Why aren't they using drones and more automation?

I know this is how people in the 80s and 90 imagined the future and a lot of concepts were probably too far fetched for them.

BUT… why arent they using drones to explore planets? why are there not more drone-spaceships? why does enterprise need a crew to begin with? Why is there so little automation? Why so few uses of AI in general?

I am saying this as a star trek the next generation person. I’d also expect them to have full video and sensory streams of any surface mission teams.

experbia,
experbia avatar

I've always said that Starfleet is, first and foremost, a jobs program.

It gives purpose to people who can't find their own, in a time where your needs are provided-for by default, and seeking personal fulfillment is the purpose for most people's lives.

Drones would cut out the human driving a shuttle over to inspect an anomaly or object themselves, robbing them of a sense of accomplishment and achievement. Starfleet is about that stuff, so that's a no-go unless nobody wants to do it and it needs to be done anyway. We see that a lot, too. They do have probes and sensor stations and stuff, after all, usually in really boring and unfulfilling locations.

They have excessive, ridiculous redundancy. They have people doing jobs the ship computers could (and often, in times of need, DOES) perform very well on its own. There are several recorded instances of entire starships being successfully maintained for extended periods of time by a single individual (who does go insane due to isolation every time, because plot).

crusa187,

They aren’t?

Enterprise sends out probes (drones) just about every other episode, especially in TNG. Almost everything is automated on the ship, controlled through the computer interface.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I know this is how people in the 80s and 90 imagined the future and a lot of concepts were probably too far fetched for them.

You also have to consider that TV executives were also considering this, and punting any ideas they thought wouldn’t be accepted by a TV watching audience of the 80’s/90’s. Like the planned gay characters who were scrapped.

I mean, think about that, being gay in the future was too much for some television executives to accept, I really wouldn’t be shocked if they gave thumbs down on lots of more esoteric and abstract episode concepts simply because they thought it would be too above the heads of a 90’s TV audience.

And to be fair, they were probably right. The communicator seems less amazing now that we live in a world with cell phones, but back then a personal communications device that was on your person at all times seemed definitely in the realm of sci-fi. Now we all have a near-equivalent in our pockets, as well as it being general purpose computing device that can be used as a personal communicator and much more. Our communicator is also a primitive tricorder.

Some of the ideas they did let pass were either already accepted tech from the original series or were close to existing civilian or military hardware that was in it’s infancy.

So a combination of “this was the extent of human imagination about these concepts back then” combined with “television executives are keenly aware of ideas the general public won’t understand, and doesn’t like confusing audiences, and thus will cut any content they deem too abstract or confusing” is what I think actually happened. One part actual limitation of imagination, one part purposeful limitation of imagination as to not to confuse the audience.

Which, honestly, is fair. Do you think sci-fi series like Rick & Morty would exist as they do without all previous sci-fi series laying down frameworks we understand for it to be based on? Human knowledge and ideas do build on themselves, and so, in a way, the TV executives are half-right that you can’t overexpose an unexposed audience. You kind of have to slowly spoon feed them ideas over time.

Like, what if we tried sending Rick & Morty as a show back to the 1960’s, and how many of the ideas would be entirely over the audiences heads? Simply because they didn’t have 60 years of sci-fi media relating different iterations of these various ideas until “the multiverse” is just talked about like it is just a given thing that exists, and nobody questions it. At least a few would have trouble wrapping their minds around it, because while many of these ideas were pioneered in the Original Series, their lack of depth might leave audiences back then really confused about some of the ideas presented.

Kolanaki,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

To further add to the idea that the concepts themselves were not foreign to people at the time, just read some classic scifi from Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury. Or even older than that, and check out some of Da Vinci’s ideas. There are even ancient Greek writings clearly describing the idea of many modern inventions we take for granted today. People are rather imaginative and inventive, and can generally take a simple idea to extreme heights long before we have all the necessary knowledge and tooling to make it reality. Even now, we know how we might do a lot of stuff only seen in fiction like warp travel and Dyson spheres, nanotechnology, etc. We just haven’t got some of the requirements to actually do those things nailed down yet.

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Too right, exposure to those kind of ideas has grown over time, and thus given the modern era the ability to take those ideas mainstream, because of the simple breadth of media available. We often take it for granted that even a hundred years ago, it wasn’t super easy to get a hold of books, let alone catch every film release. Now a near infinite stream of media is literally available at people’s fingertips. The speed and amount of media that exist has contributed heavily to a more informed modern audience that can digest these ideas more easily, because they’ve simply been exposed to more media explaining the basics underlying such ideas.

Bizarroland,
Bizarroland avatar

No human being alive in the 1960s could have survived the amount of drugs they would have needed to ingest to create Rick and Morty in the 1960s.

I feel like if you built a time machine and took Rick and Morty back to the 1960s, it would have just looked like flashing images on a screen or a nightmare straight out of hell to them, their minds would have not been able to process what was going on not because there's any real depth to the series but just because we have so much exposure to the topic content that we are able to process it where is the closest person in the 1960s would have had is a few episodes of the black and white Lost in space or a little bit of Twilight zone maybe.

pimento64,

Ask me how I know you’re not into foreign and independent film of that time period, nor from the several decades preceding it.

Bizarroland,
Bizarroland avatar

Well I think it's fair to say I've not been exposed to much pre 1960s foreign and independent film, although I do feel there might have been a nicer way to broach the topic what would you recommend to get me familiar with it?

Specifically anything that would prepare my imaginary 1959 brain for the horrors of Rick and Morty would be most appreciated.

pimento64,

The obvious answer would be any Buñuel film, Un Chien Andalou was released in 1929 and is appreciably more viscerally intense than pretty much anything on TV today. Far from the only example. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking our modern ideas are new, they aren’t, everything new you will ever see was previously thought of, tried out, and discarded by past people whose culture didn’t have a use for it at the time. Everything. It’s incredibly misguided to think a modern cartoon would be overwhelmingly intense to a supposed primitive of the 1960s, only perceived as colors and motion. It’s a form of teleological presentism that perpetuates the fiction that we’re somehow more intellectually developed than people who came before us. That happens a lot. It makes us uncomfortable to admit that a paleolithic man could function as well in a modern office as any of us, so we invent feel-good myths about how we’re more intellectually sophisticated than every past generation, but we aren’t. Not socially, not biologically, not at all. It isn’t surprising that people still believe in pop-pseudohistory like the so-called Dark Ages, a Renaissance fiction.

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Exactly, media moves so much faster now, so they literally had a smaller frame of reference and were exposed to far fewer of these ideas than modern audiences. We take it for granted now, but it used to be difficult to get your hands on media that was more obtuse or complicated, because often they didn’t have copies at your local library, and as such, audiences back then just wouldn’t have the frames of reference that we do in allowing us to understand the concepts and references to other existing media.

AnUnusualRelic,
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

Probably because the butlerian jihad forbade them.

CeruleanRuin,

This may be in jest, but they actually fully made this an actual plot point in Picard.

AnUnusualRelic,
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

I gave up on Picard. :(

BigBlackCockroach,
@BigBlackCockroach@lemmy.world avatar

butlerian jihad

dune is a trip! 😂

SameOldInternet,

Drones can’t negotiate the if they trespass or make accidental contact in uncharted territory.

Waltzy,

I mean, given the current trajectory of software and hardware, they probably could.

CADmonkey,

It’s fun to see what modern tech is missing from decades old Sci-fi.

One of the most interesting ones for me, is that there aren’t any screens with text on them shown in the original star trek. That’s because when TOS was made, computers communicated by teletype/printout. TOS is older than the concept of text on a screen.

That said, I feel like a drone would be part of a tricorder. I have a DJI drone with a good camera, and I use it a lot for getting pictures of things that are out of my reach, if you had one paired with a tricorder, you could look at things out of your reach.

Case,

Why invest in tech when there are so many red shirts around?

BigBlackCockroach,
@BigBlackCockroach@lemmy.world avatar

😂

altima_neo,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

What’s up with Troi’s nose?

wombatula,

This image smells like AI art a bit, dunno maybe I am wrong.

stingpie,

You’re right. Troi’s and Data’s hands are messed up, Data has unreal wrinkles on his forehead, the shadow on Picard’s neck seems to be a dent, and of course, Troi’s nose has a different camera angle on either side.

Eccitaze,
@Eccitaze@yiffit.net avatar

To say nothing of how Crusher looks like a RealDoll in a bad way

BigBlackCockroach,
@BigBlackCockroach@lemmy.world avatar

Cocaine?

Kyle,

I can’t remember who said this in the show in Universe; maybe Janeway? But I think a similar question was posed, and the answer was that nobody would have anything to do if exploration was entirely automated. It’s fun and exciting and gives people’s lives meaning.

My headcanon is that many mundane things are automated, and we don’t see them because they aren’t plot-relevant.

Unforeseen,

Like pooping

BLAMM,
@BLAMM@lemmy.world avatar

I hate that this was the first thing I thought of. :)

mycatiskai,

They are mundane and automated until something goes wrong, then we get a holodeck episode.

arquebus_x,

No one's going to watch a realistic exploration sci-fi show about small unmanned ships quietly going about their jobs with no drama.

Entropywins,
Entropywins avatar

You sure about that...

bionicjoey,

They tried to, but the exocomms became sentient and they couldn’t be used as slave labour anymore.

Zink,

I mean, the Borg are right there on the poster!

They live in a post-scarcity world with insane science fiction technology, but they keep the executive decisions in the hands of crew members.

Blackout,
Blackout avatar

The Amazon drone wars of 2032 is still a touchy subject in the future

CarlsIII,

The same reason all the top ranking officers go on all the away missions; so the show isn’t boring.

BigBlackCockroach,
@BigBlackCockroach@lemmy.world avatar

They also don’t have armies in star trek, like, if it makes senses to send 5 armed people why wouldn’t it make sense to send platoons or batallions in some cases? it is always individual enemies they never seem to face entire armies on foot.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

So, this one is a little more justifiable.

Phasers, and starships. And because ST isn’t about war; it’s about diplomacy.

With the exception of the Borg, there are no personal shields. One person with a phaser is a WMD; it’s a sweep-able, incredibly destructive weapon, and if you’re not interested in merely maximum casualties, it also has an effecting area-effect stun mode.

But the other reason is starships. Ignoring plot devices, orbital targetting is incredibly accurate and starship phaser banks can anihilate entire areas. If you tried to move an army across an area, it could be vaporized by a single enemy starship.

Either the enemy has superior technology, in case it doesn’t matter if you send 1 or 1,000 people; or they have inferior technology in which case you need only one person. And if you have air (space) superiority, you can level cities with even a smaller starship.

So ST is more like special forces making surgical strikes, sending in problem solvers and diplomats, and hoping nobody starts shooting in earnest.

Because phasers are OP.

BigBlackCockroach,
@BigBlackCockroach@lemmy.world avatar

a phaser is a WMD

I had no idea about this tbh they come of as very tame weapon, especially the whole stun setting part.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

It can be used that way, sure, and the Very Civilized Starfleet uses them conservatively. But a beam weapon that is capable of disintegrating anything (unshielded) that it touches is crazy powerful. And those are only the hand phasers; we don’t often see the phaser rifles, but holy heck. If phasers scale like projectile weapons do, a single phaser rifle would be capable of vaporizing entire buildings, tanks, aircraft.

BigBlackCockroach,
@BigBlackCockroach@lemmy.world avatar

Wouldn’t a simple mirror be enough to reflect the rays back to the sender?

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Phasers aren’t lasers, and the beam isn’t light; so, probably not.

The_Picard_Maneuver,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@startrek.website avatar

In the original series episode I just watched, they reference that they’ve sent out tons of unmanned drones/probes to map out systems and planets, but starships are enormous and better equipped, so they follow up on any readings from the probes that seem interesting. If there’s an in-universe answer that isn’t “it makes better television”, I’d say it’s a combination of:

  1. Space is really, really big, so probes are only covering small areas anyway.
  2. Their mission is to explore and contact new life, which is more likely to be successful with a human touch.
lolcatnip,

Space is really, really big, so probes are only covering small areas anyway.

That’s backwards. Probes can always cover a vastly larger area than manned ships, so needing to cover more area is always a reason to invest in more probes rather than dumping resources into a handful of very expensive ships.

arquebus_x,

Their mission is to explore and contact new life, which is more likely to be successful with a human touch.

Have you met us? ;)

Cylusthevirus,
Cylusthevirus avatar

Also, a lot of the niches served by drones are already covered by AI driven holograms. If you're not worried about bulky hardware and can supply holo-emitters on the cheap via replicators why wouldn't you?

RojoSanIchiban,

which is more likely to be successful with a human touch.

Andorians and Tellarites: “Are we a fucking joke to you!?”

Vulcans: “We must expend great effort to suppress our feelings of amusement at all of you.”

*Federation civil war begins

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