SG1: There But For The Grace of God

[Rocketboy1313]

Probably best not to think too hard about the Holodecks.
Even by the standards of impossible Star Trek gadgets it is a whole other level of bullshit.
It works because they say it works.

That's the whole point isn't it? TNG is 350 years in the future. The technology should be something that we as people from the 21st century cannot readily explain or understand.

It would be like someone from 1820 trying to understand how a modern car works.

No. This is not Arthur C Clarke. Star Trek regularly goes way outside the realms of possibility in ways you just need to shrug at. Holodecks are nonsense after a point.

I will accept them making a table to simulate alien abductions of Riker and Co. I will accept Guinan and Worf doing a shooting gallery. I will accept them creating a stage for their Shakespeare productions. It is a big replicator/hologram combo room used for elaborate conferences, sporting events, and scene recreation. But once they start going into jungles that are acres wide, just forget it. You will never formulate a satisfying answer to how it works, and the more you think about it the more the word "bullshit" will hover over the whole thing.

They should have just had some kind of immersive VR for things like Bashir and O'Brien fighting at the Alamo or Harry Kim fighting Vikings. It is not like that doesn't have its own host of story ideas to explore that would have allowed the holodeck to take a few weeks off from being a hack script printing machine.

[Madner Kami]

Probably best not to think too hard about the Holodecks.
Even by the standards of impossible Star Trek gadgets it is a whole other level of bullshit.
It works because they say it works.

That's the whole point isn't it? TNG is 350 years in the future. The technology should be something that we as people from the 21st century cannot readily explain or understand.

It would be like someone from 1820 trying to understand how a modern car works.

I feel that is doable, steam locomotives were around then; admittedly those are external combustion engines, but it is a good starting point. Explaining Netflix or Disney+ to them, on the other hand...

Internal combustion engines are really only fancy evolutions (and to some degree) miniturizations of external combustion engines and those were around for a good houndred years by 1820. Arguably the principle was known in select circles since at least the first century AD and, if you squint a little, even earlier, by 250 BCE, as those engines are basically an elaborate reversal of a simple pump, whereas instead of increasing the pressure by compressing a medium via a piston, you allow the release of pressure to move a piston, translating the expanding motion into something useful.

Conversely, Netflix and Co are just media companies producing a lot of (entertainment) media. Stuff like that has been around literally forever. You can easily describe it as a conglomerate of writers or troups creating fiction and selling it on a large scale.

[CrypticMirror]

Probably best not to think too hard about the Holodecks.
Even by the standards of impossible Star Trek gadgets it is a whole other level of bullshit.
It works because they say it works.

That's the whole point isn't it? TNG is 350 years in the future. The technology should be something that we as people from the 21st century cannot readily explain or understand.

It would be like someone from 1820 trying to understand how a modern car works.

I feel that is doable, steam locomotives were around then; admittedly those are external combustion engines, but it is a good starting point. Explaining Netflix or Disney+ to them, on the other hand...

Internal combustion engines are really only fancy evolutions (and to some degree) miniturizations of external combustion engines and those were around for a good houndred years by 1820. Arguably the principle was known in select circles since at least the first century AD and, if you squint a little, even earlier, by 250 BCE, as those engines are basically an elaborate reversal of a simple pump, whereas instead of increasing the pressure by compressing a medium via a piston, you allow the release of pressure to move a piston, translating the expanding motion into something useful.

Conversely, Netflix and Co are just media companies producing a lot of (entertainment) media. Stuff like that has been around literally forever. You can easily describe it as a conglomerate of writers or troups creating fiction and selling it on a large scale.

Now describe the way it reaches you.

[McAvoy]

Now don't describe it to the person and let him guess how it works.

[Madner Kami]

Probably best not to think too hard about the Holodecks.
Even by the standards of impossible Star Trek gadgets it is a whole other level of bullshit.
It works because they say it works.

That's the whole point isn't it? TNG is 350 years in the future. The technology should be something that we as people from the 21st century cannot readily explain or understand.

It would be like someone from 1820 trying to understand how a modern car works.

I feel that is doable, steam locomotives were around then; admittedly those are external combustion engines, but it is a good starting point. Explaining Netflix or Disney+ to them, on the other hand...

Internal combustion engines are really only fancy evolutions (and to some degree) miniturizations of external combustion engines and those were around for a good houndred years by 1820. Arguably the principle was known in select circles since at least the first century AD and, if you squint a little, even earlier, by 250 BCE, as those engines are basically an elaborate reversal of a simple pump, whereas instead of increasing the pressure by compressing a medium via a piston, you allow the release of pressure to move a piston, translating the expanding motion into something useful.

Conversely, Netflix and Co are just media companies producing a lot of (entertainment) media. Stuff like that has been around literally forever. You can easily describe it as a conglomerate of writers or troups creating fiction and selling it on a large scale.

Now describe the way it reaches you.

I suppose you want me to describe the internet to someone who isn't generally aware of electronics? All that's needed is a series of abstractions:

A person generally should be aware of how you can abstract a reality someone sees, into a picture. Now make the same person aware of how you can abstract a picture into a description in the form of words. Now make this person aware of how you can transmit those words via shouting at someone over a longer distance and explain, that you can basically do the same by using flag-signals or light-signals and extend the distance of effective transmission this way literally a thousand-fold and you are already pretty close to what is happening.

Now all you need to do is, to abstract how you use electric signals through a wire to transmit the information and that's really easy to do: Imagine you have a machine that can pull on a cord and a machine on the other end of the cord, which is able to pick up on the other machine pulling on the cord. The first machine is translating the information it is supposed to transport to the second machine, into a series of short and long pulls on the cord. Say, you want to transmit the word blue. Now obviously, pulling the cord doesn't automatically mean "blue", it can mean literally everything, so you have to "encode" the word. Say, the letter b is equal to the machine pulling 4 times on the cord. One long pull and three short pulls. The letter l is equal to pulling the cord once briefly, once for a longer time and then two times briefly again and so on. It's trivial to make the jump back at this point. Machine 1 encodes the information of "blue sky, no clouds, mountain-top is covered in snow, the grass on the mountain's root is brightly green" into a series of pulls, machine 2 translates those pulls back into words. Et voila. The basics of the internet. Now that the basic principle of two machines communicating with each other is established and being able to encode information is as well (if it isn't understood already, which is rather unlikely).

Now you can easily tell that person, that instead of pulling on the entire cord, our machines are much more efficient and way faster than this very basic setup that was just described (after all, we had houndreds or even thousands of years to refine that technology). Our machines are not pulling the entire cord, but miniscule threads in said cord, more precisely, they pull on the atoms or rather, parts of the atoms in the cord, to communicate with each other and our machines aren't just able to pick up on that pulling, but they can also translate the pulling back into words and paint those words, even being able to paint a picture based on the pulling of the atomic parts of the cord.

[McAvoy]

Probably best not to think too hard about the Holodecks.
Even by the standards of impossible Star Trek gadgets it is a whole other level of bullshit.
It works because they say it works.

That's the whole point isn't it? TNG is 350 years in the future. The technology should be something that we as people from the 21st century cannot readily explain or understand.

It would be like someone from 1820 trying to understand how a modern car works.

I feel that is doable, steam locomotives were around then; admittedly those are external combustion engines, but it is a good starting point. Explaining Netflix or Disney+ to them, on the other hand...

Internal combustion engines are really only fancy evolutions (and to some degree) miniturizations of external combustion engines and those were around for a good houndred years by 1820. Arguably the principle was known in select circles since at least the first century AD and, if you squint a little, even earlier, by 250 BCE, as those engines are basically an elaborate reversal of a simple pump, whereas instead of increasing the pressure by compressing a medium via a piston, you allow the release of pressure to move a piston, translating the expanding motion into something useful.

Conversely, Netflix and Co are just media companies producing a lot of (entertainment) media. Stuff like that has been around literally forever. You can easily describe it as a conglomerate of writers or troups creating fiction and selling it on a large scale.

Now describe the way it reaches you.

I suppose you want me to describe the internet to someone who isn't generally aware of electronics? All that's needed is a series of abstractions:

A person generally should be aware of how you can abstract a reality someone sees, into a picture. Now make the same person aware of how you can abstract a picture into a description in the form of words. Now make this person aware of how you can transmit those words via shouting at someone over a longer distance and explain, that you can basically do the same by using flag-signals or light-signals and extend the distance of effective transmission this way literally a thousand-fold and you are already pretty close to what is happening.

Now all you need to do is, to abstract how you use electric signals through a wire to transmit the information and that's really easy to do: Imagine you have a machine that can pull on a cord and a machine on the other end of the cord, which is able to pick up on the other machine pulling on the cord. The first machine is translating the information it is supposed to transport to the second machine, into a series of short and long pulls on the cord. Say, you want to transmit the word blue. Now obviously, pulling the cord doesn't automatically mean "blue", it can mean literally everything, so you have to "encode" the word. Say, the letter b is equal to the machine pulling 4 times on the cord. One long pull and three short pulls. The letter l is equal to pulling the cord once briefly, once for a longer time and then two times briefly again and so on. It's trivial to make the jump back at this point. Machine 1 encodes the information of "blue sky, no clouds, mountain-top is covered in snow, the grass on the mountain's root is brightly green" into a series of pulls, machine 2 translates those pulls back into words. Et voila. The basics of the internet. Now that the basic principle of two machines communicating with each other is established and being able to encode information is as well (if it isn't understood already, which is rather unlikely).

Now you can easily tell that person, that instead of pulling on the entire cord, our machines are much more efficient and way faster than this very basic setup that was just described (after all, we had houndreds or even thousands of years to refine that technology). Our machines are not pulling the entire cord, but miniscule threads in said cord, more precisely, they pull on the atoms or rather, parts of the atoms in the cord, to communicate with each other and our machines aren't just able to pick up on that pulling, but they can also translate the pulling back into words and paint those words, even being able to paint a picture based on the pulling of the atomic parts of the cord.

Again for I think the third time. Have them try to describe it without you telling them before hand. You can mention electricity, computers, and the concept of off and on.

[TGLS]

Honestly between Quark's tiny holosuites being used for a baseball game and Fair Haven where Paris (or somebody) had both holodecks running Fair Haven 24/7 I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the "solution" was a mix of treadmilling and just having holographic duplicates of the other players.

[McAvoy]

Honestly between Quark's tiny holosuites being used for a baseball game and Fair Haven where Paris (or somebody) had both holodecks running Fair Haven 24/7 I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the "solution" was a mix of treadmilling and just having holographic duplicates of the other players.

I have suspected that multiple holodecks or holosuites can be used for the same program. Like the Niners being in one and the Vulcan being in another.

[CrypticMirror]

Probably best not to think too hard about the Holodecks.
Even by the standards of impossible Star Trek gadgets it is a whole other level of bullshit.
It works because they say it works.

That's the whole point isn't it? TNG is 350 years in the future. The technology should be something that we as people from the 21st century cannot readily explain or understand.

It would be like someone from 1820 trying to understand how a modern car works.

I feel that is doable, steam locomotives were around then; admittedly those are external combustion engines, but it is a good starting point. Explaining Netflix or Disney+ to them, on the other hand...

Internal combustion engines are really only fancy evolutions (and to some degree) miniturizations of external combustion engines and those were around for a good houndred years by 1820. Arguably the principle was known in select circles since at least the first century AD and, if you squint a little, even earlier, by 250 BCE, as those engines are basically an elaborate reversal of a simple pump, whereas instead of increasing the pressure by compressing a medium via a piston, you allow the release of pressure to move a piston, translating the expanding motion into something useful.

Conversely, Netflix and Co are just media companies producing a lot of (entertainment) media. Stuff like that has been around literally forever. You can easily describe it as a conglomerate of writers or troups creating fiction and selling it on a large scale.

Now describe the way it reaches you.

I suppose you want me to describe the internet to someone who isn't generally aware of electronics? All that's needed is a series of abstractions:

A person generally should be aware of how you can abstract a reality someone sees, into a picture. Now make the same person aware of how you can abstract a picture into a description in the form of words. Now make this person aware of how you can transmit those words via shouting at someone over a longer distance and explain, that you can basically do the same by using flag-signals or light-signals and extend the distance of effective transmission this way literally a thousand-fold and you are already pretty close to what is happening.

Now all you need to do is, to abstract how you use electric signals through a wire to transmit the information and that's really easy to do: Imagine you have a machine that can pull on a cord and a machine on the other end of the cord, which is able to pick up on the other machine pulling on the cord. The first machine is translating the information it is supposed to transport to the second machine, into a series of short and long pulls on the cord. Say, you want to transmit the word blue. Now obviously, pulling the cord doesn't automatically mean "blue", it can mean literally everything, so you have to "encode" the word. Say, the letter b is equal to the machine pulling 4 times on the cord. One long pull and three short pulls. The letter l is equal to pulling the cord once briefly, once for a longer time and then two times briefly again and so on. It's trivial to make the jump back at this point. Machine 1 encodes the information of "blue sky, no clouds, mountain-top is covered in snow, the grass on the mountain's root is brightly green" into a series of pulls, machine 2 translates those pulls back into words. Et voila. The basics of the internet. Now that the basic principle of two machines communicating with each other is established and being able to encode information is as well (if it isn't understood already, which is rather unlikely).

Now you can easily tell that person, that instead of pulling on the entire cord, our machines are much more efficient and way faster than this very basic setup that was just described (after all, we had houndreds or even thousands of years to refine that technology). Our machines are not pulling the entire cord, but miniscule threads in said cord, more precisely, they pull on the atoms or rather, parts of the atoms in the cord, to communicate with each other and our machines aren't just able to pick up on that pulling, but they can also translate the pulling back into words and paint those words, even being able to paint a picture based on the pulling of the atomic parts of the cord.

I didn't understand that explanation at all, and that is me in the actual internet age.