VOY - Night

[Frustration]

Everyone writing for Star Trek seems to have a general computer knowledge aptitude somewhere around "I know how to operate a typewriter or standalone word processor, as long as it's working perfectly". Somehow this seemed like a good idea for science fiction writers.

Many ST writers have been genuine science fiction buffs, but the people running the shows haven't always been - and their requirements for how 'technobabble' should be implemented often took internally-plausible events and rendered them into silliness. (I believe Diane Duane has written about how scripts in the TNG era were required to say things like "then we [TECH] the [TECH]", and 'appropriate' words would be put in by the producers.) But when the writers aren't SF fans either, the result tends to be complete nonsense.

TOS prided itself on making gestures towards real science. (Yes, even as they often ignored it in favor of making an early-1960s TV show work.) So did B5, actually, although when they insisted upon shoehorning mystic concepts that make only sense to naive human intuition into the narrative I don't see the point in bragging about how the Starfuries moved realistically. But did they make gestures. Even DS9 did, like the episode in which probability is being manipulated and the neutrinos all have the same spin. Of course, neutrinos DO all have the same spin in reality, so it was a big blooper, but at least they'd heard something about actual physics and tried something plausible sounding.

Recent Trek? There's no awareness of actual science there at all. Not even the level necessary to consciously lampshade that something in the show makes no sense in reality; the people involved don't have enough understanding to have a 'sense' in the first place. They'd find actual science smuggled into the scripts indistinguishable from word salad technobabble.

[pilight]

There's no good reason the computer couldn't generate multiple doctors if the situation required it other than the general nonsense of the Voyager writers.

Except there are likely both ethical issues to generating multiple copies of a sapient program and then not running them all, and logistical issues - sapient holodeck characters require a great deal of processing power to run, and generating one required a significant fraction of a Galaxy-class starship's computer resources. Why else is there so much interest in studying Data, whose brain creates a mind directly instead of through levels and levels of simulation kludges?

(You'll probably ask how all the episodes in which the Doctor is stored and run on tiny devices, or inside 7 of 9, or in which there are an entire village's worth of sapient hologram characters, are supposed to have worked. Then we'll have to agree that the Voyager writers were awful. It's like the transporters, only even worse.)

The EMH isn't really sapient, or at least wasn't designed to be. In Author, Author the Federation arbiter ruled The Doctor was not a living being.

Ethical issues didn't preclude the creation of the EMH backup module, which was designed not to be used.

[clearspira]

If the void is 2,500 light years across, wouldn't you be able to see it from Earth? Or at the very least, from the outskirts of Federation space? It shouldn't have been able to sneak up on them like this. Maybe they could have used the last 4 years to outfit the ship with more things to do before they reached it. Just a thought.

[clearspira]

Everyone writing for Star Trek seems to have a general computer knowledge aptitude somewhere around "I know how to operate a typewriter or standalone word processor, as long as it's working perfectly". Somehow this seemed like a good idea for science fiction writers.

Many ST writers have been genuine science fiction buffs, but the people running the shows haven't always been - and their requirements for how 'technobabble' should be implemented often took internally-plausible events and rendered them into silliness. (I believe Diane Duane has written about how scripts in the TNG era were required to say things like "then we [TECH] the [TECH]", and 'appropriate' words would be put in by the producers.) But when the writers aren't SF fans either, the result tends to be complete nonsense.

TOS prided itself on making gestures towards real science. (Yes, even as they often ignored it in favor of making an early-1960s TV show work.) So did B5, actually, although when they insisted upon shoehorning mystic concepts that make only sense to naive human intuition into the narrative I don't see the point in bragging about how the Starfuries moved realistically. But did they make gestures. Even DS9 did, like the episode in which probability is being manipulated and the neutrinos all have the same spin. Of course, neutrinos DO all have the same spin in reality, so it was a big blooper, but at least they'd heard something about actual physics and tried something plausible sounding.

Recent Trek? There's no awareness of actual science there at all. Not even the level necessary to consciously lampshade that something in the show makes no sense in reality; the people involved don't have enough understanding to have a 'sense' in the first place. They'd find actual science smuggled into the scripts indistinguishable from word salad technobabble.

Imo, there used to be a hard line between science fiction and fantasy. SF had to feel at least on some level that it could happen, whereas fantasy was magic and monsters. But in recent years the phrase has become science fiction AND fantasy, which has enabled a fusion of the two to occur. That's why you can now get away with magic mushrooms powering the universe like in STD.

Although I will be fair, in retrospect, Star Trek's claim to be SF is shaky at best. It has always been a mash up of science and magic pretending to be science. Look at how they explained away Gary Mitchell's powers as ESP when it clearly wasn't as an example.

[CrypticMirror]

Although I will be fair, in retrospect, Star Trek's claim to be SF is shaky at best. It has always been a mash up of science and magic pretending to be science. Look at how they explained away Gary Mitchell's powers as ESP when it clearly wasn't as an example.

Back in the fifties and sixties they thought ESP might be an actual scientific thing, and well into the seventies too. ESP as a supposed scientific phenomena took a long time to die as a concept. There is a reason we see Venkman using an ESP test in Ghostbusters in the eighties, it was pretty much debunked by that time, but there was still a dying fringe of people treating it seriously [even if Venkman wasn't one of them]. I can't fault Trek in the sixties for taking the concept seriously.

[Dargaron]

Back in the fifties and sixties they thought ESP might be an actual scientific thing, and well into the seventies too. ESP as a supposed scientific phenomena took a long time to die as a concept. There is a reason we see Venkman using an ESP test in Ghostbusters in the eighties, it was pretty much debunked by that time, but there was still a dying fringe of people treating it seriously [even if Venkman wasn't one of them]. I can't fault Trek in the sixties for taking the concept seriously.

I think their point was more about how Extra-Sensory Perception was the explanation for everything from moving objects around to shooting lightning to conjuring up a tombstone for James R. Kirk out of thin air. That's not ESP, that's magic.

[Archanubis]

Wasn't polywater in "The Naked Time" based on a theory that was going around science circles at the time it was written?

[TGLS]

Everything you ever wanted to know about polywater

TLDR: The Russians didn't clean their glassware well and claimed to discover water with different properties. The Americans panicked about a "Polywater Gap".

[Madner Kami]

Everything you ever wanted to know about polywater

TLDR: The Russians didn't clean their glassware well and claimed to discover water with different properties. The Americans panicked about a "Polywater Gap".

Huh, never heard of that. Thanks for the info

[Frustration]

Imo, there used to be a hard line between science fiction and fantasy.

Not really. There has been a continuum of science fiction 'hardness' since the very first recognizable works of SF. The very earliest examples aren't clearly distinguishable from fantasy, at least partly because the concept of modern science didn't exist yet. In modern times, some writers have prided themselves on making only one fantastic leap and then proceeding to extrapolate from there, but even those authors didn't necessarily limit themselves so in all their works. Asimov's "Azazel" stories represent the titular creature as either a demon or an extraterrestrial with humanly-incomprehensible science, depending on the specific market Asimov was trying to sell each story to, but it really makes no difference: the scientific plausibility of the events described in the stories within stories is irrelevant.

There's also the point that some things that once seemed possible, even probable, have been discarded. Psychic powers are one of the most well-known examples - the Golden Age of SF included lots of works that incorporated psychic abilities, but they've been debunked completely, and are now clearly fantastic elements.

The real dividing line isn't what non-realistic elements are present, but how they're presented. Paranormal events are 'magical' in the Lord of the Rings because they're viewed as awe-inspiring mysteries by the viewpoint characters, even when it's highlighted that the beings responsible for them have a very different understanding of them; the elves don't even understand what humans and hobbits mean by calling something magical. The 'magic' in Lois McMaster Bujold's recent works heavily references real-world concepts of thermodynamics and engineering; her fantasies are infinitely more SFish than Star Wars, which has a SF setting as backdrop but incorporates no scientific reasoning and heavily relies on mysticism and wonder.