Exo-suits are a long way off. The US army is focusing on a more achievable mobility assisting frame (ie, one that augments the body and reduces fatigue instead of an Iron Man suit) and even that is making questionable process with the biggest issue being power. Battery technology hasn't come far enough for even a modest exoskeleton to be more than plausible. The Iron Man suit route the Japanese military is just starting to consider (because of course Japan would be going for powered armour) is a dream for 2050. The stresses of having something work in a military setting are undoubtedly different than what is acceptable for a civilian one but in the end if the suit runs out of energy after 3 hours and suddenly grampa is wearing 2000 lbs of immobile steel in the local Wal-Mart it's still a big problem for everyone involved.

Exactly. How do you power the damn thing? There was a prototype Aliens type exoskeleton made that would enable someone to move large amounts of cargo without risk of injury, but it had to run off of a long cord. Very limited use.

It's all fine to dream up these things, but powering it is another matter. If you were carrying around one of those blasters you see in the old sci-fi movies (or Kirk's phaser, for that matter) you would be carrying enough energy to flatten half a city, contained in a thing small enough to be carried in one hand. I wouldn't want to carry something like that. Similarly, what happens if the battery in the exoskeleton goes bad all at once? (I'm envisioning it spontaneously doing Cossack dances, which would actually be pretty cool.)

That's why I posted this. It's almost religious in nature that all technology needs to succeed is enough funding and it'll happen, in the same way that if you paid a high enough water bill, you could eventually flood your neighborhood.

And the phaser thing is one of the many nitpicks I have for Star Trek. The amount of energy in their personal weaponry was so immense, they should have been able to solve any number of power-related problems for the ship by just plugging a bunch of phasers into whatever wasn't getting enough juice to solve the immediate dilemma.

In retrospect one of the cool things about Evangelion is that they paid some mind to the absurdity of the power needs of mechs. They actually tether theirs up with long power cables and wipe out an entire city electrical grid just to provide the juice for one laser rifle shot, haha. It was oddly realistic about that aspect.

Don't let the spaceships fool you, Star Trek is a fantasy universe; all those phasers and warp drives and dilithium crystals and such make up the setting's magic system. It's fine for a magic system to break the rules of science (that's what makes it magic!), as long as that system remains internally consistent.

So if you don't want your magic spaceship able to be powered by your magic guns (and you don't, because powerful magic has to be unreliable so your story remains ultimately more about people than about magic), you just hand-wave it away -- "oh, sure, a phaser puts out 2 stupowatts of power, but the Enterprise requires 19 giga-stupowatts just to keep its antimatter containment field from collapsing and destroying the universe!" -- and you still have perfectly good fantasy. All you have to do is remember the rules you've established and not break them later because you've written yourself into a corner and there's a deadline coming up. (Honestly I'm not a big enough ST fan to know whether they fell into that trap or not, but it's a common pitfall in bad episodic fantasy.)

That's the thing, the whole "remembering the rules." They established in the TNG era that shuttlecraft were pretty badass on their own, having shields, phasers, and transporters of their own, yet nobody ever thought to use them for any of those things when the Enterprise's own systems had been shot to hell for an episode.

I distinctly remember all of the shuttle versions of those things being decidedly inferior, though. E.g. The shields were primarily for defense against a similarly sized entity or atmospheric reentry. The transporter had a massive range limitation. The life support system could only offset the average number of crew.

This is like saying that just because most police vehicles have some note pads, paper clips and rubber bands in them, when they run out of bullets they can obviously improvise a slingshot and it's just as good.

Except how many times did they need just ONE phaser shot or just ONE dude beamed up from a planet or even across the ship?

And this criticism completely bypasses how they've found godlike tech before and completely ignored it in later episodes. I mean, in one ep, Barclay gets his IQ boosted and juices the shields to the tune of 300% (for whatever that means), yet the shields remain just as fragile as ever in later episodes. Did Geordi decide humanity wasn't ready for uber-shields and delete whatever Barclay typed?

It's one of Trek's biggest problems. They have all this technology that can be used to fundamentally alter what it means to be human, yet they don't use it sensibly. JJ Abrams had a shot at fixing this at least a little, but nooooo, he gave us trans-warp transporters (eliminating most of the reasons to have starships) and immortality blood. Yay...

To that I say: Don't think about it. Just try to enjoy the story and don't nit pick the plot holes. You'll enjoy yourself a lot more that way.

Fie unto that!

Here's the thing: I like to have both a good story and a decent plot. I hand-wave plenty of things when it comes to sci-fi TV, but shows that go on for 4+ seasons and try to build a universe really do need to pay attention to their own continuity. It doesn't help that no Trek show had a head writer, so it was a crap shoot as to what the scribe du jour paid attention to. This was especially problematic with Voyager, where each writer portrayed Janeway differently, so taken as a whole, she's a bipolar schizophrenic who thinks the Prime Directive is awesome one day and something to be casually disregarded the next.

To be honest, 'Trek's continuity, both for characters and for their world, is laughable even if it was a YouTube drama.

The closest any of the shows got to having an ongoing storyline that was halfway coherent was DS-9, and that was only because it was aping Babylon-5 most of its run. Enterprise's final season also had decent continuity with 2-3 episode arcs, but by then even good writing couldn't save a show with such poorly-cast actors.

One sci-fi show that I think is a great model for episodic TV with an arc was Stargate SG-1. In that show, when they found some incredible MacGuffin that didn't get destroyed, chances were you'd see it pop up in a future episode as we tried to reverse-engineer it. For example, after seasons of finding and salvaging bits of Goa'uld spaceships, the Air Force is eventually able to build its own attack fighters and even a starship based on the knowledge they'd gained. They paid attention to their own stories and the show was much better for it. I sincerely hope any future Star Trek TV show does the same, because I'm kind of sick of seeing these concepts I love (the Federation, exploration, the unknown, etc.) running into this rigid framework of pressing the reset button at the end of each program.

'Trek needs to grow up if it's going to survive.

That's why I really liked star control 2. Human technology was amazing for humans, but generally sucked.

Yeah, I tend to be a drag at sci-fi movies. Or at least in discussing them later. I went on a rant about Qi-gong Jinn's light saber in the last Star Wars and how much energy it would take to cut through a foot of steel, and my kids yelled at me.

Same here. I hate it when shit just doesn't make sense. I mean, melting steel aside, lightsaber technology should be EVERYWHERE. It should be used in can openers, surgical tools, pocket knives, etc. The giant laser-sword version is for the truly suicidal, given how easily it chops limbs off, but mounting them on droids for mining operations should be a thing.

"A transhumanist must safeguard value in the universe"

Does anyone know what the fuck that means? I'm trying to figure out if this is the "morality" piece of the laws. Kind of like, "Don't kill people," but written so vaguely that maybe it's okay to kill people.

While we are at it, let's stop wasting power and money on street lights. How many hundreds of millions of dollars do we spend on that now, across the country? Instead, let's put all those resources into developing head mounted sonar with direct neural interfaces for the blind. Yeah, that seems perfectly reasonable.

Why not put a few huge mirrors in orbit so it's daytime for the whole planet all the time? There are no downsides to that.

Uh, hello? Night-vision optics in our upgraded cyber-eyes. They can be ad-supported.

Just what I want is ad supported eyes. I'll spend the extra $30, thanks anyway.

Where I live, there are sidewalks, but nobody uses them. All walking, running, standing around drinking, etc, happens in the street. Sidewalks are empty.

Same here, but I don't quite understand why. I live in an older urban neighborhood. We have pretty nice sidewalks, and there's a lot of on-street parking as well as driveways.

People walk, jog, push strollers, walk their dogs, etc. in the street. No one will tell me why. Either those I ask don't know, or those who do it are ashamed to tell me. I mean, the street is where those big moving metal boxes are that can kill you, so what's the appeal?

When I first noticed it, it was mostly wanna-be gangstas that would walk in the street, two or three abreast, but now it's everyone of every age. WTF? Is asphalt with cars on it more appealing than concrete with no cars?

Anyway, I don't think we need to abolish sidewalks per se, since obviously we have pedestrians. We just need to find out why they're not using the ones provided in favor of potentially being run over.