First, imagine a starship. Now, imagine you’re on it, cruising out to Alpha Centauri, or some distant speck of light in the great beyond. This starship has a great gym, and great lookout windows too. All is well with your trip until you get a nasty burn on your hand when you spill your Earl Grey tea. You rush to the infirmary, but you’re not too worried. You know the doc can 3-D print you a custom dressing that can significantly reduce the time it’ll take your burn to heal.
Imagined starships like these are filled with imagined technologies and medical advances, but in the case of this kind of wound dressings, it’s not so sci-fi. An Aurora, Colorado company called Sharklet Technologies has developed a clever dressing design that it believes could markedly improve the way we treat deep cuts and major burns.
I came across Sharklet’s wound-healing technology last fall at the fifth 100-Year Starship Symposium, held in Santa Clara, California. The symposium, organized and run by former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison, brings together scientists, engineers, business people, philosophers, and artists of a certain mindset to consider what it might take to build a spaceship to another star system, and to do it within the next century.