posted
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?
------------------ "No, thanks. I've had enough. One more cup and I'll jump to warp." (Janeway, asked if she would like some coffee in "Once upon a Time") www.uni-siegen.de/~ihe/bs/startrek/
------------------ "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
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.
------------------ Garak: "I believe in coincidences. Coincidences happen every day. But I don't trust coincidences." (DS9: "Cardassians")
posted
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
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?
------------------ "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
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?
------------------ "There's always a bigger fish..." -Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
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.
Printer-friendly view of this topic
