@CowperKettle That's because they're located at the East Pole!

UFP

It -does not- include the Romulans

Those guys are total dicks

Of all the scifi tech in Star Trek, there is one that really I find impossible to accept... and that is the Universal Translator translating immediately from some new alien species never before encountered.

OK there's a lot of other tech that is just ridiculous (time travel, anti-gravity, FTL travel), but immediate language translation (with no prior culture or object reference) is just insane.

@Cerberus lol

@Mitch And then, with the next aliens, it cannot properly translate their stuff.

@CowperKettle Well, not in the south and east.

@Cerberus I know! Sometimes I wonder if all that Star Trek stuff is made up.

It wouldn't be that bad if we made it up!

Actually it is probably the least improbable. It's similar to ciphering or deciphering. Which maybe is not instantaneous but could be rather quick.

@Mitch If you start pulling at that thread the whole Star Trek universe begins to unravel.

@tchrist: The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fires are now officially the largest conflagration in NM history: 468 sq. mi. burned (about 1200 km^2).

@Lambie Time-travel - totally doable (but economically infeasible) with a very long spinning cylinder of lead (when I say long, optimally it should be infinite, but a few light years long would probably do).

Anti-gravity - I mean floor boards that provide directional gravity fields? same tech as a tractor beam probably, an excess of gravitron particles...I think a compact generator is also infeasible, but you know engineers are clever at miniaturizing.

FTL travel - I think this is pretty unlikely without cheating, but let's say the Alcubierre drive works.

Universal Translator on first time heard speech - THAT IS INSANE.

There is just not enough data to extract a pattern. In the show they always 'open a channel, display on main' on the bridge to an alien life form never encountered before and immediately it translates directly to English.

-maybe- after a sentence of two, there's a good indication of the structure of the sound pattern (whale song, insect buzzing, Turkish whistle language), and maybe a book's worth of text to figure out syntax. But you need real life situations to figure out the semantics and vocabulary. IF you're a super AI from the future, maybe a very enriched environment of thousands of movies speed watched over a couple days would get this. But you still need that content to figure out semantics.

@Robusto A lot of that tech is available to us soon, already, or we've actually zipped past.

@Mitch Nope.

Some version of a replicator is possible now (via 3d printing) and very primitive tricorders (remote sensing/imaging inside the body in a handheld device)

The talking computer is essentially Alexa

The talking computer is essentially retarded.

In what universe does an advanced computer make teletype noises while it is "working" on a problem?

In TOS, the little square 'data modules' they would pass around, like 3 1/2 in floppy disks, we've already obsolesced.

Also ... a single computer on a ship?

@Robusto I think you're making my point for me. We (the current actual reality) has done or done better some of the unbelievable scifi tech in the show.

@Mitch TOS?

The Original Series

Ah.

TNG = The Next Generation (the 2nd series)

DS9 = Deep Space 9

Voyager = Voyager?

@Mitch We are doing many things better, but the things we don't do and are perhaps impossible are FTL travel, time travel, anti-gravity. Hence my "nope" ...

Enterprise, Discovery, Picard, and now Strange New Worlds

I'm saying we are the science fiction. We have done more and better than the best sci-fi minds of the 20th century, for the most part.

@Robusto my points exactly...those are physically non starters, -and- they are more plausible than a Universal Translator that starts translating immediately for an unheard language.

Except in cases where impossibility occurs.

That is UT is harder than FTL, AG, Time Travel, those last ones are impossible so, UT is even more impossible.

@Robusto Automatic pocket doors

IN every grocery store in the world

I'm not so sure. There are no physical barriers to UT, such a thing would just take a lot of work. Perhaps on a timeframe approaching the infinite.

@Robusto wait...

If you use time travel to learn the language -first-...

then you might get UT right out of the gate.

bzzzzt It does not compute.

If you call that absurd then yes, you may be on to something

jinx

in the fiction, the replicator is actually using transporter technology to recreate objects of a given chemical composition.

or something like that

And if you accept the lower bound of UT capability. Say it works for known types of life we're aware of.

@Mitch So many of these things present conundrums that cannot be reconciled.

The needle-less syringe has been tried numerous times but no one ever gets past the engineering problems of 1) it tends to cause infections at the 'injection' site 2) supposedly hurts. a lot.

@Robusto it -is- fiction you know

The point is, it is possible to enjoy sci-fi without falling down the wormhole.

jinx

Like the viability of manned space travel.

Yes. We are so far from serious manned space travel it isn't even funny.

Going to the moon? Sure. But that is "space travel" the way a baby's first steps are the Boston Marathon.

They're letting Putin run operations they shouldn't.

Putin is a KGB spymaster; he has no business making operational and tactical decisions for his military. That just gets his own people killed due to his lack of experience in these domains.

That is one disadvantage of the army of dictatorial power.

@tchrist Relax, this was Hitler's undoing as well.