2x09 The Measure of a Man

Odd that Data would speak of reusing wrapping paper, when it's likely that quite literally everything—the gifts and the paper enclosing them—was replicated, and the discarded bits destined to be recycled back into the raw matter storage.

Eight hundred quadrillion bits must have sounded like quite a lot in 1989, but these days it sounds like a hundred petabytes. To put that number in perspective, Backblaze (a cloud-backup service) ordered about 100 PB of hard drives for Q4 2017 alone.¹ One blogger's back-of-the-napkin estimate from 2012² placed YouTube's annual storage growth needs at about 75 PB/year. An undated answer published on BBC Science Focus Magazine's website claims that the "big four" (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook) together store roughly 1,200 PB between them.³ Basically, any way you slice it, Data's storage capacity is almost laughably small by today's standards, thirty years later. (It's no wonder later Trek shows switched to more ambiguous units, like Voyager's "teraquads".)

And I didn't even start on Data's supposed computational performance of 60 trillion operations per second. Presuming those are floating-point operations—to give us a comparable frame of reference to today's (super)computers—Data's woefully inferior there, too, by today's standards. The fastest supercomputer I could find information on, the U.S. Department of Energy's Summit, can allegedly perform 200 quadrillion calculations per second, or PFLOPS. It scored well over 100 PFLOPS on the Linpack benchmark test, and was the first supercomputer to reach the exaop range.⁴ But at least Data is about 1,000 times faster than a high-end desktop PC CPU, which today clocks in at around 60 GFLOPS vs. Data's presumed 60 TFLOPS.

Finally, there's a bit of contradiction in terms of Data's rights. If he didn't have the right to resign, because he was considered an object and property of Starfleet, how did he have the right to apply to Starfleet Academy in the first place? The right to apply (and graduate) kind of implies the right to later resign from service.

"The Measure of a Man" is one of the most widely acclaimed episodes of all Star Trek, period, let alone within The Next Generation. Mostly, I think it—unlike The Office (UK)—lives up to its praise.

Picard is on top of his game as a master debater, if not a litigator. Riker gets to have a bit of character development through being forced to defend a position with which he vehemently disagrees. Oh, and a conversation with Guinan the Wise gets shoehorned in, just to build that relationship (between her and Picard) a bit more. (Apparently that was a last-minute addition to the script…)

The episode is a bit in-your-face with the philosophy at times, and I didn't remember the plot turning on a dime the way it did, but it's still very powerful to watch. It's a credit to the actors involved, as much as to the scriptwriters. (Who, I might add, forgot that Data can't use contractions. "You've constructed a positronic brain?" is not a question Data should have been able to ask, as worded.)

1. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/400-petabytes-cloud-storage/
2. https://sumanrs.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/youtube-yearly-costs-for-storagenetworking-estimate/
3. https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/how-much-data-is-on-the-internet/
4. Summit also has 250 PB of storage, compared to Data's mere 100 PB.