I'm not talking about doing it by the hard science fiction guide book. There's degrees. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness Right now Star trek is a 2 out of 6, and would drop to a 1 if many here had there way. I'm advocating slipping up to a 3.5 or so. At current some Star trek plots are so convoluted a 9 year old could figure out that they makes no sense. I'm not saying we have to please neil degresstyson, I'm just saying a 12th grader shouldn't be able to pick apart a concept so easily.
I still wonder how some people became fans when they obviously think the material is beneath them? I love that Star Trek put the story first.
I wouldn't have too much complaint about a version of Trek that ditched most of the outright fantasy tropes. It's not like there are that many variations left to do on "these forehead aliens are a ham-fisted allegory about human nature" or "how will our crew outsmart this week's Omnipotent Space Jerk"? That stuff was fine for its time, but it had its time. Obviously a new Trek show would need to go afield from that and try to find inspiration in more relevant content both story-wise and (why not?) science-wise. I don't see why this thread is such a dialogue of the deaf. Autistoid is making a simple point which a bunch of people seem aggressively determined to misread.
I think Trek moved a few ticks away from fantasy and towards hard sci-fi could be great. But I don't see any point in eliminating warp drive, transporters, deflectors, phasers, artificial gravity, inertial dampeners, and subspace. Take those things out, and it just doesn't have the right flavor. You also have to have bold heroes doing the Right Thing on the final frontier, for the same reason. Non-humanoid aliens, yes. Unbreathable atmospheres, yes. Utterly incomprehensible aliens, yes. Stricter observance of rigid rules for how the magic tech mentioned in the previous paragraph works, yes, within reason. For example, cannot beam through shields ever means cannot beam through shields ever, and it sucks if your landing party has to die because of it, so they'll die. But at the same time, we don't need boring expositions of the Trek tech. Non-humanoid aliens means there is no Spock. If you want to have a human/alien hybrid, it will have to be a creation of genetic engineering. If you want aliens to be able to assume humanoid form, they'd pretty much have to be changelings. Just my two cents.
I wholeheartedly agree - the man has explained himself 22 times already. He is not asking that all sci-fantasy elements be dropped, just that "harder" sci-fi elements be added. For example, effort could be put forth to examine the possibility of what an alien would look like if it existed in an environment completely dissimilar to our own. Plots with psychics and silly time travel nonsense and other more fantastical elements could be jettisoned. That's not asking too much.
I'd be more happy with that for the exception of humanoid aliens. I actually think it's a higher probability than a galaxy where every 100 cubic lightyears has a independent evolved intelligent species. Having some form of space panspermia has the origins of most life in our nearby galaxy would be a really interested concept to get properly canonized.
Or it might have to do with the times we live in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect It's been FIFTY YEARS since Star Trek Started. Society has progressed drastically, technology has drastically increased, the average IQ has climbed greatly, film production technology has changed for the better, modern televisions standards are far more character and plot centric, and people are far more open to nerd culture. TOS was amazing for its time, but its time was long ago. This board is about the future of trek not the past, shows change and adapt to their time. Rehashing old trek now is a horrid idea, Trek should progress. To question my fandom, when I'm obviously a believer in a some sort of trek vision is a bit much. I have no question you love TOS, however I doubt you'd have anywhere near the passion for a rehash trek.
I like the idea of shaking up the Star Trek formula, I'm all for that. I just don't think going full-on hard sci-fi is a good idea. Reducing warp drive to the speed of light - Nah! We'd take ages to get anywhere and I don't wanna watch a show where people just sieve through the dust on some dead asteroid for five episodes. I need to be shown shiny things every now and then; wondrous new worlds, exotic aliens etc. Hiring a scientific adviser to have at least some sort of scientific credibility - That is a very good idea. As long as it enhances story and setting rather than getting in the way of it. I'm not one of the people who says every new incarnation of star trek has to be exactly like the adventures of the gold-shirted redneck. God, no, I'm the opposite of them. But there are some things that I feel are basic elements of Star Trek and FTL travel and humanoid aliens are two soft-sci-fi elements I believe are basic to Star Trek.
Just a reminder of what I stated from teh beginning. Yeah well I'm definitely open to new ideas, I have two other threads going about standard star trek no direct reboot. That being said, I really struggle to get what is so hard of envisioning an exciting trekverse based on harder sci fi. There's no need to go ultra hard, but for the life of me couldn't imagine it being remotely boring.
I don't mind the notion of getting rid of (any additional) bump-headed aliens. Then again, if it were up to me, the Greys would be present in some fashion, either as a member, or a mysterious adversary with their own agenda. Actually, I'm thinking more like a dynamism similar to the Vulcans/Romulans. And I've actually have psychic abilities as a fact of life, built up from the rumors and stories from today. And no, we are not getting rid of warp drive, or shields, or directed energy weapons.
But life on each planet will adapt to the environment there, even if it all shares a common origin across many planets and star systems. There is no reason to expect that intelligent forms that arise will have humanoid form, at least no reason that we know of. Life on Earth didn't home in on the humanoid form until relatively recently. Present data indicates that primates didn't exist before 50-75 million years ago. On the other hand, animal life has existed about ten times longer than there have been primates, give or take. Life itself has existed on Earth roughly eight times longer than there have been animals, again give or take. There were countless opportunities for hominids never to have existed on Earth at all. If they hadn't, any intelligent life that would have arisen would have looked completely different. If what wiped out the dinosaurs had still happened but not been extreme enough to have wiped the dinosaurs all the way out (assuming it was a single critical event or single cluster of critical events; for example, say, smaller and/or fewer comet or asteroid impacts), then, IMO, it's reasonable to wonder whether the descendants of dinosaurs could have benefited from intelligence to such an extent that "intelligent dinosaurs" became dominant on Earth. Same DNA stock as us, but different intelligent form, and non-humanoid. The so-called theories of parallel evolution in the Star Trek universe exist for one reason only: to rationalize in-universe the production reality that aliens will tend to have humanoid form for essentially theatrical reasons. Those theatrical reasons encompass not only budget but also the ability of the audience to relate to characters and the ability of artists to express themselves in ways that will connect with the audience. Since 1966, science fiction in film and on TV has made strides in depicting characters with non-humanoid forms, often as simple as blinking lights, like on Star Trek, or unusual costumes like the Horta, but also in the form of robots such as R2-D2. The robots in Interstellar are also noteworthy, and thanks to them I can now imagine something like an intelligent crystal being theatrically feasible to represent as a main character.
Here's a few reasons: Transporters: they only exist because with the original production budget the transporter effect was cheaper than building landing craft mockups and filming landing sequences. Several sci-fi shows with shuttle mockups and landing sequences (including trek series) demonstrate that's no longer a problem. Transporters are redundant. Deflectors: technologically, it's easier to just hide the ship behind a big-ass disc of inert material to ward off material impacts. Phasers: they're bullshit, called this only because they were supposed to be able to do things normal lasers couldn't. Modern lasers and similar devices are actually very versatile, much more versatile than they were in 1966. Inertial Dampeners: total bullshit. Right up there with "Heisenberg Compensators." It's just a term you can't say to anyone halfway informed without sounding like a complete moron. There will always be inertia. You endure it, you don't dampen it. You can keep artificial gravity and make it hard sci-fi by simply not designing the main ship like it's meant to sail on an ocean. You use cylinders, centrifuges or arrange the decks so that "down" is in the direction of the engines' thrust. As for warp drive and subspace hyperdrive and hyperspace are faster. SG-1 proved it.
That's all well and good, Admiral2. I'm just saying that Star Trek isn't that hard, as I see it. "Beam us up, raise shields, fire phasers, and warp us out of here," is about as iconic Star Trek as you can get. I love really hard sci-fi, but I don't see it as occupying the same point on the spectrum so to speak that Star Trek does. The context of my remarks is that I'm talking about what I see as intrinsic to Star Trek.
I'm not against hard sci-fi (I read quite a bit of it), I just don't believe it belongs in Star Trek. The Enterprise isn't a spaceship, its a vehicle of the imagination. Trying to apply real world physics to it would be a mistake. Heck, for me, one of the most vivid images from any series is the Enterprise floating with giant snowflakes in blue space at the edge of the universe in "Where No One Has Gone Before". Complete and utter bullshit but it really fires up the imagination.
'Hard Star Trek' as in hard to watch? That'd be most of Voyager. Hard Star Trek as in hard science fiction? I don't mind actual science entering into the kinds of stories told, but I also don't know that I'm smart enough to grasp some of the brainier kinds of things covered in 'hard' sci-fi. I like my Trek like I like my coconut creme pie - light and fluffy but with a nice solid crust.
Iconic and intrinsic, fine, but the only part of it that's actually necessary is FTL propulsion. You can still tell Trek stories without the other trappings. It's supposed to be about characters, right? How do the characters suffer if they don't get turned into particle streams just to land on a planet? I'm in the yes camp on this one. At the very least Trek writers should actually listen to their science advisors once in a while. (It's not like they've never had them. They've just been ignored.)