In 1966 Star Trek introduced many people to the cheesy acting of William Shatner. It also gave us a lot of nerdy cultural references such as "Red Shirts" and "Beam Me Up". There’s also quite a bit of technology that was first seen in Star Trek which has become or may soon be part of our everyday lives here in the real world. We aren’t even close to transporters yet, but we do have tractor beams that can move molecules and video conferences are now a staple of business. In a few ways we’ve even exceeded Start Trek’s ambitions because we can now do video conferences on own version of the Star Trek Communicator that’s known as a cell phone. There's one nuance that's vitally important to our everyday lives which Star Trek and space sci-fi in general fails to discuss.

Sci-fi shows and movies routinely talk about power usage on scales that could power a large city for days or years. But they rarely say anything about power relating to their portable devices. Even after fighting off a bunch of giant humanoids, a couple hand phasers still have enough energy to take a shuttlecraft into space. It can only be assumed that their battery technologies have completely abandoned the anodes, cathodes and electrolytes on which we are so dependent; instead storing pure electrons. Mankind is constantly working on more efficient and denser means for storing electricity. Even the experimental Lithium-Sulfur batteries only hold about 4x the energy of a standard Lithium-Ion. It's a major leap but it's nowhere close to what you see in Sci-Fi.