Hey look, another Trek post!
Nobody's surprised. I've gone on record several times in the past talking about how Star Trek is filled with bad science, whether it be bizarre interpretations of actual science or depictions of terrible scientists with absolutely no regard for the scientific method. There are plenty of examples of both characteristics throughout virtually every iteration of the franchise, but I've also gone on record as having said that so long as the bad science is internally consistent I'll forgive it.
Like, for instance, transporters. Those things are rife with issues, but they are consistent with the issues in their depiction so okay. We let it slide.
But that's not always the case, of course. Below I've laid out the five instances of inconsistent bad science in Trek that bother me the most. Some of them are categories, some of them are a single event, but all of them directly contradict virtually everything else in the show, to say nothing of how overtly inaccurate they are versus our current understanding of the universe. Enjoy!
Magical Serum That Cures Death
Oh, hey, fancy that. I've already talked about the worst bit of science in Trek on this blog. How weird.
For those of you that missed the original discussion I'm referring to the moment at the end of Star Trek Into Darkness when Bones reveals to Kirk that he brought him back from the dead using a serum synthesized from Khan's "super blood". There are... well, so many issues with this, but aside from the storytelling issues or the sheer impossibility of a blood transfusion un-radiating all of your cells the very conceit ignores the most basic premise of biological death. You may have heard of this thing called brain death. Grossly oversimplifying, brain death is the point at which, medically, a person is dead. Like if you stop breathing, or your heart stops beating, that's actually only mostly dead. If someone is able to get your heart and lungs working again fast enough you can be saved from that. Sometimes with radically altered behavior and ability due to associated brain damage, but so long as the neurons have not completely ceased firing in your brain you're not, technically, dead.
Once you've stopped sending oxygenated blood to your brain for whatever reason, brain death is basically a matter of minutes away. Restoring the flow to your brain is something that has to happen fast. In Into Darkness Kirk had been dead for... I mean, they don't really say, but I think it's probably safe to assume that it took longer than the 10-15 minutes it would (generously) take for his brain to basically fall apart for Bones to create this magical serum. Even if, at that point, they gave Kirk a transfusion of magic radiation-reversing blood by forcing his heart to beat and his lungs to breathe, he'd still be a vegetable. Brain activity doesn't just magically resume after it's been halted. Best case scenario this serum would have resurrected Kirk into an interminable coma with organs that were physically repaired but a brain that was still dead.
But hey, at least now he could be an organ donor.
Radiant Energy
I've kinda already talked about this one as well, at least one of the more egregious versions of it, but from a more broad perspective Trek is just generally very wrong about radiant energy. And I'm not talking about how radiation sickness works or anything like that; they have advanced 'future medicine' that is effective at combating and protecting against cell damage as a result of radiation. That much is fairly consistent.
No, I mean the behavior of radiation and radiated stuff. For instance, we are told many, many times throughout several series of Trek that a starship's shields are effective at blocking lazers, energy weapons, and at the very least drastically reducing radiation hitting the hull. Which, fine, okay. That oughta also be pretty effective at blocking most light as well, though, meaning a ship with its shields up should look like a distorted blob, if anything at all. And then there's the many occasions where radiation is treated like a particulate, floating around in a cloud that, so long as you avoid walking through it, can't hurt you. Yes I'm aware that radiated particulates are a thing and that those can be aerosolerized and float around in a cloud you wouldn't want to breathe. But that doesn't explain the occasions when something is described as producing radiation when it is, in fact, just smoking.
But of course the most ridiculous occasion of conflating radiant energy with something totally unrelated; the star-destroying torpedo from Star Trek Generations. You know, the one that snuffs out all fusion within a star? Right, that one. Remember how Soren was using that to change the course of the ribbon by altering the curvature of space-time? Which is just wild, considering a star's fusion reaction, which is responsible for the radiant energy required for life to develop on surrounding planets, has absolutely nothing to do with the gravitational attraction of the star. Gravity, or the curvature of space-time, is a property of mass, not radiant energy. Stars have intense gravitational pull because they're huge, not because they're bright.
Reconfigure The Deflector Dish
So there are a few hand-wavy technologies described in the Trek universe that are there to explain away interstellar faster-than-light travel as a standard way of life. The most prominent is obviously the warp drive, which allows FTL travel while simultaneously counter-acting the time-dilation of general relativity. There's also the structural integrity field, which keeps the ship from ripping itself to pieces during the acceleration of the warp drive, and the inertial dampening field, which prevents that same acceleration from turning all the passengers into gooey splashes against the back wall. And then there's the thing that keeps the ship from being perforated by the space dust that would hit like a thousand nukes at FTL speeds; the navigational deflector array. The colloquially named "deflector dish" generates a field that pushes small bits of stuff out of the way when the ship is at speed.
It also does... basically everything else, actually. Generate an interference field? Sure. Produce and project targeted streams of whatever matter the writers need it to? Why not. Create energy pulses of magnitudes that evidently even the ship's weapons are incapable of? Does that make sense? Probably nobody will care.
Except me, writers. I care. The deflector dish is a system that, honestly, has a pretty specific job. It pushes things to the side. Now it is, presumably, very powerful and very sophisticated to be doing that at significant multiples of the speed of light, but it's still a specialized piece of kit. I could see something like that being reconfigured to, say, function as a very powerful tractor beam, or an exceptionally strong forward-facing defensive shield. You could even make the argument that if you fed warp power directly to the array you could strengthen the deflector field enough to use it as a battering ram against other ships or some kind of... space... thing that needs ramming. But this whole everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-too approach where they use it for anything that requires a bunch of power is utterly absurd. They're so inconsistent with how this thing is utilized, in fact, that I'd be willing to bet that despite the fact that the job of the deflector dish is right there in the name, most people probably have no idea what it's supposed to be used for.
I mean, the borg try to use it as a communications array in First Contact. That's right, comms. Utter madness.
Time Travel
Time travel is, of course, fraught with issues when confronted with the actual properties of the observable universe. Even if you're just playing exclusively with the math, about the only form of time travel that makes sense is what we see at the beginning of Planet of the Apes.
The original. I never saw the remake with... Mark Wahlberg?? Huh. Well, honestly I don't see how his acting could be any worse than Heston.
But even with the caveat that time travel is functionally impossible in any way we'd recognize from sci-fi stories and therefore probably doesn't count as 'bad science' as much as it's just fantasy, Trek still manages to do it extremely stupidly most of the time. Their methods for traveling in time vary in ridiculous ways throughout the franchise, from 'just go real fast' to whatever the heck chonometric radiation is supposed to be. They also can't seem to decide if the grandfather paradox is a thing, or whether multiverse theory is their preferred shtick. In short, pretty much any time temporal mechanics are at play in Trek, they've already lost me. There are a few exceptions; The Voyage Home is an outstanding movie, time travel notwithstanding, and allowing Voyager to dabble in their particularly strange version of multiverse theory did give us the Year in Hell two-parter, which was awesome.
And heck, Trials and Tribbleations is also good fun, and the finales to both Next Gen and Voyager were good. Despite the fact that Trek's intersections with time travel change the mechanics of the thing basically every time, generally speaking we've all agreed to just give them a pass because the inconsistency is, in its own strange way, somehow consistent.
That said, the 'time portal' in City on the Edge of Tomorrow is idiotic. Like, at least all the other techno-babble excuses for time travel they use in the franchise try to sound like they could be rooted in some form of science. That thing is, basically, just a magic portal that lets you travel through time. For all the sense it makes they may as well find Narnia on the other side.
Space is a Vacuum
Hey, you know what's really interesting? Naval warfare. Fighting on the surface of a giant body of water versus land or air results in some unique tactics. Like, for instance, how submarines are basically impervious to traditional projectile weapons because shooting bullets or shells at the surface of the ocean may as well be shooting a thousand meter thick concrete wall for how effective it is. But you know what does move through water pretty effectively? Vibrations. Shockwaves. If you want to shoot a sub you either have to use much slower self-propelled munitions, or something that does damage with delayed explosions and shockwaves.
Conversely, do you know what medium is absolutely abysmal at transferring shockwaves? That's actually a trick question given the answer I'm fishing for, because I'm not talking about a medium at all. I'm talking about the utter absence of a medium. We call these vacuums. You know what space is filled with? Or rather, not filled with? That's right; anything. It is, for all practical purposes, a vacuum, and would be absolutely terrible at transmitting vibrations or shockwaves of any sort.
So it's a little baffling to hear somebody in Star Trek (a show famously set mainly in space) refer to things like "sonic weapons", "spacial charges", or anything of that nature. A sonic weapon is, presumably, something that using sonic vibrations to cause damage. This would take the form of a really absurd speaker, and would, theoretically, be somewhat effective at sea level or possibly even under water. A depth-charge is even more specific than that; it's essentially an explosive calibrated to induce severe shockwaves under water upon detonation. Both of these could be effective weapons for terrestrial combat.
But yeah, they'd be worse than useless in space, where like a fart in a bag they'd just kinda... sit there. At least "spacial charge" indicates the use of an explosive, so the Malon in Voyager get a small pass. The folks on Eminiar 7, though, are idiots.
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