What’s up my know-it-alls!? It’s that time. Welcome back to the Know-It-All Files, where I take the opportunity to go across the internet and find the questions you’ve had about Star Trek and other pop culture things. This one’s the Star Trek edition. I’ve searched the internet, I’ve got your questions, and we’re going to start answering them right now.

The Most Dangerous Species in Star Trek

What was the most dangerous alien species in any Star Trek series?

The tongue-in-cheek answer is whichever enemy the plot requires to be dangerous.

But let’s go by what we’ve seen. It’s easy to have thought of the Klingons, who in the early days were very aggressive and dangerous and things of that nature. Possibly the Borg come to mind, or the Dominion, or Species 8472, or any number of the others we’ve seen.

With that said, I believe the truthful answer is humans, and I’m not trying to get on a soapbox whatsoever, I promise. We’re the most aggressive and dangerous alien species out there in Star Trek. We predominantly insinuate ourselves into all kinds of situations. We find ourselves tripping over our own feet sometimes. And at the end of the day, we’re the ones who are, quote unquote, boldly going.

Of course, it’s our show, so why wouldn’t we be.

Why Away Teams Don’t Carry Personal Shields

In Star Trek, why don’t away teams use portable force fields or shields to prevent themselves from being killed?

Funny that you ask, because there actually was one. It was in the old animated series, Star Trek: The Animated Series, and they depicted the away teams with these white belts that had a little Starfleet delta on them. That belt was the protection. Out of universe, it was an animator’s discount: a way of not having to animate an entirely new outfit for the characters once you’ve built your models. All you’re doing is putting a little jaggedy yellow shield around them, and then away team missions are easy.

The truth is the power and energy requirements for a portable force shield are huge. You have to remember that shields modulate. They’re constantly shifting and moving. A shield is energy that moves, and you have these shield emitters doing their job, constantly pushing.

Great example: Tony Stark in Avengers: Infinity War. He’s fighting Thanos, and as he’s creating this metal shield you can see the nanites leaving his body, leaving the back exposed. The nanites are being destroyed, the old ones are having to make up the difference, so they come off his back, and there’s a hole where his back should be.

Similarly, the shield generators are doing a specific thing to create a certain level of strength. As the shields get hit by things, energy, hard constructs, anything that’s hitting them, they’re going down. They’re going down because that generator can only output that much energy for so long. The minute it takes a hit, it starts trying to work that much harder. The problem is it can’t fill a gap and fix something that’s continually being attacked. There’s no way it can fill the cup, so it’s just trying to hold back. That’s where you get those percentages, where people are like, shields are down twenty percent, thirty percent, whatever.

That’s the best answer that I know of, so to speak.

Klingons Aren’t Stronger. They’re Built Tougher.

Are Klingons naturally stronger than humans? Worf says that very few people on the Enterprise can break his bones, but he doesn’t appear to be any stronger than Riker. For reference, Michael Dorn and Jonathan Frakes are both six feet four inches and about the same weight.

Start with the Vulcans, because Vulcans are physically stronger than humans. They come from the planet Vulcan, which has a higher gravity than Earth. It isn’t a massive difference, but it’s enough of a difference. It also has to do with the altitude. They can hold their breath longer, their lungs are stronger, and the atmosphere is a little bit thinner. All those things create a, quote unquote, stronger species.

Come to Klingons, and they aren’t inherently stronger than humans. Your average strength Klingon and your average strength human would be more or less a comparable match.

Where it gets tricky is in how their bodies are constructed. For whatever reason, Klingons have evolved over the years so that their skull, starting at their nose ridges, which is where the ridges come from, runs all the way back and down. You’ve seen it in The Next Generation, when they did the spinal surgery on Worf: it goes all the way back to his tailbone. All of that is designed to strengthen the body so that you can take more abuse and take hits. You’re physically designed to be a more superior warrior. It’s a natural evolution of their species.

That makes them stronger in context. If you were in a head-butting contest, Worf would win all day long and twice on Sunday. Other factors come into it too. Worf could probably lift more, strictly because his spine can handle the compression. It’ll strengthen and reinforce him being able to do that.

But in musculature they’re comparable to humans. They aren’t actually stronger. They’re just built tougher. I think tougher would be the better word to use.

How Often We Actually See Earth

How often is Earth society and its people depicted in Star Trek?

Earth’s society and its people are depicted in Star Trek, but not often. It’s about Starfleet. It’s about going out on space exploration, those adventures. So whenever they focus on Earth, it’s either at Starfleet Academy or Starfleet Headquarters, those kinds of things, or maybe it’s in a flashback to a person’s human family.

It’s worth noting the vision of Earth’s future that Star Trek depicts. You know the one, where humanity has overcome poverty, war, social ills and whatnot. It’s basically a utopian society, and it serves as the backdrop for the entire series.

Gene Roddenberry wanted to show that human beings had come so far, and overcome so many of our adversities, that we were able to go out into the stars, meet other species, and help them through their adversities, whatever those might be. Showing the fallibility of humans was never the design. I know it does that now. Doesn’t matter. That’s huge. That’s a big part of what made Star Trek Star Trek, and it’s a big part of why we lead the charge, the whole humans, earthlings, Earth, Starfleet thing, progressing that exploration forward.

I like the dichotomy. I like the way we’re presented with all that information. And back in the original series days, Gene Roddenberry had decided Earth wasn’t really going to be shown or focused on, mainly because, again, the idea was that we’ve bettered ourselves, and now we go forward and teach, and move that needle forward in terms of helping other species.

I know there was the episode with Picard and his vineyard, which is probably the least Starfleet of all those early versions of things that were being shown. And there’s anytime we saw the past in the original series.

Section 31: Part of Starfleet, and Outside It

Is Section 31 a separate entity from Starfleet?

The short answer is no. The less simple answer is yes and no.

According to the canon we have now with Star Trek: Enterprise, Section 31 predates Starfleet but was rolled into the mandate for Starfleet. So it’s both a part of, and yet aside from, and yet outside of, the actual moving forward of Starfleet. Section 31 has been around for a long, long time, and it kind of continues that tradition.

The first time we see Section 31 is in Deep Space Nine, and it fit really perfectly into the narrative because of everything going on. At the time, Deep Space Nine was hip deep in the Dominion War, and what better time for secret organizations to start coming out, and spy type stuff to begin to evolve and happen, than for Section 31 to suddenly become the standouts.

I’m willing to go back and say that possibly even the original away mission that brought Captain Jellico to the Enterprise in The Next Generation was a product of Section 31.

Now, obviously, you could go, how can you say that when it comes after the other? But Star Trek is a canon. You sit here and say, okay, if this is true here, then it was also true throughout all of this, and you begin to say, fine, let’s take a look then, and you look at the nuance in between. Section 31 fits shockingly well into the established canon and history. There are things we look at in Star Trek and go, when was that the case? When did that happen? Why was that the case? And the only explanation is that it had to do with an organization like a Section 31.

Now You Know

There you go, now you know, and if knowing is half the battle, you’re halfway to being a know-it-all yourself.

I’m really excited to be putting on a new Know-It-All Files, especially now that I have all these new subscribers to check it out. This is something we do on a fairly regular basis, or at the very least we try to. I look forward to seeing you guys again.

NEVER FORGET, everyone loves a know-it-all!

Your turn. Tell me what you think the most dangerous alien species in Star Trek is, and you’re more than welcome to disagree with me. Tell me whether the personal shield generator is a good idea or a crazy one, and how you think Klingons stand up to humans. If you’ve got canon to cite on that one, I’d love to take a look. And is Section 31 a part of Starfleet, and what’s your basis for it? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.