Is there any credibility to the science discussed on Star Trek and similar sci-fi shows?
Star Trek TNG producers have stated that it was a nightmare to produce the show, technogically, because often the stuff they thought was so cool and futuristic would exist in the real world after a year. Go look at the little pads they’d walk around with on the ship – a modern iPad beats the crap out of it. The CEO of Motorola has publicly stated that he got the idea for cell phones because of the Original Star Trek’s communicators. If you look at all the technology, most of it is based in things we either can do or know we could do with enough power/advancement. The other stuff – the science of it all – like how space-time and black holes behave – was also frequently based on scientific findings at the time. They even had Stephen Hawking guest star. Warp Drive is a fascinating concept, because while the idea is that it gets to near-light speed, what it actually does is embrace relativity – the ship effectively stops completely, allowing the universe to move around it – the more stoppe
In general, real sci-fi attempts to predict what science will produce in the future and build a story around that. Examples are Jules Vernes’ 10,000 leagues under the sea where his predictions about submarines were remarkably accurate. By comparison, the Marvel Comics stories about a guy getting bitten by a radioactive spider and turning into spider man, or someone getting blasted by gamma rays and turning into The Hulk are NOT science fiction because even when they were written, people knew that couldn’t happen. In Star Trek they also latch on to new science lingo and try to incorporate it into their stories. Things like wormholes are within the bounds of what scientists think possible. Their aliens on the other hand are not. They were constrained by the fact that the aliens needed to be human actors wearing something not too expensive.
