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.
The in-universe answer re: drones would be that people want to explore. Sure, it’s dangerous, but it’s also exciting, fascinating, and fulfilling. That said, I feel like a responsible captain would make much more extensive use of probes than any of the shows.
Re: data streams, I don’t have a good in-universe explanation. I have a similar question of why they don’t have security cameras in all the hallways and public areas.
Also, using the transporter to go down to a planet always runs the risk of some storm or an orbital threat stranding your party. Why not use the shuttle as SOP? It gives your away team more resources, both for their mission and for an emergency.
The cameras are more of a privacy issue that I imagine the Federation tries to uphold.
There was an episode of TNG where a “passenger” got onto ship’s comms and was contacting Picard on the bridge. When Picard told the guy that the comms were reserved for ship’s business, the guy asked why they weren’t restricted, if that was the case. Picard said that was unnecessary as people in Star Fleet generally just…behave themselves.
That did change overtime though. They mentioned in Lower Decks that they beefed up security after the Pakleds attacks, which leads to Boimler not even being able to open doors (or activate emergency systems lol)
That’s a totally insane explanation, though. Lots of people are on the ship at all times who aren’t members of the crew, and that’s before you even consider things like hostile boarding parties.
Most of the civilians present on the Enterprise fall into one of three categories:
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A non-Starfleet staff member, relative, or passenger, who would already know and respect etiquette regarding ship’s comms.
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A non-hostile foreign diplomat, envoy, or similar passenger, who doesn’t want to potentially cause a diplomatic incident by being rude.
I also recall lots of times where civilians used ship’s comms for various purposes, but it was to contact the person directly attending to them, or a friend/relative, not the ship’s captain. (It’s been years since my last rewatch though so I could be wrong here…)
As for hostile parties, IIRC it’s implied that the computer locks them out automatically, and in emergencies the captain can lock down the entire ship, which is how Data hijacked the Enterprise when he went rogue, and why it was such a big deal.
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It’s a military / government ship. There is no real privacy.
Everyone can read your personal logs if there’s a good enough reason. Anyone can just ask the computer where anyone is at any time. People can just barge into your holodeck program. Anyone, from civilians to bartenders can just call up the bridge and talk to the captain whenever they want. People are just expected to control themselves.
I think of it like how people don’t need to carry defensive weapons now, while a knife was very common in the past. People are just expected to control themselves and not rob random strangers today.
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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.
They are mundane and automated until something goes wrong, then we get a holodeck episode.
Like pooping
I hate that this was the first thing I thought of. :)
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).
No one’s going to watch a realistic exploration sci-fi show about small unmanned ships quietly going about their jobs with no drama.
You sure about that…
They tried to, but the exocomms became sentient and they couldn’t be used as slave labour anymore.
Probably because the butlerian jihad forbade them.
This may be in jest, but they actually fully made this an actual plot point in Picard.
I gave up on Picard. :(
butlerian jihad
dune is a trip! 😂
You forgot to add “Are they stupid?” at the end of the post title
Why aren’t they using drones
They use probes all the time…
In a similar vein, I’ve been rewatching TNG and find myself thinking that they really should have put a cctv camera in engineering. Could have saved them a lot of trouble.
Why invest in tech when there are so many red shirts around?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ask me how I know you’re not into foreign and independent film of that time period, nor from the several decades preceding it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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Space is really, really big, so probes are only covering small areas anyway.
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Their mission is to explore and contact new life, which is more likely to be successful with a human touch.
Their mission is to explore and contact new life, which is more likely to be successful with a human touch.
Have you met us? ;)
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.
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The Amazon drone wars of 2032 is still a touchy subject in the future
