Okay, we all know 24th century touch screens are made by the ACME Company for Starfleet because they keep blowing up in peoples faces, but what other technology portrayed in any of the Trek series is now surpassed by current real world technology?
What real 21st century tech is better than 24th century Trek Tech?
- Thread starter Omega-Trekker
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Discipline, chain of command, propaganda, advertising, have all been scientifically proven to be effective social technologies. The technologies exist in the 24th Century, but we don’t see them used as effectively as today.
Atomic weapons, machine guns, grenades, drones, camouflage, tactical units, police. Again, the equivalent technologies exist in the 24th Century, but we don’t see them used as effectively as today. (Which might be a good thing in some cases.)
Atomic weapons, machine guns, grenades, drones, camouflage, tactical units, police. Again, the equivalent technologies exist in the 24th Century, but we don’t see them used as effectively as today. (Which might be a good thing in some cases.)
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Depending on the writer's lack of imagination, 23rd-24th century computers can be much less powerful than what we have today. For example, in both "The Cage" and "The Naked Now", the Enterprise library computer is depicted as basically a giant microfilm library. The idea that the information in it might be indexed and searchable never even occurred to the writer of "The Naked Now", which is why the only way to locate a particular starship log entry was to have Data browse through all of them at super speed.
But a little over a year later in "Contagion", Picard asks the computer scan through the recently-downloaded USS Yamato logs and show him entries with specific keywords (verbally, not by typing in strictly-defined search terms), which it does almost instantaneously; something that modern computers are only just now starting to be able to do.
But a little over a year later in "Contagion", Picard asks the computer scan through the recently-downloaded USS Yamato logs and show him entries with specific keywords (verbally, not by typing in strictly-defined search terms), which it does almost instantaneously; something that modern computers are only just now starting to be able to do.
1701 computer data is badly indexed and uncross referenced?
Computers in real life have surpassed Data's processing capabilities by the year 2000 (or was it 2010)... but its possible that how many calculations Data may process isn't as integral to his overall functionality as the overall properties of his positronic matrix (seeing how it still dwarfs a human brain in memory retention and speed of processing/access by many orders of magnitude).
I would say that smartphones are approaching the level of functionality of a tricorder (in fact, a smartphone with a spectrometer was invented, and you can actually buy an external multi-spectrometer to connect to the smartphone via USB to analyze objects for their overall contents - its just a matter of integrating bluetooth into it or fully integrating the technology into smartphones as a standard).
One downside is that smartphones and tablets need access to the internet to be of relative use... they don't have their own database integrated (yet)... but storage was already invented which can hold the total sum of human knowledge in a very small space for a very long time (thousands of years)... so I guess its just a matter of reducing it in size further or just putting in a database that's of relevance.
Data is able to process quantum level calculations that he was able to "Lock out" the main computer and re initialize in mere seconds and a Sovereign class vessel is as advanced than Intrepid.
An Intrepid class ships main computer can sustain; 575 trillion calculations per nanosecond, 575 Sextillion calculations per second. In a computer core the size of about 763 cubic meters.
By 2020, The most powerful computer is the Fugaku supercomputer in Japan at 442 Petaflops (442 quadrillion calculations/operation per second) on a server farm of several acres. Voyagers computer is 1.3 Million times more powerful, on 1/300th the area.
Data's ability to lock out the ENT-E main computer says nothing about his processing ability. It just means he has more indepth knowledge of SF computer systems which allows him to encrypt things very fast. He IS a sentient computer after all.
We've already seen that Data can work and move several times faster with his hands compared to a human (or any other lifeform) with far greater accuracy... and for that, billions of calculations per second would easily be enough.
Can you as a human do billions of calculations per second or move as fast as data?
Point being, Data doesn't need to have the processing power of the Intrepid/Sovereign class starship to achieve the speed, dexterity or strength we saw, or to lock out the main computer systems.
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Current estimates put human brains at 1 exaFLOP, or a billion billion calculations per second. Older estimates had us in the "X trillion" range.
So, yes.
My point is can you do MATHEMATICS in your head where you can provide a result instantly?
No.
You're slower than a snail in formulating a response when compared to Data.
And you're worse than a bee at navigation and as blind as a bat in the dark when a bat... isn't.
Expert systems can get stuffed. We're generalists.
Nuh uh.. majority of people in this day and age are trained to become specialists, not generalists... and btw, its not so difficult to replicate that with machines either... since even creativity is not particularly complex (its just random bits of information a person was exposed to and merged that into something they particularly liked or made sense).
A computer could easily do the same ... in fact, computers have already been teaching humans on how to hold a scalpel since 2014, about outer space, finding new treatments and drugs... materials.
Oh and the amount of data/info we can absorb as humans biologically is intricately limited. It would take millions of years of uninterruped studying just to pick up all information we acquired in 1 subject to date... nevermind all of them.
Computers have the benefit of adaptive algorithms in place which can scour the whole sum of human knowledge or heck, most relevant aspects of MULTIPLE fields in a fraction of a time it takes a human to do so and find patterns... whereas a human takes AGES to get any kind of creativity.
But in the context of Trek, Data was far better than humans at pretty much everything.
We need to time travel back and inquire Tasha Yar as to how Data's performance in bed was.
I did say 'pretty much'... which leaves things 'open' if you will... but I don't recall Tasha complaining.
SOT but the storage of the human brain is ~ petabit?
There is no need there at all.
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