Which Star Trek technology would people abuse the most if it was released today?
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
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It also makes privacy very "Easily Violatable" should the Government go corrupt and look for any excuse to monitor their citizens daily actions.
It would be easily corruptible where they can use it to monitor every citizen across their entire life for treasonous or seditious acts.
That's the major danger, the government mis-using the tech for personal gain or for personal power enrichment.
And the average citizen would be powerless / clueless to stop it.
I would argue that already happens in Trek because it seems whenever they need to find people on Earth they seem to find them in a jiffy so there must be some kind of surveillance going on somewhere.
Surveillance of Common "Public Areas" is WAY different from being able to monitor a persons life like tuning into a TV channel in the current day & Rewind/Forward to get the info that you want and use it to frame a citizen.
Remember, Time Travel & ALL Temporal Technologies is HIGHLY regulated.
The Government would have nearly sole control & access over it, that's what makes it dangerous should the government mis-use it.
Well, the law enforcement surveillance state that's permeated our civilization in the post-9/11 world already seems to be wiping their ass with the Constitution (at least in the US), as it applies to wholesale spying on innocent citizens without warrants, either with building cameras, traffic cameras, street cameras, license plate readers (both mobile and stationary), and so on. Remember the whole warrantless wiretapping kerfuffle back in BushWorld? Seems kind of quaint now. They like to bat aside such complaints with the ubiquitous "if you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about" trope of tyranny. To hell with the 4th and 5th amendments, they say! So the shit's already out of the horse on that one. This is why I don't think we'll ever be ready for such technology. Human nature is just too vile, especially for the people in control. They just can't help themselves.
If it's a Common Public Area, I really don't have issues with surveillance of it.
But the "Warrent-less" Wire Tapping & Surveillance of a person's home, communications is what I'm more upset about.
Congress really needs to grow a freaking spine, but sadly they seem to lack it.
It's all in that so-called "Patriot Act" dumpster fire that they snuck in after 9/11 under the pretense of "national security". It has a sunset clause, and every time it comes up for a vote, congress never has the intestinal fortitude to destroy probably one of the most unconstitutional pieces of legislation that's ever existed in American history. Someone comes up with some "what if" pearl-clutching and it gets another 10 years of life. It's so deeply entrenched, SCOTUS won't even touch it.
I think that such technology would be very restricted, and exclusively for use by Starfleet only: at least on earth.
Section 31 would use it however they wanted.
Other planets would use it to keep the population in line (Cardassia, Romulans/Vulcans etc)
Section 31 would use it however they wanted.
Other planets would use it to keep the population in line (Cardassia, Romulans/Vulcans etc)
Therein lies the problem. We would do all of this. When one or more limited number of organizations in absolute power have such technology at their disposal, they would do everything to keep unilateral control it. Lie, cheat, steal - even murder. The abuse of said-tech would be at the top of the playbook for preserving that power. We've seen an endless stream of asshole and corrupt Commodores and Admirals in Starfleet since Star Trek was first introduced. They are really no different than any of the other asshole and corrupt operators in organizations like S31, Tal Shiar, Obsidian Order, etc.
I've thought about stuff like this as well. One issue is that if you can observe any point in the past, it also becomes a remote viewer if you can just observe one nanosecond into the past. Unless a requirement is that you have to be in the same physical location as what you're trying to observe from the past.
Assuming the only limitation is energy to power the tech, it should make it a "God Like" technology.
The only thing that would save somebody is them not revealing when & where something happened.
Nobody has time to follow somebody 24/7/365 to figure out a incident. At that point secrecy and not revealing information becomes paramount.
Short of having a Android like Data scrub through their timeline in high speed to figure out when & where everything happened, most people don't have the time of day to scrub through somebody's entire life.
There's just too many moments of down time / borrowing every day events.
Things would escape detection because nobody was zeroing in on those incidents in particular. Maybe there's a temporal statute of limitations for some things, also.
It would become troubling when someone ran a temporal minutia AI scanner looking for all instances of a crime, analyzing context, actions taken, etc.
It would become troubling when someone ran a temporal minutia AI scanner looking for all instances of a crime, analyzing context, actions taken, etc.
Given the ability of a "Temporal Viewer", the concept of a "Statute of Limitations" would be thrown in the dust-bin of history.
There would be ZERO limits on back-tracking through time to scour every second of a suspects life to charge them with a crime.
You can't prosecute if the date of discovering the crime happened chronologically too long after it occurred.
So if somebody stole a ship in 2155, and you found out who did it in 2255, you can't find the now 125 year old thief and prosecute him. But if that same thief takes his stolen property forward a hundred years, you can prosecute the 25 year old him, as transporting contraband over Temporal lines would be a crime, though the theft itself might go unpunished.
So if somebody stole a ship in 2155, and you found out who did it in 2255, you can't find the now 125 year old thief and prosecute him. But if that same thief takes his stolen property forward a hundred years, you can prosecute the 25 year old him, as transporting contraband over Temporal lines would be a crime, though the theft itself might go unpunished.
You know the government will get that rule thrown out.
Temporal Communicators will allow future Time Cops or Future People in the Temporal department to pass the information to people in the appropriate Temporal Departments or Regular Departments in the past as to when and where it has or will happened along with enough evidence.
Then they can prosecute along the local near time frame.
No crime will go "Un-Solved", every crime will get prosecuted, it goes in "Stacked Queue" corner and things go back appropriately in time via Temporal Communicators.
Things will get solved or prevented from happening.
Crime will have a 99.99999…% solve rate as long as it occurs within the UFP Jurisdiction or to members of the UFP citizenry or allies.
Anybody outside of that Jurisdiction w/o Time Travel technology, they have to go back to old school detective work to solve their crimes.
All government agencies dealing with this in the future (no pun intended) should probably watch "Minority Report" prior to engaging in any such related activities.
They won't take anything "Hollywood" makes as anything worthwhile to consider.
Short of loss of life, anybody that commits a crime will be left to commit it just long enough to see it happen, get caught & stopped immediately, then prosecuted like on a TV show.
They'll think they got away with it for < 10 minutes, then the police will show up some how and surround them and arrest them because they'll know when, where, & how the perpetrator committed the crime.
This is the exact premise of the Baxter and Clark novel The Light of Other Days. A company invents a way to capture images anywhere through wormholes, and they initially use it for paparazzi nonsense, but once they figure out how to use it for faster-than-light long-distance captures, they immediately realize the same technique can be used to look into the past. The technology expands, in a way similar to LLMs and diffusion models, today, where it's initially gatekept by governments and companies, but those safeguards are circumvented as the technology becomes more widespread, and eventually anyone can finagle their way to look at whatever they want without restriction.
There's a lot of social upheaval from being able to look at anything that ever happened, being able to look back at any historical event from any angle, and the younger generations eventually just lose any concept of privacy or decorum since it's possible that anyone can be watching you any time for any reason, which neatly segues into their becoming comfortable with using the same micro-wormhole technology in brain implants to create a group consciousness.
I really wasn't expecting the "Group Concious-ness" part.
It's been a long time since I read it, but I'm pretty sure I was, too.
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