenesses being used without their permission is an ongoing ethical and legal controversy today.