I’m continuing on the Great Trek Rewatch. I’m currently about two thirds (2/3) of the way through Season Two of Star Trek: Deep Space 9.
A recent episode had Chief O’Brien running around the station trying to capture and remove Cardassian voles. It seems the little critters are busy chewing on all sort of power conduits, making it difficult to operate any of the station’s systems. Why the Cardassians would have had them on the station to begin with, knowing that they chew on power conduits and cause this type of trouble is beyond me, but hey, who knows what goes on in Cardassian minds?
At one point, O’Brien asks the computer to run a level 1 diagnostic of the systems to look for power fluctuations that might indicate where the voles are chewing on things. They did this in Star Trek: The Next Generation all the time too. This is pretty much the go-to move for figuring out any problem in the Star Trek Universe.
Let’s face it. Technology in the 24th century is pretty advanced compared to what we have now. Having a computer system to keep up with everything is a necessity. And it probably runs off an Artificial Intelligence, at least an AI as we envision them now. A system able to take verbal commands, interpret them, make decisions on how to carry out the command, perform the task, and return a verbal confirmation that the command ran, or give the information requested.
It occurred to me, that if an alien species, say the Klingons or Romulans, wanted to disable Star Fleet, all they have to do is submit a virus that will disable the computers. Star Fleet personnel wouldn’t be able to do anything. They may be able to run diagnostics manually, but with the complexity level of their tech systems, it will take them much longer. By then, the invaders will have landed, captured all the cities, enslaved the inhabitants, and wiped out all the ships in the fleet. It’d be just like in Independence Day when JeFf Goldblum uploads a virus to the alien ships using a Macintosh computer. One computer virus could bring the Federation to its knees.
Of course O’Brien (or Spock, or Data, or …) would be able to create an anti-virus program to combat the alien computer virus using nothing more than a datapad with 64K RAM and an assembly language compiler and save the day. Because Trek.
I suppose you could argue that computer systems in the 24th century will be more robust and capable than what we have today. They won’t be susceptible to computer viruses, and they’d be self-regulating to be able to handle them if they did. Having spent 30 plus years as a programmer, and knowing how programmers think and write code, it is highly unlikely that they will be any different in the 24th century. People may change, but they aren’t going to change that much. Having dealt with too may programmers who write code in the most obfuscated manner possible, thinking they will have “job security” if they are the only ones who can maintain the code so they can’t be fired, I don’t share Trek’s optimistic outlook. I’ve been handed too many code projects that have to be maintained after the original programmer got fired, then trying to decipher their bizarre labyrinthian coding was a nightmare.
I guess the saving grace might be having Vulcans do all the programing for the Federation. Writing sloppy, inefficient code is not logical. They at least would write good, clean, logical code. They would embody the three great virtues of a programmer – laziness, impatience, and hubris. Laziness makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it. Impatience makes you write programs that don’t just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hubris makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won’t want to say bad things about. (These virtues were set down by the great programing sage Larry Wall in the book Programming Perl).
Let’s just hope someone in the 24th century reads this and takes steps to prevent such a occurrence from happening. They’ll have had plenty of time to think about it between now (when I’m writing this) and then.
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