Star Trek’s Treknobabble, Explained

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home December 8, 2024 8 Views 8 Min Read
Star Trek's Treknobabble, Explained



Key Takeaways

  • Star Trek maintained scientific accuracy by hiring consultants to review scripts and add technical jargon.
  • Jargon added to scripts made the show more realistic to viewers, even if they didn’t understand all of it.
  • Fans and writers alike accepted the jargon as proof of the show’s believability and created the term “Treknobabble.”



When Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, was working on Star Trek: The Original Series, he was very aware of the fine line that science fiction walks between fantasy and reality. He was making a show about exploring the galaxy in a giant spacecraft years before the first men walked on the moon. Obviously, Roddenberry knew he’d be creating a fantasy world. But he wanted Star Trek’s fantasy to be as realistic and based on actual science as possible.

As Scientific American reported, Roddenberry achieved that goal by hiring actual scientists to help him make his fantasy believable. A physicist named Harvey P. Lynn, Jr. was one of the first scientific consultants for Star Trek. He reviewed the scripts for the TOS pilot, “The Cage,” and worked with the writers to make them more accurate. Once the series was finally picked up, the producers hired scientists Joan Pearce and Peter Sloman from De Forest Research to review all the scripts.


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The Language of Scientific Accuracy

Whenever Pearce or Sloman found something inconsistent with scientific fact, they worked with the writers to come up with changes that made sense for the story and maintained accuracy. This often meant adding very technical language to the scripts, and soon, Star Trek became infamous for its technical jargon.

The sheer amount of jargon in TOS sometimes made it difficult for the average viewer to follow. However, because it was science fiction, the jargon actually made the show more realistic to viewers. They accepted that they wouldn’t understand all the talk of “lightyears” and “parsecs” and “nacelles” because they weren’t scientists, so the jargon had the effect of convincing viewers that the characters knew what they were talking about.


The dedication to scientific accuracy did have its downsides, though. Fans who were scientists, academics, and researchers themselves began writing letters to the Star Trek staff asking for clarification on certain facts included in an episode and pointing out inconsistencies and errors. Despite their annoyance, the writers and consultants began to accept these letters as proof that their show was believable enough that people wanted to nitpick about the details, rather than condemn the entire premise as a wild fantasy.

The Birth of Treknobabble

Star Trek Technobabble (1)
Star Trek technobabble meme

When Roddenberry and his creative team started development on Star Trek: The Next Generation, they were still committed to maintaining the same level of scientific accuracy as TOS. Just as they’d done before, the producers hired consultants to help the writers with the technical stuff. However, the writers had a lot of trouble walking the line between good science and good-sounding science that worked for their stories.


Naren Shankar, one of the science consultants for the latter seasons of TNG told the authors of The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years, that his job:

…was not about science, it was about maintaining the fake science of the
Star Trek
world.

He went on to say that the previous science advisor was adamant about scientific accuracy, and Shankar got the impression that the writers were annoyed by that. So, Shankar did the job they were asking him to do: fill in the script with some jargon that sounded good and wasn’t so inaccurate that it abandoned all scientific merit.


In fact, filling in the blanks in the script was literally how the scientific jargon got into each episode. When the writers worked on a new episode, they’d write “[TECH]” anywhere they needed some semi-believable technical language. From there, the science advisors would fill in the blanks. The actors often got scripts before the jargon had been added, and would rehearse the scenes saying “tech” whenever it appeared in their lines. On a semiregular basis, Trek actors had to memorize complicated lines of jargon the day the scenes were set to shoot. Though the show’s science advisors did their best to stick to jargon and concepts that were at least plausible, they eventually created an entire language of Star Trek-specific jargont that persisted throughout the entire franchise.

Though the term “technobabble” didn’t enter the collective consciousness because of Star Trek, the franchise became famous (or perhaps infamous) for its use of technobabble — scientific or technical sounding dialogue that doesn’t really mean anything in the real world. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term was coined by the Wall Street Journal in 1981, long before the premiere of TNG. But the term became so associated with Star Trek that fans of the show, and later the general public, started using the word “Treknobabble” to refer to Star Trek-specific technobabble.


The Internet Phenomenon of Treknobabble

As the Internet grew in popularity, the same nerds and geeks who’d loved Star Trek since they were kids started bringing their love of Star Trek to the Internet. In Star Trek-specific bulletin board systems and later forums, Trekkies discussed, analyzed, complained about, and poked fun at Treknobabble.

Fast-forward three decades, and now the Internet is full of Treknobabble Generators, Treknobabble memes, and even Treknobabble rap. Like Star Trek, Treknobabble is now part of the mainstream.

Sources: Scientific American, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years, Oxford English Dictionary

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