Is there any technology in TNG that's already outdated?

Things that we should laugh at?

 

I'm hoping Spandex will one day go the way of Velour!

 

This isn't exactly technology, but isn't there an episode where Picard says that Fermat's Last Theorem still hasn't been proven in the 24th century? In real life, a proof was published not long after TNG was off the air.

 

I think an iphone can do anything a PADD could do.

 

Yes, but I think Fermat referred to an simple elementary proof in his margin note, which Wiles' certainly wasn't.

And a DS9 episode later referred to one of Dax's previous hosts having come up with the most imaginative proof of it since Wiles, if memory serves.

 

I think the idea of holodecks, though not the execution, is somewhat outdated; why go to all the trouble to create 3D forcefield/holograph illusions in a big room when you could just use VR interfaces? If TNG had come along a few years later, the crews might've been having their recreational experiences in cyberspace rather than a large physical room.

Data's stated processing speed of 60 trillion operations per second is below that of a modern supercomputer. We're currently up to nearly 100 trillion, and it's estimated that a supercomputer would need 38 quadrillion operations per second to match the human brain.

There are a number of things in TNG that are roughly on a par with the state of the art or just a few years beyond it. We have the equivalent of padds and programmable touch-screen interfaces. We have implants for restoring vision to the blind that are very similar to Geordi's VISOR in structure, though not yet as powerful. And the technology for creating convincingly humanlike androids is very close, though that's just the body rather than the brain.

I daresay the Borg's approach to cybernetic implants, big clunky metallic pieces, is somewhat outdated already. Modern prosthetics are much sleeker and more compact, if not yet as powerful.

 

I imagine that an Ebook is more like a PADD and the iPhone is going to turn into the Tri-corder or something along those lines.

I always thought that the old communicators for TOS were like flip phones.


^ I think that holodecks would still exist because not everyone is going to want to plug into a VR. I like the idea of physically touching things, even when they may be fake forcefield generated things, compared to just having a Matrix of sorts.

 

Coming soon to the iPhone store: the Tricorder App.

I agree with that.

 

The first flip phone was made by Motorola in 1996, and was named.......



....wait for it......


StarTAC. You do the math.

 

I assumed they just looked like that because it was cool!

 

How in the world does having clunky, primitive-looking metal and plastic doodads stuck on your body look cool?

 

It could well have been the height of fashion for Species 001.

 

You're denying that the greatest TNG villains of all time looked kinda cool?

 

What does that sentence have to do with the Borg?

The Borg make lousy villains. They aren't even characters; they're a force of nature. You can't really tell more than one story about battling a force of nature. TNG's producers had to start retconning the whole concept of the Borg as early as their second appearance in order to get any more stories out of them. Initially, in "Q Who," they were only interested in technology and had no interest in people. That's dreadful for storytelling, since stories are about people. So they had to retcon it so that the Borg were suddenly interested in people, specifically Picard. And then they had to do a story about a single drone getting cut off from the Borg and becoming an individual. And then they had him turn a whole bunch of Borg into individuals, change their whole nature, in order to get another story. And then in FC they built on the idea of the Borg assimilating Picard and retconned the whole idea of the Borg so that assimilation was a normal practice for them (in TNG, drones were assumed to be incubated rather than assimilated); basically they turned the Borg into zombies. Not to mention retconning the idea of them still further by giving them a Queen to serve as a personified antagonist. And subsequent Borg stories on VGR were about escapees from the Collective or about the Queen as a personified villain.

So really, the original concept behind the Borg produced exactly one story. Everything else required retconning it more and more as time went on. And that means it really wasn't that good an idea to start with.

 

I will not argue that the Borg became more neutered as time went on. After BoBW there were few places to go but down for them. However, visually speaking, which is all I'm really talking about, I thought they remained quite striking as villains. Even as late as their appearance on Enterprise, which ironically enough, was one of their more effective post-BoBW appearances, they remained eerily effective....all imo of course.

 

The dialogue of the episode is ambiguous enough that one can argue that what Picard was talking about was finding the proof Fermat (believed) he had, rather than any kind of proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

However, that doesn't save things very much, because historians of mathematics are reasonably confident that they do know the proof Fermat believed he had. The leading suspect is a technique called `infinite descent', showing that if there were a smallest set of positive integers where a^n + b^n = c^n then you could find a smaller set still, which pretty well shows there can't be such a set. It gets rediscovered as a possible proof by anyone sufficiently ingenious and dedicated to the quest. It doesn't work for All n Greater Than two, but variations on it can be used to prove specific cases of the theorem, specific n's, and Fermat is on record using that variation.

It's possible that future evidence will show Fermat had a completely different idea in mind, but that would probably require showing what proof he did have, which would obviate a search for Fermat's Proof. (It could be also the finding of some evidence that he knew infinite descent didn't generally worked, and so throw the question open again, granted. But I wouldn't bet on it.)

 

I seem to remember a lot of scenes in which Picard, or Data, or whomever, is accessing the main computer in a way that is like a web search - they combine variables, often add or remove a variable, and then come upon what is then a plot point - for instance in Darmok you see Troi and Data go through this process in a way that seems ponderously slow to a more modern sensibility that runs web searches all the time.

 

Search function.

Take an episode like "The Naked Now", when Riker remembers something about people showering fully clothed being a reference to one of the older Enterprises. It takes ages for them to find this information on the computer - these days it'd be a google search and checking the first couple of hits and you're done.

There are, however, other, better reasons to laugh at "The Naked Now."

 

Laughing at and/or being embarrassed of 'outdated' technology bugs the shit out of me. Why can't people understand that it's fiction? I like the idea of keeping up to date with current science, but that doesn't mean that what came before should be swept under the carpet.

 

Okay I admit that I worded that wrong. What I meant to say was kinda the opposite.

"I always thought that flip phones were based on the TOS communicator" should have been what I wrote.