In one of my earlier posts, I explained how I was skeptical that a replicator could give you ‘anything you wanted out of thin air’ without a substantial energy requirement. As marvelous a piece of technology that the replicator was, it seemed to empower the crew with too much. For too long, Star Trek has suffered from what some have amicably termed the ‘Superman-effect’ in which the technology on Star Trek has enabled its characters to do just about anything they want, get anything they want, and go anywhere they want. This is not only unrealistic but it creates a problem of how to introduce challenges for the characters after a long stretch of series and episodes. Writers would get around this by introducing challenges that were even more difficult to accomplish (i.e. how do we travel faster than Warp 10?) and then offering solutions, or reasons why they wouldn’t work, that made even less sense (i.e. traveling at transwarp speeds will turn you into a salamander). I suspect that this was the very reason that the pre-Kirk time period was chosen for the fifth series; the writers could go back when the technology was more limited and once again give the crew more tangible problems to face.
As I wrote in my previous post, I should be careful in crafting my words so that I don’t imply that the technology on Star Trek at all needs to be accurate or plausible. Gene Roddenberry, after all, was not a scientist himself. He was an engineer, with a very specific vision of the future and seemingly more interested in the fate of humanity than how his warp engines worked. Roddenberry seemed to invent technologies only out of necessity, since it was, after all, the future. As cumbersome as he may found it to be, he did invent a lot of visionary technologies back in the day. And now that we’re well into the 21st century, I suspect that new visions of the future must be ‘re-calibrated’ to reflect current technological trends, fears, and fantasies.
For example, in the 1960’s, projections were made that we would colonize the moon by the 21st century. In Back to the Future II, the movie predicted that flying cars and hoverboards would be available by 2015. It is really no surprise that none of these visions have, or will in the near future, come to fruition. But few could have envisioned how the internet would revolutionize our society in only a matter of about ten to fifteen years. In other words, it very easy to say “in fifty years, Starfleet should have ‘x’,” where x might be faster-than-Warp-10-speeds, time travel, making artifical wormholes, or what have you. But just like how we are nowhere near colonizing moon since the 60′s, I don’t think Starfleet will be near any of these leaps in technologies either.
In Reemergence, therefore, despite it being set a few decades past the TNG/DS9/VOY series, I keep the ‘pure’ technological advances to a minimum (no standard Warp 13 speeds, no phase cloak, no dimensional shifting, no slipstream drive, no super-ultra-quantum tetracobalt torpedoes or whatever, etc.). Instead, I attempt to focus on ‘the little things’ – i.e. new applications of TNG technology, and how they affect the crew and operations of the ship.
Besides, those are the best kinds of gadgets, aren’t they?
