The world of science
fiction is a world of strange and wonderful devices. Some of these
machines are somewhat plausible, and others are very far-fetched.
Let's look at some of these devices, moving from the fairly plausible
towards the more unbelievable, ending up with the most unbelievable
machine in the annals of science fiction.
A fairly plausible device
is the hand-held energy-shooting device. In the Star Trek set
of TV shows and movies, this takes the form of the phaser, a little
ray gun. In the Star Wars movies the favorite hand-held energy
device is the light saber. Given the progress man is making in
developing high-energy lasers, both phasers and light sabers seem
like something we may well see within a few centuries. Another type
of very plausible device is the palm-sized communicator used in the
original Star Trek series. We basically already have such a
thing in the form of a cell phone.
Then there is the walking
robot. In the Star Trek universe we see an example in the
android named Data. In the Star Wars universe we see an
example in the form of the walking android robot C-3PO. Neither are
terribly implausible. It is very questionable whether we ever will
have robots or computers that ever rival humans in intelligence. But
we probably will one day have pretty good chat-bot software that
could be hooked up with a robot body, resulting in something that
allows a robot to talk in a way resembling human conversation. Since
neither Data nor C-3PO really show any superhuman intelligence, such
robots are not much of a strain on our credulity.
In the Star Wars
universe, we have the large orbiting satellite called the Death Star,
capable of destroying an entire planet. Such a device is not at all
preposterous. A nation today could build a similar device, creating
a huge satellite filled with nuclear weapons rather than some energy
death ray. It is not much of a stretch to imagine a
planet-destroying device that used a huge laser or pulsed-energy
weapon.
In both Star Wars
and Star Trek, we have hologram devices capable of projecting
three-dimensional images that resemble human figures. In the Star
Wars universe, this technology doesn't seem very sophisticated.
But in the Star Trek universe, hologram technology is pushed
to the max. Crew members of a space ship can enjoy something called
a holodeck, which provides holographic simulations that include a
surrounding landscape and three-dimensional figures that look just
like real people. So if you're on a starship, you can walk into the
holodeck, request a particular simulation, and then poof, it may
suddenly be just as if you are on the beach on Tahiti, complete with
scantily clad women surrounding you.
The basic idea isn't
particularly unbelievable. If you were in a holograph room that
included both holographic projectors on the floor, holographic
projectors on the ceiling, and holographic projectors on the walls,
we can imagine that this might create an illusion that made it appear
just like you were in some entirely different place. The same
technology could produce holograms resembling human figures. But in
the Star Trek series, the holodeck users also seem to engage
in tactile interactions with the holographic projections. A character
may sit down on a holographic table, lie down on a holographic bed,
or kiss and hug a holographic figure. I have no idea how such
tactile interactions could occur using holographic technology. So we
might put down Star Trek's holodeck device as something that
is merely semi-plausible.
A Star Trek gadget that seems increasingly plausible is the replicator device, capable of almost instantly producing any equipment or food. The more 3D printing technology advances, the more plausible such a device seems.
A Star Trek gadget that seems increasingly plausible is the replicator device, capable of almost instantly producing any equipment or food. The more 3D printing technology advances, the more plausible such a device seems.
One staple of science
fiction is the faster-than-light spaceship. In the Star Trek
universe, we have something called a warp drive, that supposedly
allows a spaceship to travel faster than the speed of light, by
warping the space in front of the spaceship. In the Star Wars
universe, spaceships travel faster-than-light by doing something
called “jumping through hyperspace.” Although not totally
preposterous, such devices are not very plausible. We know of no
physics that would allow a spaceship to travel faster than light by
warping space in front of it, nor do we know of any such thing as
“hyperspace” that might allow spaceships to travel from star to
star instantaneously. About the best you can say is that there
conceivably could exist undiscovered physics that might allow such
things to occur.
Both Star Wars and
Star Trek seem to rely on a type of device that is never
discussed: an artificial gravity generator. For example, in the Star
Trek universe, characters walk around on a spaceship on which
there is normal gravity just like we have on Earth. We know of a very
simple method that will reliably generate artificial gravity in a
spaceship. The spaceship can have a spinning component that generates
artificial gravity by centrifugal force, like the Jupiter-bound
spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
You can get artificial gravity with a design like this
But the spaceships in
Star Wars and Star Trek seem
to have no design that would generate artificial gravity by
centrifugal force. Maybe the assumption is that the ships are using
some type of artificial gravity generator. But we know of no way in
which a device could ever generate artificial gravity without using
centrifugal force. This seems an area in which our science fiction
falls short in the credibility department.
But
what is the most ridiculous device in any major science fiction
series? Here the booby prize must be given not to anything in the
Star Wars universe,
but instead to something in the Star Trek
universe. The most preposterous device in any major science fiction
show is the transporter device used on the starship Enterprise.
In
Star Trek the
transporter supposedly works by doing three things:
- A scan is made that reveals the exact position of all molecules in the person being transported.
- Over the course of a few seconds, that person's body is then dematerialized.
- Over the course of a few seconds, the person's body is then rematerialized or reconstructed at some distant location.
This
is basically a “destroy and reconstruct” algorithm. The scan
part of the process seems unrealistic. How could some machine
possibly determine the exact state of all of the particles inside
your brain? We can get a blurry look inside someone's brain by doing an
X-ray, although there is radiation exposure whenever that is done.
The radiation exposure of some type of “precisely scan all particles inside
the body” would probably be prohibitive. Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle tells us that you cannot determine both the position and velocity of any particle, casting the greatest doubt on the
possibility of doing a scan giving you the exact particle information
corresponding to a body.
In
Star Trek someone can
be transported or “beamed” from the transporter room of one
spaceship to the transporter room of another spaceship. That's not
the most laughable absurdity, because at least in that case you have
a transporter machine on each end of the transport, one machine doing
the scanning and de-materialization, and the other transporter
machine doing the reassembly of the body. But in Star Trek
people are also transported from a transporter room to the surface of
a planet (where there is no transporter device), and from the surface
of a planet (where there is no transporter device) back to the
transporter room. But how could the process needed for the “from
the surface of the planet” transport possibly occur from the
surface of a planet, where there is no machine there to do the
scanning of the person's molecular state? And how could the process
needed for the “to the planet surface” transport possibly occur
on the surface of a planet, where there is no machine there to do
the reassembly of the body from the scanned molecular state? It's
like imagining that you are taking a train to the middle of some
country that has no trains or train tracks.
Any
transporter device like that in Star Trek
would also be a body duplication device. For once someone's
molecular state had been scanned and kept in a machine, there would
be no need to discard that information. The same information could
be used to recreate a new copy of someone who had died – or any
number of copies of someone. The result would be ridiculous scenes
like this:
Mr.
Scott: Bad news, Captain
Kirk. A monster on the planet attacked and devoured Mr. Spock.
Captain
Kirk: Why do you think
that's bad news? Use your head, Scotty! When we transported him down
to the planet, we scanned his exact molecular state. Just use that
stored state to reassemble him in the transporter room. He'll be as
good as new, and have no memory of what happened.
Mr.
Scott: How silly of me
not to think of that!
When
creating the Star Trek
series, Gene Roddenberry could have avoided the nonsensical idea of
transporting people by disassembling all their atoms and reassembling
them. He could have come up with the idea of a “wormhole
transporter” that would have achieved teleportation by having
people move through a time-space wormhole. The idea would be that
some machine would generate a spacetime wormhole between the
transporter and some distant location, and that your body is
propelled through the wormhole to end up in some distant spot,
without your body ever getting disassembled and resassembled.
Although relying on undiscovered physics, such a teleportation system
would have avoided the most absurd aspects of Star Trek's
transporter mechanism, such as the idea that a body could be
reassembled on some distant planet without there even being an
assembly device on that planet.
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