Despite popular opinion, Abrams was not the ruiner of Star Trek.
What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?
- Thread starter Amasov
- Start date
He did mess registry numbers up though.
Admit it, y'all were taking bets on when I would say that.
I bet $0514 on it.He did mess registry numbers up though.
Admit it, y'all were taking bets on when I would say that.
TELEVISION shows. Whole reason for being? COMMERCIALS. Always keep that in mind. FIRST. 
Entertainment for the masses. Never intended to be especially accurate when it comes to science. It simply wasn't an important goal.
Something being able to evade the transporter's screening process. Let's expand on that for a moment. Approaching a planet. Ship's sensors say Class M, atmosphere near Earth norms, nothing to indicate a problem. No environmental suits needed. Landing party beams down. And are promptly all killed because something was able to influence the ship's sensors to give false readings. Heck, with superior technology/abilities, the entire planet could be an illusion and the team could be beamed into open space without protective suits.
Considering what the show depicted, every single mission had risks. Big ones. 'Routine', itself, was a story conceit. Reality, with those conditions existing, and the potentials involved, would be very different.
Entertainment for the masses. Never intended to be especially accurate when it comes to science. It simply wasn't an important goal.
Something being able to evade the transporter's screening process. Let's expand on that for a moment. Approaching a planet. Ship's sensors say Class M, atmosphere near Earth norms, nothing to indicate a problem. No environmental suits needed. Landing party beams down. And are promptly all killed because something was able to influence the ship's sensors to give false readings. Heck, with superior technology/abilities, the entire planet could be an illusion and the team could be beamed into open space without protective suits.
Considering what the show depicted, every single mission had risks. Big ones. 'Routine', itself, was a story conceit. Reality, with those conditions existing, and the potentials involved, would be very different.
Transporter - yes.
Humanoid aliens - yes.
Artificial gravity - no.
Warp drive - certainly not.
The last two are legitimate scientific problems to be solved for any kind of extended space travel / exploration, no? Heck, they're problems we're actually working on solving now.
Will we have magic gravity that works like a sound stage? Probably not. But someone will come up with something. (Jazz hands!)
I'm an optimist. It's the Trekkie in me.
Au contraire.
My point was (among other things) that all of the elements I mentioned, including the ones in dispute here, were introduced into the show without these elements being supported scientifically in any way, shape, or form when they were introduced.
I wasn't just talking about artificial gravity generally, because scientifically sound means did exist to produce it at the time, i.e. by rotation or linear acceleration. I was referring to the particular method employed in Star Trek, left completely unspecified during TOS, the famous "gravity is down to point eight" background chatter notwithstanding, under which "down" is evidently perpendicular to the long axis of the starship. There wasn't (and isn't) any scientific basis for the operation of such a type of artificial gravity.
At the time TOS was made, faster than light travel was believed to be theoretically impossible.
It's still not proven to be even theoretically possible today, although there have been theoretical breakthroughs that have opened up at least mathematically tenable lines of inquiry.
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If millennia unfold without humanity developing practical FTL, regardless of whether it's "theoretically possible" or not, the only alternative for interstellar travel will be slower than light travel. There's been more than a little science fiction written under which that premise holds.
There are no milk runs in spaceTELEVISION shows. Whole reason for being? COMMERCIALS. Always keep that in mind. FIRST.
Entertainment for the masses. Never intended to be especially accurate when it comes to science. It simply wasn't an important goal.
Something being able to evade the transporter's screening process. Let's expand on that for a moment. Approaching a planet. Ship's sensors say Class M, atmosphere near Earth norms, nothing to indicate a problem. No environmental suits needed. Landing party beams down. And are promptly all killed because something was able to influence the ship's sensors to give false readings. Heck, with superior technology/abilities, the entire planet could be an illusion and the team could be beamed into open space without protective suits.
Considering what the show depicted, every single mission had risks. Big ones. 'Routine', itself, was a story conceit. Reality, with those conditions existing, and the potentials involved, would be very different.
Well, blue milk runs. But that's in another franchise.
Then who delivers the milk?
No, you aren't. Literally everything in the post above is written about comparing Star Trek to how things, in your opinion, should theoretically work in the real world. You are judging it based solely on 'realism' and nothing else.
But realism is not in any way the same thing as quality. Realism is a style of storytelling, like Western or Comedy or Whimsical Absurdism. Surrealist, absurd or metaphorical stories can be masterpieces (Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Strangelove, etc) Realistic (comparatively speaking) stories can be terrible (any random cheap real world drama with poor pacing and terrible plotting or dialogue). The degree of realism in a story tells you nothing whatsoever about how well written it is.
Being unrealistic can be a problem in certain types of stories, sometimes, depending on the situation.
But even when it is a problem, it doesn't automatically mean the story is terribly written because every story has some problems of some kind or other (nothing is perfect).
And even in a (comparatively) realistic story, being unrealistic is not automatically a problem, either, because reality still doesn't make for great stories in many ways. A story with 'realistic' pacing will not succeed as entertainment because real life is slow and wildly inconsistent in terms of how fast events unfold. A story with 'realistic' dialogue will almost always bore the crap out of most audiences, because most people in the real world aren't particularly good or even memorable speakers. A writer devoted to 'realistic' demographics or probabilities by default boxes themself out of being allowed to write about people or events which are unusual, unexpected or unlikely when those have literally always been the most important drivers of human fiction, because people aren't nearly as interested in some regular person no different than their neighbors or coworkers as they are in the exotic, fantastic and challenging concepts fiction can offer.
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Star Wars is definitely Science Fantasy, it was tongue-in-cheek on on purpose.
Star Trek was supposed to proverbial top rated Science Fiction. Tribbles aside.
About that blue stuff? An early 1990s issue of Scientific American, had a detailed article on nanotechnology. We should have had nanotechnology which could repair each and every single cell in our bodies.
Problem: Hackers. Which wasn't an issue in the issue. Has become one since.
Star Trek was supposed to proverbial top rated Science Fiction. Tribbles aside.
About that blue stuff? An early 1990s issue of Scientific American, had a detailed article on nanotechnology. We should have had nanotechnology which could repair each and every single cell in our bodies.
Problem: Hackers. Which wasn't an issue in the issue. Has become one since.
Perhaps they're rare, but there are counterexamples, so I would have said, "... will not necessarily succeed." All the President's Men comes to mind.
Yeah, no. Star Trek's scientific accuracy has always been grossly exaggerated, even TOS's. I don't care if Roddenberry had chats with actual scientists, that doesn't mean the show was scientifically accurate. I grant you it did make more of an effort with its science than other sci-fi shows of the time, but is still had some rather questionable science all the same. Since then, the other shows and movies have become so laughably bad at the science Star Trek might as well be considered "science fantasy" now just like Star Wars.
Not really. It was meant as an action adventure with science fiction trappings. The two pilots featured soft ideas, including ESP, the transporter and such. Through the show there's a shift from scientific knowns to fictional ideas, going from lasers to phasers, and lithium to dilithium
It had some great ideas from writers and designers and certainly captured the imagination it was not hard science fiction.
Sometimes it's like people have never actually watched the show.
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