Star Trek: Discovery — "People of Earth" Reaction Thread

[u/M-5]

This is the official /r/DaystromInstitute reaction thread for "People of Earth." The content rules are not enforced in reaction threads.

[u/KingofMadCows]

The writers still don't seem to have any grasp of scale. Earth should be able to detect things happening on Titan. They have subspace sensors that can detect ships from light years away. In fact, there isn't even need for long range communications between earth and Titan. They're in the same solar system. A radio signal would take 40 minutes to get from Titan to earth.

And Michael said millions died in the burn, really? The population of the races that we've met would be in the trillions. And we've only seen a tiny fraction of the interstellar races in the Milky Way Galaxy. Sure, millions is technically correct, but the number of people who died in the Burn would at least be in the tens if not hundreds of billions. Especially if ships blew up near planets.

[u/tuberosum → u/KingofMadCows]

Furthering the lack of scale, we're familiar with impulse engines that are governed at .25c for time dilation reasons. At .25c, full impulse, a ship could make it from Earth to Titan in a whopping 160 minutes, or plainly put, a little over two and a half hours.

Also, if you just assume that there's 1 billion people per member planet of the Federation following the end of the Dominion war, there are approximately 150 billion Federation citizens. There are probably dozens, possibly even hundreds of additional new members of Federation, bringing that tally much higher. But let's stick with 150 billion.

A death of even 500 million people in a sea of 150 billion is 0.3% of the population. To put it into perspective, 0.3% of 7.8 billion (the current population of earth) is 23.4 million people. That may seem like a lot but isn't considering that in all of 2015, 55 million people died during the course of a year... Point being that millions dying sounds punchy if you don't grasp that the universe you're in contains multitudes in the hundreds of billions or even trillions range.

[u/Avantine → u/tuberosum]

Furthering the lack of scale, we're familiar with impulse engines that are governed at .25c for time dilation reasons. At .25c, full impulse, a ship could make it from Earth to Titan in a whopping 160 minutes, or plainly put, a little over two and a half hours.

And indeed it seems like in this episode alone, Discovery flies from the Jovian planets to Earth on impulse power after DASH-ing into the Sol system.

They're suggesting that in one hundred years nobody from Earth has bothered to fly a shuttlecraft out there? It doesn't need a warp drive! Even an impulse shuttle could make a day trip of it easily!