The "I'm Not Paying" Confessional Thread

[Sophie74656]

Very little of Star Trek is grounded in reality.

Much of Trek has basis in real scientific theories.

 

[Ricky Spanish]

I'm sorry that you can't enjoy Trek for what makes it great.

I enjoy it just fine. I don't need an entertainment property to make me feel smart.

Technobabble is a bunch of fancy-sounding gobbledygook that has nothing to do with any real scientific concepts.

Kor

Yep. They've even admitted it was non-sense over the years.

 

[Sophie74656]

On the contrary, the science of star trek has been explored by dozens of physicists in as many publications. That's what excites us, the audience, the realism of the so called technobabble. Comparative realism is what makes Star Trek great.

Much of our current technology that we use every day has come from Star trek. Tablets, Cell phones, 3d printers, hyposprays, bio beds. Even warp drive uses actual scientific principles and theories.

Personally the real science behind trek is something I enjoy much better than Star Wars which to me is just magic.

 

[Ricky Spanish]

Much of our current technology that we use every day has come from Star trek.

Well, no. Surprised people still buy into this stuff...

I don't have all day, so I looked up one...

Tablets

Tablet computers appeared in a number of works of science fiction in the second half of the 20th century, with the depiction of Arthur C. Clarke's NewsPad[5] appearing in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the description of the Calculator Pad in the 1951 novel Foundation by Isaac Asimov, the Opton in the 1961 novel Return from the Stars, by Stanislaw Lem, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in Douglas Adams 1978 comedy of the same name, all helping to promote and disseminate the concept to a wider audience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tablet_computers

 

[Ricky Spanish]

Cell phones

The mobile phone may be seen as a new technology in our day, but the idea was actually first conceived in the year 1908. This statement is only true because the mobile phone is actually a high-tech radio. In 1908 a man named Nathan B. Stubblefield who lived in Murray, Kentucky applied for the U.S. Patent 887,357 for a wireless telephone; he originally applied his patent to only radio telephones. But by doing this he only meant to create a telephone that could operate with strings. [1] The police department was the next to advance this technology by adding a feature which allowed officers to communicate while they were still in their cars. The concept of translating this technology into a phone was not thought of until the year 1947 by the Bell Telephone Company laboratories. Many attempts were made to get this technology working for the public, but nothing that was produced actually worked. [2] Finally in 1973 a man named Martin Cooper and his associates effectively masted the portable mobile phone. They used the technology of the police radio and applied it to the technology of the day to make the first working portable mobile phone.

http://mobilephones.umwblogs.org/invention/

But, a communicator really isn't a cell phone to begin with. As a communicator can work across vast distances with no infrastructure required.

 

[Tesophius]

Technobabble is a bunch of fancy-sounding gobbledygook that has nothing to do with any real scientific concepts.

Kor

That's sad if you think so, I suggest you start with the basics with Laurence Krauss' works.

 

[Ricky Spanish]

3d printers

In 1981, Hideo Kodama of Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute published his account of a functional rapid prototyping system using photopolymers (more on those in a minute). A solid, printed model was built up in layers, each of which corresponded to a cross-sectional slice in the model. Sound familiar?

Three years later, in 1984, Charles Hull broke new ground by inventing stereolithography. Stereolithography lets designers create 3D models using digital data, which can then be used to create a tangible object.

https://www.autodesk.com/redshift/history-of-3d-printing/

 

[Kor]

Trek communicators are more analogous to military communications devices, not consumer-level cell phones.

Kor

 

[Tesophius]

Watching Trek for character development is pretty pathetic, lmao

 

[Ricky Spanish]

hyposprays

• 23 November 1947: "The Comic Strip Killer" episode of the radio show The Shadow aired. In it, a hypospray is mentioned, as working "on the basis of a high-pressure air gun. You hold it against the skin and it blasts fluid, painlessly, through the pores. The patient doesn't even feel the injection." The characters in the story were told that it was such a new device that the "first real publicity about it is in this week's Life Magazine".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypospray

 

[Ricky Spanish]

Watching Trek for character development is pretty pathetic, lmao

So is deceiving one's self into buying the hype about its scientific accuracy.

 

[Tesophius]

So is deceiving one's self into buying the hype about its scientific accuracy.

Which popular science literature on Star Trek tech have you closely acquainted yourself with?

 

[No Grave Marked]

On the contrary, the science of star trek has been explored by dozens of physicists in as many publications. That's what excites us, the audience, the realism of the so called technobabble. Comparative realism is what makes Star Trek great.

Well, some of the scientific aspects of Star trek have been (and continue to be) studied - like Warping Spacetime to travel long distances; and the feasibility of actual teleportation; BUT those things as they are presented and said to work in the Star Trek universe ARE NOT based in reality (IE Waoping Spacetime with no real relativistic effects on the people in the ship; the fact that the ship can accelerate to relativistic speeds in an instant - yet there are no G force effects because of the near magical inertial dampers that never fail in any way and seem to work even when every other system (and power) is down.)

Star Trek is fun and internally consistent (for the most part) science fantasy - it has never been 'hard' science fiction.

 

[Ricky Spanish]

Which popular science literature on Star Trek tech have you closely acquainted yourself with?

You mean technical manuals and the like? I have a shelf full of them. They're non-sense.

 

[tomalak301]

Watching Trek for character development is pretty pathetic, lmao

That's a shame you think that way. Some of my favorite episodes of trek are the character dramas (Duet, Darmok, All Good Things.., and Living Witness to name a few)

 

[KirkusOveractus]

You mean technical manuals and the like? I have a shelf full of them. They're non-sense.

Some light can be shed on reading books such as the Whitfield book. That will show a lot of evidence that Roddenberry and the production people were not sitting around discussing the technology from an advancement of science perspective.

The Transporter came about to save money, since having a shuttle land every week was too expensive.
A communicator came from the military walkie talkies.
Warp drive was to not have episodes in a row of them just sitting on the ship, waiting to get to the next planet.
Phasers were to seem more advanced than a laser gun in things like Buck Rogers.

 

[Ricky Spanish]

Some light can be shed on reading books such as the Whitfield book. That will show a lot of evidence that Roddenberry and the production people were not sitting around discussing the technology from an advancement of science perspective.

I think sometimes people forget this is an entertainment franchise. Complete with katras, ESPer super mutants and Protomatter.

 

[No Grave Marked]

That's a shame you think that way. Some of my favorite episodes of trek are the character dramas (Duet, Darmok, All Good Things.., and Living Witness to name a few)

But his point is - there's very little character development (IE their views and personalities don't change/advance much) - And no Picard stating he was almost an Archaeologist is really 'character development' in that sense.

TOS and TNG very much held the character's personalities as static throughout their run. You had some actual character development on DS9 and ENT (can't speak for VOY as I thought the series writing was horrible, and didn't watch it much past "The 37's")

 

[KirkusOveractus]

I think sometimes people forget this is an entertainment franchise. Complete with katras, ESPer super mutants and Protomatter.

No, Katras, ESPer super mutants and Protomatter are all real. The stuff I mentioned isn't.

 

[Kor]

That's sad if you think so, I suggest you start with the basics with Laurence Krauss' works.

Indeed. For those interested in such things, Krauss's The Physics of Star Trek is a good overview of how the science and tech depicted in Trek is pretty much impossible in the way in which it is depicted.

Kor