Honestly, after Zora became sapient, it seems like a cruelty to have her just sit around in deep space.
In Calypso, this was less of an issue, because of the implication that Discovery became sapient after centuries of floating about, developing sapience as part of that time, but Zora would be sapient from the get-go, and leaving a sapient being adrift and alone for Millennia seems like fairly unethical.
Linguistically, whatever they name themselves in their own language would just translate to whatever we call them in our languages because that’s usually what we do. I think this would be especially true if the alien language is physically impossible to vocalize as a human.
Fair point. I was rather thinking about it from more of a human categorisation point of view. If they’re not all mechanical, or weren’t constructed, I can definitely see some limits with using “mechanoid” as a descriptor.
Like how you could categorise a lot of mammals as organoid, but it lacks the nuances compared to having other words like mammalian or humanoid.
There’s some interesting ones there, but I feel like using ChatGPT lacks a certain je ne sais quoi compared to organic home-grown adjectives, that you just don’t get with their industrial machine-grown equivalents.
You can if you want, but Lemmy doesn’t translate them, like Mastodon does, and you might find them conflicting with the header Markup.
That, and Lemmy users used to a more Reddit-like structure of posting might get rather annoyed by it, since it would clog up the feed with unhelpful information.
There’s an argument to be made that an alternate timeline isn’t the same timeline, and therefore, the 24th century temporal prime directive would not apply. It may just be conventional application of the prime directive, as it applies to pre-warp civilisations. They’d likely try to get them back, and either give them the choices of keeping quiet, or having their memories of the future altered/erased, to avoid interfering with that iteration of Earth’s development.
If there is no way of them going back, then they would likely get the standard time-displacement reintegration package. The circumstances are close enough, and it would hardly be the first time ancient humans from over 3 centuries ago would crop up.
True, but that can be said of a lot of atrocities in Star Trek history. Some of which are necessary for the preservation of the Federation as we know it.
The Enterprise C incident, for example. The loss of the ship with all hands (presumably) helped prevent an escalation of the conflict between the Klingon Empire and the Federation.
We also know that the Burn didn’t create issues wholesale. All it really did was exacerbate the existing dilithium shortage by dropping the number of ships, but the underlying problems were likely going to happen either way. The Chain had the advantage of the Courier network, while the Federation was still using warp-drive ships trundling along at low speeds.
The only notable thing that did happen is the loss of functioning ships, straining Federation resources further, and that N’var believed that their experimental stargate network caused the Burn, so they stopped developing it, but the former would have likely happened anyway, especially if the Federation was to get into conflict with the Chain.
How likely is it that Discovery went to a mutable future, just one of many, especially with the Temporal Cold War, Carl, Q, Trelane, Janeway, the HMS Bounty, and any number of other temporally active agents out there in time? How locked in is the 32nd Century?
About as locked in as any of the Time Travel in the 23rd and 24th centuries.
Star Trek time travel can be inconsistent, but usually, it tends to stick with there only being one timeline that alterations shift back and forward, something that isn’t really helped by the Time War.
The only time that we’ve seen anything approaching an alternate timeline like that is with the creation of the Kelvin timeline from the Narada incursion, which resulted in bidirectional effects that separated it into a new, independent timeline, but events like that are more the exception than the rule.
Though, normally, Trek time travel rules would suggest that anything lasting longer than a season (or into the next episode) is usually here to stay, if it’s not reverted at the end of a multi-parter. Data’s head remained centuries older than his body, for example, and the crew of the Bozeman are still rattling about the 24th century, having jumped 70 years into the future.
One distilled drop of Star Trek fandom over the decades could take it to the edge of the universe and back at salamander-speed.
im not sure how one is slapped across the face with normalcy but if you’re saying discovery didnt go far enough with the barely-disguised left wing messaging we usually see in star trek i agree wholeheartedly
In fairness, that messaging has taken rather a back seat ever since Trek became big, probably because the networks see it as a cash cow, and no longer give it liberty to take the same risks.
DS9 only got as far as they did pushing the boundary because Voyager had most of the attention, for example.
You don’t really see any new Trek show pushing the boundary quite like TOS did back in the day, to the point where it was very nearly cancelled outright due to the outrage it produced. Roddenberry even wanted to add an LGBT character to it at some point, but it was shot down by the other producers. Compared to TOS, Discovery’s representation and messaging is almost contemporary, with relatively little boundary-pushing.
Compare to that to the Orville, which doesn’t have that baggage by virtue of being new, and relatively unknown, so they can get away with more on-the-nose messaging a good bit more without getting into trouble. There’s no established IP and format that the network would prefer that they keep to, or stay uncontroversial so it’s still palatable to wider audiences.
Disco had a lot of flaws, and most of them were the same flaws we saw in Picard: the writers just couldn’t write full season plot arcs that were satisfying and believable. This is made worse because each season had to raise the stakes, to the point where it just got kinda exhausting. Meanwhile the show just took itself way too seriously, without really earning my emotional investment.
Some of the were exacerbated by the production issues that happened in the early seasons of the show, too.
They went through a bunch of different showrunners/producers in that time, and it shows. Much of Seasons 1 and 2 of Discovery felt like four different shows all overlapping with each other, which did not help in the slightest. It started to find its footing in Season 3, but after that was also when CBS took it off of Netflix, which also made it harder to watch, unless you were willing to subscribe to another service (that might not even be available in your country) for the one show.
It might have been more interesting if it had stabilised itself and found its footing early on, but alas. On the other hand, it being what was basically an experimental testing-ground for a bunch of different concept gave us the short treks, Strange New Worlds, and a few other shows besides, so can’t fault it that badly.
Maybe that’s part of why the Borg never bothered with the Federation much? They weren’t actually worthy of assimilation until they started developing drone separation tech.
The Federation also has no party in the fight. It’s not implausible that if Bajor were to kick off a new conflict with Cardassia over DS9, they might just leave to avoid intervening in the conflict, and then the Bajorans would be in a pickle.
(Mostly copying the comment I did on the other places for visibility)
it is implied the nacelles assist with impulse operations (SNW: “Memento Mori”)
At the same time, that seems to be contradicted by ships that have no/limited warp capacity having impulse. The Constellation, sibling of the Enterprise, still retained impulse capabilities, in spite of the warp drive being turned into a pile of slag, and it’s implied that the Hathaway also retained impulse, despite the warp core being non-functional. It wouldn’t be much of a simulated combat if the Hathaway could only sit there.
It is clear, though, that subspace has its own physical laws and its own special frame of reference, one of which is that you can exceed the speed of light in it: for example, the use of subspace radio which transmits at, in TNG times, Warp 9.997 (approximately 79,000c).
What’s surprising is that subspace signals aren’t that much faster than a given starship is. At full tilt, the Sovereign is almost as fast as the radio signal it’s transmitting, and later generations of starships might well match, or even surpass it.
So what if generating a warp field is like domain amplification, creating a bubble of a subspace domain that encloses the ship? This subspace or warp bubble is then shaped by the nacelles, which distorts space locally, allowing the bubble and the ship to be propelled along at FTL speed. This is because while inside the bubble, the rules of subspace apply, not the relativistic rules of real space. It therefore becomes possible to exceed c in that special frame of reference. And yet, the bubble is still strongly connected to real space, so the ship can interact with objects outside the bubble. This explains the existence of Newtonian forces like inertia, acceleration and momentum still acting on the ship, and the continuing need for inertial dampers at warp.
At the same time, if they can do that, you might expect that the warp field could then be used as a shield against alterations in the flow of time, or that being in a warp field would be extremely bad for anyone on board who’s relying on biochemistry or conventional physics to live.
This tight coupling to real space is also why we can see “stars” streaking by while in warp (more likely dust particles in real space being accelerated as they are caught in the ship’s warp bubble). The visual change in post-DIS Trek where the outside of the ship looks more like a Stargate-ish tunnel can be explained away as what the interior of the warp bubble looks like stretched out, as the ship speeds along within it like a canoe on a river, being propelled by layers of warp energy within the bubble and also carried along by the current within the bubble itself as it cruises along.
In TNG, we see both, with the tunnel seeming to be a transitory state as the ship accelerates to warp speed. But treating visuals as literal seems like an exercise in futility. There’s a whole bunch of exotic physics we’re not privy to that go on, in much the same way that a Q do not use warp drives for their powers (despite the similar effect), and people don’t disappear in a puff of light when transporting.
So this further suggests that the TNG Tech Manual c values are meant to reflect speeds in subspace, or rather the ship’s velocity within the warp bubble, which translates to faster velocities and thus further distances travelled in real space. In effect the ship, by surrounding itself with a subspace domain, creates its own shortcut/wormhole through real space.
At the same time, using a subspace distance unit that conflicts with a realspace distance unit seems like it would cause more trouble than not. If anything, were that to be the case, you’d expect the Federation to have a separate distance for subspace travel, just to avoid people getting confused if there is a disparity between realspace and subspace.
It’d be like giving Calorie two different definitions. Does a 200 Calorie food mean that it has 200 Calories, or 200 KiloCalories, and someone’s just used shorthand?
Are you claiming it is in fact equivalent to the standard “trolley problem”? (I don’t think you are, but if you are, I’ll add)
Not exactly, was more thinking along the lines of both choices involving an end to the consciousness of one or the other. Either Tuvok and Neelix are held in limbo/non-existent from that point onwards, or Tuvix is unwound.
If the point is even “arguable”, I claim that is enough to distinguish it from the trolley problem, because that argument doesn’t come up there.
But I am curious, would it not? From my understanding, at the end of the shift, you’re still sacrificing one life to save two, or two to save one, which seems like it would harken back to the fundamentals of the issue. Assuming that no cloning or replicative shenanigans takes place, either Neelix/Tuvok are retained, or Tuvix is.
That said, there was some leeway in that Janeway had no urgent time-pressure to return them back to their bodies at the time, unlike with something like Transport-split Kirk. She mentions needing her crew back, but that could easily happen at some point in the future, and that might alter the variables of the problem, since part of the trolley problem is that there isn’t any time to take a third option, nor get help from other places.
Neither choice here would end, say, Tuvok’s consciousness.
Arguable, since the result is neither Tuvok nor Neelix, but a new one based on those two. They’re not active, seperate consciousness stuffed into a Tuvixian body.
And unwinding Tuvix ends Tuvix’s consciousness. Neither Tuvok or Neelix keep Tuvix as part of themselves afterwards, he’d basically die if that was to happen.
In fairness, Picard is extremely upfront and honest that he has broken the Prime Directive in situations where he’s felt it would be callous not to.
And he’s generally careful about trying to make sure that there is justification for breaking the Prime Directive before doing so.
He was particularly put out about being involved in Klingon political successsion because it would be a violation of the Prime Directive, and he’d be wading into Klingon business, with no justification for his being so, other than that he was appointed.
Now you’ve paused, thinking any action could cause a temporal paradox, or damage to the future timeline.
You can also arrest them anyway. Logically, it would fit into the timeline, since if they’re from the future, they should have accounted for those circusmtances, including their arrest in their future timeline. And a scan would show a fair few forms of time travel, which you can use to verify, or any connections that you might have with other temporal entities. Time travel is a bit convenient like that, until everything goes horribly wrong.
But ultimately, nothing actually prevents someone from just out and out lying. They could easily say “oh, sorry, can’t say, Starfleet Intelligence business”, or “I’m here on Captain/Engineering’s orders”, and you’d have that delay in either case to verify the story. The Temporal Prime Directive doesn’t really factor into it.
In the T’Pring case, we also see that sex isn’t the only outlet. A fight to the death is just as effective, with Spock ending up not needing to bed T’Pring, having resolved his Ponn Farr by fighting Kirk.
While the cultural custom is a fight to the death, it is possible that some form of extended, high-stakes physical combat might be enough to relieve things, but Vulcan sensibilities might simply prevent them from choosing that as an option.
In “Sarek” from TNG melding with Picard resolves Sarek’s emotional control.
In this case, at least, it was less a cure, and more temporarily offloading it to someone else to deal with. Basically the equivalent of Lwaxana affecting the entire Enterprise when she was going through The Phase, or someone with an injured leg leaning on another person to use as a crutch. Except that Sarek was relying on Picard’s emotional processing capabilities.
Presumably his symptoms would return when he ended the psychic connection.
The converse is that making a specific distinction based on sexuality like that is also illogical in what is supposedly the enlightened 24th century Federation.
They’re not the ancients of the 21st century, who would be so concerned with such primitive things.