Messing Around With The Prime Directive

One of the humour sites that I enjoy, SatireWire is back with a look at the daily struggles of the Enterprise orbiting the current Earth. Considering the last reaction to Star Trek, I figured people would like this.

Comments

Huh?

[Kasreyn]

My submission about the UF layoffs gets rejected, but the least funny bit in tonight's SatireWire newsletter is worthy of a front page article?

-Kasreyn

Re:The Onion - America becomes a bad movie

[goingware]

I thought the conclusion of American Life turns into bad Jerry Bruckheimer movie was especially appropriate:

The collective sense of outrage, helplessness, and desperation felt by Americans is beyond comprehension. And it will be years before the full ramifications of the events of Sept. 11 become clear. But one thing is clear: No Austrian bodybuilder, gripping Uzis and striding shirtless through the debris, will save us and make it all better. Shocked and speechless, we are all still waiting for the end credits to roll. They aren't going to

-- Shocked and speechless.

Star Trek and geek critics

[The Ultimate Badass]

One attribute of geeks that I have noticed, is that they cannot sit through a movie without picking the plot to pieces and pedantically attacking every slight deviation from reality. I have nothing in particular against this, when applied to movies that are genuinely bad, such as "Austin Powers 2", but people who apply it to all movies really get up my nose.

For some reason, however, Star Trek consistently misses out on the "Geek critique". This, despite the fact that Star Trek is guilty of some of the most contrived plots and unscientific pseudo-science.

For instance:

• Spock's pure logic: This is literally impossible. Biological brains are based on pattern matching, which necessitates illogical responses.
  
• The dilithium crystals: As a fuel source, these are contrived beyond belief. Any good crystallographer knows that crytalline structures are too inert to supply decent energy returns. Try burning a diamond, if you don't believe me.
  
• Warp factor 9: The idea that they could exceed the speed of light exactly nine times is ludicrous. As you move further from the speed of light, the rate at which speed increases grows immeasurably larger. It would be impossible to achieve any reasonable system of measurement at these speeds.
  
• No plants on the enterprise: Anyone else notice this? You need plants to breathe, fools.
  
• Artificial gravity: This was never explained. In any series.
  
• Beaming down: There's no way this could possible work. Even if you could reconstruct a body at the other end, without some kind of receiving device, it would be dead on arrival.
  
  

  Despite all these obvious flaws, Star Trek gets a free ride from the geek critics. Favouritism? Hypocrisy? Blindness? I suspect the problem is really just that geeks criticise films to demonstrate their superior intellect, over the Hollywood film-makers and the audience. Since Star Trek films are considered to be a product of more thoughtful and knowledgeable writers, it does not occur to geeks that these films could be open to criticism.

Re:Star Trek and geek critics

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite, but again, we're discussing snake oil: Spock's pure logic: No one, even Spock, ever said that his thoughs are from pure logic. He was trined to do so. He was born half human, half volcan, and he learned to be as much logical as possible. When he mind-melded with McCoy, and then back to his reborn body, he lost much of his human peculiarity, and he was able to be more logical than before. The dilithium crystal: You might be correct, but the low entropy in a crystalline structire could be broken if enough energy will start a controlled reacton. Also, who knows exactly what they do with the crystal? Burning them might not be the correct interpretation, in fact, Scotty was able to regenerate Klingon's crystals by injecting photons collected from a nuclear rector. There might be atom scaled reactions here. Warp factor 9: this means not 9 times the speed of light, but c^9. According to their theory, the upper limit is c^10 anyway. No plants: no tradition kitchens either. They synthetize whatever they need. Implying they have control on atomic and sub-atomic reaction (see dilithium crystals). If they can synthetize a roasted chiken, surely they can the same with oxygen. Artificial gravity: read many (real) publications about the missing 'gravitone' particle. Also don't forget inertia. Beaiming down: cororrect, but see plants and crystals.

Re:Star Trek and geek critics

[cheetham]

> Spock's pure logic
I agree with that.

> The dilithium crystals
I thought they are used to direct the anti-matter, rather than as a power source themself?

> Warp factor 9:
errrmm... don't forget sub-space. Also warp 9 is NOT nice times the speed of light. The warp factors are an exponential scale.

> No plants on the enterprise:
I can't remember if I've seen any or not to be honest, but can't air be recycled anyway?

> Artificial gravity:
IIRC, there are devices that emit gravitons, which are theoretical conveys of gravitation.

> Beaming down:
People are working on the problem.