Star Trek Trak (spoilers!)
The Star Trek post has arrived. I saw it. I liked it.
The science was really terrible.
I know you don't watch Star Trek for the science. The series and the spinoffs have always been more about the characters and relationships. And they got that aspect right in this movie. But oh, the science...
So if you're looking for a squee post this isn't it. But if you want my thoughts on the science and a few other matters you've come to the right place. Needless to say, massive spoilers abound, maybe even in the topics.
Red Matter
Let's start with the most egregious. I don't even know what this was supposed to be. I guess anti-matter and dark matter were too passé for the writers so they created Red Matter. They mentioned ignition which strongly suggests some sort of chemical reaction. Of course no possible chemical reaction could create a black hole. The only way to do that is to condense matter into a very small space, and gravity is the only way to do that as of yet (maybe I'll need to edit this when the LHC comes online!).
What's also mysterious is why Spock Prime was flying around with so much of the substance. A generous estimate of the volume of the drops used to destroy Vulcan and the supernova is about 1 cubic centimeter. 1 cc is enough to destroy a star. Going with a conservative 1 meter diameter for Spock's ball of the stuff, he had enough Red Matter to destroy 500 million stars or planets.
500 million!
Then later on when Spock's ship is crashed into the Romulans' ship a black hole is created in that ship through this ignition process that leaves enough time for Kirk to offer rescue to the Romulans and for Nero to poetically detail just how he wouldn't like to be saved. So, despite the more-than-abundance of RM it's not enough to instantaneously destroy Nero's ship. Huh.
This is a good lead in for the next topic, though.
Black Holes
Wow, did they ever get black holes wrong.
After Nero's ship finally is destroyed by the black hole, the Enterprise is in imminent danger of being sucked into said black hole, despite Scotty (more on him later) giving it all she's got with Warp Drive (more on that later). Things are serious enough that the Enterprise is physically cracking and will soon break up. How do they save it? By throwing bombs of some sort into the BH, the blast propelling them out of danger. I should mention that not even a nuclear blast could escape from a BH but let's assume that the bombs detonated before they reached the event horizon. I could maybe see this huge explosion pushing the Enterprise out of the gravitational well of the BH but I don't really see how a huge explosion is supposed to prevent a ship that's already about to break apart from breaking apart. I would think this explosion would have the opposite effect.
So back to the BH. In the future Nero and Co and Spock all fell into the BH and, instead of being utterly destroyed, they are whisked through a wormhole into the past. Well, whatever. But, even if wormholes could exist (I think the physics is currently out on the topic but extremely skeptical), anything larger than the subatomic would be torn apart by the immense difference in the gravitational pull on the two sides of the object. Even a hydrogen atom. So Nero, Spock, and their friends might come out the other side of this wormhole.
As a cloud of atom fragments.
Nero keeps cropping up. I want to talk about him.
Nero: his ship, his mission
First, Nero's ship doesn't make much sense. It's ostensibly a mining ship, outfitted with some nifty space drill. It's also more heavily weaponized than anything the Federation has got. It's also much, much larger. I guess Romulans take mining seriously. Maybe piracy is still a problem. It doesn't appear to be very practical for a mining vessel, though. Much of the interior seems to be devoted to cavernous spaces interspersed with dangerous ledges and platforms for characters to fall from. I think, if they are going through the trouble of making a gigantic spaceship, it would be prudent to devote those cavernous spaces to more practical uses like storing the ores or whatever they've been mining. Also, haven't they heard of safety railing?
Second, Nero's mission and his unusually devoted crew. After watching their home planet destroyed by a supernova and thrown back into the past Nero gets it in his head to exact retribution on Spock and the rest of the Federation for not stopping the destruction of the Romulan world. So they wait around for 25 years. Interestingly, at one point another Romulan mentions killing Spock but Nero says he isn't going to kill him, just make him suffer (this by watching the destruction of Spock's own Vulcan). It's hard to imagine the rest of the crew waiting 25 years to learn the significant details of Nero's plan. Talk about dedication! Not even the most elite military crew would blindly follow their captain for a quarter century on some half-baked revenge plan that mostly involves a lot of sitting in space and waiting.
And apparently no one ever said something like this Nero: "Gee, boss, that's a neat plan and all. But why don't we just go back to [Romulan planet] and warn the people so that some time in the next one hundred and fifty years or whatever they can figure out how to stop the supernova or evacuate the planet. We can stop on Vulcan along the way and pick up Spock as a kid, if you want. I really do admire your single-mindedness here, sir, but I kind of have other things I'd like to do with my twenty five years."
Spaceships, Warp Speed, and Beaming
I also don't really understand the Enterprise. It seems to be set up for exploration with a large crew and apparent resources for long voyages. But they've got Warp Speed and the impression I have based on the movie is that everywhere in the galaxy is hours or even minutes away, since they can travel much faster than the speed of light.
Oh, yeah, that! So everything we know about physics suggests that the speed of light is the upper bound on how fast anything in the universe can travel (yeah, yeah, there's quantum entanglement but nothing in ST has anything to do with that). To accelerate anything with mass to light speed would take infinite energy. But I'll give ST a pass here. The universe we live in we won't ever be getting very far from earth and even the closest stars are tens or hundreds of years away. Which isn't so much fun compared to zipping around to any star you feel like.
So since they've got Warp Speed there doesn't seem to be much need for Enterprise type ships when everywhere is close in time to get to (also, how does their faster than light travel not take them back in time?). I guess exploration is ostensibly a mission of the Enterprise but it's a poor choice of ship for an attack vehicle, like was used in the movie. Something more practical would be a ship with no or minimal crew, as fast as possible, and with a whole lot of weapons. Instead, the Enterprise is outgunned by a mining ship, albeit one from the future.
Also, all the ships have some sort of energy shields that seem able to deflect both classical physical weapons and more fanciful ones like lasers and photon torpedos. Yeah, those kinds of shields aren't going to happen.
Anyway, in any attack the shields are always in critical danger of running down, leaving the threat of an exposed and defenseless Enterprise. Except, why does that even happen? They've already fixed all the inconvenient aspects of physics, from the speed of light barrier to thermodynamics. FTL travel suggests they've got access to truly infinite energy (maybe they've tapped the quantum zero point vacuum energy, infinite but unaccessible to us?). So why do the shields ever run down? They can always just make more energy.
I haven't even talked about Beaming yet!
There are about 10^28 atoms in the human body.
Actually, I don't think I want to talk about Beaming. It was somewhat of a mistake to include in the series because it gave them a Deus Ex Machina type rescue device that the writers are forever having to find new ways to block so the characters can actually have the appearance of being in danger. Plus, it seems unlikely to be able to destructively "read" a human and reassemble them large distances away using nothing but free energy with an error rate low enough to not cause noticeable damage, particularly to brain matter. Yeah, I really don't want to talk about Beaming.
But I do want to talk about characters.
Characters
I know this is getting out of science territory. Still. So aside from the mistake with Beaming the other mistake made at the very beginning that's been haunting every incarnation of ST ever since was the focus on the wrong characters.
Yes, I'm talking about the commanding officers.
Commanding officers are sure important, no doubt. But they don't lend themselves to the kind of fun adventures that lowlier characters would be likely to have. Instead, ST has the COs always involved in some highly improbable situation that would be more likely to have them discharged than given accolades. I don't remember much about Kirk in TOS (I was more into TNG when it was on) but Kirk in this movie is reckless and foolhardy. Those are characteristics. But none that I can see Star Fleet rewarding with captainship. It also has to be incredibly frustrating for subordinates to see the worst person for the job promoted to do it.
But isn't that the way it always is?
I do want to mention Simon Pegg as Scotty. I like Simon Pegg (Spaced!). I like Scotty. I have a real hard time accepting Simon Pegg as a Scottish engineer, though. And what was with him getting Beamed into the clear pipes? Clear just so we could see him travel through them? Kind of lame.
Chekov! So he's an ethnic stereotype, and I get that was a nod to TOS character, which made more sense back then. But he's apparently Russian and pronounces words like Vulcan and Victor as Wulcan and Wictor. Get this. The Russian language has a V but no W. Viktor is a common name in Russia (see also Vladimir). So they got the letters Chekov would have trouble pronouncing backwards. More than kind of lame.
And not really sure where else to put this but when new!Spock ditches Kirk on the icehole Kirk manages to run into Spock Prime. Of all the planets in all the galaxies and so on he manages to crash land within a kilometer or so of Spock. More than convenient.
Humans and Aliens
So humans and aliens in STverse look very similar and can actually successfully interbreed. I do vaguely recall some sort of explanation being floated regarding this, maybe in a TNG ep I caught ages ago. I don't know. Spock mentions Vulcans and Romulans share a common ancestor. Spock is half-human/half-Vulcan. I think Worf was half-human/half-Klingon. Even if all these species shared some common ancestor that seeded the galaxy it still doesn't seem probable that they could, now, interbreed, being separated for at minimum thousands of years. Plus, Romulan blood, at least in this movie, was shown to be green, which suggests a significantly different biology.
But rubber ears are a lot cheaper than creating truly alien aliens.
Computers
Minor in the grand scheme of things but I was struck with how conventional their computers were. For the most part they had touch screens, with some physical pushbuttons, instead of keyboards. But 300 years into the future they haven't made any significant improvements regarding inputs and interfaces? That seems unlikely, though I suppose that could be a nod to TOS computers. And what was with kid!Kirk's Nokia™ cellphone that looked pretty much like any iPhone derivative of today? I guess it had better quality on speaker mode.
And speaking of computers, this is vaguely related. Pike, I think it was, gets captured by Nero, and is then tortured to gain access to Earth's defense frequencies. Pretty poor planning to have defenses that rely on something secret but relatively easily obtained.
Weapons
This is seemingly minor but I think reflects a real issue with the writing. On at least two occasions characters steal other characters weapons and use them. Kirk and Sulu steal some Romulans' rifles and use them to destroy the space drill platform. Later, Kirk is engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a Romulan, steals said Romulan's weapon and shoots him, who then dramatically falls from the platform inside Nero's cavernous spaceship.
In STverse technology is advanced enough to easily fly between stars and physics presents no limitations.
They can destroy planets.
But they cannot successfully lock a weapon to an authorized user or group of users.
This is no esoteric thing, either. I know handguns have been prototyped that only unlock for a specific user, which is a huge potential boon for police worldwide. The device I know about used a ring with an embedded microchip, though I suspect future ones might use something like an RFID chip implanted in the hand. Currently, I think the issue is with reliability; it needs to unlock for the authorized user(s) near 100% of the time and it's not there yet. But that's solvable with today's technology.
And they haven't figured it out in Star Trek, yet.
This was the most frustrating issue to me, even more so than Red Matter (and even the spacejump).
Wow, so this got hugely long. I think I'd better quit. After all that, though, I do want to restate that I did like the movie. It was entertaining and a lot of fun! I only wish there had been more of some characters, like Uhura and Sulu.
Bonus points for anyone that figures out the connection between the post and the song.
The science was really terrible.
I know you don't watch Star Trek for the science. The series and the spinoffs have always been more about the characters and relationships. And they got that aspect right in this movie. But oh, the science...
So if you're looking for a squee post this isn't it. But if you want my thoughts on the science and a few other matters you've come to the right place. Needless to say, massive spoilers abound, maybe even in the topics.
Red Matter
Let's start with the most egregious. I don't even know what this was supposed to be. I guess anti-matter and dark matter were too passé for the writers so they created Red Matter. They mentioned ignition which strongly suggests some sort of chemical reaction. Of course no possible chemical reaction could create a black hole. The only way to do that is to condense matter into a very small space, and gravity is the only way to do that as of yet (maybe I'll need to edit this when the LHC comes online!).
What's also mysterious is why Spock Prime was flying around with so much of the substance. A generous estimate of the volume of the drops used to destroy Vulcan and the supernova is about 1 cubic centimeter. 1 cc is enough to destroy a star. Going with a conservative 1 meter diameter for Spock's ball of the stuff, he had enough Red Matter to destroy 500 million stars or planets.
500 million!
Then later on when Spock's ship is crashed into the Romulans' ship a black hole is created in that ship through this ignition process that leaves enough time for Kirk to offer rescue to the Romulans and for Nero to poetically detail just how he wouldn't like to be saved. So, despite the more-than-abundance of RM it's not enough to instantaneously destroy Nero's ship. Huh.
This is a good lead in for the next topic, though.
Black Holes
Wow, did they ever get black holes wrong.
After Nero's ship finally is destroyed by the black hole, the Enterprise is in imminent danger of being sucked into said black hole, despite Scotty (more on him later) giving it all she's got with Warp Drive (more on that later). Things are serious enough that the Enterprise is physically cracking and will soon break up. How do they save it? By throwing bombs of some sort into the BH, the blast propelling them out of danger. I should mention that not even a nuclear blast could escape from a BH but let's assume that the bombs detonated before they reached the event horizon. I could maybe see this huge explosion pushing the Enterprise out of the gravitational well of the BH but I don't really see how a huge explosion is supposed to prevent a ship that's already about to break apart from breaking apart. I would think this explosion would have the opposite effect.
So back to the BH. In the future Nero and Co and Spock all fell into the BH and, instead of being utterly destroyed, they are whisked through a wormhole into the past. Well, whatever. But, even if wormholes could exist (I think the physics is currently out on the topic but extremely skeptical), anything larger than the subatomic would be torn apart by the immense difference in the gravitational pull on the two sides of the object. Even a hydrogen atom. So Nero, Spock, and their friends might come out the other side of this wormhole.
As a cloud of atom fragments.
Nero keeps cropping up. I want to talk about him.
Nero: his ship, his mission
First, Nero's ship doesn't make much sense. It's ostensibly a mining ship, outfitted with some nifty space drill. It's also more heavily weaponized than anything the Federation has got. It's also much, much larger. I guess Romulans take mining seriously. Maybe piracy is still a problem. It doesn't appear to be very practical for a mining vessel, though. Much of the interior seems to be devoted to cavernous spaces interspersed with dangerous ledges and platforms for characters to fall from. I think, if they are going through the trouble of making a gigantic spaceship, it would be prudent to devote those cavernous spaces to more practical uses like storing the ores or whatever they've been mining. Also, haven't they heard of safety railing?
Second, Nero's mission and his unusually devoted crew. After watching their home planet destroyed by a supernova and thrown back into the past Nero gets it in his head to exact retribution on Spock and the rest of the Federation for not stopping the destruction of the Romulan world. So they wait around for 25 years. Interestingly, at one point another Romulan mentions killing Spock but Nero says he isn't going to kill him, just make him suffer (this by watching the destruction of Spock's own Vulcan). It's hard to imagine the rest of the crew waiting 25 years to learn the significant details of Nero's plan. Talk about dedication! Not even the most elite military crew would blindly follow their captain for a quarter century on some half-baked revenge plan that mostly involves a lot of sitting in space and waiting.
And apparently no one ever said something like this Nero: "Gee, boss, that's a neat plan and all. But why don't we just go back to [Romulan planet] and warn the people so that some time in the next one hundred and fifty years or whatever they can figure out how to stop the supernova or evacuate the planet. We can stop on Vulcan along the way and pick up Spock as a kid, if you want. I really do admire your single-mindedness here, sir, but I kind of have other things I'd like to do with my twenty five years."
Spaceships, Warp Speed, and Beaming
I also don't really understand the Enterprise. It seems to be set up for exploration with a large crew and apparent resources for long voyages. But they've got Warp Speed and the impression I have based on the movie is that everywhere in the galaxy is hours or even minutes away, since they can travel much faster than the speed of light.
Oh, yeah, that! So everything we know about physics suggests that the speed of light is the upper bound on how fast anything in the universe can travel (yeah, yeah, there's quantum entanglement but nothing in ST has anything to do with that). To accelerate anything with mass to light speed would take infinite energy. But I'll give ST a pass here. The universe we live in we won't ever be getting very far from earth and even the closest stars are tens or hundreds of years away. Which isn't so much fun compared to zipping around to any star you feel like.
So since they've got Warp Speed there doesn't seem to be much need for Enterprise type ships when everywhere is close in time to get to (also, how does their faster than light travel not take them back in time?). I guess exploration is ostensibly a mission of the Enterprise but it's a poor choice of ship for an attack vehicle, like was used in the movie. Something more practical would be a ship with no or minimal crew, as fast as possible, and with a whole lot of weapons. Instead, the Enterprise is outgunned by a mining ship, albeit one from the future.
Also, all the ships have some sort of energy shields that seem able to deflect both classical physical weapons and more fanciful ones like lasers and photon torpedos. Yeah, those kinds of shields aren't going to happen.
Anyway, in any attack the shields are always in critical danger of running down, leaving the threat of an exposed and defenseless Enterprise. Except, why does that even happen? They've already fixed all the inconvenient aspects of physics, from the speed of light barrier to thermodynamics. FTL travel suggests they've got access to truly infinite energy (maybe they've tapped the quantum zero point vacuum energy, infinite but unaccessible to us?). So why do the shields ever run down? They can always just make more energy.
I haven't even talked about Beaming yet!
There are about 10^28 atoms in the human body.
Actually, I don't think I want to talk about Beaming. It was somewhat of a mistake to include in the series because it gave them a Deus Ex Machina type rescue device that the writers are forever having to find new ways to block so the characters can actually have the appearance of being in danger. Plus, it seems unlikely to be able to destructively "read" a human and reassemble them large distances away using nothing but free energy with an error rate low enough to not cause noticeable damage, particularly to brain matter. Yeah, I really don't want to talk about Beaming.
But I do want to talk about characters.
Characters
I know this is getting out of science territory. Still. So aside from the mistake with Beaming the other mistake made at the very beginning that's been haunting every incarnation of ST ever since was the focus on the wrong characters.
Yes, I'm talking about the commanding officers.
Commanding officers are sure important, no doubt. But they don't lend themselves to the kind of fun adventures that lowlier characters would be likely to have. Instead, ST has the COs always involved in some highly improbable situation that would be more likely to have them discharged than given accolades. I don't remember much about Kirk in TOS (I was more into TNG when it was on) but Kirk in this movie is reckless and foolhardy. Those are characteristics. But none that I can see Star Fleet rewarding with captainship. It also has to be incredibly frustrating for subordinates to see the worst person for the job promoted to do it.
But isn't that the way it always is?
I do want to mention Simon Pegg as Scotty. I like Simon Pegg (Spaced!). I like Scotty. I have a real hard time accepting Simon Pegg as a Scottish engineer, though. And what was with him getting Beamed into the clear pipes? Clear just so we could see him travel through them? Kind of lame.
Chekov! So he's an ethnic stereotype, and I get that was a nod to TOS character, which made more sense back then. But he's apparently Russian and pronounces words like Vulcan and Victor as Wulcan and Wictor. Get this. The Russian language has a V but no W. Viktor is a common name in Russia (see also Vladimir). So they got the letters Chekov would have trouble pronouncing backwards. More than kind of lame.
And not really sure where else to put this but when new!Spock ditches Kirk on the icehole Kirk manages to run into Spock Prime. Of all the planets in all the galaxies and so on he manages to crash land within a kilometer or so of Spock. More than convenient.
Humans and Aliens
So humans and aliens in STverse look very similar and can actually successfully interbreed. I do vaguely recall some sort of explanation being floated regarding this, maybe in a TNG ep I caught ages ago. I don't know. Spock mentions Vulcans and Romulans share a common ancestor. Spock is half-human/half-Vulcan. I think Worf was half-human/half-Klingon. Even if all these species shared some common ancestor that seeded the galaxy it still doesn't seem probable that they could, now, interbreed, being separated for at minimum thousands of years. Plus, Romulan blood, at least in this movie, was shown to be green, which suggests a significantly different biology.
But rubber ears are a lot cheaper than creating truly alien aliens.
Computers
Minor in the grand scheme of things but I was struck with how conventional their computers were. For the most part they had touch screens, with some physical pushbuttons, instead of keyboards. But 300 years into the future they haven't made any significant improvements regarding inputs and interfaces? That seems unlikely, though I suppose that could be a nod to TOS computers. And what was with kid!Kirk's Nokia™ cellphone that looked pretty much like any iPhone derivative of today? I guess it had better quality on speaker mode.
And speaking of computers, this is vaguely related. Pike, I think it was, gets captured by Nero, and is then tortured to gain access to Earth's defense frequencies. Pretty poor planning to have defenses that rely on something secret but relatively easily obtained.
Weapons
This is seemingly minor but I think reflects a real issue with the writing. On at least two occasions characters steal other characters weapons and use them. Kirk and Sulu steal some Romulans' rifles and use them to destroy the space drill platform. Later, Kirk is engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a Romulan, steals said Romulan's weapon and shoots him, who then dramatically falls from the platform inside Nero's cavernous spaceship.
In STverse technology is advanced enough to easily fly between stars and physics presents no limitations.
They can destroy planets.
But they cannot successfully lock a weapon to an authorized user or group of users.
This is no esoteric thing, either. I know handguns have been prototyped that only unlock for a specific user, which is a huge potential boon for police worldwide. The device I know about used a ring with an embedded microchip, though I suspect future ones might use something like an RFID chip implanted in the hand. Currently, I think the issue is with reliability; it needs to unlock for the authorized user(s) near 100% of the time and it's not there yet. But that's solvable with today's technology.
And they haven't figured it out in Star Trek, yet.
This was the most frustrating issue to me, even more so than Red Matter (and even the spacejump).
Wow, so this got hugely long. I think I'd better quit. After all that, though, I do want to restate that I did like the movie. It was entertaining and a lot of fun! I only wish there had been more of some characters, like Uhura and Sulu.
Bonus points for anyone that figures out the connection between the post and the song.