Star Trek Ruminations

100 Years Young: Part I: Musings About the Drayan Life-Cycle Part II: Is Aging an Inevitable Biological Fact? Part III: Can an Organism 'Grow' Smaller and Younger? Part IV: The Drayan Civilization If you're ready to accept, or at least consider, that aging isn't a biological necessity , accepting the idea that things might grow smaller over time should be a relatively simple matter. At the same time, there are some logistical problems to work out. Consider the following comment from a book about how science-fiction writers can craft convincing alien life-forms: "Every creature I know of starts out as a smaller structure produced in the body of one or more adults of its kind. To become an adult itself, it must grow" ( Aliens and Alien Societies , Stanley Schmidt). Schmidt's comment that things " must grow" does make a lot of sense—and in principle I am inclined to agree with him. This illustrates our second instinctive objection to the Drayan lif...

100 Years Young: Part I: Musings About the Drayan Life-Cycle Part II: Is Aging an Inevitable Biological Fact? Part III: Can an Organism 'Grow' Smaller and Younger? Part IV: The Drayan Civilization Regarding this first point, let me begin with the assertion that what we know as the aging process is not the fundamental truth we presume it to be. I recently came across an intriguing short story called "Invariant" by John Pierce about a scientist who learns how to stop biological aging. As the story explains: "The regeneration of limbs in salamanders led to the idea of perfect regeneration of human parts. How, say, a cut heals, leavng not a scar, but a perfect replica of the damaged tissue. How in normal metabolism tissue can be replaced not imperfectly, as in an aging organism, but perfectly, indfinitely." (The story deals with some unexpected results of his research - you may want to find a copy of this story to see how it ends.) The idea of "perfect re...

Today I came across this interesting story: "' Tower of Babel' translator made. " This is an innovative approach to creating a real-time, audio translator - something akin to the Universal Translator. The article explains, in part: Electrodes are attached to the neck and face to detect the movements that occur as the person silently mouths words and phrases. Using this data, a computer can work out the sounds being formed and then build these sounds up into words. The system is then able to translate the words into another language which is read out by a synthetic voice. Sensing the movement of the speech organs, rather than an interpreting sound-waves, allows the device to come as close as possible to real-time translation without the trouble of having overlapping voices. The effect is " like watching a television programme that [has] been dubbed." This is a huge leap forward, but clearly they have a long way to go. On Star Trek , people's l...

100 Years Young: Part I: Musings About the Drayan Life-Cycle Part II: Is Aging an Inevitable Biological Fact? Part III: Can an Organism 'Grow' Smaller and Younger? Part IV: The Drayan Civilization Reverse aging. It's one of the most intriguing concepts in xenobiology introduced into the Star Trek universe. A quiet little episode of Voyager called "Innocent" features a Delta-Quadrant race called the Drayan that have this kind of life-cycle. Unfortunately the concept was introduced but barely explored. The cursory treatment of the idea probably left most fans scratching their heads, dismissing the whole notion of reverse aging, and forgetting about the Drayan as just another alien-species-of-the-week. However, I would argue that this is a concept worthy of further consideration and is even a plausible idea——if not in the real world at least within the confines of the Star Trek universe. To address this topic I will begin by briefly outlining the episode, focusi...

In my entry " The Thing About Being a Hologram . . . " I discussed some of the oversights and inconsistencies involving the nature of holodeck characters, in particular sentient holodeck characters. But a number of episodes have inconsistencies revolving around holodeck "matter" leaving the holodeck. It has been elsewhere stated the holodeck "matter" cannot do that. The Nitpicker's Guide for Next Generation Trekkers , written by Phil Farrand, is a classic work of Star Trek commentary discussing inconsistencies and bloopers from throughout the series. (In fact, I must credit Mr. Farrand for inspiring the name of this blog - he has a subheading called "Ruminations" in his discussion of certain episodes.) The problem of holographic objects leaving the holodeck is touched on throughout the book and finally summed up in his entry on the sixth season episode "Ship in a Bottle": If holodeck matter cannot exist outside the holodeck, the fo...

Fractal - n. "In colloquial usage, it denotes a shape that is recursively constructed or self-similar, that is, a shape that appears similar at all scales of magnification and is therefore often referred to as 'infinitely complex.'" ( Wikipedia ) The Borg collective exemplifies this colloquial definition of a fractal - the idea of something that is the same at all levels of magnification. In effect, the Borg are a fractal civilization. The Borg, on the largest scale, form a collective. In fact, Seven of Nine often referred to the Borg simply as "the Collective." We can mentally picture this - swarms of cubes populated by a vast array of interconnected drones all fulfilling specific roles within the collective. Tasks are carried out for the whole. As much as each drone may perform some particular task, this specialization is part of a larger scale decentralization. There is redundancy built into the very fabric of the collective. Eliminate a drone, damage a...

Starting with The Next Generation , the holodeck became as much a part of the Star Trek universe as the transporter and warp drive. One outgrowth of the holodeck concept was the creation of sentient holograms, most notably Professor Moriarty ( TNG: “Elementary, My Dear Data” and “Ship in a Bottle”) and the Doctor ( VOY: “Caretaker” et. al.). The concept of a sentient, living hologram is intriguing and is explored throughout the seven seasons of Voyager in particular. In the process, however, the writers have allowed a persistent logical gaffe into a number of story lines that fail to recognize that holograms aren’t discreet, self-contained things , they are representation of data in a file . I am not talking about a debate over what holograms are when they appear on the holodeck ( the tractor-beam-manipulated-matter vs. photons-and-force-fields debate ). I am talking about what they are at a fundamental level. They are computer files. Yes, they are highly sophisticated compu...

If you visited the Google website earlier this week you may have seen their logo was modified as a tribute to Perceval Lowell and his studies of Mars, and the launch of Google Mars with its interactive map of the red planet. See the List of Planitia on Mars If you follow the above link, and search through the list of plains (or planitia) on the left, you can find Utopia toward the end of the list and find it on the map. Utopia Planitia is, of course, the site of Starfleet's Ship Yards and the birthplace of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D . More precisely this is the location over which the ship yards are in a geosynchronous orbit as explained in the ST:TNG Technical Manual and confirmed by visual evidence from the Voyager episode "Relativity". (This makes me wonder if Earth Station McKinley is in geosynchronous orbit above Mt. McKinley.) The idea of the Utopia Planitia Ship Yards was introduced during The Next Generation . It was mentioned (and barely shown through a wind...

In the earlier post “ Nothing New Under the Sun . . . ” I wrote about the progressive revelation I had regarding how far back the use of the wide angle phaser setting goes. Recently I came across some additional information on a Star Trek forum. [Unfortunately the thread, and evidently the entire forum, are no longer there anymore.] To summarize the discussion: There are at least two other places the wide beam phaser setting was mentioned or used that I had overlooked. One was in the Next Generation episode “Power Play.” Troi, Data, and O’Brien were “possessed” by alien life forms and had taken hostages in 10-Forward. One rescue option that was discussed was to storm 10-Forward with wide beam phaser fire—stun everybody, sort it out later. Secondly, on Deep Space Nine wide beam phasers were used to sweep rooms for hidden changelings. (There is a third reference on this forum to another use or mention of it in an episode of TOS , however in the post there was some uncertainty as to wh...

The Deep Space Nine episode “Little Green Men” presents the comical notion that Quark, Nog , Rom, and Odo were actually responsible for the infamous Roswell incident. As it turns out, it wasn ’t a weather balloon at all. It was three big-lobed Ferengi and a stowaway changeling. When Quark realizes he has traveled back in time and is dealing with primitive hu - mons — hu - mons he can relate too on one level, but disdains on another—he rattles off his plan to take over the galaxy. Sell his ship’s technology to the highest bidder, make contact with Ferenginar , and give the Ferengi a decisive advantage in the history of the Alpha Quadrant. He muses that the Ferengi will have warp drive ‘even before the Vulcans .’ As you would expect, his grandiose plans come to nothing, but the truth is, they may never had a chance, at least not in the way he envisioned them. Even assuming Rom could use his engineering expertise to manufacture twenty-fourth century gadgets with twentieth century te...

The Star Trek universe is largely populated with humanoid races - one head, two eyes, two arms, two legs – with relatively minor variations. One of the few non-humanoid, intelligent races we see on the show is the Sheliak in the episode "The Ensigns of Command" ( TNG , season three). Their non-humanoid form creates an interesting backdrop for the even larger cultural and linguistic barriers that exist between the Sheliak and the humanoid races of the Federation. At the same time it poses some interesting questions about how they have advanced to become a powerful, space-faring civilization. First it must be acknowledged that while the Sheliak are non-humanoid, they still have a roughly humanoid silhouette. What we see of the Sheliak is a human sized, upright being with a head-like protuberance at the top and undulating masses where a humanoid's arms would normally be. Still, they have no discernable face, eyes, nose nor any true appendages. Therein lies an interesting pr...