Warp vs Genesis (TNG 7 x 19) What counts as bad science in Trek? And why nitpick?

[Christopher]

It also reminds me of the second pilot, WNMHGB. The warp drive is knocked out due to trying to cross this galactic barrier, and this is one of the very few times Trek successfully sells the notion of being truly trapped out there and it's palpable. A ship losing its ability to travel faster than light is now stuck and with limited resources and confined in scope to keep the audience focused. A great blend of the fantasy and the reality where nothing trips over each other to pull one out of the story. It's great stuff.

Except they're conveniently within a few days' sublight travel of a habitable planet, which would have to mean they came out in its star system already, and why would there be an Earth refueling station that close to the edge of the galaxy if they'd never been there before? I don't see anything realistic in that situation.


But you're right about the early seasons of TNG being as scientifically grounded as Trek has ever gotten, thanks to Rick Sternbach & Michael Okuda as science consultants. The depiction of a periodic nova star in "Evolution" was so accurate you could use it in a classroom. The time warp in "Yesterday's Enterprise" was caused by "a Kerr loop of superstring material," which, aside from misusing "superstring" to mean "cosmic string," is an actually plausible mechanism for a time warp, certainly more so than chroniton fields or what-have-you. (The word "chroniton," whose only use in TNG was in season 5's "The Next Phase," doesn't even make etymological sense. The proper construction for the name of a time quantum would be “chronon,” but that's already used to refer to the smallest possible interval of time in a quantum system. The Greek root for time is khronos, and the suffix for a subatomic particle is simply -on. If it had been “chronicon,” that would make sense, since khronikos means “of/pertaining to time.” But there’s no inflection or declension of khronos that has an “it” in it as far as I can tell.)

 

[Annorax849]

Warp Drive may exist as a possibility… but what makes the one in Star Trek different is that Subspace exists. We probably won’t be so lucky.

 

[Christopher]

Warp Drive may exist as a possibility… but what makes the one in Star Trek different is that Subspace exists. We probably won’t be so lucky.

The definition of "subspace" has changed over time. TOS used it to refer exclusively to subspace radio. James Blish was the first to apply the term to warp drive in his novelization of "Tomorrow is Yesterday," saying the Enterprise traveled in a "bubble of subspace" outside of normal space, and that it was flung back in time by impact with "that part of the black star's gravitational cocoon that had also begun to extrude into subspace."

Dr. Jesco von Puttkamer, the science adviser to ST:TMP, defined the warp bubble itself as a subspace formed within normal space by the warp field -- a subspace in the sense of a subset of the whole, a small pocket universe of sorts. This is consistent with how Jack Williamson defined it in one of the earliest uses of the term, from 1937: "Yet, swift as was the Silver Bird, plunging through millions of miles in a second, drawn into a tiny subspace of her own by the field warp of the kappa coils, seven years had passed before she approached her destination." Roddenberry's TMP novelization referred to the ship traveling through hyperspace, but I guess that's technically consistent with Puttkamer's model (which anticipated Miguel Alcubierre's by 16 years, only missing the formal math), because the necessary spacetime distortion would require a fourth spatial dimension for it to distort through, and that's the technical definition of a hyperspace (just like a hypercube is the 4-dimensional counterpart of a cube).

The alternate definition of subspace as a hyperspace-like extradimensional realm through which starships traveled also dates from the '30s (see above link), and was used by Blish in 1968, but it wasn't codified in canonical Star Trek until TNG.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

What about the Genesis Device, that you can pack into such a small device the capability to build a planet?

 

[knightgrace]

The answer to my question, is 'Yes'.

The actual device is called, in common, an atom smasher. Or if want to be more exacting, either a linear accelerator, or a Cyclotron. Small ones are common...

So, in other words, please don't be too dismissive.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

The answer to my question, is 'Yes'.

The actual device is called, in common, an atom smasher. Or if want to be more exacting, either a linear accelerator, or a Cyclotron. Small ones are common...

So, in other words, please don't be too dismissive.

Huh? Who were you referring to? The Genesis Device is not a Cyclotron

 

[Christopher]

What about the Genesis Device, that you can pack into such a small device the capability to build a planet?

With 23rd-century tech, the idea is ridiculous. I read the novelization of TWOK before I saw the movie, and I assumed the Genesis torpedo was a huge missile. I couldn't believe it when it turned out to be as tiny as it was.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

What about the Genesis Device, that you can pack into such a small device the capability to build a planet?

I'm assuming the Genesis Effect depends on using the Planets Local Matter to power it's effect, it only needed a small amount of energy to start the Genesis Wave, the rest of the effect will self propagate until there is no more matter/surface area around/on the area/planet that needs converting as we see in it's usage in ST:TWoK & ST:LD.S4.E10

 

[knightgrace]

Huh? Who were you referring to? The Genesis Device is not a Cyclotron

See post number twenty. I am making a point. And, yes, it deals with this thread, plus a couple of others...

The point to be direct is that too many people dismiss Science Fiction ideas as pure bunk.

DON'T!!!

 

[Christopher]

See post number twenty. I am making a point. And, yes, it deals with this thread, plus a couple of others...

I looked at that post, and I have no idea what point you're making.

The point to be direct is that too many people dismiss Science Fiction ideas as pure bunk.

DON'T!!!

I can assure you, speaking as a hard science fiction novelist with a physics degree, that the Genesis Device is pure bunk and absolutely should be dismissed as such. It's one of the stupidest ideas in Trek history, and it got even stupider when they retconned in the gibberish "protomatter" as the magic elixir behind it. If you're looking for ideas whose plausibility shouldn't be dismissed, that's one of the worst examples you could possibly have chosen, right down there with Red Matter and spore drive.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

In broad strokes, the Gensis Device was kind of like a planet-wide replicator* that instead of making you a cup of hot tea made you habitable planet by restructuring whatever matter was at the target to conform to the artificial biosphere pattern in its programming. In a universe where transporters are taken for granted, it's not completely bonkers.

Protomatter is to the Genesis Device what dilithium crystals are to the warp drive, just part of the completely imaginary hocus pocus that makes it work in the fiction.

* - And, yes, I am aware that replicators would not become part of canon for several more years. So what? It was forward-thinking.

But on the other hand, it really seemed in TMP that the robe was beamed** onto the Ilia robot probe while it was in the sonic shower, so while they didn't have the name replicator on screen yet, the function seemed to be implied, really, pre-TWOK.

** - The robe just magically appeared out of thin air and the shower opened after Kirk pressed some controls.*** How else, if not beamed?

*** - The heels, too?

 

[knightgrace]

By the definitions of today, you are correct.

But your vision is too limited. I recall a 1986 issue of 'American Scientist ' that brought together the top minds of Science Fiction...

Their conclusion was that most Science Fiction Authors were too unimaginative in their thinking.

Why? Looking at the rate of change in the world since 1900 A.D. to 1986 A. D. was unprecedented in nature, furthermore the expected rate of change from 1986 A. D. To 2001 A. D. Would be the same, in the previous 86 years.

In other words the rate of change has been exponentailing.

Major radical thinking is required.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

^ Yes, our vision of the future will likely be very old-fashioned. Unless there's an Apocalypse, and it's all cavemen or silos.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

^ Yes, our vision of the future will likely be very old-fashioned. Unless there's an Apocalypse, and it's all cavemen or silos.

Or both or none by the way certain world leaders are acting we won't see past the next 50 years...

 

[Christopher]

Their conclusion was that most Science Fiction Authors were too unimaginative in their thinking.

Saying "Reality might be stranger than we expect" is not remotely the same as saying "Any random dumb idea demands to be taken seriously." Just because there are things we don't know yet doesn't mean everything is fair game. And no idea deserves to be taken seriously until either a theory predicts it or observed evidence suggests it.

Besides, there's a huge difference between the suggestion that there are things we don't yet know and the suggestion that the things we do know are wrong. If an idea in fiction contradicts things we know are true, then we can safely say it's unbelievable. This is why I find The Expanse's use of magnetic boots for "walking" in microgravity to be more unbelievable than the black-box artificial gravity fields of other science fiction. We can't know for sure that future science won't discover some way to generate a gravitational or gravity-like field within a spaceship, but we do know that magnetic boots in space have been tried and do not work the way they're shown in the show, and are a bad idea for multiple reasons. So it's a case where the more "realistic" approach is actually far more unrealistic.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

^ From the standpoint of strict realism, 2001's Velcro-grip shoes haven't aged well. However, visually the famous scene with the flight attendant walking in a circle to get upside down remains captivating and effective, and it still stands up as a retro vision of the future.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Saying "Reality might be stranger than we expect" is not remotely the same as saying "Any random dumb idea demands to be taken seriously." Just because there are things we don't know yet doesn't mean everything is fair game. And no idea deserves to be taken seriously until either a theory predicts it or observed evidence suggests it.

Besides, there's a huge difference between the suggestion that there are things we don't yet know and the suggestion that the things we do know are wrong. If an idea in fiction contradicts things we know are true, then we can safely say it's unbelievable. This is why I find The Expanse's use of magnetic boots for "walking" in microgravity to be more unbelievable than the black-box artificial gravity fields of other science fiction. We can't know for sure that future science won't discover some way to generate a gravitational or gravity-like field within a spaceship, but we do know that magnetic boots in space have been tried and do not work the way they're shown in the show, and are a bad idea for multiple reasons. So it's a case where the more "realistic" approach is actually far more unrealistic.

That's very interesting. Of all the devices wouldn't have imagined they would pose difficulties

 

[1001001]

^ Yes, our vision of the future will likely be very old-fashioned.

I grew up with The Jetsons.

Where the hell is my flying car?

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I grew up with The Jetsons.

Where the hell is my flying car?

People have been asking that for the last 60 years or so... Not only flying it folds into a briefcase

 

[ozzfloyd]

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