Most Impracticable Trek Technology

[NCC1968]

Heisenburg's ideas make us thing that the transporter is not going to happen.

That's why transporters have the Heisenberg compensator.

Which makes no sense considering what the theory states.

 

[FordSVT]

Just the scale of the project to me makes it seem unrealistic

but is scale really relevant once you have virtually limitless energy + the ability to turn energy into matter? Perhaps self-replicating solar-powered replicators were used to construct the sphere itself. If each one made two, wash, rinse, repeat, than a Dyson Sphere becomes entirely plausible. It would seem that the 24th century technology is not far from being able to start one themselves.

The Dyson Sphere as shown in TNG is too big, too impractical, and would still be too expensive to build relative to its benefits, no matter how easy it was for them to build. One way or another you'd need the mass/energy of an entire solar system to construct one, you've got to get that enourmous amount of replicator matter/energy from some place.

I'm pretty sure that a completely enclosed sphere orbiting a star is mechanically impossible or at least highly impractical to maintain without constant adjustment. There would be no interior gravity. No known materials would be strong enough to withstand the structure's own pressure.

But again, you simply wouldn't need all that room. Trillions of people could inhabit billions of square miles of surface area with only a fraction of that surface area. It would be more practical and more strategically sound to contruct rings or satellite networks around multiple suns.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Just the scale of the project to me makes it seem unrealistic

but is scale really relevant once you have virtually limitless energy + the ability to turn energy into matter? Perhaps self-replicating solar-powered replicators were used to construct the sphere itself. If each one made two, wash, rinse, repeat, than a Dyson Sphere becomes entirely plausible. It would seem that the 24th century technology is not far from being able to start one themselves.

And how does it sustain its mass?

Even with mass lightening and structural integrity technologies... the thing's gonna give out eventually.

 

[The Laughing Vulcan]

The laws of physics as we currently know them allow for the Dyson Sphere. The sheer scale, the technology involved may be mind-bogglingly fantastic, but the thing is scientifically possible. The same can't be said for Transporters or Warp Drive. Nothing in our knowledge of science allows for teleportation or faster than light travel. Indeed some things we currently accept as sound scientific reasoning actually preclude these things from being possible.

Of current Trek fantasies, I think the most practicable would be the holodeck. We've already flirted with virtual reality, and tentative steps have been taken with three dimensional imagery in the real world. I think we may be forty or fifty years away from creating a 3-dimensional interactive environment, just as communicators presaged mobile phones. We just need a reason to do it.