In The Original Series in the 60s, people had no idea what the future would look like or what technology would look like. In one of the early episodes, they had a paper print out machine on the bridge that looked like a fax machine, which was considered futuristic in the 1960s.
Like the example of the Enterprise fax machine, what technology or system do you think are we displaying in the current Star Trek shows that will show how dated we will become in the future?
The choice of drugs. Star Trek is all about alcohol (often alien alcohol) and caffeine (sometimes alien coffee). Any time any other drug is shown / mentioned, it’s because it’s a big enough problem to be a plot point. I think 20 years from now, a few light drugs, including marijuana, will be so common that it will seem strange that they’re not part of society in the 23rd century.
May still want to stay off the White.
My guess is … big giant spaceships
I think that future tech will have much smaller craft or technology to move people from one star system to another.
The giant starships we highlight in the shows today will be looked at in the future in the same way we look at people in the 1900s who thought that big giant cruise ships over the ocean would be the best way to travel around the world in the future.
Even skipping the point of travelling between star systems in the future, as that is highly doubtful at best, that’s not a principle I subscribe to.
It’s usually way more economical to go for scale rather than individualism, let’s look at some examples.
Travelling by bus or train is way cheaper and more efficient than travelling by car. Travelling by cruise ship/ferry is way cheaper and more efficient than getting your own boat. Travelling by passenger plane is way cheaper and more efficient than travelling by business jet which in turn is more efficient than getting your own little plane, which might not even be able to get you where you want to go.
Generally, especially when involving long distances and the material needs associated with it, having a big enough vessel to share the costs and limit the need to restock (en route) to a minimum.
Bar safety, logistical and cost concerns, we could already cram a nuclear reactor in a car or a bus. We don’t because it simply doesn’t make sense.
I see no reason why that logic wouldn’t apply to some magical device that would enable interstellar travel, even if it would be able to instantly teleport you to your location without having enormous energy requirements.
Direct-fire ship-to-ship weapons. Modern war is more and more about missiles, drones, etc. I think in the future the idea of ships coming near each-other and shooting directly will seem really old-fashioned, even if they are using space lasers.
I’ve heard that discussion before in past forums and you are right … even ship to ship battles probably won’t exist. It will most likely be space lasers, shot from locations millions of kilometers or light years away from one another, maybe not even from a ship but from a planet or a moon or some station that never moves … a random enemy ship will just be sitting in space and BAM! they get hit without warning by a blast of radiation or weapon of some sort that came in at light speed and no warning.
The modern Star Trek theatrics of a space battle of big ships flying around one another shooting lasers and weapons will look to us how we see submarine battles in World War II
Virtually all sci-fi involving ships fighting in space uses a World War 2 aesthetic. Star Wars, especially. “Fighter” ships that fire “laser cannons” that travel in the direction of the flight of the ship is right out of how WWII fighters worked. Bigger ships with guys in turrets trying to shoot at those fighters, that’s right out of how WWII bombers like the B-17 defended themselves. Space stations or huge capital ships firing really big guns, that’s just like flak cannons in WWII.
Star Trek is a bit different especially because phasers are very fast (but not light speed). But they do ship-to-ship combat a bit like battleships shooting directly at other battleships. Sure, they have photon torpedoes, but they seem to be rarely used and they fire one at a time. And again, “torpedoes” are a very WWII weapon.
Virtually every other sci-fi show or movie does something similar: Stargate, Babylon 5 (at least they do space-inertia properly though), Farscape, Battlestar Galactica, etc. The only one that seemed a bit realistic was The Expanse, where a lot of things happened well beyond visual range, and guns were mostly about point-defense from incoming missiles.
As for what realistic distant future space combat would be like, it’s really an interesting concept. In some ways it’s like submarine combat in that there’s no horizon, things don’t need to spend energy to remain “floating” in place, and there’s essentially no chance of outmaneuvering weapons. OTOH, one of the defining features of submarine combat is stealth, and in space it’s much, much harder to hide. So, it would probably be about attempting to hide while using decoys. And, probably using remotely controlled weapons platforms that used lasers to try to smoke something detected at many light-minutes distance.
Like, instead of an armored battleship duking it out with another armored battleship, you’d probably have a command capsule that was as small and as stealthy as possible. It would communicate with scanning and weapons platforms using some kind of tech that wasn’t detectable at range, like using lasers instead of radio, or maybe even using a very long cable. But, definitely no radios because they broadcast too widely. Any active scanning would make the scanner a target, so there wouldn’t be anything valuable on the scanning source. You might even make it so that the radar / lidar emitter was separate from the receivers so that when the emitter was smoked, you didn’t lose the detectors too. Any weapons platforms would also be immediately targeted as soon as they started firing, so you’d either use a launcher that was disposable as soon as it finished launching, or a nearly disposable laser turret type thing that you’d expect to be destroyed almost as soon as it started shooting. But, I think the biggest focus would be on decoys. In the ocean you can just hide in all the background noise from the ocean. In space, you’d have to make your own background noise.
The fax machine is forever. There’s a fax machine on the International Space Station.
Okay, I’m joking. But I bet you considered it for half a second, because fax machines have been that damn hard to get rid of.
cries in German
* faxes in German
I really doubt flying a spaceship will ever just be sitting in a bucket seat with a screen of touch controls
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Yeah: It’ll be your brain in a jar (or just stored digitally) and you’ll just get a new body 3D printed when you arrive at your destination… After landing.
You go ahead. I’ll keep my brain inside my body, thank you.
Calm down, Dr Pulaski.
Single Use Padds:
At first I thought PADDS were dumb as fuck.
Now though, I switch between phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, all the time.
I sometimes hand a device to someone else to show what I’m talking about, then grab a different device to continue what I was doing.
Coming from the mainframe era (which TNG did, PCs were just starting to become known to the average person when production started), it made sense. And today we have virtually the same thing if we choose - keep the data elsewhere, portable device is just an access point.
Sometimes it’s just easier to hand someone a screen, and if they’re simple to produce, why not?
My headcanon has been that many of those PADDs are 1-time use read only devices that can’t have the data copied, transferred, altered or deleted. When they’re done, they just get resynthesized. They could be for classified data, secure reports, and so on. If it’s just reading a couple duty shift reports, they are the small simple PADDs with scroll buttons. Intelligence reports on the sector, would have different levels of interactive bottoms on the sides. Potential prototype vessel upgrades, more space, more interactive features, and so on.
Alternate interpretation: Starfleet’s mobile device UI isn’t great for managing multiple documents that you quickly switch between. Everyone defaults to using multiple PADDs because they’re not going to see a major revision of LCARS anytime soon.
(Also, they’re free and easily obtained, just go to a replicator.)
because they’re not going to see a major revision of LCARS anytime soon.
I just realized the logistical support nightmare that would be. It has to support written language and cultural context for all Federation species without breaking UI/UX. It would also have to produce legible output for all those different vision systems, which could run the gamut of what’s “visible” light frequencies, contrast, brightness, and suitable magnification. Once your software engineering dream-team solves all that, you don’t change it. Ever. My head canon here is that LCARS is ugly and clunky, but is a compromise that everyone can manage to suffer through.
I find it amusing that a console featuring tangible buttons and lights with fixed positions, as seen on the original Enterprise, might actually be the better answer here.
