2nd April 2010, 2:14 PM
One thing that bugs me is how Star Trek, and other Sci-fi, making "scanning" work like magic. You can't just fire a "scan beam" at a planet and "lock onto his DNA signature". DNA doesn't give off energy like that, and any electromagnetism powerful enough to do a planetary scan for DNA would probably break it apart too. They can't "sniff" it out either, it's frickin' space. The way you examine an object is to use some sort of reaction( chemical, energy, physical, something) and more or less bounce it off the object. It depends on previously known behavior of how a specific thing interacts with that sort of scan. It also bugs me when they can physically see something, and their tricorder says "there's nothing there". Well obviously you should be able to at least detect frickin' LIGHT, because that's how your eyes work.
We don't have any rudiments of teleportation or replication. Recently some scientists have managed to do some "spooky action at a distance", and at a quantum level, things do kinda "teleport" into positions, but that's a far far cry from macro scale Star Trek transporters. In fact, there's really no way to build up these tests TO such a thing. I think there's a lot more hope in wormholes, and that's considering those can actually exist. They're predicted, and so far relativity holds up to a lot of other predictions, but it could very well just be a mathematical artifact and not something reality actually allows. Further, even if we can make a wormhole, the issue of the sheer gravitational sheering tearing apart anything getting close to either entrance needs to be overcome.
Matter replicating, well to a very small extent we can replicate CERTAIN things, but it depends on very specific chemical reactions that ONLY work for those things. We'd need to build a new reaction from the ground up for each thing we wanted built, and really complicated stuff, like a freshly cooked pizza or "gakh", just aren't going to happen like that. Firstly, we'd need to destroy one real pizza to actually scan what we're going to make. Secondly, laying down each new thing would take a lot of work. Assuming ALL this work is done in advance, maybe, but it'll never be like on Star Trek. A more efficient method would be biologically growing a self cooking pizza tree, with some sort of hyper metabolism. Even then, each one would need to be individually designed.
As much as I'd love to see a lot of those things, the real world doesn't seem to oblige us. There's no real explanation on how transporters, a solution to the problem of low budgets for taking off and landing to begin with, even work. How do you "convert someone entirely to energy" without them simply exploding, and keep track of it, and do it all remotely with a laser beam from space. Or, how would you scan the entirety of someone's body, without damaging it, while it is moving (heart beating, blood flowing, you can't stop that easily without harm), and somehow magically "destroy" the original to make your data copy with some sort of magical replicator, back on the starship.
I think we may very well be able to create a paradise on Earth with a post-scarcity economic, where we're provided for not by the sweat of our brow or by the government collecting everyone's wages, but simply by a vast automated system maintained by more automated systems. So long as that system doesn't become self aware and destroy humanity, it'll be great. It won't resemble Star Trek though. It'll be genetically modified super-gardens, some super-fast public transport system that's always available (tubes like Futurama?), and people working because they want to, since the machines won't be programmed to prevent us from doing what we enjoy. Crimes, aside from only being motivated by sociopathy, not slum lifestyles, would be far harder to pull off, not least because it's hard to kill someone who's brain is stored in a cloud networking solution.
Of course that's all blind speculation, but IF we ever have anything like a paradise, I think that'll be what it most resembles. A future Star Trek reboot (and I mean a real reboot, not just splitting off a new parallel universe like the movie did, where original Spock can literally pal around with alternate Spock, and I assume in the future they may even have Picard or Sisko show up, but not Janeway) would more resemble this. The big question then, if it's a trek in the stars, is how to actually GET to the stars without time dilation being a problem. Maybe it'll never be doable. In a real sense, the "future" of those stars doesn't even exist here until 4 years from now (at the closest star other than the sun), not just that we can't see that future, but that right here, their future doesn't even exist, so we go there, we don't exist to Earth for 4 years. I really doubt that long term space travel will be done by modern humans too. It's more likely we'll have modified versions that are specifically adapted to a zero G environment do the job.
Oh yeah, and those forehead aliens... Next Generation had ONE episode that tried to explain it, with the revelation that all humanoid races in the galaxy were the result of a single original humanoid species seeding thousands of worlds with genes to "force" evolution of at least one branch to become humanoid. I loved that, until they decided to NEVER talk about that again. They did come up with some truly alien aliens, like those founders, but that only stood to really demonstrate just how uninteresting their various variations of humanoids had become. You can only introduce so many "warrior races" before it gets stale. I want some truly alien psychology, like those bird/plant things in that one old story that thought in terms of, for example, every single word said follows rules describing the ENTIRE situation, so that as you move through a day, you use different words to describe an object. THAT was interesting alien design. It's also why whenever someone talks about "the greys" as something that seriously exists and visits us, I just have to laugh. Sure artistically, they're pretty interesting, and it's a part of our culture, and all that, but really, a hominid? That's the best you could do?
Well enough of all that. All that said, I still like Next Generation :D.
Oh, and I suppose the next part of that series is the iHouse? I still have no idea what the "i" stands for.
We don't have any rudiments of teleportation or replication. Recently some scientists have managed to do some "spooky action at a distance", and at a quantum level, things do kinda "teleport" into positions, but that's a far far cry from macro scale Star Trek transporters. In fact, there's really no way to build up these tests TO such a thing. I think there's a lot more hope in wormholes, and that's considering those can actually exist. They're predicted, and so far relativity holds up to a lot of other predictions, but it could very well just be a mathematical artifact and not something reality actually allows. Further, even if we can make a wormhole, the issue of the sheer gravitational sheering tearing apart anything getting close to either entrance needs to be overcome.
Matter replicating, well to a very small extent we can replicate CERTAIN things, but it depends on very specific chemical reactions that ONLY work for those things. We'd need to build a new reaction from the ground up for each thing we wanted built, and really complicated stuff, like a freshly cooked pizza or "gakh", just aren't going to happen like that. Firstly, we'd need to destroy one real pizza to actually scan what we're going to make. Secondly, laying down each new thing would take a lot of work. Assuming ALL this work is done in advance, maybe, but it'll never be like on Star Trek. A more efficient method would be biologically growing a self cooking pizza tree, with some sort of hyper metabolism. Even then, each one would need to be individually designed.
As much as I'd love to see a lot of those things, the real world doesn't seem to oblige us. There's no real explanation on how transporters, a solution to the problem of low budgets for taking off and landing to begin with, even work. How do you "convert someone entirely to energy" without them simply exploding, and keep track of it, and do it all remotely with a laser beam from space. Or, how would you scan the entirety of someone's body, without damaging it, while it is moving (heart beating, blood flowing, you can't stop that easily without harm), and somehow magically "destroy" the original to make your data copy with some sort of magical replicator, back on the starship.
I think we may very well be able to create a paradise on Earth with a post-scarcity economic, where we're provided for not by the sweat of our brow or by the government collecting everyone's wages, but simply by a vast automated system maintained by more automated systems. So long as that system doesn't become self aware and destroy humanity, it'll be great. It won't resemble Star Trek though. It'll be genetically modified super-gardens, some super-fast public transport system that's always available (tubes like Futurama?), and people working because they want to, since the machines won't be programmed to prevent us from doing what we enjoy. Crimes, aside from only being motivated by sociopathy, not slum lifestyles, would be far harder to pull off, not least because it's hard to kill someone who's brain is stored in a cloud networking solution.
Of course that's all blind speculation, but IF we ever have anything like a paradise, I think that'll be what it most resembles. A future Star Trek reboot (and I mean a real reboot, not just splitting off a new parallel universe like the movie did, where original Spock can literally pal around with alternate Spock, and I assume in the future they may even have Picard or Sisko show up, but not Janeway) would more resemble this. The big question then, if it's a trek in the stars, is how to actually GET to the stars without time dilation being a problem. Maybe it'll never be doable. In a real sense, the "future" of those stars doesn't even exist here until 4 years from now (at the closest star other than the sun), not just that we can't see that future, but that right here, their future doesn't even exist, so we go there, we don't exist to Earth for 4 years. I really doubt that long term space travel will be done by modern humans too. It's more likely we'll have modified versions that are specifically adapted to a zero G environment do the job.
Oh yeah, and those forehead aliens... Next Generation had ONE episode that tried to explain it, with the revelation that all humanoid races in the galaxy were the result of a single original humanoid species seeding thousands of worlds with genes to "force" evolution of at least one branch to become humanoid. I loved that, until they decided to NEVER talk about that again. They did come up with some truly alien aliens, like those founders, but that only stood to really demonstrate just how uninteresting their various variations of humanoids had become. You can only introduce so many "warrior races" before it gets stale. I want some truly alien psychology, like those bird/plant things in that one old story that thought in terms of, for example, every single word said follows rules describing the ENTIRE situation, so that as you move through a day, you use different words to describe an object. THAT was interesting alien design. It's also why whenever someone talks about "the greys" as something that seriously exists and visits us, I just have to laugh. Sure artistically, they're pretty interesting, and it's a part of our culture, and all that, but really, a hominid? That's the best you could do?
Well enough of all that. All that said, I still like Next Generation :D.
Oh, and I suppose the next part of that series is the iHouse? I still have no idea what the "i" stands for.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)