Star Trek Causality's Paradox Part two: In Space, there is no one to factcheck.
It's consequence free if you able to make love faster than the speed of causality.
There have been endless fan speculation and debates about the magical technology of Star Trek, about how whether not is the “teleporter” is a death machine or how replicators break the universe. Like the powers of Superman, the technology of Star Trek is always made undefined, leaving contradictions between series and episodes. This make sense considering that Star Trek was less meant to be hard sci fi and more of a vehicle to give social-political-commentary or to tell entertaining story. Despite having a fanbases that is infamously thought as obsessing over continuity, there wasn’t really any “hard” continuity during the original series, at least for the first two seasons. Teleporters on the worse of days could split you in half, or send you to a mirror universe, why that is have more to do with writers wanting to tell a engaging story than some internal science within the fiction’s reality. The teleporter itself wasn’t meant to be some perspective technology that could exist one day but whether a clever cost saving measure. Not that technology being undefined and magical didn’t dismiss the franchise itself, you could create great story telling with fantastical elements as long you don’t make them noticeably inconsistence to the point that they distracts from the story.
I pointed that Star Trek’s impact on real world technology has been overstated, “pocket” phones were always assume to be something that will exist ever since they publicize the phone, and that modern cell phones were a natural progressing of the walkie talkie. The magical technology within Star Trek were already common place in Sci Fi, even E.N.T’s holodeck wasn’t that much of a new concept. Even with such fantastical technology, they still haven’t found a cure for baldness…okay not my most original joke. The fictional of reality of Star Trek can have technology that can do the impossible but is still limited by the imagination of set designers and budgets, from looking like a 1960sAD command center of a lunch station to MoveiBob complaining how the new Star Trek bridge look like a “Apple Store”.
It is strange that no form of social media is depicted on Star Trek? Maybe it was something that was ban in service? And what became of Virtual Reality in the Star Trek future? Why do the effort of walking and standing, and waste the ship’s limited living space by adding a holodeck if you have a more advance form of V.R? And why send a human crew down to a hostile planet if you could instead send a probe down? It would save so many red shirt lives.
The center technology to Star Trek is the Warp Drive. Though faster-than-light travel isn’t new for Star Trek or even the warp drive itself, FTL travel allows the very premise of Star Trek to exist. Without it, Starfleet have no way of reaching “Strange New Worlds” or different alien species interacting. A universe without the possibility of FTL is a universe were Star Trek couldn’t exist.
It is very, very, very complicated to put it to simple words but for the U.S.S Enterprise to travel faster than light is for it to run over it’s own grandfather, and anyone who watch that one episode of Futurama knows what that entails. The speed of light is not just the speed of light itself but the speed of causality . Despite Trekkies thinking themselves as smarter than the average fanboy there is none in the actual franchise that seem to address this basic fact. Then again Star Trek wasn’t meant to be hard sci fi, no more than the fantastical elements from Twilight Zone were meant to be depictions of real life. Within universe Technical manuals and attempt at technological consistency was something after the original series run. Star Trek is far from being the only franchise to use FTL travel and not address the causality issue, even franchises that present themselves as “hard sci fi” have this issue. Fans and the writers themselves made came up with a made up solution for the “faster than causality issue”. But according to the current standard of physics if a planet was attack by another planet light years away, and ten retaliate by lunching a missile that goes faster than light, the other planet would be destroy before the first strike leaving a paradox. To truly travel to “strange new worlds” one must invent immortally first otherwise you will die of old age on the way there.. Even though this current Estonian model of space-time could end up becoming as untrue as the mediaeval theories of astrology, it is still a good metaphor for the agenda behind the Star Trek franchise, like how Jung used the ideas of mediaeval alchemy to explore human psychology. FTL Causality paradox may not be as true to physics as it now assume but as a analogy for the ideas of Star Trek itself it can reveal something true behind it.
The Uptonian vision of Star Trek relies heavy on these undefined “magical” technologies to exist. Its FTL causality paradox travel allowed it to interact with advance races and the undefined properties of its replicators make sure there is always a surplus of goods. The very invention of the “warp drive” by humanity within lore is the reason why there is a inter-planetary-inter-staller Federation. The idea of Star Trek being this idea utopia have more to do with its original series third season, since then fans tainted the ideas of Star Trek as a ideology to better humanity, but is this ideology actually a good one? After all if the Utopian vision of Roddenberry can only came about by a technology would “break causality” if existed in real life, what dose that really says about Roddenberry’s vision itself? What exactly is the “Star Trek’s Causality Paradox”?