Star Trek and the shiny, boring future | Hacker News Reader

Star Trek and the shiny, boring future

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14 pointsjnazario10 comments

Oh, so you have a teleportation device? Antigravity machines that let you fly and hover without aerofoils or rockets? FTL communications? Disease-adaptive medicines? A volume-based universal positioning system?

It seems to me that the author a) took a highly selective reading of the technology on display in the film, and simply omitted anything that didn't suit his argument and b) ignored the fact that the Star Trek franchise has about 40 years of 'world data' that it needs to maintain a fair degree of continuity with if it is not to piss off the large fan base.

People carry tablet computers in Star Trek not because we have iPads now, but because characters in Star Trek were using tablet computers (albeit large wedge-shaped ones with stylii) from the very early episodes.

I have to agree, the author simply ignores all the technology that doesn't yet exist.

I don't think anyone could have predicted before how quickly computers, and radio technology would minaturize giving us cellphones and ipads.

Just another formulated Hollywood movie, not an eyeglass into the future.

I don't want to nerd out on this, but realistically if we were however many hundreds of years down the line where we had the technology to do interstellar travel, it's unlikely it would resemble what's on Star Trek.

As far as devices go, they're getting smaller and more integrated so at some point they'll jump the bio-tech gap and just be integrated with your physiology. But who wants to watch a bunch of spandex laden crew walking around like schizophrenics? Gotta give a general audience something they can understand and relate to.

Exactly right.

At the beginning of the new film Spock is lowered on a rope into a volcano hanging from a little shuttle. Everyone knows this situation exists for the immediate drama and for the ramifications further on in the story, not because it's in the least bit plausible (let alone necessary). In the future they couldn't have had a robot deliver the package? Maybe just drop it in with a timer on board? The trouble is that it wouldn't have served the story, and it wouldn't have been Star Trek.

Today Star Trek is a brand, a flavour. Maybe once upon a time it was meant to have something to say about our future, but now any reasonable extrapolation would lose the essential character of the property. Hell, maybe Star Trek has never been about the future anyway. I'm sure everyone caught the bit about the morality and legality of extrajudicial killing in the new flick... I'm sure plenty of people would say the series has always been about the present as much as any other time.

Said this before, but Denno Coil is a recent post-cyberpunk sci-fi animated series from japan that explored AR tech in interesting new ways. It is not the "hardest" of sci-fi, and it is about kids, but it is touching, does not pull punches, and I like the art direction. I would suggest checking it out for anyone who wants some fresh sci-fi.

I think saying main stream movies are supposed to be imaginative is a bit of a straw man argument.

I hate to think that what's driving innovation is fantasized movie tech. I always thought it was science fiction literature, and, you know, trying to understand how the universe works in reality.

Science fiction literature isn't actually all that often about the science. The number of science fiction authors writing about fields in which they're technically experts is likely vanishingly small, as being a successful storyteller is an expertise in and of itself. The trope of science fiction writers not having a sense of scale in regards to interstellar distance or geologic time is one good example. Or Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, which weren't even really an extrapolation on the potential encoding of machine morality so much as a plot device, the entire point of which was the clever ways in which it could be broken by antagonists.

Of course the counterpoint... when it works (Peter Watts and Neal Stephenson and maybe the near-future stuff by William Gibson... Cory Doctorow maybe) the technology serves the story and illustrates the future in brilliant and almost plausible ways. More often than not though, the science in science fiction is window dressing or magic with "science" spray painted on it, because really how many stories about how bloody hard it is to get into space and not die from something besides aliens can people be expected to read?

Yeah, this essentially comes down to the "hardness scale" of science fiction writing. If you're making a big budget film then it's all for mass consumption, and realistic extrapolation only really makes the cut if the novelty or plausibility of it impresses the audience. Special effects and space battles are a better bet most of the time.

As you've said, exceptions exist, but they're even less present in the film market for obvious reasons. I'd actually say there's no dearth of good hard written scifi, though. Charles Stross (sometimes seen around here and on Reddit) has introduced a bunch of incredible new things in "Accelerando" that appear obvious in retrospect, things in Hannu Rajaniemi's "The Quantum Thief" like the privacy settings on Mars were insightful as hell. Just about everything written by Greg Egan is grounded in some jaw-dropping speculative physics or steeped in new thought on the philosophical or social ramifications of foreseeable technologies.

It’s a terrible shame and a real disservice for the years to come when the people we count on to dream are content with IKEA and iPads.

I do agree that Star Trek tech has been boring, but its tech predictions have always been boring, mostly just extensions and upgrades to what we have now, or invented as plot contrivances (i.e. the Holodeck)

It's too bad we have to hope that Hollywood invests more in thoughtful edgy fiction rather than marquee fan service vehicles mainly intended to make millions for the industry. If only there was some other form other that movies and TV that fiction could be communicated in...perhaps someone in the future will invent such a format that is ubiquitously consumable and intellectually stimulating.

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