For example, he picked up on one particular line of dialogue from the pilot script: “Any oxygen planets?” the commander asks. As later documented in a book about making the series, Lynn’s comments were varied and astute.

Lynn, Jr., a RAND Corporation physicist, to provide technical advice for a nominal fee. Nevertheless, the makers of Star Trek did try to get things largely right and reasonable, starting with the first pilot episode, “The Cage.” Roddenberry contracted with Harvey P. It’s going to be the longest one coming.” “Of everything they had on Star Trek,” Jerry Pournelle, former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, said in 1978 in the magazine Science Fantasy Film Classics, “the transporter is the toughest of the lot. Not to mention the transporter-a device that broke down bodies and objects into energy, “beamed” the particles to a certain point and then rearranged them into their original components. We likely won't see faster-than-light travel, aka “warp drive,” achieved anytime soon. Spock’s “library computer” but an early imagining of the internet? What about those square record tapes, packed with digitized information, which the crew slipped into convenient slots for everything from readouts to meals? They were no more than 23rd-century floppy disks.Īdmittedly, Star Trek sometimes reached too far. Many of the details that gave Star Trek its futuristic feel-medical monitors, hand-held communications devices, automatically sliding doors-have become reality. “He said, ‘I wanted to know that if it’s not probable, it’s at least possible.’” “Roddenberry told me, ‘I wanted scientists to be able to watch our show, believe it, enjoy it and not laugh at it,’” says Marc Cushman, co-author of These Are The Voyages, a three-volume set about the making of the series. The goal of scientific accuracy began with the creator and executive producer, Gene Roddenberry. This year the cult series celebrates the 50th anniversary of its September 8 premiere. Then, in 1966, came Star Trek, setting the new gold standard of scientific plausibility in TV entertainment. So these fictional life-forms would in reality collapse under their own weight. Unfortunately, as a body’s height is squared, its volume is cubed. Pretty far-fetched, considering that comets are made of ice, rock and dust.Įven quality shows like The Twilight Zone made gaffes, as in the 1962 episode “The Little People,” which postulated humanoids hundreds of feet high. In one early segment a comet’s heat somehow threatens to fry a couple of members of the spacefaring Robinson family.

In the early days of television, small-screen science fiction generally ignored the laws of nature, technology and common sense.

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