Sunday, March 2, 2014

Star Trek: The Next Grievance


Star Trek Holodeck Doorway

Lately I've been watching the Star Trek Next Generation episodes.  I enjoy them very much but there are a few things about this future that bother me.  If we have advanced four hundred plus years into the future, why is the doors to the Holodeck a lawsuit waiting to happen?  Don't they have safety regulations in the future?  Look at the edges of the doors.  You can poke out your eye or badly cripple your knee on those protrusions.   Who the hell designed these things?

And speaking about Star Trek doors, they open automatically when you approach.  Shouldn't hallway foot traffic be constantly opening all the doors?  I can't count the number of times I unintentionally opened super market doors while trying to finish a cigarette before going inside.

I also noticed the future has done away with seat belts.  I hope, in the least, the bridge will have air bags. We have seen Picard and his underlings being jerked back and forth on sharp turns.  Can you imagine the horror of the Enterprise crew being flung willy-nilly as they have a head-on at warp speed?

Another thing that upsets me is that the men in the future can no longer cut their sideburns properly.  Have these guys no eye for the horizontal.  Has centuries of living with synthetic gravity warped man's sense of perspective where he is no longer capable of detecting true up or down?

Getting back to the Holodeck, there is one other thing that I must point out.  It has been stated that objects created in the Holodeck cannot exist outside the Holodeck.  There is an episode where a Holodeck produced man walks out into the Enterprise corridor and is instantly dissolved back to nothing.  Yet when Wesley falls into a Holodeck created river, he remains wet when leaving and is still in wet clothes a while later on the bridge.  This wetness, which is Holodeck constructed water, should have dissolved upon exit.  It did not.  And, has man evolved so much that he no longer wants bodily pleasures?  The Holodeck can fulfill desires, but not in one episode has anybody created and enjoyed a perfect sexual partner.  I understand these scenes would not be filmed, but they could be implied.  They never were.

Finally my last grievance (not really, but I'm tiring of this) involves Captain Picard.  In over four hundred years, why hasn't "Hair Club for Men" cured baldness?  This is so unfair of the future.  Today we have the capability to restore hair by means such as Rogaine, a regrowth ointment, or surgically implanting hair plugs.  In the next four hundred years, Star Trek is telling us we can go no further curing baldness and perhaps we may have even lost the knowledge we had in the twenty-first century.  Woe is me.

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