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Any vessel, no matter how minor or limited in space-travel capabilities (a shuttle or an experimental one-man prototype ship from late 20th century Earth) can navigate the immense crushing gravitational forces and ambiant radiation present in a wormhole long enough to be spit out the other side of it.
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There are no openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender folk in the (supposedly liberal) “ideal, utopian future” of Star Trek.
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Also in the “ideal Starfleet future”, historians will have failed to retain the knowledge that Fermat’s Theorem was solved in the late 1990s. By the time Jean-Luc Picard is in command of the Enterprise-D, it will once again be considered a mystery for the ages. (Data, despite his superadvanced positronic brain, will be unable to solve it.)
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I forget where, but I recall reading an article once that posited that the existence of transmat beams is proof that in the Star Trek universe, human beings don’t have souls. (The logic being that Star Trek characters can be disassembled & reassembled on a molecular level without any loss of their cognitive functions; which suggests that there is no guiding spiritual force animating the body.)
Well, you know, they found the cure. ::Ducks and runs::
Try reading John Varley’s Sci Fi if you want actually content as mentioned.
Or much of Heinlein’s Later Novels.
Star Trek got Kudos for an Interacial kiss. The First on TV.
Jim
Never wear red in the future.
Humans will become so lazy they can’t stand having to open their own doors anymore.
The educational system of the future may neglect certain basic principles of physics or biology, but students will have their 20th century history down pat, dammit!
This specialization nonsense is a crock. No longer will people focus on becoming very good at one thing, they’ll simply become very good at everything to the point where security officers are also excellent pilots, and the Captain of a ship with a crew of thousands will immediately be able to take over for any individual in the crew without refresher training. Why didn’t we think of this?
No one will ever need to bother checking the atmosphere of a planet: apparently our solar system is unique in that it contains planets that do not have oxygen/nitrogen atmospheres.
No one will be sick in the future: unless it’s a life-threatening rare disease, and even then transmission of said disease will not be of concern to anyone.
Either all aliens of a species are warlike or they’re all pacifist. Never will there be even close to an even split of philosophies within a species.
If you can choose between two alternate universes, in one of which you were held back in fourth grade and the other you were not, always choose to be held back.
I read a story somewhere which involved the scientist who had invented the matter transmitter but who had never used it themselves. In the end it is revealed that the “transmitter” was really a duplicator. A duplicate was created at the far end and the original was then killed (and their atoms used to create the next duplicate arriving there). This had all been kept secret because they felt (probably quite correctly) that no one would use the transmitter if they knew how it worked. (The duplicates of course had all of the memories of the original up to the time they stepped into the transmitter, so never knew anything had happened.)
Just because you can put it on your head don’t make it a hat.
For that matter, diarrhea itself will not exist in the future. Neither will most embarrassing (as opposed to tragic) illnesses.
Also:
[ul]
[li]All asteroid belts in other star systems will be so full of asteroids that you can hardly spit without hitting one.[/li][li]Naturally, giant space worms will have evolved to take advantage of this.[/li][/ul]
There’s not a lot of pop culture in the future—just a lot of nostalgia for past periods.
No matter how many people the creature has deliberately hunted down and/or killed, the scientist always wants to hold off on using force against it—“if we could only communicate, think of how much they could teach us!”
Primitive aliens and their ways = good, noble. “Primitive” (in relation to more advanced aliens) humans and our ways = bad, stupid.
Energy weapons rarely fire energy “projectiles” (bolts, blasts, whatever you call 'em) that travel more than about 2000 feet/second.
Apparently, you can have a society made up entirely of warrior/hunters—no need for engineers, doctors, cooks, tailors, farmers, physicists…
Nuclear weapons are bad. No matter if you’re using weapons potentially even more destructive than a nuke, even if your enemy is a collective of Islamist-Commie-Nazi von Neumann machines who’re going to use the History Eraser Button to obliterate spacetime…using A-Bombs against them? Nuh-uh, that’s way out of line. [Anime, mostly]
All 1950s spaceships look exactly like captured V2s (complete with the “checkered” paint scheme), and the first exploratory crews will be equipped with M1s, grenades, and at least one tactical nuclear weapon.
Also, it’s REALLY easy for the above type of spaceship to end up going to a completely different part of the solar system then planned, just because of a minor accident. And it doesn’t take much longer to get to, say, Mars, in a busted ship, than it takes to get to the moon on a planned mission.
The semi-serious story goes that they were originally supposed to be horizontal tunnels. But when construction costs spiraled out of control, the Empire was forced to accept a design compromise where the Death Star’s gravity grid has a single up/down for the entire station. Causing said tunnels to become vertical shafts.
Astronauts even in the hear future wil carry firearms – ordinary guns.
I don’t know why, but this has bothered me. Not only in awful clunkers from the 1950s mde on shoestring bidgets, but ven in some of the good SF classics peopl go into space armed. They’ve got guns and grenades on board in It! The Terror Beyond Space, and they waste precious oxygen by smoking. I would have thought grenaes were strongly contraindicated aboard a fragile thing like a spaceship Wht the hell do you need them for? Events certainly proved that they were dsirable, but nobody had a right to expect redatory martians. They even used the grenades on board! That took guts (and the ship survived. They built *good * spaceships in the fifties)
Then they had guns going to Mars in Robinson Crusoe on Mars ! I guess they thought Mars was gonn be a tough planet. Again, events proved this was right. Again, the gun didn’t do any good – by the time threats showed up the gun had been lost or cannibalized or something.
Speaking of Niven, is he right that an Earth-sized world needs a Moon-sized moon to skim off atmosphere to stop from turning into Venus, or is he just full of tang?
Good question. Larry is pretty good about checking stuff like that, so I’d say that at the time he wrote it, it was the prevailing theory. Either that, or he overheard someone say it at JPL some afternoon. 
It was current theory at the time (I’m assuming you are referring to the story “Wrong Way Street”) but has since been discounted. Prevailing theory is that the formation of life caused the organic components of the atmosphere to be bound up and lead to a diatomic nitrogen (and later, diatomic oxygen) environment. Without life, the highly reactive oxygen would chemically bind and not be readily available.
Stranger
More than that - there are no toilets in the future.
(Well, have you ever seen one? Outside of 2001, and that’s the past.)
Didn’t Firefly show a toliet in passing?
It would make a great counter-cliche episode of some sci-fi show; a plot that centers around unplugging the toliet on a high tech interstellar spacecraft. First you’d have to get out the Sirius Cybernetics Extract-O-Plunger, then read the instructions which are, of course, written in Alpha-Delphian then translated into Betelgeuse by some particularly lyrical, if not especially coherent Vogons, then find out that the only comprehensible version of the document was taking by its original author on board Golgafrinchem “B” Ark which just inconvenintly crashed upon an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet orbiting an unregarded yellow sun in the uncharted backwaters of unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy that just got demolished in order to make way for a hyperspace bypass route (which is never going to be built), but was rescued at nearly incalculable odds at the last instant by an ape-descended lifeform so amazingly primative that he still thinks digital watches are a pretty neat idea…
Hey, it’d be better than the film. POV gun, my ass.
Stranger
According to William Shatner, when Kirk says “I need to think.” he sits down on a toilet which pops out of the wall. This was included because they realized that they had never seen a toilet on the Enterprise.
That said, Star Trek V didn’t really happen, so yeah, no toilets in Star Trek.
Watching an episode or two would actually explain this completely, particularly since it’s actually part of the story arc.
Another common “fact” from sci-fi: alien cultures (and even many human ones) are monolithic blocks that all exhibit the same traits and motivations.
Despite having sensors that can see for light years and count the number of people inside a ship, and computers that can keep track of it all, combat will take place at low relative speeds within easy visual range.
Any large object in space that explodes immediately loses all momentum and stops.
Genetically engineered people are always evil oppressors; they are never oppressed, no matter how outnumbered they are.
My favorite explanation for the lack of railings : “But it would add 20 % to the cost !”
I recall a funny scene in a Star Trek novel; The Last Stand IIRC. Two diplomats on board from a more primitive culture are having a conversation :
Diplomat 1 : "I couldn’t get the thing to work, until I screamed ‘Flush, damn you !’ And it did ! "
“What’s wrong ?”
Diplotmat 2 ( muttering ) : “I need to get back to my cabin.”
Firefly has them (nifty fold-away ones), and Babylon 5 has them (but steer clear of the Pakmara stall!)
Specifically in defense of firefly, this wasn’t unexplained at all. They didn’t have FTL, and they didn’t have, as a whole, technology that was hugely ahead of us.
The core worlds have a strong technological base, because the bulk of the people have lived there the longest. The people who choose to colonize the outer worlds do so because they’re poor or adventurous or whatever. And if you’ve got a “blank” world, with no technological infrastructure - do you bring your hovercar that needs a complex base to fuel, repair, operate, or do you bring along some horses (or possibly horse embyros and some sort of incubator) and some hand tools?