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

Much funnier... (tangental)

[Alakaboo]

The previous article [satirewire.com] is much funnier (imho), and probably the best I've read from satirewire in a while.

The Onion

[rsidd]

If anyone was wondering how a humour site can continue in the face of the recent tragedy, take a look at the current issue of The Onion.

They used to be an amusing diversion to me. Now I respect them more than most of the mainstream press.

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.

Satire, Slashdot, Star Trek

[MartyJG]

all rolled into one: Top 90 Ways Star Trek Would Change If Slashdot Replaced Starfleet.

As usual, you need a login to vote (moderate).

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

[Minupla]

*grins* I'll skip the nitpick of the tech details in your post, because I'm sure there'll be no shortage of people jumping in to pull out their ST Tech Refs out of their bookshelves and quote chapter and verse, and speak to why I think ST gets a free ride from geeks.

Firstly, in anything resembling a recent generation (ie: 90%+ of the population of /.) some form of ST was likely a very early introduction to SciFi to them. It's a base premise for most SciFi geeks, they don't really examine it because they internalized it before their critical thinking skills were up to scratch (this is also why you will see people arguing that TOS was the best trek. You tend to form your critical opinion of something the first time you watch it, if you watch it the first time when you're 8 years old, you're less likely to consider the lack of a recieving teleport station.)

B) frankly Trek at least tries, usually :). Voyager had a hydroponics bay, for instance. Most geeks won't nitpick 2001 ethier, for similar reasons. An effort was made to preserve scientific reality (2001 is probably the best movie I've ever seen for that.)

C) Reality is teaching us that maybe we don't know as much as we thought we did. Teleportation seems much more realistic after the successful teleportation of a photon using quantum entanglement.

D) Trek isn't (mostly) about the tech. It's a vehicle for making observations on the human condition, ethics, etc. It provides a mirror in which we can view ourselves. As a child I learned a lot by watching aliens in TNG and how they viewed our race.

E) Geeks, like everyone else appreciate a bit of optimism in their lives, especially now. At least for me, I'm far more likely to tear apart a planet of the apes, we blew ourselves up, sort of movie then I am a movie where the future seems pretty desirable overall. As a human, I want us to go where Trek is.

For what it's worth, those are my thoughts.

Minupla

Re:Star Trek and geek critics

[j7953]

... pattern matching, which necessitates illogical responses.

You'd better not tell Larry Wall.

Re:Gen X irony far from dead

[DGolden]

One wierd thing I think I noticed (but which I can't prove - never made tapes), was that the soundtracks of the camcorder-footage of the attacks was dubbed - the first few times Sky News (via Fox) here in Europe showed the videos, people were shouting "Shit! Fuck! Fuck!", but then, later the same footage had different people (with a higher proportion of female voices in the mix) going "Oh my God, Lord Help us" and crap like that.

I think that's appalling, if it's true. Much of western society is on the path to finally freeing itself from the shackles of religion, and the empty promises of religion were most likely the means used by the leaders of the terrorists to motivate the idiots carrying out the attack to commit suicide.

The original sounds more accurately reflected the current mindset of the vast majority of westerners - there weren't appeals to nebulous higher powers, just exclamations expressing shock.

Those currently in power, however, would have you believe that many more people follow irrational old belief systems than in reality - in reality, the religious nutters, in both Western and Muslim society, are a small, but vocal and powerful, minority.

FAITH IS NOT A VIRTUE.

Official explanations

[Markonen]

Here we go:

1. Spock's logic. The Star Trek Encyclopedia states that "Spock was raised with an older half-brother, Sybok, until Sybok was ostracized from Vulcan society because he rejected the Vulcan dogma of pure logic." This means that the "pure logic" isn't a feature of the Vulcan brain per se, but a norm of behavior in the Vulcan society. In other words, they just *try* to be as logical as possible.

2. Dilithium crystals are not used a power sources in the Star Trek universe. It is used to *regulate* the matter/antimatter reactions that provide the energy necessary to warp time-space.

3. Warp speed. Here's a quick roundup of warp factors' correlation to the speed of light:

• Warp factor 1, 1 c
  
• Warp factor 2, 10 c
  
• Warp factor 3, 39 c
  
• Warp factor 4, 102 c
  
• Warp factor 5, 214 c
  
• Warp factor 6, 392 c
  
• Warp factor 7, 656 c
  
• Warp factor 8, 1024 c
  
• Warp factor 9, 1516 c
  
• Warp factor 9.2, 1649 c
  
• Warp factor 9.6, 1909 c
  
• Warp factor 9.9, 3053 c
  
• Warp factor 9.99, 7912 c
  
• Warp factor 9.9999, 199516 c
  
• Warp factor 10, infinite c
  

Of these speeds, factor 5 is the cruising speed of Enterprise-D. Its maximum rated speed is factor 9.6, although 9.9 can be maintained for 10 minutes. Warp factor 9.9999 is the propagation speed of subspace radio, and factor 10, obviously, can never be reached.

4. Plants on Enterprise. Someone already answered this one correctly. The ships life-support systems are fitted to provide breathable air without any biological components.

5. Artificial gravity. Starfleet vessels are fitted with gravitational units that generate the synthetic gravity field aboard the vessel. A key component of the unit is the graviton field generator, which, obviously, generates a field of gravitons; the elementary particles that transmit gravitational force in the Star Trek universe.

6. Beaming down. It is true that the physics of the transporter are pretty much out of this world. Without going into details, all the different physical problems of the concept seem to be taken care of by a separate component to the transporter system: some of the funniest components are the Heisenberg compensator (go figure) or the transporter's "pattern enhancer". The true story is that The Original Series' effects budget couldn't possibly cope with landing the Enterprise or even a shuttle in every episode. The transporter's instantaneus speed also helps to keep out mundane tasks like shuttle travel out of the show.

Re:Warp 13

[bero-rh]

Redefinition of the scale. Imagine:

Worf: The Borg ship is following us and catching up!
Picard: Increase speed to warp 9.99999999999999999999999999999345671235...
[Borg ship destroys enterprise before Picard could finish stating the speed]

Similarily, I can easily tell you my old small car can go 180, and most British and American people won't believe me (because they'll think in terms of mph while I'm talking about kph).