Why is Star Trek considered Sci-Fi and not fantasy?

I've been rewatching TNG and VOY for a while, and to me it seems more liek fantasy than Sci-Fi. A creature Q is all in all a god, in TNG the gang gets captured by this creature callede Nilufar that is from another dimension and is carrying out experiments on the crew, and plenty of other examples.

In VOY one of the crew members seem to have ESP powers that borderline Omipontency, as she pushes Voyager 10 000 LY in a matter of seconds.

All in all everything seems to far fetched, even for Sci-Fi. The technologie of the 24th century is nearing a level that seems impossible. By the push of a button, they can create matter out of mothing.

Sounds more like wizardry to me

 

It's not fantasy because there are no elves in Star Trek.

[image=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4c/SpockVulcan.jpg]

Oh. Wait. ****.

 

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

 

Two words. Techno. Babble.

The show sets out to demonstrate the future of humanity clearly utilizing technology extrapolated from current or theorized science. While it certainly uses fantasy-like elements even those are often explained or broken down scientifically and established.

Vulcans are known to have a level or telepathy but its not established as a fantasy driven device but an extension of their physiology and continued discipline and training of the mind.

 

Matter can be created out of energy through E=MC^2



Or...you know...close enough that they can use that to scientifically back their magic.

 

That doesn't sound scientific to you? Conducting experiments, that is.

 

To elaborate on the Nilufar thingy. It had created a hole in space where no matter was present, there was no up or down back or forth, no sense of direction what so ever, and the creature did not appear on any of their insanely advanced scanners, yet it could kill a red-shirt just by looking at him.

 

No, the matter is simply duplicated, adn the atoms multiplied. The source matter itself comes from the ship's storage units.

Slimy!

 

If I'm not mistaken, there is a subset of Sci-Fi called 'Hard' Sci Fi, meaning that the material has content which tends to be strongly tied to scientific truth, or possibility via mathematical theory.



That said, to take something which blends Sci-Fi and Fantasy together such as Star Trek or Star Wars and dump it into the "Fantasy" camp solely would be to broaden "Fantasy" far too much at the expense of Sci Fi, IMO.


Perhaps as to why Star Trek is considered Sci-Fi and not Fantasy, perhaps one need only consider the percentage of science vs. fantasy elements. I think that typically Star Trek leans far more heavily toward the science.

 

The way I see it, Star Trek (and Star Wars, also) fall under both genres, however, space has come to signify sci-fi, and fantasy usually is down to earth (or whereever they are) and not so tech-filled.

 

I thought I heard some where that Star Trek is Science Fact...

 

I agree with a previous post in that "Star Trek" has more of the techno-babble going on. Plus, outside of the occasional alien and/or outrageous plot device, the series is mostly about interpersonal relations, and "Hard" Sci-Fi, when not going on about technology, also focuses on that. More so over continual action, which can sometimes classify Fantasy.

 

I understand the techno babble, but some of it sounds so far fetched, I'll bet it would make even the most optimistic scientist go "No freaking way"

 

The Fi in Sci-Fi is for fiction.

 

Star Trek is not hard sci-fi at all. For examples of hard sci-fi read something by Kim Stanley Robinson or some of Stephen Baxters books like "Titan" or "Voyage." Hard sci-fi almost always takes place in the somewhat near-term future and the science is pretty much real science or scientific theories. And it really gets into the science at well, for like...pages. Which is in fact why I don't really like the genre, because sometimes they focus more on technicalities and science rather than plot, story, characterization, etc. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is a good example of this. It is a very interesting examination of a future society on Mars and its development between 2020 and the 2200's, but there are times when Robinson goes on for pages and pages and pages about the specific scientific aspects of terraforming or the workings of a space elevator or the development of some obscure new economic system. Parts of these novels read like science or engineering textbooks. I can't really, at the moment, think of any TV shows or films that would fit in with the hard sci-fi subgenre. Maaaaaaaaaaaybe parts of 2001...ya know, until the trippy part.

I do disagree with notion though that because Star Trek is so far fetched that it should be considered a fantasy. If something happens in space, or the future, and there are aliens, I think it should be considered some genre of sci-fi. Maybe fantasy and sci-fi.

 

You mean Star Wars isn't real?

 

To be fantasy they would need to be running around fighting with swords and casting spells, preferably on another world. It's true that the science of the shows is sometimes pretty bad; in an episode of Voyager, for example, the ship escaped from a black hole through a crack in the event horizon, which makes no sense. The event horizon is a geometrically defined boundary, not a physical construct; also if the ship did go inside the event horizon, the gravitational tidal forces would probably rip it apart, and sooner rather than later. Also, several of the technologies seem to rely on matter-energy and energy-matter conversion without really understanding it or getting the mass/energy equivalence right. If the replicators just used stored atoms and molecules, that would be one thing, but my understanding from watching the shows has always been that they're converting energy to matter. Assuming this is the case, it's rather wasteful when you consider the amount of energy you need to make anything of any size; remember that the formula for mass/energy conversion is E= mc2, and that 2 is supposed to be a superscript, meaning squared. So it takes an amount of energy, in joules, equal to the mass in kilograms, times the speed of light (approx. 3.0 x 10 to the 8th m/s) squared. So to make a kilogram of matter, you need about 9.0 x 10 to the 16th J of energy. That's several orders of magnitude greater than the total sustained energy output of all the reactors on the Enterprise-D, according to various official sources such as the Technical Manual, so it would take the ship awhile just to make a quarter-pounder with cheese. However, in spite of all this, the focus is largely on science and technology, from which spring many of the problems encountered by the characters, and most of the solutions they come up with, as above. Also the shows posit scientific explanations (albeit sometimes questionable or patently false ones) for virtually all the devices and phenomena seen, while leaving a few unexplained as being beyond the current understanding of the characters.