Anyone else draw the line with the Holodeck...? (1 Viewer)

[Dick]

I don't know exactly why this is.... I've been able to more or less suspend disbelief with most things Star Trek: the warp speed and time warps and transporters and such. But, as much as I really do enjoy TNG, I found the addition of the Holodeck to be a complete bust. A cop-out, actually. A silly, completely unbelievable means of allowing characters to break away from the confines of the ship proper in order to engage in Earth-ly location stories (the Sherlock Holmes episode was one of the worst offenders). Think of it: if you could create "matter from energy" in this way (as Picard and crew have so blithely explained the mechanisms of the deck), you would never want to leave! Your every desire would materialize. Who needs "real" reality when you can dream up and program your own "fake reality" that is every bit as tangible as anything else in life? After all, reality is only what you believe to be real, and the holodeck images on the Enterprise are nothing if not three-dimensional, interactive dopplegangers. I don't know - I just intensely dislike all the holodeck episodes. I can actually (almost) buy into a food processor that materializes whatever you want to eat in seconds, but this holodeck goes too far for me. Anyone else?

 

[Don Black]

Nah. There are philosophical arguments as to why true reality trumps fabricated reality (E.g., the whole argument for re-insertion in The Matrix). I think the writers poke fun at it through the Sherlock Holmes capers though. I'm just curious as to what restrictions are placed on the holodeck. Naughty thoughts... And why isn't there a lock?

 

[James Davis]

Holodecks don't run themselves, and who wants to live in a world with no challenge or risk?

 

[Greg_S_H]

Anything goes on the holodeck, as some of the characters have hinted. I don't know how it works, though. People seem to walk in to others' programs all the time, there are logs, there are a limited number of holodecks, there are many people on Enterprise.

Either way, you could always pop in to one of Quark's holosuites if you want something kinky. :p)

 

[Greg*go]

Who needs reality?

Out of all the holodeck shows, how many are about the holodeck malfunctioning? I think the holodeck represents the home computers of the future. They're very useful and fun, but always breaking... BUT because of their usefullness, we still keep using them, EVEN THOUGH they still crash sometimes at the most crucial times.

 

[MikeAlletto]

All I know is I want a holodeck, oh and a food replicator too.

 

[Qui-Gon John]

Think of it: if you could create "matter from energy" in this way (as Picard and crew have so blithely explained the mechanisms of the deck), you would never want to leave! Your every desire would materialize. Who needs "real" reality when you can dream up and program your own "fake reality" that is every bit as tangible as anything else in life?

Nah, in many respects the Nexus was similar. But because it was not real, is the reason Kirk decided to leave.

 

[Paul McElligott]

The problem didn't become a real problem until Voyager, which took the Holodeck fetish to a ridiculous extreme. (Never mind the obvious point that a ship on the farside of the galaxy trying to conserve resources would never keep them turned on).

They didn't get too far out of hand in TNG or DS9. TNG used them to ask real existential questions and DS9 had fun with Vic Fontaine. Voyager, on the other hand, went to Holodeck like a junkie seeking a hit. It got to the point where if I saw Janeway talking to Leonardo Davinci one more time, I was going to break something.

 

[Jeremy Illingworth]

My biggest issue with them is the number of times that they nearly blew up the ship. It seems like every year the holodeck got out of hand and almost blew up the ship or killed key crew members. Why would something so unsafe be allowed on the fleet's flagship? There are safety devices to keep people from getting killed, but why would they have an override? The safety protocals should be at the very core of the system in a way that the system couldn't function unsafely. And I liked the Sherlock Holmes episodes. In the end Moriarity is given a fake reality in which to spend eternity. Is it any worse that real reality? Although he could never survive in real realitiy.

jeremy

 

[BrianW]

I thought Futurama's send up of holodeck technology was hilarious. The Trek writers' insane abuse of the technology was definitely under the microscope on that one.

TNG SPOILER:
(But I don't remember which episode. Sorry...)

..

..


There was one episode of TNG in which the holodeck characters, instead of "becoming real" and exiting the holodeck, convinced members of the crew that they had exited the holodeck when they hadn't. I was rolling my eyes until that plot twist was revealed. After that, I thought it was actually a good episode. (I've always been a sucker for the Asimovian "puzzle" plots, especially from the TNG era.)

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

To delve into the idea of "Why would you ever want to leave the holodeck?" there was also an episode that explored the idea of escapist fantasy addiction on the holodeck, Barclay being the one with the problem of course.

 

[Holadem]

I have never been a ST fan, though I did enjoy Voyager (ducks...). The one thing I could never stomach is the transporter. Sorry, I can't get over that one.

I have a similar problem with the book The City and the Stars. Way to far out for my enjoyement. I like my Sci-fi to be a little more... "grounded".

--
Holadem

 

[Phil Florian]

Actually, though I don't have the link, transporters are very possible. The problem isn't breaking something down and reassembling it. (okay it is a problem I suppose, but...) but the question is why do it in the first place? If you are able to "take a picture" of a thing or person so perfectly so as to know it down to the submolcular level AND have the ability to piece together matter (ala the holodeck) you aren't "beaming" as much as you are "creating an exactly duplicate with exactly the same memories and then destroying the original." You don't need to 'leave' because the copy is exactly the same thing. Does that make sense? It did to me after I thought about it. The way it would be so fast is that you aren't sending actual molecules but just the map. Then the machine on the other side reassembles according to the instructions.


**sigh**

(/geek)


Phil

 

[BrianW]

you aren't "beaming" as much as you are "creating an exactly duplicate with exactly the same memories and then destroying the original."

Phil, hush! If this gets out, then nobody - and I mean NOBODY - will ever use a transporter. And if we do adopt the philosophy of "copying" rather than "transporting," then we'll never get the distant human copies to willingly be destroyed... er, I mean, beamed back.

 

[Carl Johnson]

I pretty much take a break from reality whenever I'm watching Star Trek but the one technology I'd rank as least likely is the transporter. A couple of hundred years from now I don't doubt that warp drives, replicators and some Matrix/holodeck kind of virtual reality will exist but I'm not getting my hopes up for the transporter.

 

[Lew Crippen]

Actually, though I don't have the link, transporters are very possible. The problem isn't breaking something down and reassembling it. (okay it is a problem I suppose, but...)

It is somewhat more than a problem, that is so long as you accept the validity of quantum mechanics.

The reason that you occasionally hear some techno-babble in the background about ‘Heisenberg Compensators’ is because he demonstrated that it is impossible to know both the position and vector of any particle. So to get around the impossibility of identifying and reassembling all of the particles of any object (much less a person) the writers invented a magic black box to compensate for this ‘uncertainty’.

Which means that it is far easier to create an object (especially in a macro sense) out of whole cloth, than it is to recreate one, down to the molecular level.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Dick wrote (post #1):

Let's hope not. (See the link provided above.) As objectionable as I found the whole concept from the beginning, what really made it rancid in my opinion is when the producers violated their own guideline that holodeck beings not be self-aware (of their artificiality). You might say this takes place as early as episode #116 of the first season of TNG, "11001001", when Riker's "dreamgirl", Minuet, is cornered into admitting she's the tool and creation of the Binars. It really gets going, however, with the first Moriarty episode, "Elementary, Dear Data" (#129), and, yes, reaches its low points with Janeway's "holonovels" (where she becomes a late 18th- or early 19th-century British governess), her consultations with Leonardo DaVinci, and her Irish-village adventures. And, of course, Voyager completely throws out the whole concept of "holodeck"-technology by giving the EMH Doctor a "holo-emitter" for going about outside of the medical area or the holodecks. This turn of events renders the character just another "human" (only one with a "hollow" gimmick). Typical Star Trek homogenization.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Phil Florian wrote (post #13):

A la "Tom Riker" of "Second Chances" (episode #250) and, especially, "evil Kirk" of "The Enemy Within" (TOS episode #005) .

 

[Don Black]

So is there a moral dilemma in using a transporter in that you're killing the original entity in order to create a new one? Kind of 23rd century take on abortion...

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Don Black wrote (post #19):

No. There is no such "take" on the part of the characters in ST. That's an analysis devised by posters here in this thread (and elsewhere???). The characters see transportation as just that, excepting, of course, those with fears of having their molecules scrambled, like Mr. Barclay ("Realm of Fear" (episode #228)), Dr. McCoy (TOS (passim)), and Dr. Polaski ("The Child" (#127)).

For TNG's---and presumably, Star Trek in general's---take on "abortion", see TNG episode #144, "Up the Long Ladder", where Dr. Polaski and William Riker "terminate" unauthorized clones of themselves without even the bat of an eyelash, because, they say, they and their "rights to control their own bodies" have been violated---a not very veiled reference to the American abortion debate.