[kevinmhickey]

On a related note, when I re-watch shows from the 1990's or even early 2000's it's amazing how many problems would be solved with a simple cell phone call or text message. Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be a much shorter show if the gang could just text instead of wondering where the others were or if they knew some key fact.

[jfengel]

Star Trek was well aware of that problem. They often encountered "ion storms", or landing parties got conked on the head and their communicators taken, or other ways of disabling communications.

That also disabled the transporter, which is a convenient way to get into stories, but also makes it easy to get out of stories.

Somebody somewhere must have done a PhD thesis on the way that cell phones have changed storytelling in TV and movies. I'd actually kinda like to read that.

A quick Google turns up:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254345825_Mobile_Ph...

[at_a_remove]

I've counted at least three civilization-shattering technologies in Star Trek which were simply thrown in, without consideration for the long-term, for reasons of budget and convenience, but largely to maintain the Sailing Ship, Days of Yore set of metaphors.

Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging, manufacturing, and so on. Notice in many high adventure films, the dinghy, the shuttle's ancestor, is often ignored.

Artificial Gravity/Inertial Dampeners: We want our ship to be under our boots, and occasionally slosh around when we are enduring space weather. Casual mastery of the force of gravity so we can have an ion storm to knock us about.

Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business, real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the same.

I could go on and on about this, but a lot of this space opera harkens back to a time when governments would just have to trust that some captain or governor was a reasonable person to have in charge because messages back and forth would take so very long.

[aquova]

I think there's a fourth, which in my opinion is even more world shattering than the others -- the replicator. It often was shown as a novelty device to make food or warm beverages, but the ability to convert energy into any needed material would instantly transform the world into a post-scarcity, post-economic future. What would you even use as currency when everyone has personal money making machines? I've seen some people be skeptical towards the utopian future of Trek, and I understand that a bit as the show puts great emphasis on the warp drive, but I think the replicator is quietly the greatest invention they depict (and unlike warp drive, at least vaguely possible).

[jimbokun]

Star Trek is very explicitly a post-scarcity society. There was an episode of Next Generation where they revive some Earthlings who had successfully frozen themselves in the 20th century.

One was a businessman who was excited to see how much the stock portfolio he had put together as a long term trust had fared. Picard had to gently explain to him wealth and money were no longer a thing.

[SenHeng]

Last episode of the first season.

Of course the Picard series itself then thoroughly destroys that thought by going on and on about money.

[hef19898]

In all fairness, between that episode and Picard, the Federation had extensive contact with the Ferengi.

[shiroiushi]

>I think there's a fourth, which in my opinion is even more world shattering than the others -- the replicator. It often was shown as a novelty device to make food or warm beverages, but the ability to convert energy into any needed material would instantly transform the world into a post-scarcity, post-economic future.

IIRC, in Star Trek, the replicator does not convert energy into needed material: it simply reorganizes existing molecules into a new form.

So, for instance, you can't use it to make yourself a bunch of gold: you could use it to convert a bunch of gold jewelry into gold bars, or vice-versa, but you would need some actual gold. It won't convert lead into gold. I think I heard or read somewhere in the lore (maybe non-canon) that the food replicators needed supplies of biochemical ingredients to use for making food. They could get that from various places, including breaking down the waste of the crewmembers, but they couldn't just conjure food out of nothing using pure energy.

[SenHeng]

Replicator technology often comes up in episodes involving trading with a less advanced civilisation, and often mentions how the Federation/Star Fleet is not willing to share that technology because it’s too game breaking.

And that unlimited energy has led them to a post scarcity, post money utopia, though that scenario seems to have been withdrawn a little in Picard.

[hef19898]

The one thing, despite all other things I critique regarding Star Trek I still like it, that drives me crazy is how the Federation treats first contacts, from their prime directive to diplomacy in general. The whole concept is so fucked up. And every other power should be so quick in capitalizing on this: Those people won't share their miracle tech with you, we will. For a price. Kind of like what China is doing in Africa.

Edit: Why would someone, say the Romulans, do that? Well, Starfleet doesn't establish contact, or invite a planet, because of some on going war or a non-unified government or no FTL tech. The Romulans step in, side with one party. They provide technology and weapons, they unite the planet as an "ally" or theirs. And now they have a new planet and systek to exploit, to use a base. Legally, and even better the Federation canot intervene. Rinse and repeat everytime Starfleet side steps a planet in a strategically important position. Do so over a couple of decades. You see were I am going, right?

[ralfd]

In the original series there is an episode where Klingons provide flintlock guns to a tribe on a stone age planet. Kirk wants to provide the other tribes with guns too and argues with McCoy about keeping the balance of power:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1J0K1OxdSI

[SenHeng]

Totally agree. For a warrior race, the Klingons sure don’t seem to do that much conquering when it would make so much in-world sense for them to be Romans-in-space.

They really seemed to make every race encountered to be a relatively peaceful semi-utopian culture.

[coryrc]

Gold-pressed latinum, obviously, as it can't be replicated.

[crooked-v]

Also hand-woven traditional scarves, to reference a certain podcast. Sure, you can replicate them, but then it's not genuine anymore.

More seriously, the basic answer for the Federation in particular would be "amounts of energy". Voyager uses exactly that, with minor but consistent references to 'replicator rations' because they're limiting the total energy usage of the ship.

[Ekaros]

What fails me with TNG is that why would anyone do any of the jobs that require hard boring labour anymore? Like mining dilithium, or other stuff that isn't easy to replicate.

Are they all some starfleet officers toiling for decades on off-chance that one day they might get job on a vessel? The ages of people on show don't present that...

The whole post-scarity kinda really breaks down when you start to look at edges. As society would not be effectively be able to keep up the production at least not as shown in shows...

[shiroiushi]

The 60s version of Star Trek just wasn't very well thought out, I think.

[vladms]

I see scarcity more related to primary resources (ex: energy, raw materials, machines) and for normal life purposes. They obviously have some way to decide who does what (not everybody is captain), but the impact of not being captain on what you eat, what you dress, what furniture you have is much less than today.

Now, if you want an Enterprise like personal spaceship, you probably are much better of being part of the Q continuum than the human race, scarcity wise.

[at_a_remove]

Oh, I lump the replicator in with the transporter. I can see the replicator as an ancestor of the transporter.

[thaumasiotes]

> What would you even use as currency when everyone has personal money making machines?

Cumals.

You can give everyone as much food as they want (and we already do!), but you can't eliminate scarcity.

[rhaps0dy]

What is a cumal?

[thaumasiotes]

Wikipedia would have told you.

A cumal is the unit in which medieval Irish monetary values are denominated. It is also the medieval Irish term for a female slave; the unit is notionally equal to the value of one such.

The point of answering the question in a historical currency is to emphasize that this question is easy to answer by simply thinking "what have been some well-known historical currencies?"

People trade in materials, tools, food, livestock, and women.

[caseysoftware]

> Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging, manufacturing, and so on.

I'm more interested in how it would rewrite the rules of war. If you can transport a nuke (or even a strike team) directly into your enemy's headquarters, wars end faster with less widespread destruction.

Until you develop no-transport fields but now you've just created massive dead zones which - in themselves - highlight key points of interest to investigate and/or target.

Then you have to deploy LARGE scale (think city wide or bigger) no-transport fields or lots of smaller fields to obfuscate the high value targets.

But regardless, you still need normal shields because teleporting a nuke just outside the zone and letting it drop in is just as effective.

And all of that still ignores conservation of mass.. the physical material has to come from somewhere.

[crooked-v]

> the physical material has to come from somewhere

Extended canon Star Trek has references to both (a) feedstock material storage, with big blocks or tanks of elementally pure materials that get shaved off and recombobulated as necessary by the replicators, and (b) synthesis of elements from pure energy on demand, though usually with the preference of the first method over the second because it's far, far less demanding on all the systems involved to just move atoms around.

[caseysoftware]

That works well if you're going TO a transporter pad.

It doesn't work when they use a transporter to go to a desolate planet.

[mnw21cam]

Schlock Mercenary https://www.schlockmercenary.com/ dealt with this particular theme quite thoroughly. One of the protagonists invents a "Teraport", and promptly a "Teraport Area Denial" is invented to protect against it. Recommended read, though the archive is huge.

[jimbokun]

In a Star Trek novel, where bad guys take over the bridge of the Enterprise, someone in the crew repurposes a mini transporter that’s part of a game, to transport explosives into the parts of the ship controlled by the enemy as a way to fight back.

I thought that was a clever use of transporter tech.

[hef19898]

With the federation transportes, as depicted throughout the series, the impact is limited. Easy to block, unreliable. They are used so, all the time, for boarding actions.

[aidenn0]

> Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business, real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the same.

Star Trek avoids this one by just completely ignoring the lightspeed barrier with handwavy "subspace" technobabble. They can communicate, detect, and track objects moving FTL with as much (or more) ease as done with radio tracking slow moving objects today.

[at_a_remove]

If you can get from A to B faster than a photon in a vacuum could, I'm counting it as FTL.

They've been really inconsistent about it. For a while, communicating through subspace was not quite as long as travel, but it was still a non-zero amount of time. Now, communication seems to be via ansible, and the less said about the wildly varying rates of travel, the better.

[SenHeng]

And yet, we have something like the Picard Manoeuvre that uses FTL to make it look like you have 2 or more ships in a single location. So they acknowledge that FTL is reality breaking, then just hand wave it away.

[Izkata]

Several episodes mention subspace relay stations, and between how communication seems to jump between real-time and waiting hours or more for a reply (I don't recall any minutes-long delays), I have a suspicion the unwritten rule is subspace communication has some sort of speed decay. Like it actually slows down the further it has to go, instead of going at the same speed but weaker, and subspace relay stations intercept the message and re-send it at top speed. More advanced technology in the later-set series could also then just send it faster than in the prequel series, explaining how they communicate over larger distances even though it's supposed to both be subspace communication.

[smogcutter]

I think the unwritten rule is that subspace communication takes precisely as long as the plot requires it to. (Especially in the more modern series)

[mrec]

> Artificial Gravity/Inertial Dampeners

Surely this one was much more about those "reasons of budget and convenience"? Star Trek couldn't afford non-styrofoam rocks, I can't see them stretching to filming all bridge scenes on the Vomit Comet or building a 2001-style rotational set.

[amanaplanacanal]

One thing that struck me about TNG was how many plots were about Data and whether he should be considered alive, and what rights he should have, and absolutely no thought was given to the AIs in the holodeck.

[hef19898]

They did put Moriarity in his own holo reality. Quite cruel after all. Not sure ehat happened to him, I didn't watch the last season of Picard.

Also, the holodeck: Not only can the ship computers run multiple, basically self-aware General AI characters in parallel, it can also extent space beyond the confines of the decks physical dimensions. Pretty amazing tech, no idea why they don't use it to build the interior of all their ships, after all it also has superior environmental controls.

[Terr_]

That makes me think of the "teraport" invention from Schlock Mercenary, which is basically faster than light teleportation powered by a very small/evenly-spread amount of mass-to-energy conversion of whatever you're sending. (So basically three magics rolled into one.)

Large portions of the web comic are involved with how it completely rewrites the rules of politics and war, with and without review techniques designed to create interdiction zones.

[crooked-v]

I think that last part about FTL is taken more into account in the stories than you've considered. 'A Borg ship moving super fast suddenly showed up Federation core territory' is the driving conceit behind "Best of Both Worlds" and Star Trek: First Contact, FTL travel is the main technobabble allowing for surprise appearances of Romulan/Klingon/Ferengi ships in unexpected places in a number of episodes, and there are whole arcs in DS9 about the impact of the Gamma Quadrant wormhole and how it's abruptly connected two politically opposed parts of the galaxy.

[readyplayernull]

You can apply Disney's Star Wars logic to Star Trek and get an abominable time traveling FTL space ram that can destroy anything.

[omnibrain]

> Somebody somewhere must have done a PhD thesis on the way that cell phones have changed storytelling in TV and movies. I'd actually kinda like to read that.

Prime example would be the X-Files. IIRC in the first season they had no cell phones yet.

[mkehrt]

I've just gone from season one to season two in an X-Files rewatch and the sudden appearance of cell phones is shocking.

[RheingoldRiver]

It's really interesting to me how precisely you can date modern tv shows.

- Do computers exist? Does everyone have a computer? Is the idea of searching the web a novel thing? - Do they have cell phones? Are they smartphones? - And now the new one, are they mentioning LLMs in some way?

Like one thing that really dates The Expanse imo is the complete lack of AI technology in the books/movies. It was probably an artistic choice, but it's completely unbelievable now in a way that wasn't a problem 4 years ago.

[jimbokun]

There is an episode of Columbia where he asks a receptionist for information about an employee. Instead of making a phone call to get the information, she kicks off a computer query on one of those teletype systems.

The gag is it takes seemingly forever for it to print all the data about the employee to paper, while Columbia fidgets and waits awkwardly to finish, repeatedly asking if there’s a faster way to get the information.

New tech at the time was often a plot point of the show, like using call recordings to fake the murderers location at the time of the murder, editing video surveillance, etc.

[thinkingemote]

Columbo (the tv detective show) in "An Exercise in Fatality" the scene lasted 7 minutes and it hilarious!

[dylan604]

I think any scifi talking about LLM is just doing it wrong. Nobody watching a scifi cares about AI other than it's doing things--good or bad depends on the script. Imagine if Ripley and Dallas having a scene discussing if Mother can be trusted or if it's hallucinating. What if HAL told Dave that LLM isn't fine tuned well enough so he's sorry he can't do that at this time? I'll tell you what, that scene would be on the cutting room floor, and if left in, the audience would be snoring.

[Ekaros]

I think HAL is actually perfectly done example of AI. As we currently see with many recent issues. It is trained over reasonably long time and then it is fed too many directives. HAL is exactly following the instructions and survival of the crew is NOT the top priority.

Edit: added NOT

[kstrauser]

I can see the complete absence as being more realistic than a partial or limited presence. If there were a Dune-style Butlerian Jihad, AI could be banned altogether.

[falcor84]

I can't imagine any of the factions in The Expanse upholding the ban on AI while researching in secret an actually alien substance.

[hef19898]

Not sure about that so. AI at the moment is a hype around LLMs. Given what the tech in the Expanse is doing, it is easily possible that AI is used as just another tool for everything from automated med bays to ships diagnostics.

Edit: Another great example of how computers are used is Perry Rhodan (a German SciFi series going since the 60s, and a rather good one). There, in books written up tobthe 70s, they have positronic computers (and other tech that beats everything Star Trek, Star Wars or any other sci fi universe I know has), and computers are still used with punch cards and stripe print outs. Even the ones salvaged from civilisation being millenias ahead tech-wise compared to humans. Pretty funny detail.

[shiroiushi]

They did the same thing in "Space: 1999" which came out in 1975. Computers were printing out receipt paper instead of using proper displays. It was very curious to me, because IIRC, real computers at that time already had displays. And Star Trek, which came out in the decade before, didn't have printouts either.

[probably_wrong]

Interesting to me is that I saw exactly one series taking place in the "real" world where the story acknowledged COVID.

[RheingoldRiver]

I think that'll get way more common with time, eg no one would acknowledge September 11th at first but now I think if you watched a tv show set in the year 2020-2024 they'd acknowledge that as part of the history. There's 2 reasons I can think why you wouldn't want to include a recent event, the biggest one obviously is that TV is escapism and people don't want to see their troubles highlighted in their escapism story (and also advertisers might not want their products displayed on anything mentioning traumatic recent events), but another is that when you're writing for a tv show in the modern worlds, you don't really expect to do as much creative worldbuilding as you would for a fantasy show. But if you include recent events that are going to cause a huge geopolitical ripple, you won't be able to predict as well what happens next.

[kej]

That reminds me of this McSweeney's piece by Google's Peter Norvig: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/stories-that-would-have-...

[dylan604]

along the same line of applying modern day to older shows, I recently re-watched Stargate Atlantis. I found it amusing that with all of the futuristic tech, McKay still carried around a bulky laptop. Even the original Star Trek minimized the computer to a hand held device. The prop team kind of failed in SG:Atlantis on this one to me. How much easier would their off world adventures been with a tablet or other smaller futuristic compute device?

[actionfromafar]

OTOH it was kind of cool to have a more "realistic" take of what would probably happen if the US military merged with Alien tech. Contemporary tools would be used next to new gadgets.

[dylan604]

For SG:1 sure. For SG:Atlantis, they had access to all of the ancient's tech.

[ben_w]

They had access to a lot of Ancient artefacts which they didn't really understand; despite many oddities that came to mind since first watching it, I think it would still fit the setting that they didn't know how to get the Ancient's 3D printers (or whatever) to spit out better hardware — if they could make it spit out more hardware on demand, even if they "could only find one file to print", it would radically change the show.

This also means there was no way for either SG-1 or Atlantis to sensibly continue past the SG-1 finale, when they got Asgard replicators and all the instruction manuals for them… and that Star Trek TNG onwards is best done without thinking too hard about the implications of almost any of the tech they demonstrate.

[themaninthedark]

I really didn't like the direction that SG-1 and Atlantis took.

There was a novel that took place after the movie that depicted Hathor coming back and trying to take over with a simultaneous plot of the US trying to extract resources from Abydos. I though it was really we done and wished that SG-1 used it as the starting point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_literature

[ben_w]

I can sympathise with that; while I enjoyed both, they were a radical departure from the source material and non-trivial departure from the SG-1 pilot (which I only learned recently was initially a made-for-TV film).

[mrgoldenbrown]

STar Trek's handheld computers never made sense to me, unless they have some crazy good AI that does all the work for you based on vague inputs. How do you input anything like code quickly on such a tiny screen?

[Izkata]

In DS9, once Jake Sisko gets into writing he's often seen using his PADD with a stylus. It is possible to enter text without the stylus using the controls at the bottom (Bashir enters "GO AWAY" for Dax in one episode when she interrupts him flirting with someone else), but it's apparently cumbersome enough that it's not normally used like that.

[dylan604]

how much code do you enter into a mobile device? these aren't the devices to do that with. they just run apps that serve the purpose at hand dictated by the script.

when ever you want to send a text, you don't enter the code for that. neither did anyone on an away team that needed to take air samples, or scan someone's health.

seems like you had an idea not fully thought out

[Izkata]

> neither did anyone on an away team that needed to take air samples, or scan someone's health.

You're thinking of tricorders[0], GP is talking about PADDs[1]. Tricorders are mostly read-only sensors that need to be pre-configured (with some ability to switch between configurations during use), while PADDs are basically modern tablets with some physical inputs around the screen.

[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tricorder

[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Personal_Access_Display...

[cardiffspaceman]

What about shows set in USA with heroes who are vulnerable to gunfire? There’s a good half hour in Buffy the Vampire Slayer where a vampire lays in wait for Buffy, with a rifle loaded and ready. The show didn’t end on that episode. At least one of Buffy’s friends knew what could be done with computers, and researched floor plans and “ancient lore” online.

Can writers plot a story in any given milieu? Yes. Sometimes they do seem lazy.

[Izkata]

Or the opposite, like the demon that couldn't be harmed by any weapon - unfortunately for him, he wasn't around for the modern era. Buffy used a rocket launcher, worked just fine.

[thaumasiotes]

> What about shows set in USA with heroes who are vulnerable to gunfire?

Buffy is more vulnerable to gunfire than the vampires are, but she's not vulnerable in the way that a human would be. She is a supernatural force just like the vampires are.

This is only called out in a few episodes; it seems that the writers would mostly prefer that you forget. But compare e.g. her meeting with Glory in season 5, where the two of them get into a fistfight, and after trading a few punches Glory realizes that a human would have been dead by now.

[aspenmayer]

Definitions from Oxford Languages

plot armor

noun

used to refer to the phenomenon in fiction whereby the main character is allowed to survive dangerous situations because they are needed for the plot to continue.

"I do think that he can't die since the inevitable plot armor is far too thick"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_armor

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor

[thaumasiotes]

...was this supposed to be related to my comment in some way? Do you just wander around the internet posting random links in random places?

[aspenmayer]

Yes, if it wasn’t obvious I apologize. Many main characters have plot armor in a way that makes for lazy writing, bad characterization, lowers stakes in the plot in favor of protagonists, and breaks immersion, which is what I was alluding to in response to this part of your comment, and the thread broadly:

> But compare e.g. her meeting with Glory in season 5, where the two of them get into a fistfight, and after trading a few punches Glory realizes that a human would have been dead by now.

That being said, you were a bit uncharitable near the end:

> Do you just wander around the internet posting random links in random places?

I think this was a bit of an unfair characterization of my original comment, and veers close to being against HN guidelines by assuming bad faith, and if you look at my comment and submission history I think you’ll find that I don’t in fact do this.

[thaumasiotes]

> Yes, if it wasn’t obvious I apologize. Many main characters have plot armor in a way that makes for lazy writing, bad characterization, lowers stakes in the plot in favor of protagonists, and breaks immersion, which is what I was alluding to in response to this part of your comment, and the thread broadly:

>> But compare e.g. her meeting with Glory in season 5, where the two of them get into a fistfight, and after trading a few punches Glory realizes that a human would have been dead by now.

You have yet to describe what the connection is between your comment and mine. Plot armor describes people doing things they can't do, and not suffering the consequences because that would be a boring story.

What's the connection to people doing things that require the supernatural powers they are explicitly characterized as having?