Star Trek: 11 Greatest Unfinished Story Ideas
9. Who Built The Dyson Sphere? (TNG: Relics) Relics is more famously known as the episode that brought Montgomery Scott into the world of the 24th century and it certainly is a blast seeing Scotty interact with the crew of the EnterpriseD. Yet it also contains one of the most compelling scientific discoveries ever made by the crew of the Enterprise. The Dyson sphere was an immense hollow construction that had a habitable interior surface equal to that of hundreds of millions of planets. Freeman Dyson first proposed this bold concept back in the 1960s and a sphere such as he described could solve problems as far ranging as energy consumption and over-population. This is an idea that seems all but impossible to realize, but leave it to Star Trek to turn the seemingly impossible into the possible. Yet the question remains: "who exactly built this thing and how?" The Enterprise's mission is one of exploration and the Dyson sphere would have provided the chance for that central mission to be placed front and centre. However, little time is devoted to ponder this fantastic discovery and it is never brought up again, which was a missed opportunity to put the "science" first in science fiction.