Guessing at the Future, Part 2 of 2

(Continued from part 1)
Poor Guesses, or Things That Will Not Happen

Replicators

I admit that 'a replicator in every room and a shuttle in every bay' sounds nice. Unfortunately, replicators aren't going to happen. Creating food directly from energy would certainly save space, but the power demands would be enormous. Pouring the energy of several nuclear explosions into a cold glass of water would risk destroying the ship every time and would easily drain power from the rest of the ship. "Hey captain, can we shut off the engines and life support? I'm thirsty!" So that leaves replicators that rearrange molecules in existing source materials like rotten food, sewage, and tribbles. It sounds great to not have to eat rotten food, sewage, or tribbles, but that's only because I haven't told you the exciting changes that will happen with Febreze.

Dot Matrix Fax Machines in Every Room

I know at least a dozen people were happy to loudly print a document on special dot matrix printer paper and then take a half hour to send a darkened and slightly rotated copy of that document to someone else with a similar machine. I also know there were exactly zero people who legitimately thought there could be nothing better, that they were in witness of the crowning achievement of human ingenuity. Something tells me the set designer for Back to the Future 2 heard about how some sequential movies flip-flop in overall quality and just decided to shoot for the moon.

Single-use Displays

Want to pilot the ship? How about check the status of the port nacelle? There's an app for that. In the future, the touch-screen displays will be able to do just about anything. Dramatic leaps to the weapons station will be replaced with awkward tension while waiting for programs to load. Sadly, the convenience of being able to do anything from anywhere will be overshadowed by the constant need to accept the ever-changing iTunes terms of use conjured up by Apple's millions of iLawyerBots.

Exploding Consoles

I don't know why anybody ever yelled "Brace for impact!" on Star Trek. They should have been yelling something like "Everybody get the f*** away from the consoles!" Liquid crystal displays may continue to be quite popular in the future, but that liquid is most definitely not going to be nitroglycerin.

Magnify!
It's not a stretch to expect the sensors on ships like the Enterprise to be better than today's average telescopes. Because of that, other things will enter visual range when they're still eleventy bajillion miles away. At that distance, turning on the view screen at 1x zoom would always yield a view of almost nothing, with the distant ship taking up less than a pixel in the center of the screen. Since most of the requests to put the other ship on screen wouldn't actually do anything without magnification, it'll become expected behavior for the ensign to zoom in quite a bit every time. Since the distant vessel will always appear large, clarification text will be added to the display: "I assure you that the pictured ship, planet, or entity is quite a large distance from your current location." For further clarity, non-magnified windows will be engraved with the text "See? I told you so. Stop doubting me."

Space Precinct
Space precinct will not happen. Sorry.