Bad science in Trek

[Mach5]

There's an interesting (and quite off-topic) discussion going on in the ENT forum, about the Bajoran solar sail ship (no inertial dampeners, FTL without time dilatation etc.)...

Anyway, it made ma wanna open a thread about all the "bad science" in Trek. There are numerous examples for it in ST XI alone, but my favorite has always been ENT's Dear Doctor with its absurdly bad misinterpretation of the theory of evolution.

So, name your favorite examples of shit science in Trek. Who knows, maybe we'll even be able to make a list in the end.

I think we should probably skip episodes like Spock's Brain in this thread (there's really nothing to discuss here).

 

[Admiral Shran]

No thread about bad Trek science can be considered legitimate without first mentioning VOY: Threshold and it's absurdly laughable conception of evolution. ENT: Dear Doctor puts it to shame, though that's not saying much.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

None of that compares to:

"129 years from now, a star will explode and threaten to destroy the galaxy."

I can't believe that was written in a script, approved, and even read by a famous actor who should be above saying lines like that and "I had to extract the red matter and shoot it into the supernova."

 

[Admiral Shran]

^ True. But like Mach5 said, the bad science in Trek XI alone could fill an entire thread.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Star Trek is fantasy, dressed up in sci-fi colours. Always has been, always will be. Human aliens with silly colourations and useless bumps who speak Amercian English and think and act like we do? If you can accept utter nonsense like that, then stuff like the Genesis device, alien/human hybrids, the Praxis shockwave, infinity speed, a galaxy-threatening supernova, time travel, ignorance of relativity, ignorance of evolution, the magic of replicators and living machines, Odo's changing mass, Laas flying at warp speed, nonsensical space anomalies and whatnot should be nothing.

Star Trek: You're watching it wrong.

 

[Deckerd]

Wot he says. If you want to start a manageable thread about ST science, you should ask about Good science in Trek.

 

[Myasishchev]

Wot he says. If you want to start a manageable thread about ST science, you should ask about Good science in Trek.

Objects in scenes set on Earth appear to be subject to one gravity.

...I couldn't think of anything else.

 

[Bill Morris]

Some of it was necessary, like the forehead aliens, just to make it possible within a TV budget to produce Star Trek.

But there is bad science in science, as well, where people who call themselves scientists refuse to look at the data when told it will reveal something they believe is not possible. Galileo experienced it, and so have the many Nobel laureates in the sciences who suffered decades of riducule before their work was accepted. And some of the science we believe today will be shot down some day as our knowledge grows. There are still surprises in store.

You can laugh at replicators, but today we have technologies that imitate them (stereolithography, selective laser sintering, and even what Panosonic calls bread machines). Watching selective laser sintering in action is pretty amazing, with metal machine parts forming right in front of your eyes. And you can take a Lightwave file of a starship to a stereolithography shop, pay some money, and walk out with a real, high-quality plastic model based on that file.

 

[Timo]

To be sure, Star Trek is explicit about our current understanding of evolution being dead wrong. It's not just bad science, it's deliberately fictional science.

We know for a Trek fact that humans did not evolve from monkeylike creatures through adaptation to changing circumstances in eastern Africa. Instead, we learn that humans became humans because a deviously clever piece of genetic programming was inserted into our predecessors - apparently into the entire biome of our world - and at one point activated and turned us into humans in apparently complete disregard of natural selection.

We don't know if things like shrews or dragonflies or ferns evolved "naturally" despite the above fact. But Trek scientists would be worthless charlatans if they continued to believe in the same type of natural selection today's scientists do, because obviously the Trek reality is different.

That probably holds true for most of the pieces of "bad science" out there: they may sound bad, but that's only because the Trek universe is different from us. And it has to be, in order to key tenets such as transporters and warp drive and time travel to work.

The relevant question is whether a given piece of fictional science really needs to be fictional in terms of overall drama. Do we need unnatural evolution? Yes, we do, in order for "The Chase" plot to make sense - and it's handy in explaining why every planet out there has spawned humanoids like us. It's not particularly bad science, then. Do we need weird "phasing" or "subspace" things? Sure, or else we wouldn't have transporters or FTL communications. But do we need every single occurrence of those things? Probably not. It's just that once we accept a few violations of current natural laws, absolutely vital for allowing the Trek tenets, we don't have much ground to stand on if we want to oppose some other specific and seemingly unnecessary violation.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mach5]

Star Trek: You're watching it wrong.

Yet, some people are stupid enough to buy Lawrence Krauss' The Physics of Star Trek, and think that some of it may actually be real sci-fi.

No thread about bad Trek science can be considered legitimate without first mentioning VOY: Threshold and it's absurdly laughable conception of evolution. ENT: Dear Doctor puts it to shame, though that's not saying much.

Yeah, when I said that we should probably skip episodes like Spock's Brain, I thought that automatically included Threshold.

I mean, it's just THAT obvious. Threshold is unanimously considered awful, but A LOT of people praise Dear Doctor for the "ethical and moral issues it raises"

 

[Timo]

What is "real scifi"? Arthur C. Clarke got most of his physics wrong when writing about lightsails or space elevators or interstellar flight. He didn't personally crack his numbers, he just took fashionable elements of popular and not-so-popular science from "real" scientists and liberally twisted them for the purposes of drama. Yet scifi doesn't really get "realer" than Clarke.

Trek "concepts" as such are more or less as valid as Clarke's. Their "scientific" validity is about as close to nil as Clarke's, though, in terms of details that are unrelated to their value as drama but are real showstoppers if one bothers do do the math.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Admiral Shran]

The closest sci-fi ever came to "real" was Jules Verne's writings.

 

[YARN]

None of that compares to:

"129 years from now, a star will explode and threaten to destroy the galaxy."

I can't believe that was written in a script, approved, and even read by a famous actor who should be above saying lines like that and "I had to extract the red matter and shoot it into the supernova."

Indeed.

 

[MacLeod]

Must have been one massive subspace shock-wave it send out.

 

[Art Vandelay]

Star Trek is fantasy, dressed up in sci-fi colours. Always has been, always will be. [...]
Star Trek: You're watching it wrong.

I agree - to a point.

While Star Trek is pure fantasy, it should try and create suspension of disbelief. Maintain the illusion of a set of internally logical rules by keeping to them - more or less.

When the writers throw in blatant nonsense, it destroys the illusion, which makes me go harumph and takes me out of the story. I dislike it when that happens.

Most times, I can take it as the writers over-reaching and just failing by fumbling. In those cases, I laugh it off and proceed - Spock's Brain and Threshold are prime examples.

Then there is Abramstrek. A movie with atrociously bad science that I can only attribute to the laziness, carelessness or even smugness of its writers. That, I cannot forgive.

 

[Warped9]

We can accept some "gimme's" in science fiction, but each individual draws the line when they recognize something blatantly wrong. The solar sail ships of DS9 and the ion powered spacecraft in "Spock's Brain" are but two examples.

When I was a kid I didn't recognize the flaw in "Spock's Brain," but not long after I started reading about speculative space drives and then I understood it was wrong before anyone else spelled it out for me. Now I don't cringe when I hear the references in the episode, but it would have been nice (and appreciably smarter) if they had thought of something else.

Ditto with the solar sail ship of DS9. You want to use a sail spacecraft in your story, fine, but please do at least a little reading first to get some basics right even if you may exaggerate.

It's understandable that television is under a time constraint and things in the script slip by, by what are science consultants for if it happens again and again and again?

 

[Mach5]

Then there is Abramstrek. A movie with atrociously bad science that I can only attribute to the laziness, carelessness or even smugness of its writers.

Uhm, wait a second. Braga and RDM had nothing to do with this movie.

 

[Art Vandelay]

^ Heh, good one. Although I consider RDM to be one of the "good guys".

Braga, in my opinion, was sensible enough to couch his laziness, carelessness and smugness in an air of sci-fi sophistication, if that makes any sense. I can let that slide. Kind of.

What Kurtzman and Orci did to me with their script... Man, watching that movie to me felt like getting rubbed down with dog sh**. Not that I ever really experienced that.

 

[sonak]

^ Heh, good one. Although I consider RDM to be one of the "good guys".

Braga, in my opinion, was sensible enough to couch his laziness, carelessness and smugness in an air of sci-fi sophistication, if that makes any sense. I can let that slide. Kind of.

What Kurtzman and Orci did to me with their script... Man, watching that movie to me felt like getting rubbed down with dog sh**. Not that I ever really experienced that.

then you're missing out, trust me.

 

[Deckerd]

I don't know how anyone can differentiate between 'good' science fantasy and 'bad'. It seems to me that if you enjoy this genre then you have to put your credulity on hold all of the time. The number of space stories produced which are actually possible you can count on one hand. It doesn't make sense to pick and choose. As far as ST09 goes; it was funny, entertaining, silly and from the cast an extremely affectionate homage to the original; in the same way as all of these shows are entertaining and silly. The trick is not to make them too silly, which is what seems to be the major complaint in a discussion about 'bad science' in science fantasy.