Hows today's tech match Star Treks?

[Robert Maxwell]

Those are fair points but you can have a very-close-to-real-time video call from one side of the world to the other. We may not have any of the FTL-enabled/enhanced technology for most people's purposes what we have is plenty sufficient and can only be improved in terms of quality at this point. I don't think we're looking at any kind of quantum leap in phone or videoconferencing technology anytime soon--we don't really need it. Things will just get faster and better but the basic nature of the technology is not likely to change. What does seem to be happening is that fixed computer systems (desktops) are giving way in the consumer space to things like notebooks, netbooks, iPads, and smartphones. One thing Trek (especially TNG) didn't seem to account for is the emergence of the "cloud." Endpoint devices need not have a huge capacity or a lot of power as the storage and workload can be diverted to distant, fixed hardware at an arbitrary location. It was sometimes implied that PADDs worked this way but it was never quite clear. They at least seemed to be capable of performing substantial work while "offline" from a ship/station's network. I think that's a fair criticism but if you have a solid network you don't need the ability to "work offline" because it should never happen. We don't make phones nuke-proof because the odds of nuclear conflagration are quite low. We are trying to make phones waterproof given how often people drop them into toilets, sinks, and bathtubs.

You have to consider that some Trek tech won't come into fruition because the needs it would serve don't exist in the real world.

 

[sojourner]

Iridium phones, by their nature, contact orbiting spacecraft with every call. Just sayin.

And when in Star Trek did we ever see someone with a communicator talk to someone a 1000 lightyears away?

I will give that computers in Star Trek are faster, but faster than light? - citation needed.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Iridium phones, by their nature, contact orbiting spacecraft with every call. Just sayin.

And when in Star Trek did we ever see someone with a communicator talk to someone a 1000 lightyears away?

I will give that computers in Star Trek are faster, but faster than light? - citation needed.

The TNG Technical Manual had a lot of babble about subspace fields surrounding the computer cores, so in essence they calculated at warp speeds. I don't think this was ever stated onscreen (not off the top of my head, anyway) but there you go.

 

[Jadzia]

One thing Trek (especially TNG) didn't seem to account for is the emergence of the "cloud." Endpoint devices need not have a huge capacity or a lot of power as the storage and workload can be diverted to distant, fixed hardware at an arbitrary location. It was sometimes implied that PADDs worked this way but it was never quite clear. They at least seemed to be capable of performing substantial work while "offline" from a ship/station's network.

I think the computers in star trek were designed to appear as an aesthetic and ergonomic progression of unix mainframes. It didn't anticipate clusters of standalone machines.

I think there was always a sense of there being a main computer at the core of the ships with centralised memory and processing. The PADDs seemed like they were normally disconnected from this network and (although we never saw it) I imagine there would be some cable/docking system/tricorder scanner needed to connect them temporarily into the network for transferring data. It didn't anticipate abundant wireless communication.

Iridium phones, by their nature, contact orbiting spacecraft with every call. Just sayin.

Our world has too much dependency on supporting hardware. The phones do not work without the phone network / service provider / satellites etc. The communication devices in star trek appear less dependent on supporting hardware, in that they'll happily communicate directly with one another (peer-to-peer), or will cooperate with any comms network they can tap into.

I will give that computers in Star Trek are faster, but faster than light? - citation needed.

The computer core was surrounded by it's own warp field, which as a plot device allowed it to work FTL.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

One thing Trek (especially TNG) didn't seem to account for is the emergence of the "cloud." Endpoint devices need not have a huge capacity or a lot of power as the storage and workload can be diverted to distant, fixed hardware at an arbitrary location. It was sometimes implied that PADDs worked this way but it was never quite clear. They at least seemed to be capable of performing substantial work while "offline" from a ship/station's network.

I think the computers in star trek were designed to appear as an aesthetic and ergonomic progression of unix mainframes. It didn't anticipate clusters of standalone machines.

The presence of "computer cores" seems to validate your position. A ship's network could just as well be distributed among many nodes, and would in fact be more disaster-proof since it wouldn't have a single point of failure. Voyager seemed to have something like this in the form of the bio-neural gelpak network, but as we saw they could fall victim to viruses that would spread throughout the ship, so a distributed system isn't entirely safe.

I think there was always a sense of there being a main computer at the core of the ships with centralised memory and processing. The PADDs seemed like they were normally disconnected from this network and (although we never saw it) I imagine there would be some cable/docking system/tricorder scanner needed to connect them temporarily into the network for transferring data. It didn't anticipate abundant wireless communication.

How can you say they didn't anticipate abundant wireless communication when they had those wireless commbadges? Those were tantamount to cell phones, only they worked over vast distances, apparently without needing a massive supporting network.

Iridium phones, by their nature, contact orbiting spacecraft with every call. Just sayin.

Our world has too much dependency on supporting hardware. The phones do not work without the phone network / service provider / satellites etc. The communication devices in star trek appear less dependent on supporting hardware, in that they'll happily communicate directly with one another (peer-to-peer), or will cooperate with any comms network they can tap into.

Mesh networks might be the solution to this. If we someday end up with ubiquitous WiFi networks it may be entirely possible for cell phones to fail over to a WiFi mode and route calls that way, without reliance on an actual cellular network. Individual phones simply lack the power to communicate point-to-point to with a distant unit, but we could certainly build in some redundancy so it will use whatever kind of connection it can find nearby, rather than relying entirely on the presence of an appropriate cell tower.

 

[Jadzia]

How can you say they didn't anticipate abundant wireless communication when they had those wireless commbadges? Those were tantamount to cell phones, only they worked over vast distances, apparently without needing a massive supporting network.

What I mean is, that PADDs were carried around to transfer data physically. We didn't see data being transferred to/from them wirelessly. It seems to me that although wireless voice communication was anticipated and appeared abundantly in the programmes, the same can't be said for wireless data ports in portable devices.

Signals from the ship (like distress signals and ship-to-ship video) are a different matter, as they were not portable devices. They used the future equivalent of broadcast radio.

Tricorders didn't seem like they used wireless either. I seem to recall them having to be docked with the ship's computer, and they felt very invasive in how they extracted data from things.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

How can you say they didn't anticipate abundant wireless communication when they had those wireless commbadges? Those were tantamount to cell phones, only they worked over vast distances, apparently without needing a massive supporting network.

What I mean is, that PADDs were carried around to transfer data physically. We didn't see data being transferred to/from them wirelessly. It seems to me that although wireless voice communication was anticipated and appeared abundantly in the programmes, the same can't be said for wireless data ports in portable devices.

Signals from the ship (like distress signals and ship-to-ship video) are a different matter, as they were not portable devices. They used the future equivalent of broadcast radio.

Tricorders didn't seem like they used wireless either. I seem to recall them having to be docked with the ship's computer, and they felt very invasive in how they extracted data from things.

Yeah, you're right, some of that stuff never quite matched up. Just weird that the commbadges worked just fine without being physically tethered but they couldn't transmit data in a similar fashion. That might have just been an oversight (or limited thinking) on the part of the writers. Given the technology we saw there's no reason to assume they didn't have wireless data transfer capabilities in tricorders and PADDs.

The whole notion of someone carrying a PADD from one end of the ship to the other is completely laughable from a technology standpoint, yet it happened more than once in Trek.

 

[Jadzia]

I'd put it down to limited thinking of the writers. After all, their primary function was to create dramatic stories, not be visionaries of the future.

 

[Trekker4747]

Iridium phones, by their nature, contact orbiting spacecraft with every call. Just sayin.

And when in Star Trek did we ever see someone with a communicator talk to someone a 1000 lightyears away?

I will give that computers in Star Trek are faster, but faster than light? - citation needed.

It's in the TNG tech manual which says the computer systems work on FTL (faster than light) concepts.

"Canon" sources are harder to come by other than logical thinking (if the ships are moving FTL then it seems making the computers operate this fast would follow too.) In the technobabble-laced conversation Riker has with the Ferengi flunkie in "Rascals" he points out that the computer has an "FTL processor." Granted the conversation he's having was mostly made up and designed to confuse the Ferengi, but....

Without looking it up, though, I don't think the FTL was very much and probably wouldn't even be calculated as being as fast as even Warp 2 (10 c in TNG) but just slightly over c.

In fact I'll check....

The book says that the core runs at "3350 milicochranes."

A cochrane is the power-measurement used with warp travel. 1000 milicochranes being equal to 1 cochrane. 1 cochrane is the power needed to travel at Warp 1 (c).

So the ship's computers run at three times the speed of light.

 

[sojourner]

^I know it's fiction, but doesn't that violate causality just a bit? The computer should be solving problems before it's asked.

 

[scotthm]

...and the loss of some technical things like dos (the command console) from windows.

The "command console" is not gone, and in fact Powershell is now part of Windows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell

I think the biggest technological deficit compared to Star Trek (less the FTL and transporter/replicator technology) is our lack of virtually limitless, cheap energy. I don't see that on the horizon.

---------------

 

[paudemge]

My memory is not too good, but I thought Spock was able to access the ships computers from his tricorder on at least one occasion.

 

[Trekker4747]

^I know it's fiction, but doesn't that violate causality just a bit? The computer should be solving problems before it's asked.

You realize the ship travels faster than light too, right?

 

[sojourner]

Strictly speaking, no, it doesn't. It warps space to achieve an effect faster than light. The ships never actually attain a velocity faster than light.

 

[ProtoAvatar]

Strictly speaking, no, it doesn't. It warps space to achieve an effect faster than light. The ships never actually attain a velocity faster than light.

As per special relativity, that's all it takes; if you can move with FTL with respect to another frame of reference (which is exactly what warp does), you can travel back in time by using simultaneity's relativity.

The computer should be solving problems before it's asked.

Have you seen some of the answers those computer spot - getting information that's just not there, at present?

 

[Jadzia]

My memory is not too good, but I thought Spock was able to access the ships computers from his tricorder on at least one occasion.

Since this is the Sci-Tech forum, it's not about what is canon, it's about what trek technology appeared to be normal and in everyday use. Obscure uses of tricorders and hacked together devices don't count.

 

[Trekker4747]

Strictly speaking, no, it doesn't. It warps space to achieve an effect faster than light. The ships never actually attain a velocity faster than light.

And the computer does the same thing. The Tech Manual says the computers make a non-propulsive subspace field to achieve data processing at FTL speeds.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Strictly speaking, no, it doesn't. It warps space to achieve an effect faster than light. The ships never actually attain a velocity faster than light.

And the computer does the same thing. The Tech Manual says the computers make a non-propulsive subspace field to achieve data processing at FTL speeds.

Yeah, but if the computer is inside a subspace field and the user isn't, they should technically receive results from their inputs before they're ever entered into the system. Effect would precede cause.

"FTL computing" is one of those things that sounds neat on TV but it's difficult to imagine how it would actually work in a practical way.

 

[Trekker4747]

At the same time the Tech Manual mentions that the impulse drive systems have Einstein Compensators to negate the time dilation and length contraction effects of high-speed space travel. As far as the tech-manual says and is concerned the shps' computers operate at speeds that are faster than the speed of light and, apparently, are able to do this without cause and effect being violated.

Now, while we're more or less on the subject, it seems that traveling tiny, non masses at warp speeds is easier and more energy efficient than traveling a mass. The tech manual puts the Enterprise's top speed at something like Warp 9.8 but will result in an auto shut-down of the engines after a few minutes. Subspace radio, on the other hand, travels at Warp 9.9999... out to several decimal places. So, IIRC, the ship's top speed before auto-shutdown is almost 5000c subaspace radio's top speed is several times that (the speeds get exponentially faster the closer one gets to Warp 10.)

All of the technobabble seems to want to "establish" that these higher speeds are just that. Speed And they don't have any effect on Einsteinian physics. In "the real world" in speed over C is practically considered "infinite speed" as the only theoretical particle that can do this is a tachyon and it can only move faster than light but not any slower.

In Trek things are able to move, relative to the real universe, faster than light without any time effects occuring. So saying something is traveling at "5000 c" isn't saying it'd get somewhere before leaving but that it's simply traveling, relative to the universe, really damn fast.

Saying Warp 9 or 1400c is easier than saying 938 billion miles an hour. Also, saying the computer systems "operate faster than light" is only a way to measure the rate at which its calculating things. Your computer processes things at just a hair under c (since they use electrons, which have mass, they do not travel at c) and yeah they can operate pretty fast so it's hard to say how increasing this by orders of magnitude will do anything but the trek computers are also doing a lot more complex processing and aren't even working on "electronics."

So saying that the computers being FTL means they'd violate causality is sort of ignoring the "reality" of it. The computer can just make limitless complex calculations in an instant perhaps to the point where maybe it does know the answer to something before it really knows the question but it relays this information to the user in real time for the best use.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

At the same time the Tech Manual mentions that the impulse drive systems have Einstein Compensators to negate the time dilation and length contraction effects of high-speed space travel. As far as the tech-manual says and is concerned the shps' computers operate at speeds that are faster than the speed of light and, apparently, are able to do this without cause and effect being violated.

Yeah, but come on, all it means is that they recognized there would be inherent causality violations in an FTL-capable computer, so they invented magic "compensators" that hand-wave the problem away.

Now, while we're more or less on the subject, it seems that traveling tiny, non masses at warp speeds is easier and more energy efficient than traveling a mass. The tech manual puts the Enterprise's top speed at something like Warp 9.8 but will result in an auto shut-down of the engines after a few minutes. Subspace radio, on the other hand, travels at Warp 9.9999... out to several decimal places. So, IIRC, the ship's top speed before auto-shutdown is almost 5000c subaspace radio's top speed is several times that (the speeds get exponentially faster the closer one gets to Warp 10.)

The idea of ferrying EM transmissions over subspace is pretty suspect. Exactly what is maintaining the warp field around your radio waves (or whatever) as they travel from one sector to the next? Once again, there's "subspace radio" which is just one giant hand-wave. "It works, just don't ask how."

All of the technobabble seems to want to "establish" that these higher speeds are just that. Speed And they don't have any effect on Einsteinian physics. In "the real world" in speed over C is practically considered "infinite speed" as the only theoretical particle that can do this is a tachyon and it can only move faster than light but not any slower.

In Trek things are able to move, relative to the real universe, faster than light without any time effects occuring. So saying something is traveling at "5000 c" isn't saying it'd get somewhere before leaving but that it's simply traveling, relative to the universe, really damn fast.

Saying Warp 9 or 1400c is easier than saying 938 billion miles an hour. Also, saying the computer systems "operate faster than light" is only a way to measure the rate at which its calculating things. Your computer processes things at just a hair under c (since they use electrons, which have mass, they do not travel at c) and yeah they can operate pretty fast so it's hard to say how increasing this by orders of magnitude will do anything but the trek computers are also doing a lot more complex processing and aren't even working on "electronics."

So saying that the computers being FTL means they'd violate causality is sort of ignoring the "reality" of it. The computer can just make limitless complex calculations in an instant perhaps to the point where maybe it does know the answer to something before it really knows the question but it relays this information to the user in real time for the best use.

Of course, we are just overthinking the whole thing since the rationalizations are always cooked up after the fact. The writers wanted ships that could travel faster-than-light so you can tell stories on different planets every week. Whatever explanation they come up with just has to be good enough not to disrupt your suspension of disbelief, not to stand up to any serious scrutiny.