I have an issue in general with scifi totally ignoring the existence of bicycles, but star trek is particularly fun to think about since in so many situations beaming down in an away team with electric mountain bicycles would be incredibly useful in a basic utilitarian sense. Like shuttles, bicycles could be treated as disposable if needed, you can always replicate more right?
You also don’t need to build up any infrastructure on a planet for bicycles to function as transit system for huge amounts of people. A starship could arrive into a humanitarian aid situation, quickly adjust a bicycle blueprint for whatever bipedal humanoid lived on the planet, replicate a metric sh*&ton of alien bicycles and beam them down to the planet on mass. It wouldn’t require longterm maintenance, lengthy training of local aliens on how to use, or return visits to resupply complex parts. A starship could drop bicycles, spare parts and maintenance gear and then leave and the citizens of that planet would be able to benefit from that for… decades? Even more? I am sure the instruction manuals would get super long with all the alien languages though…
Even if bicycles weren’t being used as tools or transportation in a far future like star trek, there is no reason humans would stop wanting to bicycle recreationally or for exercise. Also you could go on crazy mountain biking rides on the holodeck right? I can’t see how people wouldn’t be doing that all the time along with skiing, surfing and other sports that are scary but exhilarating. Further, I think it is likely most bipedal aliens would have discovered bicycles at some point along the development into advanced technological civilizations. It would be really weird if only humans discovered them.
TNG in particular is egregious for not having bicycles since the NCC-1701 is so cavernous that unless you always used the turbolifts you probably are going to need a bicycle to get anywhere quickly…
What do yall think? Should star trek have more bicycles?
The thing that has always bugged me is the lack of bicycles in post-apocalyptic movies.
It will definitely be a meme in the future that post apocalyptic US movies from the late 20th and early 21st century always have a protagonist driving around some kind of badass exotic car (?!?) that probably gets horrendous gas mileage even if you could get the gas… There is no food, medicine, water or even much oil but everybody is still driving the coolest car they can.
Meanwhile, if you raided a run of the mill bike store you could outfit probably a hundred or more people with easy to repair transportation that could transport them 40 miles in a day if need be.
Idk, I hope those future memes make fun of us good at least.
(I give the newest mad max a pass on this though since the cars are purposefully over the top and lots of people have dirt bikes at least)