Sci Fi TV science or fiction?

I think he was the first to suggest using a projectile to travel to the moon. Eitherway, Verne rocked.

Padraic wrote: Sagan was great Jim, used to love watching the old Cosmos shows on PBS.

I bought the whole series on DVD for my niece when she was about 10.  Was hoping to plant the seed of imagination and an interest in space...i think it worked. 

Padraic wrote: Sagan was great Jim, used to love watching the old Cosmos shows on PBS.

Sagan was good. Neil deGrasse Tyson is not. And the promos for the new Cosmos look utterly atrocious.

VOTOMS wrote: By the way, Star Trek made the first cell phone ever.

Except they didn't. The key word there is "cell" and Star Trek communicators were not part of a cellular network, they were point-to-point, much like a walkie-talkie or the 2-way radios used in taxis (or even aircraft & ships come to that) and those had been around since the 1930s. Even if you are refering to personal communicators, then Dick Tracy predates James T Kirk by several decades.

I love everything about sci-fi series, anime and comics, books, movies... space opera, cyberpunk and steampunk are my favorites. well, almost the whole genre. 

still is

Don't analyze Star Trek for anything realistic.  It's a fun show.  Just watch and enjoy.

Finnforest wrote: We all know there is a wealth of space trash floating out there, plus meteor fields, and god knows what else.  At slow speed I would assume Federation ships simply scan and avoid anything that could hurt the hull of the ship.  But when a ship jumps to warp, wouldn't the speed be so fast that there would be no way the ship could make quick dodge maneuvers?  Thus, wouldn't the ship eventually hit a large meteor or whatever and be destroyed by the impact at such a speed?  Does anyone know how they supposedly deal with objects when moving that fast?

Well depending on where the scifi you read places on the Mohs scale, there's a bit of a difference. Magic need only be consistent in the self-contained world of the novel. The technology needs an internal and external consistency.

Finnforest wrote: We all know there is a wealth of space trash floating out there, plus meteor fields, and god knows what else.  At slow speed I would assume Federation ships simply scan and avoid anything that could hurt the hull of the ship.  But when a ship jumps to warp, wouldn't the speed be so fast that there would be no way the ship could make quick dodge maneuvers?  Thus, wouldn't the ship eventually hit a large meteor or whatever and be destroyed by the impact at such a speed?  Does anyone know how they supposedly deal with objects when moving that fast?

I guess they tried to thinly justify this by having the actors punch coordinates into the computer before the jump to warp speed implying that some super advanced future (past) computer would be able to handle the calculations needed to navigate at such impossible speeds. This just isn't possible. I mean this could be attacked on a number of grounds, but aside from even worrying about how you would navigate obstacles, the human body could never survive the massive g-force experienced by the jump to warp. You'd have trouble with constructing a ship that wouldn't crumble.

Super fast travel like this will most likely involve gradual accelerations with low fuel costs (ion thruster, solar sail) or exploitation of spatial-geometric anomalies (worm holes, folding).