I found DS9 got particularly silly when it featured a magic book which could blind Dukat and summon fire and wraiths.
Good point, but I actually never noticed how silly it is after getting used to seeing blue-eyed people and red-eyed people shooting chest beams at each other XD
I presume that the precise chemical name of the cyristals is "something something something di lithium something something something" and is was originally shortened to "lithium" but someone decided it was too close to the name of the element lithium, and so it was lenghened a little bit to "dilithium".
My answer: "Evolved humanity". I firmly believe that we will continue to improve our overall condition, in spite of occasional setbacks, just as our pattern has shown since the beginning of recorded history. But the idea that that would involve a fundamental change in the basic nature of humans themselves seems to be a complete pipedream, and anyone who would try to base maintaining hope for a brighter future on it is being foolish. In my opinion, no offense intended: you may feel free to think me foolish for thinking that way. I don't mind you being wrong. I like the explanation from some of the novels, that dilithium turned out to be unusually abundant on Earth, which was part of the reason for Earth's relative power in the Federation. But we didn't know how to recognize its 4th dimensional and other special properties until we discovered them (learned from Vulcans?) and so we confused it with all the quartz around it that looked just like it. Which explained some of the odd things that ritualists had experienced with "crystal magic" and such before then. If you think about it, that makes dilithium the opposite of fantastical, though: they're the science that explains away fantasy, just like chemistry is to alchemy, just like science has always done. The fact that we don't understand it yet doesn't make it fantasy as long as by it's nature it's something we could understand and not "a wizard did it". It's just futurism. ... and lived to report it.
The fact that in the future, the people of Earth will have eradicated hatred, bigotry and intolerance, seems a little fantastical for me.
Nice ideas. Yes, Earth has an abnormal abundance of minerals probably due to it being the largest rocky body in the solar system. Yes, lithium impurities are found in lithium quartz (Silicon Oxide), so, maybe some percentage of it is dilithium. But why in quartz crystals? Lithium in general is very abundant on Earth, so, wouldn't that Lithium also have dilithium in it, too? Since it is called lithium and dilithium crystals, I would assume that a purer crystalline compound of lithium would be better, and not quartz. Maybe a high gravity field (like the sun or Jupiter or simply material left over from the previous supernova that coalesced into our solar system) is needed to bring out the dilithium time properties.
I like your ideas. If I'm correctly remembering the author who wrote the passages relevant to that, I believe that she generally also writes some very magic-y stuff, outside of Trek. So I think she wanted the dilithium mistaken for quartz to imply that there's something solid and scientific going on underneath ideas about crystal magic.
I assume you mean in the temperature / pressure range humans live in. This is also true for Krypton, but it doesn't stop the crystals from hurting Supergirl.
All matter has temperature / pressure levels at which it switches phases, so I'd have to imagine they exist, though I have to admit that I thought we were talking about the fictional lithium-on-the-second-level-periodic-table element dilithium, and not a paired lithium molecule. So I might be wrong and the molecule might break its bonds above and below the temperature range in which it is a gas. But still correct that lithium (and the fictional dilithium) would exist as various states of matter.
Socialist utopia is the most obvious but besides that I consider two of the primary technologies of Star Trek, that being transporters and replicators. The transporters are fantastical because in a sense they are also replication devices. The moral implications of death and re-fabrication are certainly out there. The replicators themselves as far as I’m aware are supposed on the theory of energy and molecular reconstruction which is entirely absurd. As much as it is an efficient fictitious device to deal with produce and the absence of trade, it also needs to sidestep some fairly core scientific principals. Almost everything in Star Trek is fantastical but these are some that I consider from time to time.
I think there's some confusion in this conversation about what is fantasy, and what is science-fiction. Let me try to break it down: Fantasy: A wizard did it. There is no scientific explanation for how it works, except possibly other being caused by other inexplicable or mythical agents. Star Wars lives here in the middle, closer to fantasy. Soft Sci-Fi: There's a scientific explanation for how something works. It doesn't have to be explained to the viewer / reader. It's enough that the characters know the science and math of how it works. Star Trek lives in the middle here, closer to the soft end. Hard Sci-Fi: There's scientific explanations for how things work, and those explanations are either real science or at least reasonable extrapolations of real scientific theories or at least scientifically respectable hypotheses.