There are engineers and scientists all over this planet who attribute some part of their reasoning for joining their fields of expertise to Star Trek. They were inspired both by the technology on show and the scientific accuracy that the show aspired to. There were scientific advisors who would write lines of dialogue in the Next Generation. In the original series way back in the 60's we had communicators (precursors to mobile phones), talk of ion drives (which now exist), transporters, warp speed, shields and cloaking devices. Almost all of these either exist now or are theoretically possible. The new films though take artistic license to a whole new level. Let's look at teleporting from Earth to Quo'nos. What a load of utter pish (as Scotty would say). Quo'nos is approximately 80 light years from Earth and would take around 4 days at warp 4.5 by old school speeds. 1 light year is 9,460,528,412,464 km, transporter range at the time of the original series is about 40,000km. The "trans-warp beaming" is supposed to be about being able to transport from one ship at warp to another, not hopping across distances that would take the information making up your body 80 years to traverse. There is an excellent article on this site concerning the times when Star Trek really did break the laws of physics and everyone should read it, including the writers of the next film. From a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is to travel at warp speed to the ridiculous and unnecessarily large ball of Red Matter the new films throw science to the wind with an abandon that would make Gene Roddenberry weep if he were still alive. Internal consistency is all we ask. We already know that artistic license must be taken in the service of a good story, but when the story is as bad as that of "Into Darkness" adding fuel to the fire by taking all semblance of reality and trashing it is criminal. This reboot may be fun, but it's unlikely to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.
I.T. Consultant, technophile and Doctor Who fan. I like to talk about tech, take films apart and make excuses for Doctor Who's continuity errors. No other show has the power to make me feel like a big kid.
