Bleeding orange and green...or what?

Discussion in 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine' started by Nerys Ghemor, Aug 13, 2009.

  1. JustKate

    JustKate Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Yeah, but, that Google thing does require you to ask stuff, right? It's not like you can say, "Hey, you got any images of the origin of the Galor?"
     
  2. Thor Damar

    Thor Damar Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Actually I typed in 'Darth Sidious' and voila.

    Typing in 'Galor' gets you the Starship that looks like a scorpion riding a Manta Ray.;)
     
  3. JustKate

    JustKate Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    ^ A sea-worthy scorpion? Euw. The land-based kind are bad enough.
     
  4. PSGarak

    PSGarak Commodore Commodore

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    There were sea scorpions. They were called eurypterids. They are, thankfully, extinct.
     
  5. JustKate

    JustKate Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I think I've seen the fossils, now that you mention it, PS. Euw. But a scorpion composed of rock is the best kind to have around, IMO.
     
  6. PSGarak

    PSGarak Commodore Commodore

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    Yeah. The biggest fossil one discovered to date was an estimated 2.5 meters long. And we think swimming in the ocean is dangerous today? Ha!!
     
  7. Nerys Ghemor

    Nerys Ghemor Vice Admiral Admiral

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  8. Thor Damar

    Thor Damar Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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  9. PSGarak

    PSGarak Commodore Commodore

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  10. Myasishchev

    Myasishchev Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Without a doubt.:lol:

    Really, it strikes me that a sapient species with the capabilities of the ancient humanoids is probably the least likely one in the whole galaxy to die out. It is far more likely that their untended experiments would go disastrously awry--as it surely did, many times, on Earth, unless it was all part of their plan, and they accurately predicted the late heavy bombardment, and the P-T and K-T extinctions amongst others, which is bewilderingly advanced.

    Given this, I wonder if the Progenitors and Battlestar Galactica's God are the same people. They both go to insane lengths to accomplish very questionable goals. :p

    It also seems very unlikely that you can code humanity into a prokaryote, which were probably the only thing that would have existed when the progenitors were doing their thing, at all. Even if you could, surely it would have been noticed very rapidly that the staggering amounts of junk DNA in virtually every life form on every planet visited by the progenitors coded the same information as what is likely to have been the most studied DNA on any of those planets, that of the humanoid being.

    There is also a question of physical possibility of the progenitors' carbon-based evolution beginning perhaps as far back as nine to ten billion years ago. Astrophysically speaking, that long ago, did sufficient concentrations of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and other materials vital for life-as-we-know-it exist?
     
  11. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Die out, of external reasons? Probably not. Die out, of internal reasons? No doubt sooner or later. Mutate into something that doesn't leave much mark on the galaxy, unless a nostalgic memorial is erected? That seems a given.

    I wouldn't call that particularly distastrous. One planet here or there... Who's counting? And it seems they succeeded on Earth twice, producing both the Voth and the Humans, and may succeed a number of times still before Sol goes out.

    It probably was. I mean, it's a no-brainer: build in the code that perverts natural evolution into humanoid evolution, and let events run their course so that the galaxy always stays populated with humanoids. A given planet may produce anything from zero to half a dozen humanoid cultures, and on the average, the plan will proceed unsupervised till all eternity.

    And our heroes did notice it, eventually. It takes a bit of starfaring to accomplish, though, since without interstellar comparisons, one wouldn't be aware of what constitutes "humanoid DNA".

    However, the actual Progenitor plan wasn't coded in base pairs AFAWK. Only the message sent to future generations was. And even that message probably relied on levels of information storage that weren't evident at mere molecular level.

    If anything, astrophysics today is tending toward an increasingly early introduction of stars as we know them - thus, also second-generation stars capable of sprouting life-friendly systems. I wouldn't sweat the odds of one planet out of billions being life-generating and life-sustaining early on in the Trek history, then, especially not when apparently most planets are that way in the present time. Although the latter might be due to extensive terraforming. And that is probably the work of the Progenitors, directly or indirectly: by engineering a specific type of technological sentience to be prevalent, they'd also dictate what sort of geomanipulation that sentience would perform, and thus all their offspring would be producing the same sort of planets...

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  12. PSGarak

    PSGarak Commodore Commodore

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    ^^ It's unlikely, but not completely impossible. Most measurements of the age of the Universe fall between 12-14 billion years. In the first 2 billion years of that time, it is believed that no stars contained planetary systems. There wasn't enough spare material for the formation of rocks or dust. Carbon can only be formed in a star that has become a red giant, in other words, a star that has entered approximately the last 10% of its lifespan. Because it is difficult to pinpoint accurate time frames for things that happened that long ago, most astronomers say hundreds of millions to several billion years passed before the formation of carbon. If it was just hundreds of millions of years, then yes, it would be possible for carbon to have been around by then, but there would have been no planets to sustain life from that carbon. Even if we assume that planets started forming after 2 billion years, it would have taken a great deal of time for any of those new planets to become habitable. It's an awfully big stretch.
     
  13. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Well, a big stretch is what we're looking for, really. After all, the Progenitors were alone in the galaxy, meaning that the odds of carbon life developing at their time and age were slim.

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  14. Nerys Ghemor

    Nerys Ghemor Vice Admiral Admiral

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    What I have personally wondered would be, what is the vector for the seeding? I've always thought it had to be a retrovirus of some sort, something programmed to be extremely stable and maintain its code over billions of years so that it can repeatedly guide the evolution of the target species...in other words, one HECK of a technological accomplishment. Especially when you consider that we've seen it work on mammalians of varying biochemistries (humans, Vulcans), therapsids (Cardassians), reptilians (Voth), and other forms entirely.

    Whether this is actually feasible or not, I'm not sure and rather doubt, but it's the only explanation I can come up with in the context of the Star Trek universe.
     
  15. DevilEyes

    DevilEyes Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    And in what is either an important connection or an astonishing coincidence, a individual extremely physically similar to the Cardassian we know as 'Elim Garak' - although apparently of human appearance - was known on Earth in the beginning of the 8th decade of the 20th century, as 'Scorpio Killer', until he was shot dead by one Inspector Harry Callahan. :)
     
  16. JustKate

    JustKate Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    ::deedeedeedee, deedeedeedee::

    :lol:
     
  17. PSGarak

    PSGarak Commodore Commodore

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    :guffaw:OMG, I can't stop laughing!
     
  18. Marie1

    Marie1 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    LOL- yeah, when I first saw the thread I thought it'd be something re: Cath. vs. Prot. in Ireland!

    My Bruises are usually purple, will turn brown then yellow... Scars turn purple when fresh, then I can tan to fade them... burns turn brown tho- like severe ones...

    [/QUOTE]
    Nope, they don't mention it... I don't think they put that much thought in it. :p
     
  19. Sal'ira

    Sal'ira Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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    This conversation may be old, but I just went onto the Star Trek Wiki and it said that Cardassian blood was brown.
     
  20. Nerys Ghemor

    Nerys Ghemor Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Have you got a link? There are a LOT of Star Trek wikis, so it would help to determine the type of source you have (canon, lit, or fanon) if we could actually see the link.