Star Trek: 10 Most Overused Plot Tropes

In the Star Trek future, technology was humanity's salvation, with machines like food synthesizers, transporters, and warp drive leading to the utopian society we see on Earth in the 22nd century and beyond. Unfortunately, humanities technologies often also have disastrous unforeseen consequences.

One example, amongst countless others, is the Friendship 1 probe from the Voyager episode, Friendship One. Friendship 1 was a deep space warp probe launched from Earth in 2067 with the purpose of making contact with new alien species. Disaster struck when, hundreds of years later, the probe crash landed on a planet in the Delta Quadrant and the planet's inhabitants, unsure of how to properly use its antimatter technology safely, accidentally destroyed their whole society and ecosystem trying to reverse engineer it.

But the destructive nature of human technology doesn't stop there. Nomad was another space probe, from the Original Series episode, The Changeling, that became self-aware and went on a mission to kill anything it considered imperfect. The Voyager 6 space probe had a similar fate, becoming V'Ger, the energy cloud from Star Trek: The Motion Picture that came to resent biological life. In the Next Generation episode, Force Of Nature we learn that even warp travel has consequences, damaging space.