Things we have now that Prime universe Trek did not foresee

So I wonder how Trek will handle social media, for instance? The Internet was very new the last time Trek mentioned it.

Any other things it didn't predict?

 

Tom turned into a tadpole (frowney face)

 

What do you mean they didn't have social media in Star Trek?

 

Social Media was a fad of the early 21st Century that came to an end after people realised it was slowly eroding society, which, had it continued, would've brought about the downfall of civilisation.

 

Thankfully, nuclear hellfire came and saved us from such a terrible fate.

 

How about big world issues or happenings? Like Wikileaks, for instance...

 

The full capasity of our personal "communicators?"

They ceased being just mobile telephones years ago, I use mine all the time, but can go days without making a phone call with it.

 

I'm sure that everyone in Starfleet have Spacebook accounts!

 

Captain's Log is really a vlog.

 

1. Multi-core processors. We can easily retcon it to say they meant a server room with many processors when they said "computer core", but the fact remains that the intention at the time was that the Enterprise-D had 3 cores. The computer I'm typing this on has 4.

2. Firewalls and isolated, dedicated computer systems. If something got into "the ship's computer", it could get pretty much anywhere. There should have been no way that the holodeck (an entertainment device) could touch the essential operating systems of the ship without someone (like Barclay) intentionally allowing it, and there's no reason any of that should touch data storage or processing for the replicators.

3. Encryption and strong passwords. At the time, the password Data used to lock out command functions in that episode where he hijacked the ship seemed pretty impossible. But knowing how quickly it could be found *now* by a zombie network means it would be utterly trivial for a late 24th century computer system. And it was the most complex password shown. The shield prefix codes seemed horribly silly to me *at the time*, and the simplicity of the destruct codes should have been putting the ship in danger all the time. And the idea that just because Kirk's Enterprise could intercept the Romulan transmission in "Balance of Terror" should mean they could *decrypt* it so easily as to be able to look at the Romulan bridge is absurd to us, now.

4. Socially acceptable relationships and marriage equality for gay people. We *just* had our first apparently gay character. (I mean "apparent" in the sense that we can tell, not to question whether or not he is. Lt. Hawk in First Contact was gay, but there was *no* indication on screen.)

5. Realistic industrial-style robots and other hardware/software automation. This was done almost-correctly exactly *twice* that I can recall - the exocomps, and the automated repair station in Enterprise. In both cases, there was a plot twist, though: the exocomps became self-aware, and the station was part of an evil plot. Never that I can recall did we just see something simple and straight-forward like non-self-aware robots working on damage on the outside of the ship.

6. Wi-Fi. This is a weird one, because it seems like sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. The tricorders could tie-in to the ship's computer, but Data needed a big honking cable stuck into his head to interface. I know that was partially for the viewers, but c'mon: letting the viewers know what was going on could have been achieved in dialog or by having Spiner consistently do a gesture or other expression in a specific way that indicated he had connected.

 

But early on Data would state "accessing" and briefly look to the side, and then recite information. I took that to be him remote accessing the ships computers.

In a only a few years this is going to cause a significant problem for us, at least in terms of employment. My take is that Humanity deliberately stepped back from what you're referring to. This is why we see engineers on the enterprise, and really people at all.

Everyone seemed to be a bit surprised by the mere existence of exocomps.

In one of the novelization of TAS, the ship's computer (again) was taken over and Kirk thought to himself that it was a good thing that there weren't any robots on the ship.

 

Regarding Data, that's an interesting take, and if it's what you prefer to think, I'm all for a good retcon or No-Prize. But I'm pretty sure what they were *trying* to depict was him "listening to the voices in his head": either referencing the memories of the colonists or searching an internal database. As for the second, you may be right about it causing problems for a while, but you can't stuff the genie back in the bottle. Our real answer has to be based on making the new robotic productivity work for all - not on trying to ignore it's an option. I've always preferred to assume that humanity as depicted in Star Trek lacks robots because they had a Sky net-like event and it scared hell out of people. I don't really believe *that*, either, though, because aliens would either have them or *be* them, and humans would be forced to have them, too, to compete - in trade, or in battle.

 

Something like that is the usual explaination as to why there no overt genetic engineering, there was the Eugenics Wars and Humanity stepped back from changing ourselves.

Otherwise Bashir's illegal intelligence boost would not have been a legal problem.

 

Isn't it kind of lazy to play the "once bitten, twice shy" card for everything they don't do?

 

Seatbelts

 

Not to mention that it's kind of cowardly for people "boldly going" to be not have bothered to conquer their own boogeymen.

Like I said, I'm willing to suspend disbelief for the purposes of the series, but if I were applying real-life standards to it, I wouldn't buy it. As soon as humans came across Denobulans or some other medically advanced species who said, "What?! We've been using genetic engineering safely to improve ourselves and correct problems for a thousand years. You're seriously just going to let that child be born blind or mentally handicapped because you're *scared* of a mistake you made early on?", the parents would raise hell, our advanced friendly species and other logically minded people would back them, and within a few years, that would be that.

Same with AIs and robots - honestly, we should have seen that argument come back up during the Dominion War given that the Federation was apparently fielding ground infantry. And Starfleet might be leery of having autonomous ships or other platforms, but as soon as they came across a species that had their ships set up to automatically attack anything not registering on sensors as one of their own at the speed of computer control (and you know such would exist, as many species of spacefaring aliens as we've seen), or as soon as an enemy set their ships up in a similar fashion to specifically target Federation sensor positives (too good a tactic for *every* enemy the Federation has faced to be "too honorable" or whatever for - especially when there are honorless enemies like the Borg), then they would have no choice but to get over their squeamishness if they wanted to survive.

Not to mention that they seemed remarkably inconsistent with that squeamishness in the first place given the presence of Data on the bridge of the -D. Tactical maneuver Picard-Always should have been for Data to take complete control and fight any enemies at his full speed (short of turning his organic crewmates into a pink paste on the back walls of the ship, of course. ).

 

How do they ever get anything done?

I'm not saying that everything that pops into some Federation scientist's head should be fully realized, but it makes me wonder how any treatment or piece of tech ever got approved, what with all the red tape and various objections.

 

Selfies.