But it does have 4G and GPS and all.

Just because you don’t? I use e-mail as my main way of messaging people I know and like.

You are using a fake app.

How did we get from “in the future, humanity can build a utopia if we leave conservatism in the past and boldly go to explore the wonders of space” to “the power of friendship and believing in good® is the only thing saving humanity from the cruel world we have built”?

I mean, it fits the Americanized capitalist realism of new Trek, but it’s depressing. When did we downgrade back to platitudes and traditionalist values?

Yarr, her head full of goo.

I feel so talked down to by these. They’re even more unfunny/more quippy than the first season of Orville, and that’s saying something.

Why can’t some writers these days not just let something absurd be played straight and let the viewers laugh? Why do we need a character explaining the joke out loud? “Uh-oh, that alert isn’t part of the song! Guyss!” How to ruin a decently funny situation in one easy step.

Imagine if movies like “The Naked Gun”/“Police Squad” or “Airplane!” made the characters explain and comment on every funny moment.

Then if replicator technology isn’t able to kick start the process, how does transporter technology do it?

It physically pushes or moves the field, it does not recreate it.

Depends on the process by which a neural energy field first is created by an organism; whether it’s a “one time charge” thing or just a byproduct of their brains. If the latter, that’d throw the entire theory away since that just means you can replicate a brain and it starts going on by itself.

Fair, but I did say “we” cannot replicate life (with a big fat hypothetical “yet” at the end)

In the same way that you might be able to perfectly replicate a fireplace and kindling wood but need a lighter to make it burn, there simply might be a process to “kickstart a brain” that goes beyond its physical structure, some way to “charge” it with neuro-electric energy that happens naturally but cannot so far be replicated. Star Trek never shied away from quasi-religious concepts like “the sanctity of life”.

That’s difficult, honestly. Most of the novels I read don’t put much of a focus on the societies they live in, more on the characters or cool phenomena. I personally liked the depiction of Earth in the Department of Temporal Investigation novel series (which, by the way, is excellent anyway), but even that wasn’t very specific.

As for fan fiction, I personally try to write much more plausible fiction that doesn’t take “human-ish” patterns for granted; e. g. some of the species we explore don’t even form nation states, I put more of a focus on non-humanoids, I try to make Starfleet and Federation names and representation equally distributed among member species (e. g. no USS Einstein, but instead like USS Rogra jav Baur, after the Tellarite diplomat), and look at super underrepresented peoples, subcultures, professions and areas to flesh them out a bit. I also assume that in the future we are talking about, important places are all over Earth, not just in the USA and Europe. Like, the hero ship freighter that I am writing about currently is called the SS Kyakhta, after the Russia-China trade route in the late middle ages. The Captain is a non-binary elderly Kaferian. And the only human crewmate is from Daşoguz, Turkmenistan; which developed into quite a bustling center for high-quality engineering schools.

But I haven’t read much other fan fiction with the same values; most Trek fan fiction is centered around the main characters of the shows, usually in a romantic or sexual manner. Not that that’s bad, I just wish there was more general, plausible-for-a-show fiction too.

One thing that Trek consistently garbles up is evolution and biology in a larger sense, and it’s really frustrating! I can accept some premises to make the science possible (like, for example, that parallel timelines attract in order to merge, making the ‘butterfly effect’ not a thing and things like the time-loop in that one TNG episode possible where the universe doesn’t behave deterministically), but that evolution isn’t just a side-effect of efficient species living longer on average, but actually something encoded in the genes that just has to be “activated” somehow epigenetically… ehhh. I guess you can handwave that with the progenitors somehow, given that the DNA of humanoids is already artificially constructed.

All of these had some external source making the duplication possible. The Riker duplication for example was an accident that could only have happened in the strange atmospheric layout of the rock he was on.

Some space phenomenon duplicating an existing electromagnetic field is not entirely impossible to imagine, if limited to that phenomenon, but creating it artificially in a transporter, practically on demand, is a different story.

Hence why I theorize that the neural energy field is completely independent from the vessel it occupies; just like people can “possess” others. In “Rascals”, the neural energy fields were transported correctly, only their bodies were misconfigured in some way (a way that I really can’t be bothered to theorize about, lol).

I assume that the same way the transporter beam was reflected and split two ways, the neural energy field running along the beam was duplicated; but that was in the episode a freak occurrence due to the planet’s unique physical makeup, and I don’t think it’s easy to replicate outside that environment.

The more content, the more people check regularly, the more content. It’s a cycle. Because there’s not much there currently, there aren’t many people. We all have a duty to post things.

When I write fan fiction I make a point out of exploring parts of the Trek universe we have not seen at all or only very little of. It’s very fun, especially because you can finally subvert some of the more illogical things, like why almost every species seems to be monocultural under one flag and name with one home planet that’s named after the species, why humanity is so over-represented in the Federation, why there are no spacefaring nation states, and all.

Plus given the track record of how the Federation is represented in recent Trek especially, I don’t trust them to portray actual paradise.

In Picard we see car-centric Americanized cities, the FNN just being a thinly veiled once-again American CNN clone, everything’s about the West and its culture again (this was already bad in old Trek, like why San Fran and Paris are the most important cities and how the Xindi weapon fucked up the USA instead of literally any other place on Earth). It’s like they think being in space and having technology makes paradise, and culture wouldn’t change at all.

I trust single novel authors more than huge production companies and writing rooms.

Moneyless society doesn’t mean a post-scarcity society. There’s clearly poverty on some Federation fringe worlds. Only Earth and the other core worlds really are paradise. The others have always been implied to work towards their bettering but not being quite there yet.

Hey, computational linguist here who works with large language models. This is the most ridiculous thing I ever read.