Agreed. combined with what Col Green did, and the post-war conditions shown in Farpoint, it took warp drive and Vulcanian intervention to really save Earth.
I am not sure how scientific is it, but I heard/read more than once the average Trek fan should be at his/her fifties. So most of us will be at our eighties and if we didn't successful destroy the earth until then, it could be possible that some of us will be at their hundreds+ and mentally as well as physically healthy. Well, it is statistically correct but statistic is not the reality.
Wow. We're really not too far from Enterprise's years, it's crazy to think about that. if I make it to 2150, I'd be 147 years old. I'll be such a old woman by then.
I think it's Zuckerberg who said that the first person to live a thousand years has already been born. I don't believe that for a second but if he's right then you may even see Braxton's timeship!
I have my own theory about space lanes set up by slavers, VSL style: http://cds.cern.ch/record/618057/files/0305457.pdf This would also explain how travel to known worlds along space lanes takes less time than travel in free space. Even a nuclear pulse Orion might find itself farther along than it should have been.
...The underlying problem there being that Star Trek either never mentions the concept of finding the quickest route, or then has the characters express pretty fundamental amazement at the existence of such a route. It might of course be that finding the quick route is what the navigator does, without any verbal prompting. But this makes the commands about warp factors meaningless, as the skipper can't know whether a trip from A to B at warp 5 is going to take hours or months in that case. And the amazement at Waadwaur corridors and the like becomes even more amazing, as there is no reference to the Starfleet ships already flying along such corridors as a matter of routine. Spacelanes might work fine in a show where the heroes always used those. I mean, Stargate SG-1 could have worked just fine even if they (perhaps after the pilot episode) omitted all the dialing scenes and just implied that dialing happened. But Trek heroes virtually never ply known routes! Timo Saloniemi
The skipper would be expected to make a preliminary, computer-assisted calculation of the entire trip anyway. How many times did they specify the exact azimuth and elevation, which must have come from the same source estimating warp drive performance?
Well, never. That is, if Kirk wanted to go to Alpha Beta, he said "Set course to Alpha Beta", and Chekov and Sulu did. (So perhaps they always chose the fast route instead of the direct or short route?) It was only if Picard wanted to make a maneuver for maneuvering's sake, without a set destination as such, that he would command "Set course, 123 mark 45". He would never command that if he wanted to go to Kappa Tea. (But sometimes he would choose a heading even if the point was just to get away from danger, in which case LaForge or Crusher ought to have been the ones making the decision about the fastest route, assuming such things existed!) Whether an estimate of travel time or ETA would be given for a trip... varied from case to case. The estimate would be given by the one punching in the commands, though, not by the one ordering the trip to be taken. (Remarkably, the helm never offered the skipper any alternatives, such as "fast or direct, Sir?".) Timo Saloniemi