[Damocles]

Star Trek:TNG Science blunders:

Evolution According to Star Trek

ST:TNG,ST:VOY

There was an extremely painful episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Genesis". Written by Brannon Braga^1, this episode showed just how ignorant the Trek producers are about basic science. Captain Picard returns from somewhere to find his crew devolving into their more "primitive forms". You know you've got someone without a clue when a cat devolves to an iguana. The eventual explanation is even hokier: some modified T-cells given to Lt. Barclay by Dr. Crusher caused a runaway virus that devolved the crew.

OK, once might be enough, but Brannon hadn't finished with this story idea. Later on Star Trek: Voyager, Brannon does this again with an episode where Tom Paris and Janeway devolve^a. into newts. Vaguely more believable, as amphibians are considered to be the precursor form of land vertebrates, but our biology just doesn't work that way. You can't trigger genes in a grown adult and make them express themselves totally. If it was that easy to introduce a new gene and have it express itself, we would have cures for cystic fibrosis and a host of other genetic diseases right now. Once a cell has specialized itself, introducing new genes or forcing the expression of existing genes would cause havoc with your immune system as well as your existing body chemistry. This is bad science all around.

^a. Kyle Creasey pointed out that the episode claimed they evolved into those newts like creatures.

^1 One of the "Killer Bees". The other "Killer Bee" was Rick Berman.

Intelligent Deuterium Ore

ST: VOY (Not TNG, but I'm going to blame them for this anyway since it was the same bunch who wrote TNG!)

This boner is one of my all time favorites. I forget the episode title* (you wouldn't make me re-experience that pain just to find the title, would you?), but the episode involved Voyager looking for deuterium. The opening scene tells us they are in a new solar system looking for deuterium. They scan a planet and find "deuterium ore" which they go down to fetch only to find the deuterium is intelligent and capable of beating Ensign Kim up (to be fair, even my mother can take Ensign Kim).

Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen. It makes up roughly 0.01%* of the hydrogen in the Universe. An alien visitor to our solar system has more than enough places to find deuterium: our Sun, water ice on Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede, the Kuiper belt, the Oort cloud, the list goes on. I've never heard anyone refer to hydrogen in nature as an "ore". This episode sounds like someone read the technical bible Mike Okuda (who knows something) prepared for the Voyager writers, saw that Voyager needed Deuterium, then proceeded to write it like something from a very bad 30's pulp-SF magazine.

Again, Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen!! It's not a metal* or a mineral!^2

^2 This is also bad science. Hydrogen in the solid state exhibits all the properties of a metal including permanent magnetism. We know this because we make ALLOYS using hydrogen to obtain this magnetic property in its alloyed state with another metal.

]Ships Always Have the Same Orientation When They Meet

* All Star Trek Series
* Various

The Starship Enterprise slows to one quarter impulse as it meets a new alien race. The alien ship pulls closer and after hundreds of light years, has the same orientation as the Enterprise.

Why? Solar systems scattered throughout the galaxy will have a random orientation, and most ships will align their orientation to the last solar system they came from. In fact, there is no reason what so ever for them to stay that way in flight (for example, to navigate), yet somehow, they always meet right side "up".

Now there is a simple explaination for this: the other ship choses to match orientation with the other, but have you ever seen Captain Kirk or Picard give the order, "Match orientation, ensign." No, I didn't think so.

I wonder if there's a galactic treaty everyone signed declaring which way is "up" for all races. I'm sure the Organians were behind it.^3

^3 Every science fiction TV series does this, but ST:TNG gets the blame for it, here, because they set the original gold standard. At least Babylon 5 occasionally had shots of ships oriented every which way. We have to wait for the Babylon 5 RIPOFF Deep Space Nine, the best of the Berman Dreks, for Wolf 359 and the Dominion War; for the Killer Bees to finally get a clue. Even then they revert back in Voyager and Enterprise to foul it all up, again. Also, they never seemed to figure out that it doesn't matter what kind of boojem you use for an engine: a rocket is still a rocket. Only with a gravity keel can you zoom and swoop. B5 got that one right too!

And here is my real boner: not only did the Moore Ron in the movie script surgery he did: kill Kirk in the most disgraceful way possible thus -----ing his soul, the Moore Ron's, to the deepest hell there is in the Star Trek universe, but this clodhopper hack typist pulls this one from where no light shines.....

]Star Trek Generations' Nexus

Star Trek Generations

Jon V. sent me an interesting e-mail:

This is something I've been thinking about in Star Trek: Generations. Maybe it's not such a huge blunder, but as a physics student I think that it's neat.

When Picard and Data are in astrometrics, the Captain asks Data to list all of the effects of the star exploding. On the list is the fact that a starship had to make a course correction because the star was no longer there, and therefore its gravitational pull is gone. That is bull. The star may not be shining any more, and much of it may have blown off (which it wouldn't have), but all of the mass is still in the general area of where the star was. That means that the gravitational pull is still there, and the ship can keep going on its same course.

When Data shows the path of the "nexus" through the second solar system, it shows the nexus missing the planet by at least a few million kilometers. When the second star is blown up, it happens only seconds before the "nexus" hits the planet. EVEN IF the star's gravity went away, there would not be a very big change in the direction of the nexus in these few seconds, and certainly not enough for it to divert such a large direction.

I can't believe I missed that. I guess I was so attuned to bad physics in Star Trek, it didn't bother me. This is actually a very common blunder in SF. The destruction of a star or planet instantly makes the gravity go away. The gravity is still there if the mass is still there. Those very close (like less than 3 radii) would notice the dispersal of the mass, but those farther away would still feel the effect of gravity as though the planet is still there.

And there is another one. A big one. Did you spot it? "EVEN IF the star's gravity went away, there would not be a very big change in the direction of the nexus in these few seconds..." Recently, an experiment proved something that was generally believed but not really accepted by some.

The speed of gravity is finite. Einstein suggested that changes in gravity would propogate out at the speed of light. So if you could manage to make the mass of an entire star disappear, the loss of its gravity would still take time to propogate out, And in the case of Star Trek Generations, the stars are light years apart so destroying the star would take years at least before its disappearance would be noticed.^4

^4 Here is another blunder by this physicist as well as the dumb Berman Drek writers-principally the one Berman threw off the Paramount lot for incompetence: He Who Who Shall Not Be Named. Energy and matter are both affected by gravity. E=MC^2 is a ratio and an EQUIVALENCE! And not only does gravity not disappear (Conservation) but it also bends light. If you've been checking out the "Just for the Heck of It" thread, http://www.colonialfleets.com/forums...ad.php?t=15913, there are about forty physics teaching videos there alone that pounds that little fact home. Gravity is a space warper. Everything that passes through it gets refracted. Ever hear of the Higgs Field?

Source for the blunders quoted:

http://www.geocities.com/naran500/infamy/star_trek.html

Next up:

Engineering blunders or why ST:TNG is a how-to-die-quick-in-space course.