And I've long had the impression that Scotty's real contribution was from re-organizing the SCE from a general-purpose appendage to the "real" Starfleet into a dedicated branch of problem-solvers and specialists --less about the tech than about knowing what engineers need (and being willing to irritate the Admiralty enough to get it).
Should I buy TNG: Indistinguishable from magic
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Also, by 2375, Scotty has been in the 24th century for six years. It takes an Academy student four years to go from knowing nothing to working on a Galaxy-class starship. I'm sure Scotty got it figured out.
That's not a fair assessment. Yes, it takes an a student 4 years to graduate, but to qualify to get into the academy they have to know a bunch of underlying concepts and science in the first place.
What was cutting edge 100 years ago would be beyond out of date and I sincerely doubt he'd be equipped to make that leap that easily any more than a scientist from the year 1910 could make the leap into our world and get completely up to speed (and beyond) in 4 years.
Not necessarily. The rate of innovation is not a universal constant. If anything, historically, the norm has been a fairly slow rate of progress, only minor and gradual improvements in techniques, with bursts of rapid innovation being atypical. And if you really compare TOS tech to TNG, there aren't really many material advances in physics or technology. The warp drive is faster, but it's still warp drive, using the same principles. The transporters have longer range and biofilters, but they're still transporters. The phasers have more powerful settings, but they're still phasers. They have replicators, but those are simply a refinement of transporter tech, based on the same principles. They have structural integrity fields, but those are a refinement of forcefield and artificial-gravity tech. Sensory prosthetics are more advanced, but Geordi's VISOR is basically a more powerful equivalent of Miranda Jones's sensor web. Computers use optical chips, but they don't seem that much more sophisticated or powerful; if anything, they seem to be less intelligent at times, since we don't have things like "Day of the Dove" where the crew asks the computer to explain the plot to them and suggest a strategy.
Meaningfully new technologies in the 24th century are few. Holodecks are the most prominent one, although if you accept TAS: "The Practical Joker" and disregard early TNG's references to the novelty of holotechnology, you might see a 23rd-century precedent there (and ENT has established that Earth had some limited holotechnology over a century before TOS, since there was an episode where they used a holographic target drone -- and that's not counting the Xyrillians' holotechnology in "Unexpected"). There have been breakthroughs in artificial intelligence -- Data, Moriarty, the EMH -- but one of those was near-unique and the others were accidental; and besides, Scotty certainly encountered sophisticated alien androids from time to time, so he has some prior knowledge in that field. I suppose the single most significant sea change in technology between 2294 and 2375 would be the bio-neural gel pack.
So evidently the Federation has reached something of a technological plateau, experiencing far less innovation in a century than we have in our current period of atypically rapid progress. Most advances made during Scotty's, err, extended vacation were matters of degree, improvements upon familiar principles rather than fundamentally new principles. So it wouldn't have been anywhere near as hard for him to adjust to the 24th century as it would be for an engineer from the 1930s to adjust to the present day.
Yeah, I don't think it's a leap to say that Scotty's background at least gives him as much of an engineering education as a 24th century high school student (as far as basic concepts go). He certainly could have become semi-knowledgeable within 6 years (as much as any primarily administrative/political job would need, certainly). Plus, the guy is clearly an expert at knowing what a starfleet engineer needs/wants from individuals of higher rank.
Probably more so, given his frequent encounters with alien technology beyond the Federation's state of the art.
Which Scotty does.
I don't see why they couldn't-- scientifically, at least (culturally is a different matter). My brother is about to graduate with masters in electrical engineering, but I guarantee you he didn't know a whole lot about it when he started his degree five years. Probably less than an electrical engineer from 1910!
I gather than Indistinguishable takes place in early 2383, which I think makes it the farthest-forward main-continuity book to date, not counting frame sequences or flashforwards. I'm not sure how much its storyline relates to elements from Destiny, though.
Yes, but ever since the introduction of computers our rate of understanding and discovery is increasing at an amazing rate. I believe we're at a point where the difference between technology right now and 100 years from now will be incredible.
For reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change
I chalk that up to the lack of imagination for the people who wrote the TNG bible when they first came on air, not an indication that technology would start advancing more slowly once we hit a certain plateau. Nothing about our current rate of discovery gives us any reason to believe that the rates won't continue to reflect Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns.
Well, as others point out, it's fiction so it's possible - albeit unlikely in my opinion. It's understandable from the perspective of a writer that that the Federation would only make small leaps forward in the time between TOS and TNG, but I suspect if the same situation were to occur in real life, the technology and level of understanding would be profoundly different.
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For now, yes. But the history of human/hominid technological innovation stretches back a few hundred thousand years, and on that scale, a century of accelerating progress is still just a hiccup. We can't assume that our current rate of accelerating innovation will continue forever. That's the conceit behind the notion of the Singularity, but it's simpleminded, the assumption that the patterns of history and society can be reduced to a single mathematical curve. An exponential process of technological increase could be cut short by any number of factors, whether physical, economic, social, or whatever. There's no way to rule out the possibility that our current rate of increase could come to an end, the same as every other period of rapid progress in human history.
But we're not talking about "we" here. We're talking about the universe Scotty inhabits. You're reading my point completely backward. I'm obviously not suggesting that TNG's fictional conceits prove anything about our real future, because that would be idiotic. Rather, I'm using the idea of punctuated equilibrium in technological innovation as a justification for the established fictional conceit of slower progress in the Trek future. The same way any SF writer would use a postulate of real science or history to lend credibility to a premise in a work of science fiction. It's not about saying it has to happen that way, simply about justifying the story premise as something that's theoretically possible.
About our current rate, no, but current information is not a very large sample set in proportion to the hundreds of millennia in which human invention has occurred so far. Come back in, say, ten thousand years and maybe then we can have the necessary perspective to speak with authority on this issue. But drawing on a paltry century or two of progress and assuming we can predict the future? That's just overconfident.
Agreed.
One of the reasons why I don't read much Trek lit. It's way too much fanwank for me.
Both are just airplanes in principle. But I think the guy who constructed the old one would have a very hard time even understanding the new one (and now if you focus on "but one is a jet and the other one is a propeller plane", I slap you with a trout or something because that's not the point). Also the difference between this old car and this car. Both are just cars with combustion engines, in principle.
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It may very well be the point (as the comparison between 24th century warp engines and 23rd century warp engines may be more equivalent to the comparison between 1960s jet engines and 2010 jet engines).
Regardless, you're not just sticking the Wright Brothers in a jet and telling them to fly. You're giving them 6 years of training. Plus, you're not even asking them to use the jet engine at the end of that 6 years. You're just asking them to understand the general principles.
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