8 ms·

On a related note, when I re-watch shows from the 1990's or even early 2000's it's amazing how many problems would be solved with a simple cell phone call or te

On a related note, when I re-watch shows from the 1990's or even early 2000's it's amazing how many problems would be solved with a simple cell phone call or text message. Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be a much shorter show if the gang could just text instead of wondering where the others were or if they knew some key fact.

dylan604 3y ago
along the same line of applying modern day to older shows, I recently re-watched Stargate Atlantis. I found it amusing that with all of the futuristic tech, McKay still carried around a bulky laptop. Even the original Star Trek minimized the computer to a hand held device. The prop team kind of failed in SG:Atlantis on this one to me. How much easier would their off world adventures been with a tablet or other smaller futuristic compute device?
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  OTOH it was kind of cool to have a more "realistic" take of what would probably happen if the US military merged with Alien tech. Contemporary tools would be used next to new gadgets.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    For SG:1 sure. For SG:Atlantis, they had access to all of the ancient's tech.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      They had access to a lot of Ancient artefacts which they didn't really understand; despite many oddities that came to mind since first watching it, I think it would still fit the setting that they didn't know how to get the Ancient's 3D printers (or whatever) to spit out better hardware — if they could make it spit out more hardware on demand, even if they "could only find one file to print", it would radically change the show. This also means there was no way for either SG-1 or Atlantis to sensibly continue past the SG-1 finale, when they got Asgard replicators and all the instruction manuals for them… and that Star Trek TNG onwards is best done without thinking too hard about the implications of almost any of the tech they demonstrate.
      - themaninthedark 3y ago
        I really didn't like the direction that SG-1 and Atlantis took. There was a novel that took place after the movie that depicted Hathor coming back and trying to take over with a simultaneous plot of the US trying to extract resources from Abydos. I though it was really we done and wished that SG-1 used it as the starting point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_literature
        ben_w 3y ago
        I can sympathise with that; while I enjoyed both, they were a radical departure from the source material and non-trivial departure from the SG-1 pilot (which I only learned recently was initially a made-for-TV film).
        crooked-v 3y ago
        A made-for-TV film for Showtime, at that, which is why the pilot has nudity and an R rating and the rest of the series pivots into more family-friendly territory.
- mrgoldenbrown 3y ago
  STar Trek's handheld computers never made sense to me, unless they have some crazy good AI that does all the work for you based on vague inputs. How do you input anything like code quickly on such a tiny screen?
  - dylan604 3y ago
    how much code do you enter into a mobile device? these aren't the devices to do that with. they just run apps that serve the purpose at hand dictated by the script. when ever you want to send a text, you don't enter the code for that. neither did anyone on an away team that needed to take air samples, or scan someone's health. seems like you had an idea not fully thought out
    - Izkata 3y ago
      > neither did anyone on an away team that needed to take air samples, or scan someone's health. You're thinking of tricorders[0], GP is talking about PADDs[1]. Tricorders are mostly read-only sensors that need to be pre-configured (with some ability to switch between configurations during use), while PADDs are basically modern tablets with some physical inputs around the screen. [0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tricorder https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tricorder [1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Personal_Access_Display_Device https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Personal_Access_Display...
  - Izkata 3y ago
    In DS9, once Jake Sisko gets into writing he's often seen using his PADD with a stylus. It is possible to enter text without the stylus using the controls at the bottom (Bashir enters "GO AWAY" for Dax in one episode when she interrupts him flirting with someone else), but it's apparently cumbersome enough that it's not normally used like that.
jfengel 3y ago
Star Trek was well aware of that problem. They often encountered "ion storms", or landing parties got conked on the head and their communicators taken, or other ways of disabling communications. That also disabled the transporter, which is a convenient way to get into stories, but also makes it easy to get out of stories. Somebody somewhere must have done a PhD thesis on the way that cell phones have changed storytelling in TV and movies. I'd actually kinda like to read that. A quick Google turns up: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254345825_Mobile_Phones_as_Narrative_Tropes https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254345825_Mobile_Ph...
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  I've counted at least three civilization-shattering technologies in Star Trek which were simply thrown in, without consideration for the long-term, for reasons of budget and convenience, but largely to maintain the Sailing Ship, Days of Yore set of metaphors. Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging, manufacturing, and so on. Notice in many high adventure films, the dinghy, the shuttle's ancestor, is often ignored. Artificial Gravity/Inertial Dampeners: We want our ship to be under our boots, and occasionally slosh around when we are enduring space weather. Casual mastery of the force of gravity so we can have an ion storm to knock us about. Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business, real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the same. I could go on and on about this, but a lot of this space opera harkens back to a time when governments would just have to trust that some captain or governor was a reasonable person to have in charge because messages back and forth would take so very long.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    > Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business, real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the same. Star Trek avoids this one by just completely ignoring the lightspeed barrier with handwavy "subspace" technobabble. They can communicate, detect, and track objects moving FTL with as much (or more) ease as done with radio tracking slow moving objects today.
kej 3y ago
That reminds me of this McSweeney's piece by Google's Peter Norvig: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/stories-that-would-have-turned-out-differently-if-the-protagonists-had-had-cell-phones https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/stories-that-would-have-...
RheingoldRiver 3y ago
It's really interesting to me how precisely you can date modern tv shows. - Do computers exist? Does everyone have a computer? Is the idea of searching the web a novel thing? - Do they have cell phones? Are they smartphones? - And now the new one, are they mentioning LLMs in some way? Like one thing that really dates The Expanse imo is the complete lack of AI technology in the books/movies. It was probably an artistic choice, but it's completely unbelievable now in a way that wasn't a problem 4 years ago.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  I can see the complete absence as being more realistic than a partial or limited presence. If there were a Dune-style Butlerian Jihad, AI could be banned altogether.
  - falcor84 3y ago
    I can't imagine any of the factions in The Expanse upholding the ban on AI while researching in secret an actually alien substance.
- dylan604 3y ago
  I think any scifi talking about LLM is just doing it wrong. Nobody watching a scifi cares about AI other than it's doing things--good or bad depends on the script. Imagine if Ripley and Dallas having a scene discussing if Mother can be trusted or if it's hallucinating. What if HAL told Dave that LLM isn't fine tuned well enough so he's sorry he can't do that at this time? I'll tell you what, that scene would be on the cutting room floor, and if left in, the audience would be snoring.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    I think HAL is actually perfectly done example of AI. As we currently see with many recent issues. It is trained over reasonably long time and then it is fed too many directives. HAL is exactly following the instructions and survival of the crew is NOT the top priority. Edit: added NOT
- 3y ago
cardiffspaceman 3y ago
What about shows set in USA with heroes who are vulnerable to gunfire? There’s a good half hour in Buffy the Vampire Slayer where a vampire lays in wait for Buffy, with a rifle loaded and ready. The show didn’t end on that episode. At least one of Buffy’s friends knew what could be done with computers, and researched floor plans and “ancient lore” online. Can writers plot a story in any given milieu? Yes. Sometimes they do seem lazy.
- Izkata 3y ago
  Or the opposite, like the demon that couldn't be harmed by any weapon - unfortunately for him, he wasn't around for the modern era. Buffy used a rocket launcher, worked just fine.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > What about shows set in USA with heroes who are vulnerable to gunfire? Buffy is more vulnerable to gunfire than the vampires are, but she's not vulnerable in the way that a human would be. She is a supernatural force just like the vampires are. This is only called out in a few episodes; it seems that the writers would mostly prefer that you forget. But compare e.g. her meeting with Glory in season 5, where the two of them get into a fistfight, and after trading a few punches Glory realizes that a human would have been dead by now.
  - aspenmayer 3y ago
    Definitions from Oxford Languages plot armor noun used to refer to the phenomenon in fiction whereby the main character is allowed to survive dangerous situations because they are needed for the plot to continue. "I do think that he can't die since the inevitable plot armor is far too thick" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_armor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_armor https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      ...was this supposed to be related to my comment in some way? Do you just wander around the internet posting random links in random places?

dylan604 3y ago

along the same line of applying modern day to older shows, I recently re-watched Stargate Atlantis. I found it amusing that with all of the futuristic tech, McKay still carried around a bulky laptop. Even the original Star Trek minimized the computer to a hand held device. The prop team kind of failed in SG:Atlantis on this one to me. How much easier would their off world adventures been with a tablet or other smaller futuristic compute device?

actionfromafar 3y ago
OTOH it was kind of cool to have a more "realistic" take of what would probably happen if the US military merged with Alien tech. Contemporary tools would be used next to new gadgets.
- dylan604 3y ago
  For SG:1 sure. For SG:Atlantis, they had access to all of the ancient's tech.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    They had access to a lot of Ancient artefacts which they didn't really understand; despite many oddities that came to mind since first watching it, I think it would still fit the setting that they didn't know how to get the Ancient's 3D printers (or whatever) to spit out better hardware — if they could make it spit out more hardware on demand, even if they "could only find one file to print", it would radically change the show. This also means there was no way for either SG-1 or Atlantis to sensibly continue past the SG-1 finale, when they got Asgard replicators and all the instruction manuals for them… and that Star Trek TNG onwards is best done without thinking too hard about the implications of almost any of the tech they demonstrate.
    - themaninthedark 3y ago
      I really didn't like the direction that SG-1 and Atlantis took. There was a novel that took place after the movie that depicted Hathor coming back and trying to take over with a simultaneous plot of the US trying to extract resources from Abydos. I though it was really we done and wished that SG-1 used it as the starting point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_literature
      - ben_w 3y ago
        I can sympathise with that; while I enjoyed both, they were a radical departure from the source material and non-trivial departure from the SG-1 pilot (which I only learned recently was initially a made-for-TV film).
        crooked-v 3y ago
        A made-for-TV film for Showtime, at that, which is why the pilot has nudity and an R rating and the rest of the series pivots into more family-friendly territory.
mrgoldenbrown 3y ago
STar Trek's handheld computers never made sense to me, unless they have some crazy good AI that does all the work for you based on vague inputs. How do you input anything like code quickly on such a tiny screen?
- dylan604 3y ago
  how much code do you enter into a mobile device? these aren't the devices to do that with. they just run apps that serve the purpose at hand dictated by the script. when ever you want to send a text, you don't enter the code for that. neither did anyone on an away team that needed to take air samples, or scan someone's health. seems like you had an idea not fully thought out
  - Izkata 3y ago
    > neither did anyone on an away team that needed to take air samples, or scan someone's health. You're thinking of tricorders[0], GP is talking about PADDs[1]. Tricorders are mostly read-only sensors that need to be pre-configured (with some ability to switch between configurations during use), while PADDs are basically modern tablets with some physical inputs around the screen. [0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tricorder https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tricorder [1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Personal_Access_Display_Device https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Personal_Access_Display...
- Izkata 3y ago
  In DS9, once Jake Sisko gets into writing he's often seen using his PADD with a stylus. It is possible to enter text without the stylus using the controls at the bottom (Bashir enters "GO AWAY" for Dax in one episode when she interrupts him flirting with someone else), but it's apparently cumbersome enough that it's not normally used like that.

jfengel 3y ago

Star Trek was well aware of that problem. They often encountered "ion storms", or landing parties got conked on the head and their communicators taken, or other ways of disabling communications. That also disabled the transporter, which is a convenient way to get into stories, but also makes it easy to get out of stories. Somebody somewhere must have done a PhD thesis on the way that cell phones have changed storytelling in TV and movies. I'd actually kinda like to read that. A quick Google turns up: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254345825_Mobile_Phones_as_Narrative_Tropes https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254345825_Mobile_Ph...

at_a_remove 3y ago
I've counted at least three civilization-shattering technologies in Star Trek which were simply thrown in, without consideration for the long-term, for reasons of budget and convenience, but largely to maintain the Sailing Ship, Days of Yore set of metaphors. Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging, manufacturing, and so on. Notice in many high adventure films, the dinghy, the shuttle's ancestor, is often ignored. Artificial Gravity/Inertial Dampeners: We want our ship to be under our boots, and occasionally slosh around when we are enduring space weather. Casual mastery of the force of gravity so we can have an ion storm to knock us about. Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business, real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the same. I could go on and on about this, but a lot of this space opera harkens back to a time when governments would just have to trust that some captain or governor was a reasonable person to have in charge because messages back and forth would take so very long.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  > Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business, real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the same. Star Trek avoids this one by just completely ignoring the lightspeed barrier with handwavy "subspace" technobabble. They can communicate, detect, and track objects moving FTL with as much (or more) ease as done with radio tracking slow moving objects today.

kej 3y ago

That reminds me of this McSweeney's piece by Google's Peter Norvig: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/stories-that-would-have-turned-out-differently-if-the-protagonists-had-had-cell-phones https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/stories-that-would-have-...

RheingoldRiver 3y ago

It's really interesting to me how precisely you can date modern tv shows. - Do computers exist? Does everyone have a computer? Is the idea of searching the web a novel thing? - Do they have cell phones? Are they smartphones? - And now the new one, are they mentioning LLMs in some way? Like one thing that really dates The Expanse imo is the complete lack of AI technology in the books/movies. It was probably an artistic choice, but it's completely unbelievable now in a way that wasn't a problem 4 years ago.

kstrauser 3y ago
I can see the complete absence as being more realistic than a partial or limited presence. If there were a Dune-style Butlerian Jihad, AI could be banned altogether.
- falcor84 3y ago
  I can't imagine any of the factions in The Expanse upholding the ban on AI while researching in secret an actually alien substance.
dylan604 3y ago
I think any scifi talking about LLM is just doing it wrong. Nobody watching a scifi cares about AI other than it's doing things--good or bad depends on the script. Imagine if Ripley and Dallas having a scene discussing if Mother can be trusted or if it's hallucinating. What if HAL told Dave that LLM isn't fine tuned well enough so he's sorry he can't do that at this time? I'll tell you what, that scene would be on the cutting room floor, and if left in, the audience would be snoring.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I think HAL is actually perfectly done example of AI. As we currently see with many recent issues. It is trained over reasonably long time and then it is fed too many directives. HAL is exactly following the instructions and survival of the crew is NOT the top priority. Edit: added NOT
3y ago

cardiffspaceman 3y ago

What about shows set in USA with heroes who are vulnerable to gunfire? There’s a good half hour in Buffy the Vampire Slayer where a vampire lays in wait for Buffy, with a rifle loaded and ready. The show didn’t end on that episode. At least one of Buffy’s friends knew what could be done with computers, and researched floor plans and “ancient lore” online. Can writers plot a story in any given milieu? Yes. Sometimes they do seem lazy.

Izkata 3y ago
Or the opposite, like the demon that couldn't be harmed by any weapon - unfortunately for him, he wasn't around for the modern era. Buffy used a rocket launcher, worked just fine.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> What about shows set in USA with heroes who are vulnerable to gunfire? Buffy is more vulnerable to gunfire than the vampires are, but she's not vulnerable in the way that a human would be. She is a supernatural force just like the vampires are. This is only called out in a few episodes; it seems that the writers would mostly prefer that you forget. But compare e.g. her meeting with Glory in season 5, where the two of them get into a fistfight, and after trading a few punches Glory realizes that a human would have been dead by now.
- aspenmayer 3y ago
  Definitions from Oxford Languages plot armor noun used to refer to the phenomenon in fiction whereby the main character is allowed to survive dangerous situations because they are needed for the plot to continue. "I do think that he can't die since the inevitable plot armor is far too thick" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_armor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_armor https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    ...was this supposed to be related to my comment in some way? Do you just wander around the internet posting random links in random places?