23rd Century Security Headaches

[ZapBrannigan]

Technology is often a double-edged sword.

The most obvious and devastating tech nightmare in Star Trek has got to be time travel. What's stopping a Klingon fleet from sling-shotting around their own sun (where we can't monitor them), going back in time, and then traveling to Earth when it is utterly defenseless?

Even time travel by our friends opens up no end of mortal threats to everyone. Things had to happen in just such a way for you and more importantly Diane Lane to be born. It scares me.

The other big 23rd century techno threat is the transporter. You could send someone a hand grenade with the pin pulled. It's a terrorist's wildest dream.

In another thread, Christopher just suggested that Spock's brain surgery, in I forget which episode, was done with transporter technology. This means that a weaponized transporter beam could capture our hearts, and not in the Reese Witherspoon sense but more of a Leatherface vibe. Not cool, man.

While the computer revolution has brought us many benefits, we also face new problems like malware, privacy loss, cyber bullying, cyber stalking, Internet addiction, and rampant identity theft. A cyber warfare attack might take down our civilian electrical grid or financial institutions. We're better off but we're in more danger. Star Trek opens even bigger nightmares we should be glad aren't happening.

 

[Push The Button]

It beats living in caves and dying of dysentery in your 20's.

 

[Melakon]

While the computer revolution has brought us many benefits, we also face new problems like malware, privacy loss, cyber bullying, cyber stalking, Internet addiction, and rampant identity theft.

And people posting minute-by-minute reviews of a new film during its first showing on opening day before it's even finished.

 

[Timo]

What's stopping a Klingon fleet from sling-shotting around their own sun (where we can't monitor them), going back in time, and then traveling to Earth when it is utterly defenseless?

I can only hope the trick requires good old Sol to work, and will produce no results on generic stars elsewhere. Sol may feature an uncommon subspace neighborhood or something - it's one of the two known stars (Bajor's sun being the other) to pose so great a danger to warp travel that not even Armageddon-level emergencies suffice to make our heroes attempt insystem warp. Of course, this only happens in certain episodes and is not a feature in others, but such unpredictability might serve to make Sol even more unique.

OTOH, certain novelists suggest it requires the Enterprise, with her history of accidental time travel and accruing of temporal residue on her engines - and the BoP doing the trick later on is only because Spock is the only person in the universe to understand what exactly happened to the Enterprise originally.

The other big 23rd century techno threat is the transporter. You could send someone a hand grenade with the pin pulled. It's a terrorist's wildest dream.

This is somewhat balanced by the fact that transporters can be rendered inoperable by pretty much anything, down to and including strong winds! Securing a facility against transport, with jammers, scramblers or low-level shields, would seem trivially easy (although I suspect very few facilities ever are). It's particularly surprising in light of this that our heroes manage to beam down to Camp Khitomer at the climax of ST6, then... Did Cartwright's cohorts turn off the jamming to allow the assassin to escape, or did Valeris provide the codes needed for that?

This means that a weaponized transporter beam could capture our hearts

This is essentially what a phaser pistol is, more or less. It makes either you or bits of you disappear, and the latter feature sounds nasty indeed (it's what got Varon-T banned, supposedly).

We're better off but we're in more danger.

I'd think being in danger has never been less dangerous than today - and will become even less dangerous in the wonderful world of Trek where a decapitation requires little more than two tri-isoaspirins and a call in the morning.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ZapBrannigan]

It beats living in caves and dying of dysentery in your 20's.

Yeah. Like I said, we're better off. I'm not a singing space hippie. But you have to take the bad with the good when it comes to time travel.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Timo, it would sure be convenient if Sol itself or Spock's know-how was required for non-Guardian time travel on demand. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Also, I never thought of strong wind as an impediment to transport. But I guess when you're trying to materialize, you don't want your goo spread upon the wind, thinner and thinner, until only the wind remains.

 

[Melakon]

There's usually some ion storm or something going on along with those high winds, and we know what they can do to transporters.

 

[Timo]

There are two amusingly explicit cases there. One is VOY "Tattoo":

Torres: "I'm not sure we can transport down. Every time we try to lock onto a transport site, a storm begins."

The other is ENT "Strange New World":

Reed: "There's a problem, Sir - there are contaminants in the matter stream. The phase discriminator can't seem to isolate the debris."

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Melakon]

This means that a weaponized transporter beam could capture our hearts, and not in the Reese Witherspoon sense but more of a Leatherface vibe. Not cool, man.

This is what the Vidiians were armed with as hand weapons, and how they stole Neelix's lungs.

 

[HIjol]

While the computer revolution has brought us many benefits, we also face new problems like malware, privacy loss, cyber bullying, cyber stalking, Internet addiction, and rampant identity theft.

Just read an article today about the fact that we are quickly exceeding the storability of the amount of data we are creating.


And people posting minute-by-minute reviews of a new film during its first showing on opening day before it's even finished.

Or the people emailing the "blow-by-blow" plays of NFL games in real time.

Timo, it would sure be convenient if Sol itself or Spock's know-how was required for non-Guardian time travel on demand. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Also, I never thought of strong wind as an impediment to transport. But I guess when you're trying to materialize, you don't want your goo spread upon the wind, thinner and thinner, until only the wind remains.

The answer, my friend, is blow in' in the wind

There's usually some ion storm or something going on along with those high winds, and we know what they can do to transporters.

Hmm...HIjol searching Wiki and Alpha for "Effects of ion storms and high winds on Transporter efficiency and success"

 

[Melakon]

There's usually some ion storm or something going on along with those high winds, and we know what they can do to transporters.

Hmm...HIjol searching Wiki and Alpha for "Effects of ion storms and high winds on Transporter efficiency and success"

Clue #1: "Mirror, Mirror"

 

[HIjol]

Technology is often a double-edged sword.

The most obvious and devastating tech nightmare in Star Trek has got to be time travel. What's stopping a Klingon fleet from sling-shotting around their own sun (where we can't monitor them), going back in time, and then traveling to Earth when it is utterly defenseless?

Even time travel by our friends opens up no end of mortal threats to everyone. Things had to happen in just such a way for you and more importantly Diane Lane to be born. It scares me.

The other big 23rd century techno threat is the transporter. You could send someone a hand grenade with the pin pulled. It's a terrorist's wildest dream.

In another thread, Christopher just suggested that Spock's brain surgery, in I forget which episode, was done with transporter technology. This means that a weaponized transporter beam could capture our hearts, and not in the Reese Witherspoon sense but more of a Leatherface vibe. Not cool, man.

While the computer revolution has brought us many benefits, we also face new problems like malware, privacy loss, cyber bullying, cyber stalking, Internet addiction, and rampant identity theft. A cyber warfare attack might take down our civilian electrical grid or financial institutions. We're better off but we're in more danger. Star Trek opens even bigger nightmares we should be glad aren't happening.

You bring up some EXcellent concerns, Zap! Plus, as I am sure you already know, the

True
Name

Of Diane Lane is

"Alien Dean"

So there is that.

 

[Timo]

Interestingly, things apparently don't have to happen "just right" to create specific outcomes, i.e. specific people: Kirk's team has messed up with the past often enough, and only one time travel incident out of the dozens resulted in their faces getting changed...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Redfern]

The "slingshot effect" was not unique to just Sol. Remember, dialog established the Rnterprise reached the Enterprise cruised to close to a "dark star" ("black star" or another term similar to that [I know they didn't say "black hole"]). Spock deduced the effect could be replicated to send them forward in time using Earth's sun.

One can gather from those conditions there are at least 2 celestial bodies that can generate temporal displacement, our sun and that "dark star". And if those two, each having very different properties, why not others? This makes it all the more dangerous as there are so many celestial bodies of sufficient mass, literally billions.

Sincerely,

Bill

 

[Marsden]

I'm going to say: the successes we've seen have been the unusual cases and other attempts weren't mentioned again because the participants were never seen again, so the Klingons probably did send that fleet and it went poof! no more fleet.

 

[Avro Arrow]

The most obvious and devastating tech nightmare in Star Trek has got to be time travel. What's stopping a Klingon fleet from sling-shotting around their own sun (where we can't monitor them), going back in time, and then traveling to Earth when it is utterly defenseless?

Probably the main thing stopping them is the simple fact that they don't know about the technique. Starfleet only found out by accident, and they'd be motivated to keep that a secret.

(There was a novel back when where the *Romulans* actually tried this, but it didn't work out as well for them as they had originally hoped anyway.)

But yeah, I guess the Federation should be thankful that they found the Guardian planet before any of the rival powers...

There are two amusingly explicit cases there. One is VOY "Tattoo":

Torres: "I'm not sure we can transport down. Every time we try to lock onto a transport site, a storm begins."

Did they specify anything about the storm? Maybe it was more of the "ion" variety. At any rate, I would imagine lightning would be a bigger problem for a transporter beam than high winds would.

The other is ENT "Strange New World":

Reed: "There's a problem, Sir - there are contaminants in the matter stream. The phase discriminator can't seem to isolate the debris."

But the transporter systems were in their infancy then... they had *just* been approved for human use. I wouldn't assume that this would still be a problem in the 23rd century. Spock, McCoy and Chapel all beamed down during high winds in "The Paradise Syndrome", and seemed to suffer no ill effects.

 

[Timo]

The "slingshot effect" was not unique to just Sol. Remember, dialog established the Rnterprise reached the Enterprise cruised to close to a "dark star" ("black star" or another term similar to that [I know they didn't say "black hole"]). Spock deduced the effect could be replicated to send them forward in time using Earth's sun.

One can gather from those conditions there are at least 2 celestial bodies that can generate temporal displacement, our sun and that "dark star". And if those two, each having very different properties, why not others? This makes it all the more dangerous as there are so many celestial bodies of sufficient mass, literally billions.

The fact that the starship would slingshot from another star system entirely and end up in stable flight inside Earth's atmosphere is a remarkable one. Perhaps we are the best off assuming that the dark star in fact was well within the Sol system?

We know from ST:TMP that there's a black hole extremely close to Earth, or at least 2270s science still believes there could have been one there in the 1970s - close enough to swallow Voyager 6 at the very earliest stages of its flight. We hear in "Past Tense" that small black holes passing through the Sol system aren't unheard of. And we see on several occasions (the most recently with the death of Vulcan) that black holes in the Trek universe have an alarmingly severe effect on passing starships: they suck beyond all proportion to their size.

Perhaps the Enterprise was on final approach to Earth when she hit a local black hole; escaped its grip by Sulu's hasty punching in of high warp; and did not have time to slow down before this high warp inside the influence of Sol resulted in time travel? The ship would still have her course set for a gentle final approach to Earth, and would perform that automatically even with the crew incapacitated.

This isn't at undue odds with the dialogue, and accounts for many of the oddities.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Commishsleer]

I'm romanticising this but I think the Guardian of Forever would not allow say an army of Klingons/Borg to enter it and change Earth history. I'm speculating in the way it talked to Kirk and Spock that it was interested in having them there to abate its loneliness to some extent.
It would probably send the Klingon horde on a one-way trip. Its just speculation on my part. I didn't see the Guardian as particularly sub-servient or overly cooperative.

I also think Spock kept the sling shot formula to himself or otherwise every Tom, Dick and Harry with a powerful Starship could do it.

 

[Richard Baker]

IIRC in one of Christophers Books (Watching the Clock?) it is explained that the Enterprise had a unique setup with its engineering configuration (due to adventures and field repairs) which allowed the slingshot technique to work. I forget wy the KBoP could do it also.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Wait. Stop there. What is this? What the hell am I looking at???