• GraniteM@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      Yes, they confirmed the objective existence of the soul within the context of their fictional universe, alongside faster than light travel, time travel, accessible parallel universes, stable wormholes, hand-held weapons that can vaporize a human being, and artificial general intelligence.

      On the scale of science fiction hardness, Star Trek is somewhere between warm jello and cotton candy.

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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        3 hours ago

        Ah, in-universe.

        hand-held weapons that can vaporize a human being

        About that, the US military did experiments with powerful lasers in 2000. The result:

        • first few milliseconds create a superficial wound
          • spark of hurt paralyzes the target
        • vaporized mass creates a charged plasma, that shields against further shots
        • longer pulsing frequencies literally eat through the target (ablative)
          • explosive pulses (more powaar) are less effective

        This one i think?

        Woah, a epstein hijack on Archive? And no pdf upload…

      • Dion Starfire@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        Ironically, Star Trek is considered “hard sci-fi”, even if there are other shows/books that are harder. The hardness of science fiction isn’t related to how plausible the science backing it is, but how much effort the story puts into explaining the “science”, and how internally consistent that explanation is. Trek spends a fair amount of effort into technobabble, and had dedicated technobabble writers whose job was to try to maintain consistency with those explanations.

        Compare this with something like Star Wars (the movies, not third party novels), where nearly zero effort is put into explaining how magical Force powers work or why laser swords have a fixed length.

        Hard sci-fi says “this is how this works”, even if it’s complete bullshit. Soft sci-fi says “just accept that these things work, so we can use them as plot devices”.