How accurate is Star Trek?

Forget that they routinely make up technobabble as a means of creating a new plot twist. Forget that every ship has the capability to emit seven trillion different types of energy fields, all focused through the “sensor dish”. Forget that Picard’s head was so shiny it should have blinded all of his crew (even Data).

I’m talking about their society. The United Federation of Planets (or whatever the heck it is). Supposedly a “Utopia”, if you see what it’s like in some of the episodes. Set approximately three hundred years in the future, during which World War Three obliterated a lot of the planet, humanity achieves a sort of “mass enlightenment”, supposedly by their “First Contact” with the Vulcans.

Now, how likely is it that humanity can achieve such a paradisical and stable society, which lasts for many decades and more, no less? Even with the influence of an advanced alien race, one would imagine that a peaceful human culture wouldn’t be able to survive more than a few weeks, tops.

So what say you, O Great and Wise 'Dopers? Are the Star Trek writers in general complete idiots, or are they simply too optimistic for their own good? Or, does the problem lie solely with the ideas that arose in Gene Roddenberry’s (bless his happy soul!) imagination?

What I can’t understand is why there isn’t abuse of the halodeck.

I mean, I imagine these things don’t come cheap, so perhaps only the rich and military personnel would have access to them. But, even so, you’d think that the rich would set up some sort of business so that commoners could take advantage of these marvels of technology.

Which brings me to another question. If I remember correctly, money doesn’t exist in the Federation. Money, in terms of tangible material that can be used in exchange for goods and services. This is just something that irks me.

I really have trouble envisioning a society that relies solely on “doing favors for one another.” Because, that’s basically how it works right? If there is no monentary system, everyone would live by trading and bartaring. (e.g. I’ll show you how to do the vulcan death touch if you build me a halodeck.)

Hogwash!

I think it’s very possible we would stop fighting with each other, provided we find others out there to fight with or worry about. Which is what is depicted in Star Trek - no more humans fighting humans, but plenty of tension with alien races.

I agree with vandal about the holodeck and “no such thing as money anymore” aspects, they should have thought them through before introducing them as plot devices. I also wonder why there isn’t more abuse of time travel. Kirk did it on purpose and it worked; why wouldn’t others do it for profit or to save lives? Just because they know it’s not nice to mess up reality with paradoxes?

[Edited by slythe on 09-19-2000 at 11:29 PM]

It is done . Quark in DS9 does exactly this . People pay him in latinum to use his . It is also clear that a lot of people use this for sex programmes .

While on Earth there is no money . Everybody seems to have access to replicator so there is no need for money . They do however use mineral as a form of money with say the Ferengi(sp?) . The use Latinum which seems to be like gold except more valuable .

The no need for money thing annoys me aswell however . We see Cisco’s father running a restaurant where he prides himself on the fact that it’s home made food with real ingrediants (no replicated) . Why on earth would anybody run a restaurant out of the goodness of their own heart. Are we really to believe that he is almost saintlike in his generosity . We see that most people (even some fed. officers) have the same faults we have , lust , jealousy , greed etc. and yet we are also meant to take it as fact that other people are saints . It just doesn’t click.

That all being said I love ST .

*Waiting for somebody to bring up Mother Theresa to blow apart my sainthood thing * :wink:

Sythohol?

Sythohol?

Thats sounds like as far away from Utopia as it gets to me.

It’s a liquid metal(? It’s an extremely valuable liquid, anyway.). It’s fixed in bars, strips, and slips made of otherwise worthless gold (Thus the name ‘Gold-Pressed Latinum’). It, unlike gold, is unreplicatable, thus its value.

As to why Cisko’s dad runs a restauraunt when there’s no money on Earth? You put it right in your post: He takes pride in the fact that it’s all ‘real’. He’s an artist, he takes pride in his work, and wishes to share it.

And finally, as to exploitation of Time Travel - there’s a rather large and powerful enforcement agency to prevent it.

And, of course, how do we know there isn’t, even with the Department of Temporal Investigations working to stop it? If someone’s working outside the law to change things, how will it be noticed? It could have happened dozens of times and, since the DTI never noticed, the change became the ‘true’ history.

(As to why it doesn’t happen more in the shows - these are the good guys, they want to avoid it, and they don’t go after the bad guys who are doing it (often) since that’s the DTI’s perview and not Starfleet’s.)

Humans are too much of a whiny touchy-feely morality-obsessed race in Star Trek. This is how I think humans should be protrayed: We should be out there exploiting less advanced races for our profit, much like the european nations exploited less advaced countries in the not-too-distant past. We should be using ruthless tactics to get ahead politically, economically, and militarily, while masquerading as a highly ethical civilization (too bad the federation isn’t just pretending to be so moral). We should be stealing technology and actually USING the technology to its full potential. Why can a deflector dish to 798,324,987,389,157 different things, yet they can’t figure out how to use replicator/transporter technology to conduct surgery? “Need a new arm?” Bing! “There you go!” “Got a nasty alien disease? Just load yourself into the transporters’s pattern buffer, then be rematerialized without the viruses!” No such luck; after all the show would have far fewer episodes if disease were intantly curable. They should mass-produce androids like data, too. Hell, why not just make their ships automated (with robots etc.) with the exception of a handful of people? And why do people still grow old on Star Trek. In real life we’re probably less than fifty years away from negating the aging process.

What was I talking about? I… I’m gonna go get some sleep now…

I dunno… we are different from our ancestors of September 1700. I mean, the new world for them was North America, people had even moved over there to live.

But is Star Trek’s future realistic? Not as portrayed in a TV series. Culture is just something that comes up as a plot device when drama is needed.

Synthehol is a great invention. You can drink all you want, get sh*tfaced, and in the event of an emergency, consciously metabolize all of it and become sober.

Of course, I can’t speak as to how it actually tastes.

Keep in mind Roddenberry’s Cold War political agenda. He had to create the “free world” to do battle with the Klingons, lovely communist analogues. Possible in reality or not, the Federation worked perfectly in Roddenberry’s program.

MR

There is a lovely scene reguarding this in one of William Shatner’s novels. After Kirk is brought back from the dead, he’s talking to Spock. I’m paraphrasing here.

Kirk: Another thing I don’t understand, how can there be no money?

Spock: It is a remarkably simple and logical system, Captain.

Kirk: Oh, yea? If it’s so simple and logical, explain it to me in 25 words or less.

Spock: ( thinks ) I can’t.
Hehe!

In TOS, Gene Roddenberry tried to demonstrate social issues, such as racism, sexism, etc under the guise of science fiction. Certainly those didn’t comprise all of the episodes, but enough to make a point.

He needed a “perfect” society to view the problems we currently have on Earth to see the problems on other planets. The episode with the aliens whose faces were painted half white, half black (some were white on the right, some on the left) and hated each other for their differences needed a society who had gone beyond petty squabbling to view them with an objective eye.

I think that ST in general has become a much more realistic universe (as far as society goes) since Roddenberry’s death. The DS9 universe is certainly a lot darker. It also contained, I believe, the first real reference to currency (the gold pressed latinum), greed, and more war than any other series. This is probably why DS9 is my favourite series. People get angry. People get hurt. Starfleet officers don’t always make the right decisions. Anyone who saw the episode where Garak and Sisko try to get the Romulans to join the war against the Dominion can probably agree that moral issues aren’t as clear cut as they were in the first two series.

My friends and I had a running joke that the holodeck must have a drain in the middle. :smiley:

Another unrealistic element in the original series - the skirts!

Actually, money was in use in the original series, but like many other things, there were problems in continuity. In The Trouble With Tribbles the barkeep aboard the space station negotiates with Cyrano Jones over the price of tribbles. In Mudd’s Women Harry Mudd makes mention of how rich the dilithium miners are, and speaks of them buying whole planets in a moment of hyperbole. In Requiem for Methuselah Flint was described as very wealthy, and the planet he lived on was bought by his former identity. So Roddenberry’s original creation did indeed use money, although it wasn’t spoken of much. The only time I can recall any of the original crew talking about there not being any money was in the fourth movie. Even there there is enough wiggle room to suggest they might use ‘credits’ as opposed to hard currency, rather than there being no medium of exchange at all.

vandal wrote:

cough Reginald Barclay cough

A problem facing any science-fiction television show is making it relevant to the present day. Most depict a world culturally and politically like ours, with a few gadgets thrown in and maybe a dash of utopianism. Try to imagine the consequences of a world in which:

-no one ever dies of old age.
-matter duplication makes physical wealth almost limitless.
-total automation makes work unnecessary, except for top-level decision making.
-people can be physically and mentally engineered to any specification.

Any one of the above would lead to a society so different from ours that it would be hard to have a dramatic show based on it, since the people in such a world would not have many of our problems (but might have unique problems of their own).

The best written SF in fact deals with exactly such “big” questions, and how they would effect humanity. But written stories can explore these possibilities in ways that don’t translate well to the screen. Movies and televisionm deal mainly with drama- the adventures and dilemmas of the hero. And that requires a hero we can identify with.

Babylon Five’s treatment of the consequences of telepathy are the closest thing I’ve seen to a series that tried to show a real “what if” world.

Well, Reg was more a result of “escapism” than “abuse of the holodeck”. I think what Vandal meant by “abuse” is people loading up sex programs or other such less-than-wholesome activities (wanna beat the crap outta your boss? Here’s your chance!).

I just hate how the Holodeck is treated in general. How many storylines have centered around crew members getting trapped in there, or some fluke in the system makes it go haywire? Dozens of times, in the three latter-year series. And yet they can never find a way to tell the computer “don’t let THIS happen”. In addition, are the recreational benefits of the holodeck worth the apparent risks?

Well, if wires get crossed or a big-ass meteor hits the ship, maybe the “don’t let THIS happen” program is destroyed and it happens after all.

Riker sucks.

If you want a more serious treatment, try http://www.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/startrek/

The neat thing about that list is that all four of them will likely become reality within the next century.