I mean once you have flight/hovering vehicles than practically the only transportation that doesn’t make obsolete is a bicycle for transporting someone a mile or two daily from their spaceship to a residence or wherever.
How is using a bicycle clumsy? I mean I get if people don’t like bicycles but honestly a bicycle is just fun to cruise around on, they are the opposite of clumsy.
Bicycles don’t necessarily need flat terrain, especially with electric bikes that have futuristic insanely efficient batteries.
Yes bicycles do best on trails but anywhere that has humanoids is going to have trails. Anywhere that has any kind of large animal is going to probably have some degree of path system as well. I don’t think it’s that big of an issue compared to any other kind of ground vehicle.
You sound like someone who has never ridden a bike through broken terrain.
I'll argue that the "flat" used by the comment above might be better taken on a more granular level. You can go up and down mountains just fine so long as there are no logs, large rocks, pits, or gullies that are in the way.
I was doing some D&D world building a while back and wanted to really dive into transportation of people/goods and found the same problem. Tenser’s Floating Disk is a very low level wizard spell that basically does away with all but the heaviest ships and carts.
It's the same for the trek universe. They have personal transportation methods that mean there's literally zero need for a bicycle for anything other than recreation.
Hell, Lower Decks opens with Mariner pushing around a hover cart full of stuff. It's literally the cold open of the entire series.
If you can have a hover cart like that, then why bother with a bike? Need to move stuff to a remote area? Get the hover cart, you don't need to cut a trail, just go over the obstacles. And that's if the transporter doesn't work if the first place to beam the people and equipment to a nearby area.
I was doing some D&D world building a while back and wanted to really dive into transportation of people/goods and found the same problem. Tenser’s Floating Disk is a very low level wizard spell that basically does away with all but the heaviest ships and carts. It’s the same for the trek universe. They have personal transportation methods that mean there’s literally zero need for a bicycle for anything other than recreation.
I mean, its all just “magic” at a certain point, they could do everything with a transporter… but they dont so presumably there are reasons not to (even though the real reason is it is a tv show). I have never seen hovercarts used prominently in the live action shows, especially not as a vehicle.
I agree, in my utopian future it’s possible to leisurely bike everywhere. Why hurry anywhere in a post-scarcity society when you can cruise around and take in the scenery?
It would be a matter of public health policy that people had some kind of access to a short, physical commute to whatever place they worked/spent their day at, right? That is at least how I rationalize why they just don’t teleport people everywhere. They COULD technically teleport everywhere all the time… but the mental and physical health consequences to not getting some kind of mild daily exercise like bicycling are too intense (also having some kind of short, stress free commute helps one get into the mindset of work anyways).
Its honestly because its not interesting to watch people beam down and bike all the time. Usually shit happens almost immediately after the beam anyway. But yeah where are my turbo maglift bikes.
They could just take bmx bikes and beam down right into the action though, maybe even in the middle of a sweet handlebar spin. Are you going to tell me you don’t want to see bmx star trek action?
They have meditations they can do with a group of fellow Vulcan's to help suppress the urge in the case of not being able to procreate with their mate. It comes up in Voyager.
Hold up: I lied. (I realized I was commenting on Daystrom and went to go get a source.)
I was thinking of…
DEANNA TROI’S CHOCOLATE OBSESSION
If there’s one thing that Counselor Troi knows, it’s chocolate. And this is one of her favorite drinks in the galaxy. An empathic concoction of raspberry liqueur, Kahlua, Bailey’s, and chocolate syrup.
Here’s the recipe for Raktajino:
RAKTAJINO
Klingon coffee. A frozen blend of mocha and cappuccino. An honorable drink to prepare any warrior for combat. Qapla!
That’s very strange, I’ve looked at a few recipes and never seen alcohol as an ingredient. It usually is just coffee with some spices, usually including cinnamon.
I’ve seen people suggest adding alcohol, but I think the idea is to simulate that Klingon coffee would have a sharpness or bite to it, rather than assuming that raktajino on the show would actually have alcohol. I played around with some recipes for fun and I actually mixed a few together and found something pretty delicious. I mix Turkish coffee, a small amount of whipped milk, cayenne pepper, cinnamon, and a little honey.
I’m always reminded of Star Trek when I’m watching… Bond movies. The smorgasbord of over-the-top tech he’s using and the casual manner in which he keeps pulling them out at the right moment feels like should be right at home in the Federation.
They’re scientists that are exploring. You can’t see the forest for the trees when you’re barreling down a trail at 15-30kmh. You’re going to see a lot more hiking methodically through kilometers of new alien landscape than you would on a bike. If they want more range or speed they can shuttle, transport, or send a drone. When I explore a new city these days, I take a smart device and a wallet wearing my contemporary version space PJs, jeans and a T-shirt; either walking, ubering, or public transporting where I need to go. I’d miss a lot of interesting stuff by biking because my focus would be on biking, and less on the landscape around me.
Interesting, for me unless I am riding a road bike with a really heads down sitting posture, I find leisurely bicycling around to be a fantastic way to see explore a place and notice things (as long as the place is bike friendly… which in the US…). Far more than getting around by car.
I can't go very fast even on my (small/cheap) ebike and have definitely noticed (even with not-the-best-eyesight) plants/animals, flooding, nearby infrastructure/locations, smells etc. on the trail. I wouldn't say 15kmh is "barreling" and is my average comfortable speed. Slowing down or stopping to walking around a bit is also incredibly easy (and a thing already you stop to rest/drink/eat anyways), but you can still make up for lost time if needed.
In the context of a show, I could see a lot of angles to this. From somebody remembering something they briefly saw to 1 person in a group investigating something (staying behind, rushing ahead, taking a sample etc), also successfully evading chases and camp-y rock ambushes.
Personally I'd also say that biking long distances just seems easier than walking/hiking. Maybe mechanical advantage (esp. w/derailleur) or the speed, maybe health issues, or maybe there's just something about the feel of it that's boring/taxing to me. I can't imagine walking 20 km but is something I've done a few times on my weak ebike.
You won’t be able to make sense of it because the idea is just some nonsense words made up by writers as a means of allowing the story they wanted to tell to be told. It doesn’t make sense because it’s writing, not science.
As other posters have pointed out to you, blithely dismissing OP’s question because they are asking about the meaning of “nonsense words made up by writers” is completely missing the point of this community. We all know Star Trek is fiction constructed by writers; pointing that out while adding nothing else of interest is both pointless and boring.
We don’t expect or require all answers to be from an in-universe perspective, but we do expect everyone to engage in discussion politely and seriously. If this is all you have to say on the subject, don’t comment.
There’s a lot of made up nonsense in star trek, sure, but there’s also a reason they call it ‘science’ fiction. I guess my question had two points. Firstly to see if anyone more knowledgeable than ne could either confirm that it’s nonsense or give me a way that it’s actually potentially possible based on some legitimate scientific theory, or secondly, like the other person said, just to see how people could use their creativity to explain away the inconsistency in universe.
if anyone more knowledgeable than ne could either confirm that it’s nonsense or give me a way that it’s actually potentially possible based on some legitimate scientific theory
The downvotes are because what you wrote is pointless. We all know it’s made up and in the end there is no actual, definitive, real answer. That’s not what we’re here for. We are here for the creative exercise of finding an answer that fits the universe of the show and episode. You just shut down that creative process.
Here’s a shot at the balloon filling up with water explanation:
It’s like two cars driving down a highway at night. You see the headlights from the car ahead of you illuminating the scenery, but you never catch up to them.
I think OP is implying that time works like a film strip, so that if I’m five minutes behind you, I see where you were five minutes ago.
That’s the way time travel in Trek works. If you travel from Time B in the future to Time A in the past at a given place, you see the place as it was at that time, including the people who were there.
I think that rather being just shifted in time a la time travel, they were actually dealing with a flex in spacetime, like a curve in the road you can’t quite see around, but Diana could see their essence like light from the tail lights, as in your example.
In other words, they were caught in a time warp, again.
Now that you mention it, yes. However it’s probably so deeply ingrained in American authors that bicycles seem like uncool garbage that’s not very useful so they don’t even think about it.
I am so tired of sci-fi futuristic cities that just replicate a highway in the sky complete with crazy stressful traffic and all. It is kind of embarrassing how big of a flaw this is for sci-fi art when a fundamental aspect of the genre is the attempt to gaze far into real and unreal futures.
trek has had at least one place where people actively reject modernity because they simply don’t like it, so there’s that.
i think the expanse is the best portrayal of the future i’ve seen in terms of this, things generally look like they do now except everything’s walkable and public transport is utterly bog standard, and they casually use holograms for shop signs.
just like how we’re basically the same as in the past, except walking around with technology in our pockets that was idle speculation 100 years ago and would be considered magic 1000 years ago
Interesting, I have heard the expanse is good and that it is more realistic scifi than most. Honestly the reason I haven’t watched it is that people only really seem to mention the fact that the space combat is realistic in the expanse and I just don’t give two flying sh$%s how realistic a scifi universe’s space wars are… I am watching star trek for a reason and that reason is that it isn’t myopically obsessed with war and gritty dark grim universes like 99% of the rest of scifi is sigh. I am fine with space wars, I am fine with grim or dark visions of the future to a certain extent but most scifi can’t ever seem to tell stories about literally anything else. Everything is just black mirror it feels like.
On the subject of black mirror though, I really want to see a black mirror parody episode where bicycles aren’t invented until the 2020s when a techbro invents the “segway 2.0” which is just a normal bicycle. Everyone becomes so addicted to this invention that it tears apart families, society and economies (no more cars being sold??? no oil being sold?? all the car plants close and the economy crashes). Kids overthrow society because they all get bicycles and become addicted to them first and no one can stop them because they are too fast…
ST:Picard showed that Earth basically had a public transporter network around the world. It is how Picard goes from his vineyard in France to Starfleet headquarters. So, it isn’t all car flying cities.
However, if these are the people making decisions to deploy resources, why would they think of having ground vehicles at all? The only reason why the dune buggy was in Nemesis was because Patrick Stewart wanted it. Otherwise, it doesn’t really make sense.
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