Star Trek: 10 Huge Discoveries That No One Cared About
Starfleet's ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds and never mention them again.
Often times, while exploring the final frontier, Starfleet comes across some truly astounding discoveries. Sure, we've all heard of the odd mind-controlling nebula or sentient starship but there are certain things that Starfleet encounters in its travels that should, by all accounts fundamentally change everything about philosophy, life, and our place in the universe.
Only to be immediately forgotten about next week.
Perhaps, when every week you're dealing with some ship-wide catastrophe, it can be hard to keep track of everything you discover. However, Starfleet has a serious problem of finding the perfect solution to many every day problems and then only ever using it once, as well as completely glossing over crucial facts about their history.
There is a nearly endless amount of highly advanced technology and terrifying ethical questions that Starfleet comes across and simply chooses to either ignore or forget about and this list will be counting down the worst offenders. Let's take a look at the ten biggest discoveries in Star Trek that no one cared about!
10. Multiple Methods Of Immortality
Starfleet has managed to drastically increase the human life expectancy from about 80 Earth years in our time to around 120 years in the time of The Next Generation. However, humans still have to die, along with most other known species in the universe. The thing is, though, they really shouldn't have to.
Throughout the history of Star Trek, humanity has discovered dozens of methods of increasing the human lifespan or just flat-out cheating death, from the Borg nanoprobes used to resurrect Neelix in the Voyager episode Mortal Coil to the transporter accident in the Next Generation episode Rascals which reverts several officers back into children.
The list goes on and on. If you feel like it, you could even pull a "Kirk" and jump inside the next temporal Nexus that comes along and live a hundred years in a psychedelic trance-like state of pure happiness until Picard decides to drag you out into the real world only to die 10 minutes later...
None of these methods are used beyond a couple of instances. You have so many options for immortality in the Star Trek universe but no one ever bothers to look into it. Perhaps the only true way to live forever is to have your name in the intro credits.