Stark Trek - How far are we?
jodrellblank: I've always been pretty amazed at the thought of a space world.Great! 'cos you're living on one :)Very far. We can't travel faster than light and at the moment not even close to it. We have vague ideas that warp drives might be possible, but generating, containing and manipulating enough energy to work in some of the suggestions is also currently unthinkable. We're at the stage of needing multiple unpredictable breakthroughs to get anywhere close, and that leaves travel to the nearest extra-solar anything taking many years.Also, the Star Trek technology is very inconsistent, I don't think we are going that way. I haven't seen the new film (yet) but from the TV series, there are numerous questions. How come nobody else ever has Geordie-style visors as an option? Or any kind of optical or neural enhancement or display? Or any kind of body armour?Why is there no nanotechnology anywhere except when the Borg turn up? Why isn't there an anti-Borg good cyborg species? They destroy entire star ships so frequently and inconsequentially that they must have tremendous manufacturing capability, but wouldn't that have more ramifications somehow? How come Picard has a replacement heart and Geordi a brain-connected replacement vision, and everyone can be rebuilt by the teleporter, but they all have wrinkles and age and die? Why don't they throw half the Enterprise away and replace it with a much smaller holodeck with simulated rooms? Why does nobody ever ask the computer anything interesting? Why can't Data improve himself or replicate himself? Or merge with the ship's computer? Why has nobody built a machine to pick up what Deanna Troi's empathic sense does and done away with the whole "Computer, where is x?" "x's badge fell off so I can't find them" thing?Why is nobody sitting at home on Earth and using the magical instantaneous subspace communication to explore with unmanned spacecraft?So, yeah - space: big, cold, empty. planet bankruptingly expensive.