Bleeding orange and green...or what?

[Marie1]

Nerys Ghemor wrote:

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What's common? Bruises/scars appearing purple? Or am I misreading you?

Bruises/scars being purple. A lot of umm... parts, of non-white people are purple, when on a white person, they'd be pink. That includes scars and bruises, in my case... I could post a non-gross picture?

So they could have red blood and purple bruises etc.

To complicate things, in TrekLit- Jem'Hadar have amber blood, in the show, it was that same dark colour as Garaks...

[Nerys Ghemor]

As long as it's non-gross...I'm not good at looking at blood!

(Even watching the show ER was tough for me!)

[Marie1]

LOL, no blood... I do have pictures of the wound when it was new, but that wouldn't really prove my point... unless you're wondering what colour my blood is.

See- my scar is purple... ruining my nice calf! Boooo!! Haha!!

[Nerys Ghemor]

LOL, no thanks on the "bleeding" pics.

[Marie1]

LOL! No prob! But I'm purple!! =D

[Myasishchev]

Marie1 wrote:

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Bruises/scars being purple. A lot of umm... parts, of non-white people are purple, when on a white person, they'd be pink. That includes scars and bruises, in my case...

My experience has been that it's more of a dark brown, but that could just be a different in terminology. Which makes sense, as my understanding was it's just a melanin concentration issue--with the skin simply not being transparent enough to visual wavelengths for the blood to reflect light to our eyes.

My girlfriend of Korean-American (German-Jewish-muttish) descent has pinkish scars that veer toward the purple, I suppose, but I've never given it that much thought. My scars tend to be white--probably showing that the melanin concentration in the incorrectly reconstructed skin tissue is lower. Her scars also tend to be hypertrophic, with raised deposits of collagen, while mine tend to heal flat.

To complicate things, in TrekLit- Jem'Hadar have amber blood, in the show, it was that same dark colour as Garaks...

Amber? Geez. Do they bother to name a chemical? Pink (Klingon?) blood is hemerythin, also iron-based... I think vanabins are orange... what would make golden yellow?

[Crimea River]

Memory-Alpha says that Cardassian blood is brown, but it can't always be relied on, despite the fact that it's the best source. And a bit off-topic, but in response to what someone had said prior: I agree, about the smiling, etc; it doesn't seem real for them to be like humans in that way, unless they could explain it as cultural things like that, kissing, etc, being a humanoid thing caused by the Progenitors - though that really doesn't make sense. Some ancient Earth civilisations didn't have smiling as an expression of joy, I believe. This all sounds like a jumble, I bet. >_<

And that looks like it hurt, Marie1. D: Hopefully it doesn't hurt anymore.

(Finally something I can post in; still in the middle of Season 3, lol).

[Nerys Ghemor]

I would not be surprised if the Progenitors' original intent was for all the humanoid races to get to know each other, if they DID deliberately program the instinctive expressions to be the same. Paul Ekman's studies of humanity revealed that certain expressions are universal to humanity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman

It would make sense with the Progenitors' stated goals if they did program humans, Cardassians, Klingons, and all other species sharing their genetic inheritance to smile, laugh, and express their most basic emotions in ways that would be recognizable even with the cultural and physiological differences that they did have.

[Myasishchev]

As for human emotional signals in aliens--I always thought it was a very nice touch by Leonard Nimoy, or whoever was responsible, in "Enterprise Incident," to establish that Vulcans and Rommies don't kiss with their mouths. (Not to suggest that it is a problem in ST11 that they do; he's getting it with a human, who wouldn't get much of a kick out of holding hands).

Still, TV production realities force human emotional signals in aliens, and that's okay. There is no economical way around it to do the kinds of stories Trek wants to tell.

Worse is the Trek misunderstanding of how biological systems evolve.

In "The Chase," I wish so much that they hadn't gone for the bleachers with their binding of the various humanoid species. What's wrong with leaving the Progenitors as the force who had enforced a galactic standard of DNA over other replicators, creating an oh-so distant, but still palpable, kinship link between all (except the Horta, and the Tholians, and the Sheliak, I guess )? This isn't implausible--it leaves open the question of their motives, but the actual act is not so unlikely and difficult to perform that it raises questions of practicality.

I find it difficult to fathom how they were supposed to "program" bipedality, large brain size, and a mouth that allows food to stupidly pass over the airway (choked on my dinner out earlier tonight, thanks a lot Salome Jens and our terrestrial vertebrate common ancestor! <_< ) into the chemistry, when that chemistry is simply not there at that point in time. I mean, if you programmed that which makes us humanoid into DNA, the DNA would express itself (in the appropriate environment) as... well, a humanoid. Not a proto-humanoid. Not an ancient protist that will one day lead to humanoids. A humanoid. Lacking an appropriate environment, of course, the Progenitors presumably just left a bunch of dead fetilized eggs all over the galaxy.

Further, while an ecology based on a DNA/RNA regime definitely can lead to bipedality, etc., under some circumstances--obviously, here we are--it would not, necessarily, under every circumstance. If the wisdom of the Progenitors is such that they could reliably predict the outcome of such a chaotic system as hundreds or thousands of biospheres operating over billions of years, so that they could influence the initial conditions to make humanoids, then it raises the question: why didn't they just make humanoids?

There are also critical ethical questions about permitting the savagery of all natural and social history to take place when it wasn't really necessary.

Trek is really into the idea that evolutionary potential is already inside us, like a hidden item in a video game, "locked away" until we go down the proper pipe. It's the free radicals, radiation, randomness, time and above all the context of our environments that shape us. From the entertainingly egregious scientific illiteracy of "Genesis," to the fun fable, marred by the traditional Trek tactic of fixing an implausibility problem with an even more implausible solution, of "The Chase," to the truly sickening ideological implications of "Dear Doctor," Trek seems to believe wholeheartedly in this entirely ridiculous, conceivably dangerous position.

[DevilEyes]

Myasishchev wrote:

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As for human emotional signals in aliens--I always thought it was a very nice touch by Leonard Nimoy, or whoever was responsible, in "Enterprise Incident," to establish that Vulcans and Rommies don't kiss with their mouths. (Not to suggest that it is a problem in ST11 that they do; he's getting it with a human, who wouldn't get much of a kick out of holding hands).

He also mouth-kissed Leila Kalomi and Zarabeth in TOS. Leila was definitely human, and Zarabeth at elast looked 100% human, although from another planet. So it's nothing new to see Spock engage in mouth-kissing with human women. The only time we saw him with a Vulcan or Romulan ("The Enterprise Incident", TSFS), they were engaginn in finger-touching instead.

However, Trek hasn't been particularly consistent in providing different alien races with different emotional signals. Klingons have their own specific ways of courting and making out, but many of the alien races in Trek seem to engage in the same kind of mouth-kissing that humans so.... Bajorans, Cardassian, Trills...

As for the blood color, I wonder where the idea about Cardies having brown blood comes from. I don't remember it ever mentioned. Garak's blood looked red, and we've seen both Dukat and Damar with bloodshot eyes (not that it would be worth changing this is post-production, anyway ).

I have been very tempted to comment that you are all overthinking this... I am prefectly OK with the realities of making a TV show that dictate using human actors, for starters and letting them still look sufficiently human-like even in makeup - I admit that I never liked the more puppet-looking aliens as some of those in "Farscape", which aren't any more realistic, for that matter. If we ever got to meet actual aliens in RL, I'm sure that the differences between them and humans would be far greater than the color of blood. There is no reason why they would look like any species from Earth. Maybe they'd be pieces of goo or something. Trek has had several worthy attempts to portray trully alien aliens, but in these cases, they either had to appear for a short time, and to possess a humanoid body to even be able to communicate with the humanoids (Medusans, Prophets), or, in the case of Changelings - Trek's most alien major alien race - they had to keep a human form 99% of the screentime so they could be played by actors, communicate etc., which results in viewers too often practically seeing them as humans and forgetting just how different they are supposed to be.

[ElScoob]

Honestly, before I came in, I was wondering if maybe the thread was about O'Brien.

--g

[PSGarak]

ElScoob wrote:

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Honestly, before I came in, I was wondering if maybe the thread was about O'Brien.

--g

Good one!

[Nerys Ghemor]

Ha! I didn't even catch that!

I was thinking, of course, of the colors of the emblem of the Cardassian Union.

[Timo]

why didn't they just make humanoids?

It does appear logical to me, sort of. These Progenitor folks supposedly began their galactic seeding program because they felt their own mortality catching up on them. They were lonely, they knew they'd go extinct one day, they wanted to leave a monument in form of some sort of offspring, and they didn't want this offspring to be as lonely as they had been.

Yet the offspring would also be mortal and eventually go extinct. So in order to keep the galaxy populated with the desired "humanoid monument", the Progenitors would have to program a succession of emergencies: a couple of thousand humanoid species emerge first, meet each other, perhaps fall in culturo-technological synch, vie for supremacy, and ultimately go extinct - and then a next batch emerges from previously humanoid-free biospheres and does the same.

The Progenitors began their program five billion years ago. There could have been quite a few cycles of humanoid cultures there, if a typical culture normally goes from humanoid through techno-humanoid to noncorporeal in a matter of tens of millennia at most...

No doubt the project would go astray at some point. But it makes sense that it would begin in an orderly fashion, with several dozens or hundreds of cycles of humanoids sticking to the original parameters - because the Progenitors programmed those parameters to be simple and universal, with few bells and whistles and very little in the way of variation. That the various species in the Trek 24th century are compatible is only a sign of good engineering - in the 24,000th century, the differences will probably be somewhat more severe, and the monument will start to crumble.

Timo Saloniemi

[Thor Damar]

Nerys Ghemor wrote:

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Ha! I didn't even catch that!

I was thinking, of course, of the colors of the emblem of the Cardassian Union.

Ah, yes the awe inspiring sigil of the Cardassian Union. Let's bask in its glory:


(I've got nothing else to contribute to this excellent discussion thus far, I just really like that symbol)