Stupidest Lack of Tech in Sci-Fi: The Winner Is…

This one was supposed to be hard. Instead, you all knocked it out of the park. I’m a bit pressed for time, so I honestly can’t pick out my favorites, if only because so, so many entries were superb. I’m not sure I’ll ever watch Star Wars again without wondering how people there wipe their ass, and all the piling on Trek was wonderful and much deserved. Still, there must be a winner, and I agree with the people: Strangeman.

I’d have to say it’s the near total lack of seatbelts in the entirety
of the Star Trek Universe. At least every episode there’s a battle
scene where everyone gets thrown from their chairs, sometimes to their
own deaths. So every time there’s a red alert, everyone has to go to
their battle stations. What these stations don’t include, however, are
seatbelts. So here you are, a human pinball in front of a hard,
unforgiving computer terminal that for whatever reason is powered by
dynamite that’ll explode at the smallest impact, and you have no safety
aparatus whatsoever. Why? Would it have cost too much to install them?
You could go to the replicator and make your own, but then Worf or
someone would come by and throw you in the brig for violating ship
rules.

And what about Worf? He doesn’t even get a chair. There he is, at the
back of the proverbial bus, and there’s no chair. So he’s on his feet
pretty much 24/7 staring at the back of Picard’s chrome dome, while
there’s a tireless android up front, sitting in a chair. Is it because
he black/Kligon? I think so. I could just imagine someone like Wesley Crusher trying to pitch the idea of seatbelts to the Captain, and being shot down.

Wesley: “Think of all the lives they’d save!”
Picard: “Ridiculous! How would we ever get out?” Picard would reply.
Wesley: “Well, they have buckles on them that… unbuckle.”
Picard: “Wesley, just because I’m trying to nail your mother doesn’t mean I’m going to put up with your shit.”
Mr.Belvedere: “Oh Wesley.” *laugh track*

As other commenters noted, it’s kind of the perfect lack of bland, omnipresent current-day tech that Trek should have figured out something much better for. Add in the TNG‘s cree casual racism, and I’m sold. Strangeman gets the last TR shirt of ’08, but don’t the rest of you worry, because the TR contect will be back on January 9th. Feel free to keep loading TR with comments like you did this weekend, because that was kind of awesome.