The iPad

[A Black Falcon]

Heck, come to think of it, notice that all those Starships seem almost completely cut off from any sort of galactic sized network? At best they have a sort of rudimentary phone system set up, but no real internet to speak of. Too many episodes have someone complaining about how "our ship's database doesn't have any information on that", the sort of problem a Federation Internet could solve instantly. Heck, how many episodes could be solved if all the Federation engineers on all Starships could just instantly communicate and work with each other? Come across an ancient alien asteroid defense system that's mysteriously modified the phase variance of your warp drive so you can't escape? Call up all the star ships that AREN'T currently going through this surprisingly regular bulltonk and have a roundtable discussion!

Star Wars does have HoloNet... it's described somewhere as having been extremely expensive to set up, because it's a Republic-wide network it requires a lot of hardware to work... lots of floating transmission relays, etc. I know it sort of just seems like a phone thing, but I'm pretty sure it's internet too, or at least they added that to it after the web got popular. :) I think it was there from the start though, really.

But that does relate to my point -- people can't really predict the future. We can guess based on what current circumstances are, but we can't guess accurately the way things will go in the future. People trying to guess the future usually end up wrong, because things usually do not go as we think they will, as you have described. As a result of that it's natural that sci-fi shows will not really reflect the future. They can't, the people creating them had no idea what the future would be like! I don't hold that against them; how should they possibly have been expected to guess the future, when we know humans really can't do that?

Sci-fi shows are more about the time that they were made in than really about the future, really. I love them anyway, but it's true.

Oh yeah, and as you pretty much say, transporters and forehead aliens are just budget things. I'm not sure about transporters (why not have them, it's science fiction), but for forehead aliens, I completely agree that the whole concept is utterly absurd.

Of course, we only know life as we know it, so we can't really predict what form aliens would really look like... that is part of the explanation. But they don't even try, they just use humans with bumpy foreheads. Sigh... just like with medieval fantasy videogames and movies and such, it's one of many things that reminds me of how much more accurate books are than any movies or games. Fantasy books often actually create believable, realistic medieval fantasy style worlds. Games and films... pretty much never, you usually end up with inane random mishmashes of stuff aimed at being something the current mass market will find acceptably familiar and that make no sense if you think about them for two seconds, which of course you are not supposed to do. The same goes for sci-fi, really. There's a huge gulf between the books and movies or games. At least with sci-fi there are a few movies which come closer, but with fantasy even that's sketchy...

You care about silly the science, I care about the silly cultures and societies. Makes sense that I've mostly studied history and politics in college, doesn't it. :)

Honestly, the concept of a ubiquitous global network, to say nothing of its obvious evolution into an interplanetary/galactic network, seemed to completely elude most science fiction prior to the Internet.

The internet's existed since like the 1960s, though... the web is not the internet, it's just one facet of it. Of course pre-web the internet was quite different and very very very much less popular, but it was there.