Space travel is the least important part of Star Trek

Ricardo and Sara have never watched Star Trek before! So Marvin and Dan are taking them on a journey to watch it all, one episode at a time! From unhinged unrelated tangents to deep philosophical discussions, you'll never know what the week's episode might draw out of us!

We’re currently going through Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, alternating by air date! New episodes every Tuesday!

#StarTrek #TNG #podcast

[thefadgamer]

Food from thin air and a place to have some sticky man time .... what a time to be alive

[ericthyren]

This is why I like some of the early episodes of Voyager. They’re sent to a part of the galaxy where the people have never seen transporters and replicators and that technology becomes highly coveted. It could solve a lot of problems but at the same time it could be used with ill intentions.

[mattcat]

Space travel would be more significant if we lived in a galaxy as populated by other intelligence humanoids as that of the show.

[starforge]

Technologically, perhaps, but I think there's something to be said about how space travel enabled that. Only by meeting others and learning to understand them did any of this come into being.

That said, most folks in Trek don't use warp drive day to day, that's a good point!

[charialer]

The replicator is mentioned as the tech that helped move society from selfish to a selfless mindset. Needs were met instantly, so it allowed people to do what they wanted because they wanted to do it not because it was necessary to met some need to exist.

[d.francescovalls]

A post-scarcity world. That's kinda the heart of the dream.

[cadman]

That is incredibly dependent on what is out there.

[ryandubeau]

The Holiday, so many people will be filming movies in there.
Yeah, those kind of movies.

[jcortese]

THE most insane, inexplicable, impossible thing that would transform society in ways we can't even begin to contemplate is something else that's even more invisible: artificial gravity. Out of absolutely everything, all the wacky magical technology they've come up with, that's the one thing that makes this physicist go, "Nope, nuh uh, won't happen, not possible." I'll accept replicators, transporters, and even touch telepathy as real before I'll give one scintilla of slack to artificial gravity.

[Insightfill]

I think The Orville had a good position on this: "you get all of this by BECOMING better people." We fix our problems first - the replicator and transporter come after.

[dac]

When you think of the quality of life, the lack of scarcity, that these people don't need to labor in order to be provided for, it makes the people who sign up for StarFleet really just want an excuse to go outside and be active, not that what theyre doing is so important that it needs doing.

[bobnolen]

well to be fair there energy production is insane without it your transporters or warp engines or replicators would be useless

[Clone]

I dont think I could be trusted with a replicator. You basically have access to infinite food

[JAGtheTrekkieGEMINI]

I disagree....
*Warp Drive>>Everything Else*

[christianschoenewald]

The show could not afford to send shuttles down to a planet every week, so they came up with the next worst alternative they could possibly think of, the murder machine, a.k.a. transporters.

[Ironcorgi]

Kind of disagree. Faster than life travel is insane. It opens up every hospitable planet in the universe. Converting energy into mass is way more plausible than warp drive

[NeonVisual]

Eventually we will have this level of tech. Well maybe not the transporter, but a basic replicator which can create lots of the same thing over and over, like water molecules, isnt impossible, high power lasers can create matter/antimatter pairs already.

Warp drives are a theoretical possibility if negative energy exists in usable qualtities (which has been observed in the casimer effect).

Holodecks.. well it wont be long before VR headsets can fit in regular non goofy glasses, or contact lenses. We used to have really basic computers running at 80Mghz that filled entire rooms with a fracrion of today's computing power and sucked huge amounts of energy. I'm typing this on a foldable smarphone 4.7mm thick with batteries that are the thickness of 2 credit cards that last all day, and contains multiple processors measured in Ghz.

Oh, and there's a Starbase in South Texas now, building Starships to colonise Mars, at the same time as some very high ranking military officiels, pilots and 3 star Generals are coming forward to confirm that we have some non-human technology and vehicles locked away in a black program called "Immaculate Constellation" trying to reverse engineer since the 1940's.

There will be breakthroughs, big scientific knowlege gaps in quantum gravity, dark energy and dark matter.

[TheFiddleFaddle]

Space travel is the most important aspect of Star Trek. This tech is so easily abused by less evolved societies. Humanity reached out to the stars and came together because they were humbled by what they found.

[joldsaway]

I slightly disagree with the premise here. Much of the point of these technologies isn't so much that they're invented out of the blue, but that they're often acquired by interstellar intellectual trade. Humans didn't have holodecks until they began collaborating with other species out there (as seen in Enterprise). The space travel isn't the end of technological advancement, but the beginning of it.

[smwillia]

Ahh, yes the luxuries of Fully Automated, Space Socialism. That is what Star Trek is about.