This is a very funny way to describe TNG, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone argue that Star Trek is a hard sci-fi.
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And just like his technology, Q's love for his receding hairline is beyond our comprehension.
Who calls Star Trek hard sci-fi?
Some people use hard scifi to mean consistent with its established rules, other people use it to mean consistent with our current knowledge of physics. Star Trek isn't either.
Hard Sci fi would be more like The Expanse or maybe The Martian. Trek is just regular SciFi.
The fun one is Star Wars, which is more Fantasy than SciFi
The initial world of the Expanse is definitely something I'd call hard sci-fi, but then the story happens.
Trek is space opera.
Wars is a fairy tale (there’s a princess, evil emperor, magic, etc.)
Trek is utopia with whispers of benevolent authoritarianism. The Federation are the Borg at some level, looking to assimilate all they come across despite their morality that appeals to the viewers of the show.
Wars is dystopia with magic. Most people appear poor, all the power and money is concentrated in a few places. Gangs and warlords everywhere. Always someone trying to take more, whether it be Hutt or political fascists.
The former I just call "good storytelling/world building." If your rules aren't consistent then it's poorly written.
Star Trek is just 1960s US jingoism wrapped up in some kind of pseudo-scientific veneer.
what's it like being the most cynical person on earth
Yeah but besides that, it's all hard science. There's breeding between genetically disconnected species, making new technologies by "reversing the polarity" of things, teleporting matter/life thousands of miles without any technology to rebuild matter on the other end, and inconsistently defining warp speeds where warp 10 is "infinite" velocity and causes you to devolve (into a salamander thing... which isn't a part of human ancestry) but also some ships have gone over warp 10 just casually traveling in the original series. That's some hard science there.
There's an episode of TNG that tries to explain the inter-species breeding thing. Turns out, ancient aliens spread their DNA across the galaxy, and that's why every alien looks like a human with prosthetics added to their ears, nose, forehead, etc.
Yea, I'm aware, but evolution/genetic drift is a thing. We can't breed with even our closest terrestrial cousin species with a common ancestor from 5-8 million years ago, which would have come from that same seeded genetic line. Why would we be able to breed freely with a Klingon whose last shared genetics were this seed from 4 billion years ago?
We can’t breed with even our closest terrestrial cousin species with a common ancestor from 5-8 million years ago
... we can't?
Dammit! All that effort, all those lacerations and broken bones, for nothing!
We can’t breed with even our closest terrestrial cousin species with a common ancestor from 5-8 million years ago
It might be possible, but there haven't been many attempts given the obvious ethical and "what the fuck is wrong with you!?" reasons.
Excuse me that didn't devolve into salamanders they went through accelerated evolution and the only reason they didn't turn into crabs is the writers suck
"who voluntarily has a receding hairline"
Hilarious that anyone would think an ambiguisouly queer trickster God would give the slightest of fucks about human beauty standards, and doesn't just think it looks fitting for its own standards.
TIL whether something is hard sci-fi apparently has a lot to do with baldness.
Have we stopped the trend of putting excessively large and unnecessary borders around social media re-posts? Please let it be so.
just because a being can materialise and dematerialise at will in any costume you can imagine does make them a god
It's kinda funny when people oversimplify things to black vs. white in order to mock other people and feel good about themselves.
It's tricky because there are several potential meanings of, "hard sci fi".
Some people specifically mean that it lacks any "woke" elements.
Sometimes it means that it doesn't address any social issues and is limited to an action movie with fantasy physics.
Sometimes it's about a standard of how realistic the physics fantasy physics are.
I probably wouldn't count Star Trek as "hard sci fi" on any of these criteria and that's not a bad thing. In general, good science fiction isn't really about the science. It's about the people and the science is just a vehicle to explore questions and ideas about people.
Ive never heard of anyone use the term to refer to anything but the third point so i was confused by this meme. Thank you
I've never, ever heard anyone use either of the first two "definitions." I read a stupid amount of SF and reviews of SF. I'm going to go out on a limb and say you've just heard some people using a term incorrectly, which doesn't constitute an alternate definition.
It's a pretty standard response from when people are trying to disguise their hatred for any hint of progressive politics. They won't say, "I don't like this show because they have a black lesbian." They'll try to dismiss it as fake sci-fi by responding with, "I only like hard sci-fi."
Your second description is literally the definition of soft scifi. No one on planet earth calls comics hard science fiction.
Anyway, Trek is a little hard in that it DOES deal with social issues, and scientific implications, and does what scifi is meant for. But it also has teleporting and magic gods.
I’m not familiar with the characters, can some kind person provide screenshots?
Edit: TIL Picard is French
IT'S MY FUCKING MBTI TYPE AGAIN WHAT DID I TELL YOU PEOPLE. Sorry I recently got fascinated by the connections between esoteric spirituality and Jungian psychology but when I did my mbti then looked up fictional characters they're all either trickersters or just literally Lucifer.



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