Star Trek Ruminations

Starting with The Next Generation , the holodeck became as much a part of the Star Trek universe as the transporter and warp drive. One outgrowth of the holodeck concept was the creation of sentient holograms, most notably Professor Moriarty ( TNG: “Elementary, My Dear Data” and “Ship in a Bottle”) and the Doctor ( VOY: “Caretaker” et. al.). The concept of a sentient, living hologram is intriguing and is explored throughout the seven seasons of Voyager in particular. In the process, however, the writers have allowed a persistent logical gaffe into a number of story lines that fail to recognize that holograms aren’t discreet, self-contained things , they are representation of data in a file . I am not talking about a debate over what holograms are when they appear on the holodeck ( the tractor-beam-manipulated-matter vs. photons-and-force-fields debate ). I am talking about what they are at a fundamental level. They are computer files. Yes, they are highly sophisticated compu...

If you visited the Google website earlier this week you may have seen their logo was modified as a tribute to Perceval Lowell and his studies of Mars, and the launch of Google Mars with its interactive map of the red planet. See the List of Planitia on Mars If you follow the above link, and search through the list of plains (or planitia) on the left, you can find Utopia toward the end of the list and find it on the map. Utopia Planitia is, of course, the site of Starfleet's Ship Yards and the birthplace of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D . More precisely this is the location over which the ship yards are in a geosynchronous orbit as explained in the ST:TNG Technical Manual and confirmed by visual evidence from the Voyager episode "Relativity". (This makes me wonder if Earth Station McKinley is in geosynchronous orbit above Mt. McKinley.) The idea of the Utopia Planitia Ship Yards was introduced during The Next Generation . It was mentioned (and barely shown through a wind...