More to the point, the biobeds on Trek are merely extensions of medical technology that’s been around for years. They’re nothing new or different. Star Trek’s view of the future of medicine is bland and remarkably short-sighted.
When Worf’s badly injured in an accident, shattering seven of his vertebrae and crushing his spinal cord, he’s told he’ll probably be permanently paralyzed (“Ethics,” TNG). Dr. Toby Russell, a neurogeneticist consulted by Dr. Crusher, wants to use an experimental nanotech medical technique to repair the damage. She does so, though Dr. Crusher feels that Russell is taking unnecessary risks with patient’s lives.
More than three centuries from now, and nanotechnology is still experimental? How then does the Doctor on Voyager solve the Borg’s problem with Species 8472 in just a few weeks? His solution requires a detailed knowledge of nanoprobes and how to modify them. Yet a crushed spinal cord can’t be repaired by Federation science using this same technology. Remember, this is the same world in which science has cured heart disease, liver damage, and emphysema (“The Neutral Zone,” TNG) and can bring back to life people who died from those problems. Not logical, as Mr. Spock might suggest.
Speaking of Spock, when Dr. McCoy needs to operate on his father, Sarek, the doctor complains he’s never done surgery on a Vulcan before (“Journey to Babel,” TOS). Since the Enterprise computer core holds nearly all the information in the Federation, shouldn’t it contain detailed information about how to conduct such an operation? Or why not check a computer operation simulator, as developed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, capable of reproducing operations in virtual reality environments, so the doctor could run through the operation before attempting it?1
Or, if Dr. McCoy needs some expert advice, why not use subspace communication to discuss his problems with doctors on Vulcan? Similar consultations took place in 1993, in Mogadishu, Somalia, when specialists broadcast pictures of medical problems they couldn’t solve from a tent hospital and received answers from all over the world by phone and fax.2
Again, the future of medicine looks a lot different from what’s shown on Trek. Where, for instance, are the “smart-shirts”? “Smart-Shirts” are garments developed with funding from the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They look like ordinary t-shirts (or Star Trek uniforms) but have plastic optic fibers and other special fibers sewn into the material and computer processors built into the clothing. The shirts are already being called “one of the genuine breakthroughs for the next century” by one of its inventors, Sundaresan Jayaraman of the Georgia Institute of Technology.3
The fibers in the shirt work together to create a network of data about the wearer’s health. Sensors send information on heartbeat, breathing, and other vital signs to a miniature processor worn on the user’s belt. This information can be sent by satellite anywhere on Earth.
The shirts can immediately detect heart attacks. Or sense heat buildup on the skin, alerting firefighters to possible flashpoints in buildings.
More astonishing, these “smart-shirts” can even monitor bullet wounds. When a bullet tears through the fiber, the location is immediately noted by the network of optic mesh throughout the shirt. Incredibly thin microphones in the material record sound waves as the bullet passes through the victim’s body, creating a digital picture of how deep and where the slug went. Such information is then immediately sent by satellite to doctors, and medics can be immediately dispatched to the scene of the shooting. In the meantime, sensors also detect whether blood is coming from a vein or artery.
Perhaps the most amazing fact about these “smart-shirts” is that they cost approximately $30. While not yet licensed for public use (they’re still in the final development stage for the Army), there’s little doubt that they will become available to the general public within the next few years. At first, they will probably be used mainly for elderly people in poor health or in nursing homes. But as their sensors become more refined, they will undoubtedly become popular garments for anyone suffering any type of health risk as well as for athletes and others who want to monitor their own cardiovascular functions.
Real-life computer medical technology is quickly outpacing Star Trek. Pushing the concept of “smart-shirts” three centuries into the future would give us uniforms that would not only protect the crew but heal them when injured. But Trek medicine is both too conservative and too melodramatic. Such as when it comes to plagues.
With the advances in medicine over the past hundred years, epidemics are infrequent and quickly isolated and controlled. Despite a plethora of non-fiction books and novels about “hot zones,” killer plagues are not breaking out all over the globe. True, the possibility of chemical and biological warfare is a grim reminder of human stupidity. Yet, except for AIDS, the scares that draw headlines in the West—such as mad cow disease or flesh-eating bacteria—result from small numbers of actual cases. But, that seems not to apply to our Star Trek future.
The crew of the original series encounter more than their share of plagues and killer viruses. In “The Naked Time,” a landing party sent to the planet Psi 2000 discovers that the science team stationed there are all dead. Though the investigators from the Enterprise are wearing protective gear, one crewmember has a bad itch on his chin and removes his gloves to scratch, thus becoming infected with the deadly virus. (This scratching moment has to be one of the most embarrassingly stupid scenes ever in a Star Trek episode.)
In the original series episode “Miri,” an away team discovers a destroyed civilization on a planet much like Earth. Here, an experiment to prolong life has resulted in a plague that killed off the adult population, while slowing the aging of the children to one month per century.
And on a mission to the Gamma Hydra IV research colony, the crew discovers all the colonists dead or dying of an aging disease. Needless to say, the disease soon strikes the crew. McCoy, as usual, develops an antidote in the nick of time (“The Deadly Years”).
In three years of the original series, there are eight encounters with killer diseases. While we realize that some colonies are not fully established, it seems hard to believe that they don’t have medical facilities capable of handling these emergencies. In any case, do the vaccines have to be delivered by hand? Can’t formulas be sent via subspace? And what about a comprehensive medical library containing the chemical formulas necessary for synthesizing of the vaccines?
While deadly infections are less common in The Next Generation, they still occur with alarming frequency. Early in their explorations, Picard et al. rendezvous with the science vessel Tsiolkovsky only to find all eighty of its crew dead. They’ve been killed by a virus similar to the notorious Psi 2000 disease. Once again, the away team brings the infection back to the crew of the Enterprise (“The Naked Now”).
Several months later, the Enterprise is sent to transport specimens of a plasma plague to a science station in hopes of finding a cure for an epidemic on the planet Rachelis (“The Child”). Soon after, the Enterprise receives a distress call from the starship Lantree. The crew of the ship is found dead, from what looks like old age. It’s another deadly virus, this time an artificial one, caused by genetically engineered children with powerful immune systems (“Unnatural Selection”).
We could go on.
Actually, these incidents aren’t surprising when we consider away-team policies on Star Trek. In all of the various Trek series, we’re treated to scene after scene of people beaming down to a planet without any protective gear. When they return, rarely are they put in quarantine before being allowed to roam the ship. Presumably this is because the transporter contains a “biofilter” that screens out alien microbes—but it is clearly not 100 percent reliable. In Trek, it’s easier to visit a totally unknown planet than it is for a traveler today to go to Africa or Asia.
Medicine today is incredibly advanced from what it was only fifty years ago, much less centuries past. New discoveries are being made constantly, and there is no reason t
o believe that the next few decades will not be filled with even more startling advances. Given the state of medical technology three centuries from now, combined with the tremendous speed and memory of computers, it’s hard to believe that so many infections will present greater problems than the cuts and scrapes Dr. Crusher heals with her “dermal regenerator.” Infectious microbes survive by making copies of themselves—which means that the members of a strain of microbes will be pretty much identical. They’ll all have the same surface chemistry. The body’s natural immune system works by identifying particular chemicals (called “antigens”) on the surfaces of microbes, and synthesizing complementary proteins, called antibodies, to attack them. Any infectious agent—fungus, bacteria, virus, prion, or even something totally alien—is bound to have some consistent chemical signature by which it can be distinguished from the body’s own tissues. Three hundred years from now, there will certainly be a common computer algorithm that will analyze this signature, design a molecule that can serve as an artificial antibody and provide instructions for its rapid synthesis. Then these molecules can be attached to nanites and injected into the bloodstream.
Many diseases, such as the AIDS virus or the malaria parasite, remain deadly by periodically changing their surface antigens. They may change, but nanites can change faster.
Universal Translators
It’s well documented that Gene Roddenberry came up with the idea of transporters for the original series, because landing a huge starship like the Enterprise on a planet’s surface every week would break the show’s limited budget. Entering and leaving shuttlecraft would waste valuable running time. Thus one of the most fascinating (though absolutely impossible4) concepts in science-fiction television was born.
That’s often the case with television and the movies. Budget and time constraints force compromises in plot and logic. There are only so many minutes to tell a story. It’s why in the original Mission Impossible, characters were seen opening doors to corridors but never walking through them. Save those seconds for more important scenes. On Star Trek, considering that week after week the crew is encountering new races, dealing with interstellar crises, and defending themselves against unimaginable menaces, it’s not surprising that there are shortcuts. Transporters, the holographic doctor, and replicators are shortcuts. So are computer communicators and Universal Translators.
Why is it so easy for starships from different interstellar empires to establish communications? Why are the messages from the Klingons, Cardassians and the Romulans so similar? They frequently even sign off in the same manner. There seems to be an implicit assumption that Starfleet officers can not only use but hack any computer they find, and breaking codes is child’s play for Data. Encrypted messages are routinely intercepted and deciphered during the war with the Dominion.
Examples of computer compatibility abound in all series. The Gorm send a false message to the Enterprise, luring crewmembers into a trap on the planet Cestus (“Arena,” TOS). Khan Noonien Singh has no problems using the Enterprise’s computers, even after three centuries of improvement (“Space Seed,” TOS). Spock’s brain is stolen from his body and used as a CPU in the computer system of Sigma Draconis VI (“Spock’s Brain,” TOS).
In The Next Generation, the Bynars steal the Enterprise to use its main computer to restart their computerized civilization (“11001001”). An automated computerized weapon system almost destroys the Enterprise while advertising its superior weaponry (“The Arsenal of Freedom”).
It’s the same in all the shows. Garak manages to rework Dominion technology to save himself and friends from captivity on a prison asteroid (“In Purgatory’s Shadow,” DS9). Sisko pilots a captured Jem’Hadar starship in a sneak attack on one of their bases (“Rocks and Shoals,” DS9). And a being in the form of a spatial-distortion ring downloads 20 million gigaquads of information into Voyager’s computer memory banks (“Twisted,” VGR).
These are interstellar confederations that have existed for centuries, even millennia. Many races, such as the Vulcans, were traveling through interstellar space long before warp drive was developed on Earth (First Contact). The Borg have been evolving for more than a thousand centuries. Yet obtaining information files and software is commonplace between Federation members. And their enemies! There’s no problem involving executable systems. Even in the Delta Quadrant, far from the Federation, the crew of Voyager seems to have no difficulty communicating and trading with the dozens of new races they encounter.
Which forces us to ask the obvious question. Is some galactic Microsoft selling Windows 2400 to every computer user in the universe? Are we looking at another television shortcut like the transporters? Or is it actually possible that the computer systems of the many races of the Star Trek universe might somehow be compatible? In The Next Generation episode, “The Chase,” we’re informed that many of the humanoid species in the galaxy are the result of genetic seeding done by an ancient humanoid race millions of years ago. Could this interrelationship between Earthlings, Klingons, Romulans, and others be in some way responsible for the similarity of their computer technology? It’s a fascinating theory, almost mystical, that shared genetic codes can lead to parallel developments in science. But there’s another possible—though improbable—explanation.
As we explained early in this book, computers in their most basic form are merely collections of on-off switches. The on-off position is determined by the flow of electricity through a transistor. Each transistor represents one bit of data. Group a number of bits together and you form a byte, a basic unit of information for a computer. Link millions, or billions of bytes together, add an operating system, and you have a computer.
What’s important is that all digital computers depend on bits—on whether a switch is on or off, as determined by the flow of electricity. Computers are not dependent on human or alien languages, the appearance of their operators or the location of their home world. They’re based on one of the basic truisms of physics, the flow of electrons.
Thus, the Bynars, (“11001001,” TNG) even though they are an alien race who evolved independently of Terran civilization, use digital computers, based on the same basic concept of digital computers—binary language. And they’re described as the finest computer engineers in the Alpha Quadrant. Once we accept the idea that binary codes and bits are a likely path for development of computers, it stops being totally unbelievable that the various cybernetic systems used by the different races in the galaxy might have a basic common denominator.
Which raises the question: Are there possible computer systems not dependent on binary machine language? At least one Star Trek race uses computers that are totally different from anything used in our galaxy. That’s because the aliens who employ them aren’t from our universe. They come from fluidic space and are supposedly the ultimate biological creations. The Borg call them Species 8472 and their starships and computers are composed entirely from organic matter (“Scorpion, Parts 1 and 2,” VGR). Where the Federation’s computers use optical switches as the heart of their processors, Species 8472’s computers use DNA, the genetic material of living cells.
Is such a thing possible? In fact, DNA computers have been in the works for years. In 1997, two researchers at the University of Rochester, Animesh Ray and Mitsu Ogihara, constructed logic gates using DNA molecules, a major step towards DNA computers capable of solving problems normally handled by digital computers. DNA computers seem a very real part of our future.
Instead of using silicon chips and electrical currents, DNA computers rely on deoxyribonucleic acids—A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine) and T (thymine)—as memory units and carry out fundamental operations by recombinant techniques. The main difference between DNA computers and electronic computers is that regular computer bits have two positions (On/Off) while DNA bits have four (C, G, A, and T). Therefore, DNA molecules can in theory handle any problem done on a conventional computer, but can also manage more complex operations as well by using their extr
a two positions.
As we’ve discussed earlier in this book, most electronic computers handle operations linearly—one operation at a time, though at incredible speeds. DNA computers rely on biochemical reactions that work in parallel. A single operation in a DNA computer can affect trillions of other DNA strands. DNA computers are thus much faster than any electronic computer.
Synthesized DNA strands are used in DNA computers. The amount of information that can be stored in these biological strands is staggering. One cubic centimeter of DNA material can hold as much as 1021 bits of information. More to the point, it’s estimated that one pound of synthetic DNA has the capacity to store more information than all the electronic computers in use in the world today.
Needless to say, future advances in DNA computers hold great promise. At present, they’re only capable of solving very specific types of logic problems, but it seems quite likely that in three centuries, fully functional DNA computers will be a reality. Their existence on the biological ships of Species 8472 is much closer than three centuries in the future.
With their totally incompatible computer systems, communication between Voyager and Species 8472 is impossible. (Fortunately, Kes’ telepathic powers come to the rescue. Never underestimate psychic power when you need a deus ex machina.) Usually, when Voyager or any other Federation starship makes contact with a new alien species, the Universal Translator comes into play. It’s another wonderful time-saving device that eliminates a lot of dead air (although the hilarious scene in The Undiscovered Country in which the Entreprise’s bridge crew all crowd around Uhura, leafing frantically through dusty old English-Klingon dictionaries because they think the Klingon outpost they’re trying to slip past would be made suspicious by the Universal Translator, is an anachronism not to be missed). Still, while a Universal Translator sounds like a necessary tool for any space exploration team, is it really possible?
The Computers of Star Trek Page 14