21st century frozen people and Data's "television" comment?

[gastrof]

In the episode where the three people from the 21st century were defrosted and cured of their ailments, Data made a comment regarding what year it was that TV went out of existence as an entertainment form.

Does anyone here know the exact quote of what he said, especially what year he said it happened?

 

[Holdfast]

"That particular form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year Two Thousand Forty."

(a good script archive is at http://www.antoa.com/tng/. The episode you're thinking of is The Neutral Zone, S1's finale.)

 

[The Castellan]

Though movie night, and new movies (Archer and that female captain he liked mentioned "Another World War 3 flick".) seem to have survived.

Though I can picture Riker watching Curly, Moe and Larry during his off hours.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

The thing is, TRADITIONAL TV might be gone even sooner.
Already we're seeing a strong development toward netbased entertainment with more and more interactive programming.
In a few years nobody will be sitting in front of a large box and passively watch. Entertainment on demand will be televisions successor.

I think this is a case were a future prediction of Star Trek might once again prove to be more or less accurate.

 

[Myasishchev]

^Technically accurate, and missing the forest for the trees. People are still going to get involved in lowbrow entertainment--which TNG admitted every time they did a holodeck episode. I mean, are Dixon Hill novels cannibalized to make holodeck games really contributing a lot to improving the human condition? If so, what about Vulcan Love Slave?

 

[Hober Mallow]

The thing is, TRADITIONAL TV might be gone even sooner.
Already we're seeing a strong development toward netbased entertainment with more and more interactive programming.
In a few years nobody will be sitting in front of a large box and passively watch. Entertainment on demand will be televisions successor.

I think this is a case were a future prediction of Star Trek might once again prove to be more or less accurate.

It's looking more and more likely, though at the time the episode first aired I thought the writers were crazy for even suggesting the teevee might go away.

 

[Uncle Pennybags]

The thing is, TRADITIONAL TV might be gone even sooner.
Already we're seeing a strong development toward netbased entertainment with more and more interactive programming.
In a few years nobody will be sitting in front of a large box and passively watch. Entertainment on demand will be televisions successor.

I think this is a case were a future prediction of Star Trek might once again prove to be more or less accurate.

Even when everything is netbased and on demand, we are still going to be sitting on the couch in front of big screens. There are too many social events that are televised to have everybody only watching things on small individual screens.

Sports aren't going away anytime soon and, as such, people will have family and friends over to watch the Superbowls, college football, basketball, etc.

And they aren't going to want to just have everybody sitting there with a laptop, or watching on an iPod.

"TV" isn't going away anytime remotely soon, even if the delivery method of the content changes.

 

[nx1701g]

^ Who's to say that computer screens will always remain small? I was at BestBuy the other day and they have converters that allow your computer to connect to your television screen. My own computer monitor is 24 inches.

 

[Timo]

It's really just a random fluke that we have the sort of technologies we do today. The television is separate from the computer, why? Because IBM decided their PC was better off with a crappy monocolor CRT than with a plug that goes into the TV set. We have phones in our pockets instead of on our wrists, why? Because when phones shrank to practical size, somebody forgot to review the assumptions about how they should be worn. We don't have videophones because somebody forgot to reattempt those when bandwidth ceased to be a problem. OTOH, we do have camera cellphones, which nobody thought of or believed in a decade before they became reality.

The Star Trek universe shouldn't actually be in synch with ours in this respect. They didn't have IBM PCs - they had Henry Starling's Chronowerx machines which apparently had their mass memories inside their monitor boxes. They probably had in-synch technology up until the 1960s, including television, but the rise of mobile phones in the Trek universe seems quite unlikely when they had Starling's alternate technologies available.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Gil T.Azell]

In the episode where the three people from the 21st century were defrosted and cured of their ailments, Data made a comment regarding what year it was that TV went out of existence as an entertainment form.

Does anyone here know the exact quote of what he said, especially what year he said it happened?

I thought they were from the late 1990's??
but my memory may be gone,

 

[Timo]

Yup. The cryosat was dated indirectly in the episode, by saying that the homemaker died about 370 years before the episode's date of 2364.

The penultimate version of the script, which was on TrekCore until recently at least, had the heroes speculating much more on how and why the cryosat could have reached the Romulan Neutral Zone. The idea that it had originated from Earth orbit in the 1990s was present there as well, though. Clearly, the writers kept with the approach that 20th century Earth technology in the Star Trek universe was quite a bit more advanced than in our universe, including artificial gravity, working cryopreservation and whatnot. So their "television" might have been a bit different from ours, too - in their 1990s and their 2040s alike.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

Yes, it occurred to me as well that the cryo-satellite had artificial gravity, even as Data commented on the "old style disc drive".

 

[Timo]

This was omitted from the beginning of the episode:

Data: "This is quite intriguing. It is transmitting a carrier signal on a frequency which has not been used for centuries."

Riker: "Is there a message?

Data: "None. Just the carrier, possibly intended for encoded computer or telemetry information."

Worf: "I have never seen a space vehicle like it."

Data: "Strictly speaking, it is not a 'space vehicle'. It appears to be a satellite, similar in its rudimentary design to those which orbited Earth in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."

Riker: "Three hundred years ago. <mostly as a joke> Then there probably aren't any life signs?"

Data: "<deadpan> None. The power is solar... quite primitive. There is however minimum life support."

LaForge: "I wonder how it got out here. If it was in orbit around Earth, even at maximum impulse -- and there's no way it could travel any faster -- it would have taken a dozen centuries to get here."

We then get to the bit where Riker authorizes an expedition, and it goes exactly like in the aired version. When Data and Worf get aboard the satellite, we get no mention of the artificial gravity, nor a set direction for somehow faking zero gee, so the writers apparently thought that AG would be normal for a 1990s - and rightly so, considering the Botany Bay. They do think that FTL speeds would have been impossible, probably again in accordance with "Space Seed". And they do stress the fact that it would have been impossible for the sat to end up there without some sort of "divine intervention".

It's perhaps too bad that the aired version doesn't have our heroes wondering about the really amazing things here. OTOH, if they did wonder, and it was left unexplained, we might be even more dissatisfied with it all. And if the presence of the satellite really is a mystery worth several lines of dialogue, wouldn't our heroes suspect a devious trap or something?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SG-17]

I bet that traditional cable and satellite TV will be gone within 40 years and instead every new TV will have a built in ethernet (if we still use that) port or a wifi receiver.

 

[Hober Mallow]

^ Who's to say that computer screens will always remain small? I was at BestBuy the other day and they have converters that allow your computer to connect to your television screen.

Totally offtopic, but as a kid who grew up in the 80s, I find it funny now you need to buy a special attatchment to hook your computer to your TV. Back in the day, it was the only way to use your computer. Your computer worked with nothing but your TV.

 

[Hober Mallow]

The Star Trek universe shouldn't actually be in synch with ours in this respect. They didn't have IBM PCs - they had Henry Starling's Chronowerx machines which apparently had their mass memories inside their monitor boxes. They probably had in-synch technology up until the 1960s, including television, but the rise of mobile phones in the Trek universe seems quite unlikely when they had Starling's alternate technologies available.

Unfortunately, that technology had its major drawbacks. It could sometimes cause this to happen.

 

[The Castellan]

Well, might explain why everyone's smarter in TNG than now....no news from television.

 

[BolianAuthor]

The cryosat was rotating. It didn't need artificial gravity. As for the TV thing, Data is pretty spot-on... even now, nobody really needs a TV, because anyone with even a netbook or iPhone can just log onto any TV network's website, and stream live broadcasts, or download on-demand video.

 

[Myasishchev]

^How fast was it rotating? But no, I assume it was rotational gravity. Frankly, I assume that for the Botany Bay too, with a rotating internal compartment.

 

[Timo]

There wouldn't be space for one in Khan's ship, unless we also double or triple up the size of Kirk's... The set depicting (part of) the cryochamber room is a rather large square in layout, not something you could easily fit inside a pencil-shaped hull.

And the Coriolis forces would be rather noticeable if something was spinning in such tight circles; the shards from Khan's cryocompartment glass shouldn't have fallen straight down, and should probably have been sliding towards one corner or the other afterwards.

The cryosat would also have to be huge. Data and Worf moved along the long axis of a narrow space, which seemed to coincide with the long modular structure of the satellite. But if the end-to-end rotation was causing the gravity, then Data and Worf actually had to be walking at straight angles to that axis, covering only a teeny weeny part of one deck on the satellite. Yet dialogue suggests that they surveyed the entire satellite interior and were convinced that there were just those three well-preserved corpses and a couple of less well preserved ones.

Naah, artificial gravity seems standard in 1990s Earth spacecraft. One wonders when it was invented; Captain Christopher never expressed surprise at experiencing it aboard Kirk's ship... Perhaps his F-104 had an AG device in the ejection seat instead of a parachute?

OTOH, the 2030s Ares IV didn't seem to have AG installed. Or at least it was shut down for the stretch of the Mars survey that we witnessed.

Timo Saloniemi