Star Trek: Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, etc. are boldly going where Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and everyone else has gone before. Really. That’s even though traveling through light years of empty deep space would be about as exciting as watching two teams of handless Hortas trying to play baseball. So in review of the Star Trek franchise before you had to pay to see it, here as seven reasons Star Trek is stupid.
1. Warp Drive
This is a fundamental part of all Star Trek live and animated series and movies (so far). However, physicists have characterized the concept of warp drive, in terms of its applicability as a practical means of faster than light travel as (warning: technical term approaching) “stupid.” I once almost passed a physics class, so I should know. Suddenly accelerate from 0 to infinity (and beyond), and they’ll be wiping your atomic sludge off the poop deck. But the starships somehow absorb the incredible astronomical forces so well that everybody’s body stays protoplasmically together in their seat–unless something, anything, hits the ship on the side. Then bodies go flying. This is the equivalent of “You can fire me naked from a photon torpedo tube head first into a neutronium brick wall, and I won’t have so much as a scratch. I won’t even spill a single drop of my tea, Earl Grey, hot. But if a shy 9-year-old Talaxian girl gently taps me on the shoulder, my arm will fall off.”
2. Medicine
Speaking of arms falling off, what’s with Starfleet medicine? Dr. Crusher can fix a broken arm by pointing a glowing stick at it, but nobody’s quite figured out cloning yet. Clones suffer from short life spans, replicative fading, or go crazy and try to kill somebody. Anybody hear of Dolly the sheep, who was successfully cloned almost 400 years before the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation? And for seven years Geordi had to wear a pair of “glasses” that looked like a metal banana hair clip instead of getting some implants that looked like, well, eyes?
3. Transporter
Unlike Star Trek medicine, the transporter is amazing, isn’t it? Utilizing the unlimited power of technobabble, it splits your body, clothing, cup of tea, into a zillion quantum bits and puts it all back together, good as new, on the other end. Except there isn’t any other end. There’s nothing in that forest, jungle, desert, or alien space bar to put you back together. Think about it. Imagine you cross-cut shred your handwritten love letters to Dax–all of them–so your new sother won’t learn how geeky and fickle you are. When you throw the pieces out the window, they won’t automatically come back together again, will they? I think that violates the Law of Entropy or something (where’s my old physics textbook?). Or maybe it’s the Law of Humpty Dumpty.
4. Replicator
When you can replicate stuff, who needs to transport anything? But lots of people in far-out makeup make mega-credits transporting and even smuggling goods. Why? Because replication is too expensive? No. Quark, like any good Ferengi, believes “Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to (Rule of Acquisition #3).” That’s as fundamental to Ferengi male psychology as getting turned on by an ear rub. So why doesn’t he hire a cook at minimum wage instead of selling replicated soup? Because using a replicator is cheaper than paying a cook. And a lot cheaper than smuggling.
And if you believe Dr. Crusher’s nonsense about some medicine or other being “too complicated” to replicate, consider this. In spite of what those Star Trek technical manuals tell you, a transporter and a replicator are versions of the same thing. When Captain Picard’s disembodied essence got lost in space, they recreated him from his stored memory pattern buffer. When they failed to beam Commander Riker off Nervala IV and tried again, they actually made two of him. If they can replicate soup and even people, they can replicate medicine. But why do they worry about people dying anyway?
“Captain Janeway, I am sorry to report that we just lost Harry Kim out the airlock.”
“Again? Get those pattern buffers going and make a new one. I need a fourth for a game of Parrises squares.”
5. Token Outsider
Every Star Trek series has to have an outsider so we can show how open minded we are while laughing at them. And the outsider gets progressively stranger and stranger each series. Star Trek: The Original Series (only Vulcan on board ship); Star Trek: The Next Generation (only android); Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (only shapeshifter); Star Trek: Voyager (only hologram); Star Trek: Enterprise (only Vulcan). Wait–only Vulcan again? No wonder Enterprise got cancelled.
6. Romulans and Klingons
What happened to them? When we first saw the Romulans, they were noble, honorable soldiers, idealized Roman space cadets who looked like Spock’s father. The Klingons, on the other hand, were a bad-guy race of Cold War Communist conmen sporting goatees and Fu Manchu mustaches while wearing copious quantities of coco tan #2 makeup. Then, as quick as you could say “movie and a sequel,” the Romulans transformed into the interstellar bad-guy schemers, and the Klingons became wrinkly-foreheaded noble Viking space warriors.
What happened? It’s as warped as if the logical Vulcans suddenly got all hyperemotional at, say, mating time, or because of a virus, or due to a faulty mind meld, or drugs, or a bad time travel trip, or some wild flower, or because they’re outcasts or Spock’s older brother, or they listened to too much Jazz music. Come to think of it, almost anything can make Vulcans emotional. Except baseball.
7. The Prime Directive
This means don’t interfere with the development of primitive cultures. Basically, no free upgrades. Kirk lost his command for breaking it in Star Trek Into Darkness. But with the Prime Directive, if somebody else already broke the rule with the natives, you can break it too (see A Piece of the Action, The Return of the Archons, Patterns of Force, The Apple, A Private Little War, ad nauseam.)
This is like if somebody else gave the San Francisco Giants some Ferengi energy whips, it’s OK for you to give the Pittsburgh Pirates phasers. Now that would be a baseball game. Besides, the whole “primitive” limitation was ignored in post-original Star Trek series, when even societies with advanced technology were considered off limits (State of Flux, Maneuvers, The Circle, etc.).
Kind of warps the Star Trek adage of “To boldly go where no one has gone before” out of whack, huh?
Maybe the motto should be, “You can go there, but be very, very careful and don’t touch anything!”
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Alden Loveshade first thought of emself as a writer when in 3rd grade. E first wrote professionally when e was 16 years old, and later did professional photography and art/graphic design. Alden has professionally published news/sports/humorous/and feature articles, poems, columns, reviews, stories, scripts, books, and school lunch menus.
http://AldenLoveshade.com
Fun article. I have to admit, I was horrified when I learned that the Star Trek producers in the era of The Next Generation never actually made the writers understand any science. If they came up with something that needed an explanation, the writers were instructed to write [Tech] in the script. If approved, one of the people good at creating technobabble would fill something in there! This is how we got the technobabble “Inertial Dampers” to explain why people didn’t go flying back into the rear bulkhead the moment the Enterprise rubber-banded into warp drive.
Thanks for that! The article is meant to be fun, as you saw it, not truly critical of a franchise I love!
I remember reading about the [Tech] thing for authors, although I didn’t know how far that went. Real-life inertia dampers such as flywheels, pendulums, and automobile brakes are a completely different thing than what’s called that in Star Trek. And as I wrote in the article, “I once almost passed a physics class, so I should know.”
For those who don’t know, David Lee Summers is not only a real-life astronomer, he’s also a science fiction publisher and author.
Fun article and fine website indeed!
I did pass a physics class or two. Not to get too serious about a comic article, some comments.
1. Warp Drive: Until recently, this was truly often considered by physicists to be the least likely to succeed science fiction method for accelerating from slower to faster than the velocity of light. It’s now being considered. True, the out of proportion effects from being hit on the side do seem out of line with the inertia.
2. Medicine: Not a physician. But in the Star Trek universe, instruments to harm do seem more advanced than instruments to heal.
3. Transporter: Total agreement here. Not even remotely possible. Likely not even possible with a reassembly booth.
4. Replicator: Significantly more likely to work than the transporter, but if it is possible the energy cost would likely be quite prohibitive.
5. Token outsider: A fun way to point out Star Trek’s vision of diversity.
6. Romulans and Klingons: Klingons rightly changed. The originals were outside Roddenbury’s vision.
7. The Prime Directive: A rule made to be broken.
I appreciate your comments!
On warp drive, as NASA has stated, “The bulk of scientific knowledge concludes that it’s impossible, especially when considering Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.” But NASA officials are open to new knowledge that challenges what we already know.
I had come up with a faster-than-light idea in high school that I was surprised an astrophysicist I talked to later at a university didn’t immediately dismiss! But it also included Einstein’s most famous equation being at least just a tiny bit off. Later, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who unlike me actually does know what he’s talking about when it comes to physics, proposed something similar to my half-baked high school idea. Still, I found the similarity pretty exciting!
On The Prime Directive, yes. Consistent non-interference would not make for much of an adventure series!
Marvelous! Even Captain Kirk is shocked!
But a Star Trek Facebook group is taking the whole thing seriously! Don’t they know all Star Trek isn’t serious? Like they never heard of The Trouble with Tribbles or Lower Decks?
Thanks!
To be fair, I can’t take credit for choosing the images or image captions in this article–scifi.radio deserves the credit for that!
I confess I did self-promote this satire, including on Facebook. I find the wide variety of comments there “fascinating.”
Fun article, but a bit off on a couple points.
1} Warp drive (as proposed by physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994) does not involve changing the interia of the ship in the warp bubble; it is, in fact, ‘stationary’ with respect to the space immediately around it inside the bubble. There are lots of difficulties with the Alcubierre warp though. Some physicists do seem to be working on it, sporadically; but the consensus right now seems to be ‘amusing, but physically improbable’. Maybe some of the latest breakthroughs showing tiny cracks in the Standard Model will give us insight into new physics which is friendlier to war drives.
2} Fair point; but I think quite a lot of this is that the writers were completely awful at science.
3} The Transporter was, IIRC, a creation of necessity. The early TOS episodes had the characters having adventures not-on-the-ship — but there was no budget to build props & sets for shuttles. One set & some silly camera tricks with christmas lights, and presto! A high-tech way to get around without a shuttle. Today, in Real Life ™ physicists can and do teleport things — individual isolated particles — for a generous enough definition of ‘teleport’. Only the information of the particle is really moved, and it requires interesting tricks at the receiving end. Also, it requires a normal, slower-than-light signal carrying the data to arrive. Chances that we will be able to send humans from point to point via teleportation is zero — we cannot even send atoms at this point. Honestly, we’d have better luck trying to build Krasnikov tubes.
4} Replicators as mini-transporters are ridiculous. Firstly, the only teleportation technology we are aware of in the real world destroys the original — and with Replicators there is no ‘original’, it is created ex nihilo from energy. That should be fantastically expensive — fine for the flagship on a military-scale fraction of Federation GDP, less good for a cheapskate bar-owner.
5} The Original Series was better at diversity: an alien (Vulcan), a black woman (in racist, sexist, 1960’s USA), a soviet (during the cold war era, this was a big deal), and an Asian were all part of the essential ‘bridge crew’.
6} The Klingons & Romulans were analogs to the threats in the public psyche of the USA at the time. The Klingons were the stereotypical (drunken, espionage prone, warlike) Soviets, and the Romulans were the stereotypical (cunning, untrustworthy, plotting) Chinese. Thankfully, enough time has passed, and additional original material written, that the misguided stereotypes no longer form the core of these cultures or how they are portrayed on-screen.
7} The prime directive was always a plot device, and a poorly conceived one at that.
I appreciate your detailed comments!
On the transporter, I do remember reading something similar to what you wrote–it helped the budget, and also sped up the action. Of course the warp drive sped things up as well! Otherwise, it might have been, “We’ll spend the next seven years of the series traveling to our first destination….”
The replicator/transporter thing was, like the rest of the article, tongue-in-cheek. I do wonder, though, if a physicist has ever seriously compared the two concepts. If anyone’s seen such a thing, I’d be very interested in seeing it.
All joking aside, I certainly agree about the importance of diversity starting with the original series. To me, that’s one of the most important things about Star Trek: “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.”
I agree about the Klingons. I think in their first appearance the Romulans were inspired by the Roman Empire, but things did change later. Getting serious for a moment, I never have liked the idea of the “bad-guy race” or “they’re just monsters.”
I suspect the Prime Directive was a reaction against the historical colonization/taking over of other civilizations and forcing them to conform in dress, language, culture, etc. At it’s beginning, it may have been related to the then-current Vietnam War. But yes, as I commented above, strictly following a noninterference policy wouldn’t make much of an adventure series!
Alden Loveshade, you may claim to be a “long time fan” (though that claim is questionable), but you obviously have extremely limited knowledge on the subject
1 – Haven’t you ever heard the words “inertial dampeners”? They’re mention on a regular basis in Star Trek
2 – The “glowing stick” is a bone knitter, it accelerates cellular mitosis, thereby accelerating the healing process, dermal regenerators do the same. There’s no evidence of clones having short life spans in Star Trek, and replicative fade is the result of cloning a clone of a clone and so on. Basically making a copy of a copy of a copy, there’ll always be degradation given that situation
3 – Imagine you had a device that could send a directed beam of energy, like a light beam. But this energy is organised enough to reconstitute matter. No laws of physics have been broken and there is no “Law of Entropy”.
Not possible today, but with time there’s no telling what can be achieved
4 – Replicators are able to make some things yet not others due to their chemical make up. Humans and most other biological constructs, including foods are made from basic elements arranged in a very specific way.
It makes perfect sense that some elements may be too complex at the quantum level to replicate or transport (example, “The Most Toys” TNG S03-E22).
When it comes to replicating life. There’d need to be life to copy directly from, otherwise the resulting person would be a blank slate with no memories, no knowledge of motor functions, no ability to regulate anything including breathing and no metabolic functions
5 – The “Token Outsider” is never the subject of ridicule and contrary to getting stranger they are always the subject of development thereby showing that in any enlightened society all are welcome and anyone can find their place with support from their peers
6 – The Romulans were always an “interstellar bad guy” right down to the fact that the “Federation” once fought a war against them (Balance of Terror TOS S01-E14).
The Klingons started as enemies however, when they needed our help the Federation came to the table and this was used to illustrate the fact that enemies truly can become friends
7 – When someone has broken General Order One (AKA The Prime Directive) it is not only allowed, it is an expectation that Starfleet make every effort to correct the error.
Also, correcting the mistake doesn’t involve giving advantages to someone else, that would only make things worse. It comes down to returning the society as closely as possible to it’s correct path
Thanks for making comments!
“Long-Time Fan” is, of course, a subjective phrase. In my case, I was first called “Spock” in I think junior high school; certainly I was by high school. I was thrilled to attend the convention for Star Trek’s 25th anniversary. I was also called Spock at my first university where I was co-founder of a Star Trek club. And I personally know some people who have been heavily involved in the production of official Star Trek television/movies/books, but I’m going to refrain from name-dropping.
As for the science, I had hoped my statement, “I once almost passed a physics class, so I should know,” would be a sufficient clue that this article is intended as satire, not as a serious analysis. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear! (And in truth, I did pass some college physics classes, in addition to astronomy, biology, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, psychology, and sociology, although I don’t claim to be a scientist, just a fan.)
“Inertial dampeners” under variant spellings, teleportation, etc. are also discussed in the comments above, so feel free to check those out!
Thanks for bringing up cloning and replicative fading! Of course Star Trek is science fiction/science fantasy/space opera (depending upon how one classifies it). So ST can do things however it wants! But in real life, according to the U.S. Government’s National Library of Medicine, “Cloning describes the processes used to create an exact genetic replica of another cell, tissue or organism. The copied material, which has the same genetic makeup as the original, is referred to as a clone.”
The United States Government’s Food and Drug Administration has a fascinating article called “Myths about Cloning” you might want to check out. While it doesn’t seem to deal exactly with replicative fading, it does talk about breeding clones with “Myth: Offspring of clones are clones, and each generation gets weaker and weaker and has more and more problems.”
I hope this helps!
7 outside and real-world reasons why these 7 in-verse reasons happened.
1: The “Warp Drive” was a military-expansion of potential future conflicts after the Americo-Polenesian economic cold war in 1958, barely known in American and Polynesian history as records were incredibly classified for simply a food trade! America was making a lot of natural rivals than enemies after WW2, so the US needed more bodies to send as scouts even when the threat was potential.
2: A really, REALLY bad mix up on insurance and storage & distribution after America’s first refugee relocation during the Cold War on Russia and earlier on, China. Radiation sickness and mutation created from said radiation was still in its infancy, as the safety standards slowly went on for the reactors, the medication for reducing, or in more barbaric terms “curing” radiation came out of the mouth of Wives Tales.
3: Recreation drugs becoming more mainstream to the public along with the encouragement of 16+ students to commit addiction habits. Guess America never learned after the 1910 Opium and proto-marijuana outbreaks?
4: Blatant excuse for Patriotism and unfair trades during the last years of WW2 and the brief 1948 UAA religious war based of mistranslated texts found in a bombed tomb. Resources were meant to be used and created, not hoarded. Fort Knox can testify with 88 other intra-nation state banks.
5: “Little bit” of classical bigotry in the ’70’s timestamp, but more on the focus of reason 1. Gene was “turtle-ing” his emotions and PTSD after his very brief battles as an air-pilot, though more akin to the frontline-repairman with NO issued weapon! Bredand and Brega slowly were adopting the Italian fascist mindset after their hypocritical criticism on Congress’s New-Flavor plans to improve American households and better tax-acceptance from other minority groups, if those Birckheads were alive today, they would easily be “Kennedy-ed”. Studio mindset DOES affect the universe you created!
6: Attempting to salvage and “Americanize” past and re-introduced grudges after the Cold War and early Korean invasion. Both rival nations NEVER forgot how unfair the resource deals were in those conflicts as well as the obvious lies NATO allies used to push for more American troops to safeguard for potential military invasions.
7: Criticism on early NATO and extra-USA state policies that were Soley focused on pro-congressional and pro-Presidential actions. i.e., nuking Japan again while coming up with the lie that Japan built anti-nuke submarines and troopships for Japan’s economic conquest of America as revenge from WW2, which in truth, Japan WILL econ-conquer America but not for WW2 revenge. Japan just wanted the Breadbasket for the forced refugee camps during the Cold War and the Asian continent was a near-perfect hide out for neutrals. Feeding 4 million adopted is not an easy task!
Loved Trek during its re-run of season 2 in 2002 but a lot of the canon and plot-tumors are simply unresolved traumas and sociopathic tantrums the studio-bankers allowed to exist, old men holding onto old hates.
Interesting comments!
Certainly real-life, including personal experiences, is likely the foundation for any fiction. (Although fiction can be inspired by other fiction which in turn was influenced by real life). And I agree that “Studio mindset DOES affect the universe you created!”
I admit my knowledge of much of this is limited, including exactly what historical events influenced the creation of Star Trek. I know often even the creators of something don’t know exactly where their ideas came from!
In any case, I appreciate your comments!