Flare Sci-Fi Forums: Trek devices survey

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Posted by Bernd (Member # 6) on :

Which device or technology do you think is the least credible in Star Trek, and you think there's no way it could actually work?

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

Transporters.

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"There's always a bigger fish..."
-Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace

Posted by Mucus (Member # 24) on :

The plot device known as the reset button.

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If a tree falls on a mime in the forest...does anyone care?

Posted by The Excalibur (Member # 34) on :

Transporters. I can see why Star Trek used them, but I glad Babylon-5 didn't.

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PARTURITION

Posted by Warped1701 (Member # 40) on :

The vaunted "plot-device drive".

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"Angels and Ministers of Grace, defend us"
-Hamlet, Act I, Scene IV

Posted by Aethelwer (Member # 36) on :

Anything involving subspace.

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"CORUSCANT...DOES NOT COMPUTE...I mean, uh, you're under arrest!" - Anonymous battle droid

[This message was edited by The Shadow on May 26, 1999.]

Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :

The Boy.

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"You can't catch me where I'm gonna fall. You can't catch me where I'll hide. This world's too cold, this Nova rolls. I'm moving to the sun."
--
They Might Be Giants

Posted by Elim Garak (Member # 14) on :

Regarding transporters: Is it not theoretically possible, just creating too much radiation? If so, why could we not find a way to take that all but away somehow in the future... say, using... subspace?

Seriously? Warp drive. Or anything else subspace-like.

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Garak: "I believe in coincidences. Coincidences happen every day. But I don't trust coincidences." (DS9: "Cardassians")

Posted by Simon on :

Well transporters are theoretically possible, just not the way Trek does them.

I think the least plausible technologies are those concerning time travel. Less those that take you back in time but mainly those that can return you to the future.

Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :

Well, assuming you can warp space at your leisure, time travel becomes old hat.

I'm somewhat cautious in deeming any technology impossible. Some aspects of the transporter, for instance, might be made possible within the next century. Namely the replicator. Oh, not by breaking objects down with energy, but with extremely tiny machines.

Nanotechnology aside, it can be difficult to predict what the future holds in terms of science. Our current understanding of the universe is highly accurate, as far as we can determine. It doesn't seem likely that we'll ever be able to travel faster than light, for instance.

Then again, somewhere out there, a budding Zefrem Cochrane might be solving the Grand Unified Theory, yielding...who knows?

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"You can't catch me where I'm gonna fall. You can't catch me where I'll hide. This world's too cold, this Nova rolls. I'm moving to the sun."
--
They Might Be Giants

Posted by Aethelwer (Member # 36) on :

We'll be able to travel faster than light. Why else would all those planets be there, then?

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"CORUSCANT...DOES NOT COMPUTE...I mean, uh, you're under arrest." - Anonymous battle droid

[This message was edited by The Shadow on May 21, 1999.]

Posted by Elim Garak (Member # 14) on :

To take up lots of space, � la Contact, of course.

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Garak: "I believe in coincidences. Coincidences happen every day. But I don't trust coincidences." (DS9: "Cardassians")

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

The reason Trek's transporters are impossible is because you can beam anywhere. They claim to use an annular confinement beam, but that would mean a transport would have to be line-of-sight. How could you get through another ship's hull? And, how does the thing put all your pieces back together from as much as 40,000km away?

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"There's always a bigger fish..."
-Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace

Posted by Cargile (Member # 45) on :

Universal Translator-- unless it becomes possible to create a devise that can read minds.

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Think of it this way, at least we will be in prison together.
Tom to B'Lanna, upon reaching Earth and and being arrested by Tuvok.

Posted by Xentrick (Member # 64) on :

[Babel fish?]

Transporter: I just can't buy the ability to materialize a living person *exactly* on the ground, not above or below, from orbital altitude, through miles of atmosphere, through lightning storms or solid rock, and regardless of the differenttial velocity between planet and starship.

Re-assembly is just too far-fetched. I can believe in a space-warp doorway or point-to-point wormhole before I can believe in the Transporter. Lawrence Krauss helped kill my belief when he described the math required.

Posted by Trinculo on :

I am not going to say what I believe is impossible. About two thousand years ago, a writer wrote of a mission to the moon. In that time, this would have been thought impossible. Eventually, transporters and FTL travel may be possible. However, these technologies may take a form that is unrecognizable to us. (The writer I spoke about earlier imagined a wooden ship carrying the astronauts to the moon. The space ship of the Apollo design would be alien to him.)

Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :

I believe Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Given enough time, energy, and resources, you can accomplish anything.

Posted by Xentrick (Member # 64) on :

Clarke's Third Law, yes. But that suggests that the "sufficiently advanced" technology is being viewed by someone of a lower technology, not by the user.

Pacific islanders thought that the aircraft of the outside world were gods, or sent by the gods, but to the pilots who flew them they were nothing special.

Likewise, a transporter that is magic to us may be ho-hum boring to the people who use them daily. Moon-landing would be impossible to the ancients, but history to us. Still, if the ancients had certain understanding of how things worked (not the least being thrust, Newtonian reactions, etc) they might have envisioned a Moonlanding.

We can envision a transporter, but aren't likely to built one. The problem can be seen, but not necessarily overcome.

Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :

The Universal Translator as depicted on the show.

That an the amazing shrinking device installed on the Defiant.

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-Rex Murphy on The Phantom Menace

Posted by Bernd (Member # 6) on :

The transporter: It will never work the way shown in Star Trek. Even if the transmission of a matter stream were possible, it would not work without a receiver.

The universal translator: Besides all "small" technical obstacles (filtering out the original voice, simultaneous translation), it is impossible to analyze a new language with only a few words available.

Warp drive & subspace: Might be impossible, but the explanation is plausible enough for a sci-fi series.

Time travel: The fact that it is connected with paradoxes does not necessarily mean it's not possible.

Posted by Identity Crisis (Member # 67) on :

According to General Relativity, faster than light travel, anti-gravity and time travel are all the same thing and are all impossible.

Transporters are completely impossible as depicted in Trek.

My personal bugbear: life form sensors. How can you detect that there are five life forms, three of which are Vulcans and two of which are Romulans on a starship 1000s of kilometers away? What strange particles are living beings constantly emitting that can penetrate a starship hull travel great distances across a vacuum and which can carry information about the race, gender and health of the life form?

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-->Identity Crisis<--

Posted by Montgomery (Member # 23) on :

Personally I think that in time we'll be able to accomplish any task not expressly forbidden by the laws of Physics.

Transporters
It's the smegging Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
You cannot know exactly where a particle is AND simultaneously know what its momentum is. No way around it. Add to this the problem of the vast amount of data required to store a set of coords for every atom in your body, and the requirement of either "moving" or "copying" all of that and you get a horrendous amount of energy. All that with no apparatus at one end?!
Much easier to pop in and out like a Q. Perhaps via personal wormholes. At no time would you be "disassembled".

Gravity nets are a problem too, but we know so little about gravitons it'd be risky to say too much against the concept.

TranslatorsI agree with the ridiculousness of the "instant" Universal translator as outlined by others above.

FTL TRAVEL
I have a hunch this will turn out to be possible after all. As Frank says, it's a very big universe out there, which to me implies there is a way to access it. (Not involving giant gyroscopes I trust - not much a "Star Trek" that!)

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- THE BIG BUS

Posted by Bernd (Member # 6) on :

I'm not so pessimistic about artificial gravity or antigravity. Maybe it will be possible to create gravitons without the according mass being present.

FTL travel is impossible according to Special Relativity, but I wouldn't say that there is no way to overcome it at least hypothetically.

The Uncertainty Principle applies to elementary particles, while atoms or molecules as a whole are exactly to determine. I'm not sure to what degree living organisms are really dependent on elementary particles. Most microelectronic circuitry is not (yet).

Sensors: Hmmm. I always tend to forget these nifty devices, although I'm amused every time they yield a precise view of the interior of a starship.

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

I think it was the January '99 issue of Scientific American that had a big section on various new theories about the workings of the universe, and I think one of them had to do w/ antigravity. FTL and time travel are intertwined, but I don't think AG is part of that...

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