The Bad Science of Voyager

[TommyR01D]

There were so many problems with the Voth and that entire episode.

One little example is that hadrosaurs ate plants, but we see the Voth chowing down on insects chameleon style. I grant though that a lot can happen in 65 million years.

Much, much worse however, was the holodeck scene. The doctor says the last common ancestor that the Voth had with the humans was Eryops, from the Devonian - 400 million years ago. This is all wrong. Eryops was from the early Permian, about 295 million years ago. Secondly, Eryops was not the last common ancestor of "warm blooded and cold blooded organisms." Eryops was a Temnospondyl, a group which is generally considered to be related to modern day amphibians (and certainly lived like an amphibian). The common ancestor of reptiles and mammals was an amniote - probably something very small and lizard-like. Warm-blooded and cold-blooded organisms did not split apart at one time, given birds are dinosaurs and evolved endothermy separately (though I grant perhaps hadrosaurs perhaps could have been cold blooded - we don't know when warm blood evolved. Finally, the actual model shown doesn't look anything like Eyrops, but more like a primitive Synapsid ("mammal-like reptile).

The other big problem with that scene was that it repeated Threshold's misconception that evolution was predictable and goal-oriented. Janeway gives this command to the computer:

"If the Hadrosaur had continued to evolve over the last sixty-five million years, extrapolate the most probable appearance."

This request is utterly absurd and should be impossible to meaningfully answer, but in a heartbeat the holodeck generates something reminiscent of a Pertwee-era Silurian* to stand before them. Remember that this is before the Voyager crew know anything about the Voth's home environment or the events that the species have experienced in all those millennia, without which there is no way to predict their evolutionary path.

*Yes, I am aware that the name of the Silurians is itself an example of bad science.

 

[Tenacity]

it repeated Threshold's misconception that evolution was predictable and goal-oriented

TNG episode "The Chase" said exact;y that.

In the Trek universe evolution is designed and follows a plan.

 

[Discofan]

TNG episode "The Chase" said exact;y that.

In the Trek universe evolution is designed and follows a plan.

That's backdoor ID!

 

[USS Excelsior]

And then there was Silver Blood where even Tom and Harry forget that they’re copies, and the whole crew must have also forgotten standing on the silver blood planet and leaving it in their silver blood ship.

So it can copy technology too, even though they weren’t given samples of it to copy it from.

 

[Discofan]

And then there was Silver Blood where even Tom and Harry forget that they’re copies, and the whole crew must have also forgotten standing on the silver blood planet and leaving it in their silver blood ship.

So it can copy technology too, even though they weren’t given samples of it to copy it from.

It must have taken a 3D picture of the ship when it almost sank in it.

 

[USS Excelsior]

And then there’s Tuvix.

 

[Discofan]

Not really Science but bad all the same in Deadlock when Janeway (the "surviving" one) says that she's thought long and hard to finally conclude that she would have given the same order as "herself"... Well, let's hope so!

I mean if she can't even agree with a copy of herself that only a few hours back was HERSELF, how could she expect anyone else to?

 

[UnknownSample]

I think it was in a first or second season where there was talk about there beeing "a hole in the event horizon" of a quantum singularity....

I was going to post about this, but I don't remember details. All I remember is an alarmingly, totally wrong, made up definition for "event horizon" that had nothing whatsoever to do with what one really is...
----
I remember no mention in Next Gen of warp 10 being impossible. It does seem implied by their coming closer and closer to 10 without ever reaching it, though.

TOS and Next Gen both had them going faster than 10... in That Which Survives they go way over, and in All Good Things too.

 

[Discofan]

I think the notion of "event horizon" is just too subtle for the ignorant writers to wrap their heads around.

 

[Timo]

I was going to post about this, but I don't remember details. All I remember is an alarmingly, totally wrong, made up definition for "event horizon" that had nothing whatsoever to do with what one really is...

Then again, Trek has two levels of physics: regular, and warp. By its very definition, warp would rewrite the rules of event horizons: there would be FTL radiation escaping from where mere lightspeed radiation cannot.

Not that it would be easy to see how this would result in what we saw in VOY "Parallax". But while gravity is hard pressed to create directional effects around a singularity for lightspeed radiation, directionality of effects on FTL radiation is certainly a possibility, considering how much directionality of subspace we see elsewhere in Trek.

I remember no mention in Next Gen of warp 10 being impossible. It does seem implied by their coming closer and closer to 10 without ever reaching it, though.

In "Time Squared", Riker says (perhaps half in jest) that going faster than warp 10 would be a way to achieve time travel. This is of course true of warp 10 is infinite speed: by exceeding it, you'd arrive before you left.

On a less specific note, in "Where No One", LaForge expresses great disbelief at his tachometer showing the ship passing warp 10.

TOS and Next Gen both had them going faster than 10... in That Which Survives they go way over, and in All Good Things too.

Which does leave the two specific mentions from "Time Squared" and "Threshold" as in-between outliers. We may disregard them, and "Sub Rosa" and the idea that Worf would have a son and whatever else we please. Or we may decide the warp scale was redefined at least twice. Or we may decide the engines had a built-in limiter during the 2360s and 2370s for some reason. Or that warp 10 was the speed past which anything and everything was possible, because no engine or engineer could maintain control at that point, and the ship might well shoot out at infinite speed then, or time travel, or turn into a sperm whale, or...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Shamrock Holmes]

The thing that annoys me about the "infinite velocity" thing is that it wasn't necessary. According to most accepted sources, the 'sustainable cruise velocity' of Warp 9.975, would actually have been fast enough to get them back in (on average) twelve years, not seventy-five, and given that AQ travel times are often shown as much shorter than the average, then less than half that time is possible. Therefore this would suggest IMO either Stadi didn't know what she was talking about (Janeway's '75 years' suggests an average ('sustainable cruise' speed of Warp 7.5) or Voyager's warp drive was severly damaged during Caretaker and wasn't restored to full operations until years later if ever.

 

[TommyR01D]

The thing that annoys me about the "infinite velocity" thing is that it wasn't necessary. According to most accepted sources, the 'sustainable cruise velocity' of Warp 9.975, would actually have been fast enough to get them back in (on average) twelve years, not seventy-five, and given that AQ travel times are often shown as much shorter than the average, then less than half that time is possible. Therefore this would suggest IMO either Stadi didn't know what she was talking about (Janeway's '75 years' suggests an average ('sustainable cruise' speed of Warp 7.5) or Voyager's warp drive was severly damaged during Caretaker and wasn't restored to full operations until years later if ever.

I like DITL's method, giving a "Normal Cruise" of Warp 8, a "Maximum Cruise" of Warp 9.975 and a "Maximum Rated" of Warp 9.985.

 

[Discofan]

From Virtuoso:

"TINCOO: What about the simplest equation of them all? One plus one."


Aren't she supposed to be a math genius? "One plus one" is NOT an equation!!! At best it could be a member of one.

That kind of mistake really takes the cake!

 

[Timo]

The other big problem with that scene was that it repeated Threshold's misconception that evolution was predictable and goal-oriented.

Well, in "Threshold"

1) the environment in which the evolution would take place was known in detail: the innards of a starship or shuttle when Tom began molting, the swamplands of Planet Wetanddark when Tom and Kate turned into salamanders.
2) the extreme speed of evolution would boost predictability, as the environment would remain utterly stable throughout.
3) the very mechanism involved a single individual undergoing natural selection - that is, Tom and later Kate somehow turning down unwanted mutations and endorsing wanted ones; the process need not be in any way goal-oriented (save for striving to survive in the present environment), but it would certainly be creating that impression, since the observer would get to see the end result and the goal scored with that result!

What the EMH says is not an endorsement of evolution-with-a-direction: he puts the conditional into his humorous speculation, and justly so.

Then again, as stated, humans ever since "The Chase" have known that a secret programming perverts all natural evolution into eventually producing a sapient biped, out of a random species conveniently available. It happened to us humans; it could and should be expected to have happened to the Voth. So Janeway's instructions to the holodeck would be implicit: "Show me how one gets a star-traveling sophont out of a hadrosaur". And not because she would be curious about the process - but because she wanted a rough comparison with their captive. Essentially she was just asking the computer "Is our captive a hadrosaur descendant?" in a particularly visual way, and the computer answered "This is not impossible".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Discofan]

Well, in "Threshold"

1) the environment in which the evolution would take place was known in detail: the innards of a starship or shuttle when Tom began molting, the swamplands of Planet Wetanddark when Tom and Kate turned into salamanders.
2) the extreme speed of evolution would boost predictability, as the environment would remain utterly stable throughout.
3) the very mechanism involved a single individual undergoing natural selection - that is, Tom and later Kate somehow turning down unwanted mutations and endorsing wanted ones; the process need not be in any way goal-oriented (save for striving to survive in the present environment), but it would certainly be creating that impression, since the observer would get to see the end result and the goal scored with that result!

What the EMH says is not an endorsement of evolution-with-a-direction: he puts the conditional into his humorous speculation, and justly so.

Then again, as stated, humans ever since "The Chase" have known that a secret programming perverts all natural evolution into eventually producing a sapient biped, out of a random species conveniently available. It happened to us humans; it could and should be expected to have happened to the Voth. So Janeway's instructions to the holodeck would be implicit: "Show me how one gets a star-traveling sophont out of a hadrosaur". And not because she would be curious about the process - but because she wanted a rough comparison with their captive. Essentially she was just asking the computer "Is our captive a hadrosaur descendant?" in a particularly visual way, and the computer answered "This is not impossible".

Timo Saloniemi

The problem is that evolution doesn't work this way, not at all!!!

Here's how it works:

1) random mutations occur.
2) The individuals struggle through life, some are eliminated before they can reproduce others aren't.
3) The descendants of the latter start over.

So you see it's not possible for one individual to evolve alone.

 

[Catarina]

I sometimes cringe when I hear "some kind of" when it blatantly is and there is no variation.

 

[TommyR01D]

I sometimes cringe when I hear "some kind of" when it blatantly is and there is no variation.

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[Refuge]

I love these threads about science because they play to my views on theoretical science in general. Of course Trek is going for futuristic science so that is a game changer. All previous laws and rules can simply be waved away, even from episode to episode

 

[fireproof78]

I love these threads about science because they play to my views on theoretical science in general. Of course Trek is going for futuristic science so that is a game changer. All previous laws and rules can simply be waved away, even from episode to episode

Yes, the last thing I want from science is consistency...

 

[Discofan]

The problem with Voyager is that often the story itself doesn't have a hold on reality. I mean like the people who dream. Chakotay goes down on a planet where everyone is asleep and we're supposed to accept that even though it's completely stupid!!! who feeds these people? Who bathes them? Who puts clothes on them? One thing about dreaming is that while you're doing that, NOTHING gets done in the real world!!!