The Computers of Star Trek

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dedicated with love to my parents, Sam
and Freda Goldberg.

Lois H. Gresh

 

To Dr. Marshall Sparberg and
Dr. Karen Spurgash—the best doctors
I've ever met.

 

Robert Weinberg

The authors thank Larry Charet of Chicago, who made available to us his video library of every episode of all the
Star Trek
television shows as well as the
Star Trek
movies. Without his help, this book would not have been possible. Thanks also to our agent, Lori Perkins, her associate, Susan Rabiner, and our editor, Bill Frucht, for reasons too many to mention.

Since its beginnings in the nineteenth century with the writings of Shelly, Verne and Wells, science fiction has always tried to describe what might be, what could happen, what life will be like in times to come. Unlike all other fiction, it's not concerned (at least overtly) with what exists now but what will happen later.

In 1966, the most popular science-fiction television show ever,
Star Trek,
sent its crew on an ongoing mission to explore new worlds and seek out new civilizations. A third of a century later that mission continues with new starships and new crewmembers but the same dream. Our fascination with the future remains unquenched and it seems quite possible that viewers will still be watching
Star Trek
when voyages into outer space are daily occurrences.

Intelligent plotting, combined with vivid attention to detail, makes the
Star Trek
universe the most complex future world ever created. It's a setting that's been described in more than five hundred hours of television and movies, a half-dozen computer games, a detailed chronology, and an encyclopedia. It has its own
language, Klingon, and dozens of international fan conventions. A vast number of novels have been published featuring characters from the various shows. There are Star Trek trivia books, photo books, postcard albums, and several technical manuals. Books have been written about the physics, the biology, and even the philosophy of
Star Trek
.

Not surprisingly, events taking place in the universe of
Star Trek
, three hundred and fifty years from now, are strikingly similar to incidents in our everyday world. This is not only because good storytelling reflects universal human concerns that do not go away with changes in technology (although, as science fiction keeps reminding us, they constantly re-emerge in new guises). The real reason for the similarity is that, after all, no science fiction can do more than project into the future the concerns of the time in which it was written. Every word, every image, every moment of every episode of
Star Trek
depicts ideas that, by definition, already exist.

It's especially important to remember this when examining, as we do in this book, the way
Star Trek
deals with computer technology. The world of the twenty-third century as envisioned by the original series is based on the technology and culture of the 1960s. The universe of
The Next Generation
is vastly different, considering the scientific and social changes that took place in the two decades following the first adventures. Today's adventures,
Deep Space Nine
and
Voyager
, reflect even greater changes that have occurred in the past decade.

These incredible advances are no better demonstrated than in the evolution of computers in the various shows. The giant thinking machines of the original series seem laughably primitive compared to the smaller and much more versatile hand-held units of the 1980s'
Next Generation
. Just as the computers of
The Next Generation
seem archaic when compared to those on
Voyager
. As our world changes, so does our view of the future world of
Star Trek
. In a sense, each series is a photograph of tomorrow taken with a camera firmly rooted in today.

Will the universe of
Star Trek
ever come to pass? The answer is clear: it won't. To understand why, you need only look at the shows of the original series and think about how much we'd need to forget in order to build a world like that. But by showing you how each series reflects the ideas and technologies of its time—and even the current shows are years behind what's happening in the research labs—we hope to get you thinking about how unimaginably different the real future is going to be.

For brevity, we have used the following abbreviations to refer to episodes of the various Star Trek television series:

Although the words
Star Trek
are formally part of all the movie titles (e.g.,
Star Trek
—
Insurrection
), we use only the latter part of the title (
Insurrection
) except where necessary to avoid confusion.

Since this book is the collaboration of two authors, the plural
we
represents the authors' joint viewpoint. (We definitely don't have delusions of royalty.)

In the
Deep Space Nine
episode “One Little Ship,” Chief O'Brien and Dr. Julian Bashir shrink to perhaps finger size and enter the computer consoles of the starship
Defiant,
trying to find a security protocol interlink. Once inside the computer, they sit on “benches” (which could well be live circuits!), wander among flashing lights reminiscent of LEDs (light-emitting diodes), and then become lost. They manage to find their goal only by using a large isolinear chip as a landmark. Moving huge pieces of hardware around like packing crates, they fix the security interlink. Then they get back into a shuttlecraft, also proportionately shrunk, and fire on some big lizardlike aliens, killing them. The
Defiant
is saved.

Of course all this is absurd. The
Star Trek
computers will have components the size of large molecules (many of their components undoubtedly
are
large molecules). If O'Brien and Bashir are as big as cockroaches, what exactly are they shoving around? What are those flashing lights for? For that matter, why does the bridge have physical consoles at all instead of virtual-reality projections?

The universe of
Star Trek
is a paradise of computers. They're everywhere and do just about everything. They're the glue that binds the entire
Star Trek
phenomenon together. Without them, everything else collapses into sheer fantasy. Without computers, this future civilization would vanish.

It's the computers—and everything they make possible—that make
Star Trek
seem like a show about the future, our future. But how believable is it really? Are these machines actually attainable, and are the tasks they perform possible? Or is much of what we see a sham, a future built on magic and sleight-of-hand, a universe that could only exist on the screen and never in real life? Most intriguing of all, will the
Star Trek
future fail to happen not because the technology is too outlandish, but because it's not outlandish enough?

As we watch
Star Trek
, we often feel like O'Brien and Bashir. We stumble around, trying to feel as if we're in the twenty-fourth century, but we keep tripping over components that look like leftovers from an old Heathkit catalogue. In part this is testament to
Star Trek's
success. It's only because the show is so interesting and fun to watch that it's jarring to be reminded we're not looking at the real twenty-fourth century, only at a twentieth-century drama that, like all science fiction, is more about the present than the future.

Each
Star Trek
series reflects a distinct mindset, a projection into the future of the beliefs and concerns of the era in which it was produced. Thus the original series universe of the twenty-third century, as imagined in the late 1960s, is a much different place from the twenty-fourth-century cosmos visualized in the late 1980s and 1990s.
The Next Generation
was literally the next generation of TV science fiction, and nowhere is this generational difference more apparent than in the characters' attitudes about computers.

Computers are everywhere in the later programs. The
Enterprise
computer is without question the most important system on
the ship—as it is on
Voyager
and every other starship in the Star Trek universe. Computers are at the heart of
Deep Space Nine
and every other artificial environment. From what little has been shown of life on various Federation planets, as well as the lives of Federation allies and enemies, computers are apparently critical everywhere. The population of an entire world, Bynaus, is so closely tied to the planetary computer that its failure signals the end of all life. (“11001001,”
TNG
)

The
Enterprise
crew in
The Next Generation
is surrounded by computers and relies on them for everything from food to information to communication to entertainment. The crew even lives with a sentient computer—Data—in its midst.

Every sentient being in the universe of the twenty-fourth century is computer literate. Episodes of
Deep Space Nine
that show Keiko O'Brien's school, as well as
Next Generation
stories featuring Worf's son, Alexander, show young children using computers as part of their earliest education. Crewmembers on all of the starships carry PADDs (personal access display devices), hand-held computers that provide instant networking to the ship's main computer core. In the current shows, being comfortable with computers isn't merely important or even necessary: It's inseparable from being a functioning member of society.

That's not nearly as true in the original series. In those adventures, the original
Enterprise
's life-support, weapons, and navigation systems are obviously run by a central computer. This mainframe processes data gathered from the sensors and tricorders, serves as a huge storehouse of information, and even analyzes difficult social problems (“A Piece of the Action,” TOS). Yet despite the machine's importance to the ship, a strong distrust of computers is woven into many of the original series' episodes.

The late 1960s were a period of great economic and social change in the United States. It was a time when America's most
powerful enemy was a nation in which the ideals of rational order and control had produced a nightmarish, dehumanizing society. The ease with which utopia could shade into dystopia was a major concern for science-fiction writers. Computers were like fire: powerful tools if kept firmly under control. Several episodes reflect the concern that the absolutely rational, collectivist values of the computer would take over and subjugate human freedom.