Comment by yc1010 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yc1010 | Hacker News Reader

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They had the PADDs on star trek more than decades before tablets where released, yet another example of star trek being ahead of its time

as for your "Utopian" comment, in the last few decades we have entered the era of plenty, the main problem encountered by startups we see here in HN is not that they are not innovative its that their products/services get drowned out in a sea of plenty

Given a few hundred years and plentiful+cheap energy it is not beyond the realm of imagination to imagine replicators, hell on a recent cruise i nicknamed then soda vending machines "the replicator" because the thing could spit out hundreds of different drinks with a few taps.

So a world of the future would be fairly "socialist" as machines and cheap energy allow people to devote their times towards science, exploration, art etc, we are already seeing this happening today and further mechanization and robotics will only speed up the trend

I'll grant them 15 years ahead of the iPad, but the show was supposed to be hundreds of years advanced.

My utopian thoughts aren't really around the economics. Star trek humans are all pure of motive and work to do the right thing in all circumstances, modulo plot-necessitated black hats. I'd prefer a bit more humanity there. Humans are far more complex than the black-and-white morality plays star trek tends to be.

If they make a show that has "wrath of Khan" level pathos to the characters, I'm in. If it's action schlock or morality plays, the star trek brand isn't enough to attract me, particularly if the technology alternates between "stupidly unreal" and banal.

Yeah the real part of the tech that kicks me out of the show is how shitty the computers are. Having manual pilots doing anything seems absurd. In some episodes, rigging the computer up to do something is seen as something tricky and complicated.

Even in-universe, it doesn't make sense. The Holodeck is sophisticated enough to fly ships through physically real environments. (They do physics tests in the deck.) So just use whatever great AI system powering the Holodeck to do whatever advanced maneuver you need.

Also, the biggest fake tech: The communicators. The show clearly shows a person hailing another on the comm badge. BUT there's no delay in the response. "Captain to LaForge" - "LaForge here". We see that the recipient always hears the entire message. We also see there's no delay in the reply, much less than "Captain to" takes. I suppose this is easily solved by the commbadge just reading neural patterns and determining who you're gonna call. But there's no mention of that, and the badges don't seem to function that way.

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