Star Trek technologies:
[ul][li]Cloaking device[/ul][/li]Although creating some kind of quasi-holographic projection that makes an object blend into its backdrop at a significant difference is plausible, the sort of perfect invisibility portrayed in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is completely impossible, especially since it is clear that one can see outside the field from within even though light has to be absorbed or wrapped around to make it invisible.
More critically, any system producing power or doing work is going to create waste heat which will be detectible (as referenced in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country to dicover the cloaked Bird-of-Prey and then promptly forgotten). A spaceship producing massive amounts of power and zipping through space will have a large infrared signature as well as neutrino radiation produced by nuclear or antimatter reactors which could not be shielded by any plausible material.
Feasibility: IMPOSSIBLE
[ul][li]Holodeck[/ul][/li]As a projected simulated reality with a high degree of vermissilitude to visual, auditory, and perhaps olfactory senses, perhaps. Producing apparently solid materials through projected force fields and replicated materials? That’s basically magic although some kind of direct interface to the somatosensory cortex might simulate textile sensations, which is well beyond the current state of the art but potentially within the means of technology a couple of centuries ahead.
Feasibility: IMPLAUSIBLE
[ul][li]Replicator[/ul][/li]Although we can print materials from polymers and metals, a universal assembler that can produce any arbitrary combination of chemical substances from “basic matter” with essentially perfect fidelity? No. However, we will likely develop the means using enzymes and proteases to make and modify many complex organic and organometallic substances and perhaps even assemble finished products (or at least whole components of an assembly) the way a mollusc builds a shell or coral constructs a reef.
Feasibility: PLAUSIBLE WITH SIGNIFICANT LIMITATIONS
[ul][li]Tractor beam[/ul][/li]The mechanism of the tractor beam is never really explained but it appears to be some kind of an polarized attractive gravity generator with a narrow beam collumation and some kind of ability to focus at a specific distance, which would require some kind of controlled exotic matter of a type that modern physics can’t even readily describe. It does shoot some kind of visual radiation at the object being tractored so perhaps it is actually creating a mechanical or electrochemical bond with the object, but given that it has been projected through solid matter that doesn’t really make sense. It also exerts a force on the object being tractored that does not react upon the ship issuing the beam. So it seems to be completely counterphysical to everything we know about the universe.
Feasibility: IMPOSSIBLE
[ul][li]Transporter[/ul][/li]There are so many things about the transporter that are beyond any feasibility that it could actually fill up a small book, but to start with, disintegrating a person and producing a replica at “the other end” is not transportation but killing. Even if the person at the other end wakes up with the same memories and a continuity of consciousness, they are still not the same person, and as transporter accidents i the show have demonstrated it is possible to produce a second person while the first remains intact. So even if this technology were workable, it is a cloning device, not a literal transporter.
The computational complexity of breaking down something as complex as a human body and reproducing it, taking apart a body atom by atom without it at some point collapsing in a pool of protoplasm, projecting a partical stream at an arbitrary point hundreds or thousands of kilometers away and reassembling it with essentially perfect replication, and all of the thermodynamic and conservation of momemtum problems associated with transporting from an orbiting vessel to a lower energy state planetary surface are never explained except with pure technobabble, and are rarely even addressed aside from the occassional sane character who rightfully fears being transported.
Feasibility: IMPOSSIBLE
[ul][li]Universal translator[/ul][/li]The Universal Translator may seem at first to be viable because of the ability of computer translation systems today, although it should be noted that those translation systems work okay at the level of a word or simple statement but largely fail when it comes to communicating colloqualisms or idiom, and running something like a letter or story through one results in almost complete gibberish. Such system will improve, of course, at least between widely used human languages but even then can only convey basic directions and information, not the cultural context necessary to communicate abstractions.
And this is within human languages which have a grammar that maps to the way human brains interpret speech and action. Communication between humans and truly alien species will involve not only large gulfs of context but essential differences in the way they perceive the world and experience themselves. It’s not a gurantee that basic elements of human perception and cognitive modelling of the world, such as discrete shapes and counting numbers, will be shared by an alien species which may see the world in terms of statistical distributions and use compound factals to quantify their experience. There is almost certainly not going to be a one-to-one correspondance between human and alien vocabulary even if they use auditory speech and a grammar structured in the equivalent of subject-predicate sentence units. And being able to make these translations upon first contact without a basis for creating any kind of dictionary makes about as much sense as the Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, which Adams create to poke fun at that very trope.
Feasibility: IMPROBABLE to IMPOSSIBLE
The list didn’t include the warp drive or “impulse drive” (which would appear to be an inertia-less drive, or inertial dampers, which work until you need the crew to bounce around the bridge), or artificial gravity, or force fields, or “phasers”, or “subspace communicators”, or any of a number of other technologies which the shows and movies employ to allow characters to zip from star to star and zap each other with with abandon in their spandex onsies. But it should be noted that essentially all of the technologies exist not out of any plausibility but employed out of the narrative necessity in allowing characters to have some vital role in exploration (hence, why there is very little evident automation or use of robots even though the level of technology would seem to allow for virtually all hazardous missions to be undertaken remotely while the crew remains in safety). The transporter, for instance, was conceived because of budgetary limitations with building a shuttle model for the show until later in production. Depsite the power that technology has to be an essential deus ex machina for many of the problems the crew faces and should be able to essentially reconstruct anyone regardless of amount of damage, making the characters practically immortal, it is used in a banal manner and requires more twisted logic and technobabble to come up with reasons why it cannot solve the problem of the week.
A show about realistic space exploration, even assuming advanced technologies like essentially unlimited fusion power, projected energy weapons that don’t melt in your hand from the enormous waste heat they would produce, and some kind of superluminal drive or wormhole transportation, would still consist of long periods of boredom, unseen but insidious hazards in the form of radiation or environmental dysregulation, and a lot of telling robots and machine intelligence systems to take care of the dangerous work. And while the Star Trek computer systems seem essentially capable of almost complete autonomy (and the character of Data is evidentially sapient, but for some reason despite the perfect scanning and reproduction ability of the transporter, they have elected not to even attempt to create more of the same type of machine. Even The Expanse, which attempts to be more plausible with respect to gravity, thermodynamics, weapons, et cetera, still has to stretch plausibility with their super-efficient “Epstein Drive” and some elements of outer system colonization.
Star Trek was always an adventure show with some allegorical elements (at least in the original series; that was largely abandoned in The Next Generation and later shows for more straightforward direct action, political machinations, and the occasional mystery plot). That being said, the finale episode of TNG, “All Good Things…” is legitimately one of the most self-consistent time travel stories ever told in the television medium, and the essential message of optimism of the original series and the early TNG show were a contract to the largely military-action dominated cinematic and television “science fiction” which is mostly just military guys or plucky rogues running around with guns blowing shit up and stealing things, with some hand-to-hand martial arts and bladecraft thrown in for variation, often by implausibly attractive people in uncomfortably tight leather suits.
Shows like Dark Matter are a guitly pleasure (sometimes for just how cringeworthy the dialogue is, and how good the actors can actually be on the rare occasion they aren’t just shooting and kicking or having awkward intracrew rivalries and conspiracies) but they aren’t science ficiton in the sense of exploring the societal and psychological impacts of advances in technology or changes in essential perception on hairless apes who are still having trouble dealing with groups of more than four and handling tools that require more than two gripping appendages.
The less said about the J.J. Abrams “kind of a reboot, but not really, because we want to change things while not abandoning the existing base even though we have trashed continuinity in every essential way” films, Enterprise, and Star Trek: Discovery, the better. Even Voyager, which maintains essentially continuity with the preceeding shows, essentially made up whatever technomagic it needed for the plot of the week and then disregarded it for future use. The physics of all of them are fundamentally nonsense even by the standard of Hollywood technobabble.
Stranger
