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I hadn't noticed this before, but an actual Star Trek writer posted a comment to Scalzi's post: > Raging at Trek because its filled with rubber science is a straw man argument. When has any Star Trek show ever pretended to be scientifically accurate? Every Trek show has always been, at the core, an action-adventure drama about contemporary issues refelected off the funhouse mirror of an SF setting. It’s allegory, not extrapolation. So, don't try to predict the consequences of new technologies by analogies to Star Trek. You'll do as well as predicting the outcome of a war by analogies to Bruce Lee movies. Same goes for Terminator, Dr. Who, and the Jetsons. And, despite https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien..., the same really goes for fiction in general: fiction is literally, unashamedly, intentionally, nothing but lies. It doesn't tell you anything about reality, just about its authors' beliefs. And when we're talking about things that haven't happened yet, the authors generally don't know any more than you do; even when they have thought about the subject, as is undoubtedly the case with Star Trek's English-speaking extraterrestrials and audio-transmitting vacuum, they may prefer to portray things they know are impossible because they think they'll be more entertaining or help them achieve some other artistic goal. Don't reason from fictional evidence. It makes you look like a fool. |