Wouldn't Earth Teleportation Be Too Disruptive?

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

He was even annoyed by "No smoking on the Bridge" sign in TWOK.

Some alien cultures may smoke a non-tobacco plant that is actually good for their physiology, but disruptive/annoying/harmful to Humans.

Yeah, but whenever culture from our future is mentioned, it's always alien culture. Virtually all of the human art, music, or entertainment that gets mentioned is from our own past. The characters are fans of classical music or jazz or noir mystery stories or Westerns or '30s movie serials or what-have-you, but we never see a regular character who's a fan of, say, the literature of the early Martian Colonies, or the music of post-First Contact Earth.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Cold_Moon_Over_Blackwater comes to mind.

I think it's easier (and probably considered funnier/more fun by writers) to use/parody well-known cultural icons/genres and see how your aliens and modern Humans would regard things we know well.

NuKirk and co shuttled from an Iowa shipyard to starfleet academy rather than beaming.

They're going to be flying around a lot anyway. Might as well start flying now. If NuMcCoy hadn't finally sat down and behaved himself and gotten his mind off his aviophobia, he might have been kicked off the shuttle. If you can't even handle a short shuttle trip in the atmosphere, how can you hack it in space?

 

[Christopher]

I think it's easier (and probably considered funnier/more fun by writers) to use/parody well-known cultural icons/genres and see how your aliens and modern Humans would regard things we know well.

But resorting to the easy and the obvious is not a hallmark of good writing. Sure, there's fun in familiar references, but it undermines the credibility of the worldbuilding if there's a total void of popular culture between the audience's time and the story's time. That just exposes that the story is a current creation rather than a plausible construction of the future. Throw in some familiar references, sure, but alongside more futuristic references. Like in TOS when Kirk name-dropped dictators like "Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Hitler, Ferris, Maltuvis." We didn't know who those last two were (at the time, although Maltuvis is a major character in my Rise of the Federation novels), but we knew from the context of the line what they were like. It helped get across the idea that Kirk's history included our history but did not end with it. And that was better worldbuilding than if his list had ended at Hitler.

When I wrote my original novel Only Superhuman, set about 90 years from now, I drew on a lot of familiar pop culture, particularly superhero and anime references, but in order to avoid falling into the Trek trap, I also made a point of establishing several works of future pop culture that the characters were familiar with, both from their own contemporary media (like a really bad rush-job biopic about the main character, which kept coming back to embarrass her throughout the book) and from their childhood or earlier generations (like how, at some point, there was a fad of Bollywood-made Westerns, aka "curry Westerns"). It was more fun to drop hints about these bits of future kitsch than just limit myself to real works from the past and present.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

I guess the future Trek shows have even less excuse than TOS did; at the time they were making "Space Seed", they had no idea Trek would be this popular 50 years later. By TNG, TOS was already wildly popular.

I can see how it might be fun to make up "trends" like that. But you have no idea whether something which happens ten years from now or even a few months from now could eliminate the possibility of it. But then, that trend-killing event happened in a different reality from the one in which it flourished...

 

[robau]

One of the things Fifth Element did very right was introduce genuine contemporary pop culture. Star Trek needs to do the same. There was opportunity at the nightclub Scotty was at but they didn't show a band or anything for some reason. It's another reason why I want a show more focused on earth.

 

[The Old Mixer]

there would be something on the Battle of Vulcan

There's an idea...maybe that apocryphal reference that McCoy makes to Vulcan having been conquered in "The Conscience of the King"...is actually a reference to a contemporary popular work of fiction about Vulcan being conquered.

 

[fireproof78]

One of the things Fifth Element did very right was introduce genuine contemporary pop culture. Star Trek needs to do the same. There was opportunity at the nightclub Scotty was at but they didn't show a band or anything for some reason. It's another reason why I want a show more focused on earth.

Good point.

 

[Phily B]

I always imagined there being stations where you can transport from one station to another station, maybe mass transportation on giant pads every half an hour or hour to certain destinations. I also thought the little pods in Beyond were cool, though again I imagined them being more to transport to different locations on a facility of that size.

Sisko mentions transporter credits in an episode of DS9, so I imagine that it is fairly limited and you can't just transport to anywhere you want at any time.

 

[Tenacity]

maybe that apocryphal reference that McCoy makes to Vulcan having been conquered in "The Conscience of the King"

Only a moment before Spock had made reference to "my father's race," combined with Spock's later statement that Vulcan had never been conquered and I think McCoy was referring to a sub-group of Vulcans, and not Vulcans in general.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

@Christopher and then there's the cliche of altering popular Earth sayings by inserting an alien creature whose only difference in name is its origin.

 

[Shawnster]

http://voy.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/2x05/nonsequitur032.jpg

What appeared to be the entrance to an underground mass transit system in 24th Century San Francisco. From VOY: Non Sequitur.

 

[Christopher]

http://voy.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/2x05/nonsequitur032.jpg

What appeared to be the entrance to an underground mass transit system in 24th Century San Francisco. From VOY: Non Sequitur.

From the graphic, it seems like part of the same transit system as the tubes running across the Golden Gate Bridge in the theatrical cut of TMP.

 

[Shawnster]

Oh my goodness, Non Sequitur was a treasure trove of information on this topic.

After Kim visits Tom Paris in France, there is an establishing shot of a shuttle flying alongside the Golden Gate on the way back to San Francisco. This implies that Kim took a shuttle instead of transporting.

Later, when Kim tampers with the ankle monitor and triggers it's alarm, 2 Starfleet security officers beam straight into his apartment. There was no defense against this measure. Perhaps security can override such defenses, especially if they are coming after someone basically on house arrest like Kim was.

Interestingly they didn't beam Kim away. Instead, the security guards chase him on foot through the streets of San Francisco's Mission District. He's finally rescued by Tom, who has an interesting device:

KIM: I have an office at Starfleet Headquarters. I think we can access the runabout launch codes from there.
PARIS: Site-to-site transporter. With friends like mine, you never know when it'll come in handy. Where's your office?
KIM: Main complex, level six, subsection forty seven.
PARIS: I can beam us in. But we'll only have a few minutes before Security starts kicking down the door.
KIM: Let's do it.

No mention of the legality of a site-to-site transporter or how it operates. It is a palm sized device. They both beam first to Kim's office at Starfleet San Francisco and then to an experimental runabout docked at an orbiting space station.

 

[Christopher]

No mention of the legality of a site-to-site transporter or how it operates. It is a palm sized device.

Well, there's no way it could be an actual transporter in itself, because how could a transporter possibly work while it was in a dematerialized state? I always figured it was just a device that tapped into the city's transporter grid and operated it remotely. (Though it's harder to justify the much smaller "personal transporter" that Data used in Nemesis to beam Picard off the Scimitar. The Enterprise's own transporters were down at the time, so how could it have remotely operated them? Well, maybe it was just the control systems that were down.)

 

[Paul Weaver]

Well, there's no way it could be an actual transporter in itself, because how could a transporter possibly work while it was in a dematerialized state? I always figured it was just a device that tapped into the city's transporter grid and operated it remotely. (Though it's harder to justify the much smaller "personal transporter" that Data used in Nemesis to beam Picard off the Scimitar. The Enterprise's own transporters were down at the time, so how could it have remotely operated them? Well, maybe it was just the control systems that were down.)

Maybe it tapped into the shuttle transporters

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

http://voy.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/2x05/nonsequitur032.jpg

What appeared to be the entrance to an underground mass transit system in 24th Century San Francisco. From VOY: Non Sequitur.

I wonder why they didn't just use BART...copyright restrictions on the name, maybe?

 

[Christopher]

Maybe it tapped into the shuttle transporters

Oh, good point. That's something a lot of Trek writers overlook -- whenever the ship's computer or transporters or whatever are down, it never occurs to them to use the shuttles. Or rather, they choose not to, because the plot requires the computer or transporters or whatever to be down.

 

[Jedman67]

No mention of the legality of a site-to-site transporter or how it operates. It is a palm sized device. They both beam first to Kim's office at Starfleet San Francisco and then to an experimental runabout docked at an orbiting space station.

Yeah, I figured it was something like a transporter controller, probably stolen or bought from the black market with some specialized equipment to make tracing difficult.

Well, there's no way it could be an actual transporter in itself, because how could a transporter possibly work while it was in a dematerialized state? I always figured it was just a device that tapped into the city's transporter grid and operated it remotely. (Though it's harder to justify the much smaller "personal transporter" that Data used in Nemesis to beam Picard off the Scimitar. The Enterprise's own transporters were down at the time, so how could it have remotely operated them? Well, maybe it was just the control systems that were down.)

Can't we all agree that no part of Nemesis made any sense at all?

 

[Christopher]

Can't we all agree that no part of Nemesis made any sense at all?

There were parts of it that I thought made more sense than usual. Like giving the Romulans an actual subject race that they used as cannon fodder in their wars, which is how actual empires work. Trek's tendency to portray interstellar "empires" as having only one species and culture within them is misunderstanding what an empire is, but Nemesis got it right.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

That's something a lot of Trek writers overlook -- whenever the ship's computer or transporters or whatever are down, it never occurs to them to use the shuttles. Or rather, they choose not to, because the plot requires the computer or transporters or whatever to be down.

It's a wonder they ever work right.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Uhura sang the latest 23rd century pop song in TOS 'Beyond Antares' so it can be done without turning the audience off.

Also "The Moon's A Window To Heaven". That's another thing, by the way; is 23rd century(?) music limited to songs about space/using it as a metaphor?