life-extension technology in Star Trek (or lack thereof)

[SoM]

Timo wrote:

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There was some confusion when it was declared in "Encounter at Farpoint" that McCoy was "only" 137 years old. Granted, we didn't yet learn the year in which the episode took place, but when the season-ender suggested it was 2364 or 2363, the confusion grew: if McCoy was born in 2227 or 2226, he'd only be in his early forties in TOS, whereas DeForest Kelley was past his mid-forties. But the mismatch is not too pronounced.

Isn't Patrick Stewart a decade younger (in any given episode) than Picard supposedly was?

[Timo]

Supposedly so; it's too bad this isn't true of every adult character, to suggest "improvements".

It might also have been interesting to find out that Worf is about fourteen in "Encounter at Farpoint", in human years, explaining why he behaves accordingly...

Timo Saloniemi

[SoM]

Timo wrote:

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It might also have been interesting to find out that Worf is about fourteen in "Encounter at Farpoint", in human years, explaining why he behaves accordingly...

There's surely no way they'd let a Klingon teenager on the bridge (if Klingons are adults by fourteen Earth-years old, you'd expect them to behave accordingly. Which isn't exactly "mature", but is at least not "teenager".)

[Timo]

It seems Alexander was qualified to be a soldier at eight'ish in "Sons and Daughters" - even though the Age of Ascension ritual supposedly takes place at 13-15, as per "Icarus Factor". So Klingons at least appear fine with having kids at menial work, and teenagers in responsible roles.

Dunno. Humans generally have historically been okay with placing impressionable teenagers in commanding roles and on the bridges of ships.

Timo Saloniemi

[T'Girl]

SoM wrote:

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There's surely no way they'd let a Klingon teenager on the bridge (if Klingons are adults by fourteen Earth-years old, you'd expect them to behave accordingly. Which isn't exactly "mature", but is at least not "teenager".)

You have to take into account species like the Occampa and the JemHadar, not every species/culture physically and intellectually matures at the "standard" Human rate. Klingons could be actual adults by their mid-teens. Alexander was of adult size (if a bit thin) when a Human of the same age would be of child's height.

no way they'd let a Klingon teenager on the bridge

Wesley.

[SoM]

T'Girl wrote:

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You have to take into account species like the Occampa and the JemHadar, not every species/culture physically and intellectually matures at the "standard" Human rate. Klingons could be actual adults by their mid-teens. Alexander was of adult size (if a bit thin) when a Human of the same age would be of child's height.

You missed the point - Timo was saying that Worf's S1 behaviour could be accounted for by his being, essentially, a kid. My point was that if he's a kid - regardless of his chronological age - they surely wouldn't have him on the bridge (let alone his having been promoted - I'm not sure whether he was a Lt. jg or full Lt in S1, but either way he wasn't at the bottom of the officer tree, and wasn't in a speciality like medicine to have jumped past Ensign on commission). Plus, the Starfleet Academy course is three/four years by itself!

T'Girl wrote:

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Wesley.

Nepotism!

[Timo]

My point was that if he's a kid - regardless of his chronological age - they surely wouldn't have him on the bridge

If the point was to have a Klingon in Starfleet, then certain shortcomings could surely be overlooked. It's not as if Worf actually did any damage by being a brainless hothead anyway - Picard turned down all of his input as a matter of routine, as if he had been instructed by Starfleet to treat the politically convenient but immature officer as pure window dressing.

Plus, the Starfleet Academy course is three/four years by itself!

Not for the Ocampa, I guess...

Plus, at fifteen, Worf might already have had plenty of Klingon military training that would allow him to skip most of the Academy.

In this putative alternate treatise of the character, that is. The way Worf was actually and eventually described in TNG precludes the possibility of him already being a full Klingon warrior when he goes to the Dark Side and joins the Federation.

Timo Saloniemi

[Crazy Eddie]

SoM wrote:

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There's surely no way they'd let a Klingon teenager on the bridge (if Klingons are adults by fourteen Earth-years old, you'd expect them to behave accordingly. Which isn't exactly "mature", but is at least not "teenager".)

Klingons have relatively long lifespans, though; if Kang and Koloth are any indication, 14 Klingon years would be about 30 Earth years. Reposition that into, say, a human being raised by someone like, say, the Salarians from Mass Effect who typically live about thirty to fourty years. A fourteen year old human might achieve a relatively high rank only because he has more life experience already than a middle-aged Salarian of superior rank. On the other hand, Klingon childhood and maturation is implied to be jaw-droppingly quick; Alexander gives a date for his birth as Stardate 43205, which corresponds to a couple of months AFTER Worf's holodeck bootycall in "The Emissary." It really sort of depends on which calendar we're using.

Either way, Worf's emotional immaturity is a matter of hormones and biochemical urges (he's horny all the time and he's ready for a fight) but he's dealing with those hormonal changes in the position of someone who has the life experience of a middle-aged human.

We don't really know how old Worf was when Khitomer was massacred, but he evidently remembers enough from his Klingon past -- and enough of Klingon culture -- that he didn't have to go off and re-connect with his heritage later in life. Seems the Rozhenkos raised him simply because too few of Mogh's living relatives survived the massacre to care for him or otherwise weren't contacted until Worf was already an adult... so I'm guessing he would have been about 5 or 10 Earth years at the time. In the Klingon lifecycle would have made him a grade schooler, but at that age he would have BEEN a grade schooler for almost the entirety of that decade before slowly growing towards puberty (which, curiously, he did not fully experience until Insurrection).

[Carcazoid]

Wouldn't population be a concern? I seem to remember something like that in "Mark of Gideon" ...

[Crazy Eddie]

"Mark of Gideon" was just plain stupid. After first titpoing around the obvious fact that their entire population is engaged in a tremendous orgy (because, seriously, if nobody on your planet has any privacy at all, that means they're all having sex, giving birth and using the john while elbow to elbow and shoulder to shoulder).

The simplest solution is to put together a military and start a war with somebody. The next simplest solution is to colonize a nearby planet. The next simplest solution is to just get over yourselves and stop having sex in public. And failing all that, natural social evolution would have forced much of the population to either starve to death or resort to cannibalism, or at the very least going crazy and killing each other just to have a tiny bit of privacy; either way, the problem should have resolved itself LONG ago. The fact that it didn't means the entire species is composed of complete morons with no sense of privacy or appropriate conduct and no forethought whatsoever for the consequences of their actions.

So what they do? They go to elaborate lengths to kidnap an alien, construct an equally elaborate facsimile of his starship -- apparently right in the middle of a public place, a few inches from the ongoing orgy -- and try to trick him into giving the president's daughter an STD.

That entire planet is overdue for a darwin award. The Federation should grind them all down and serve them as cheeseburgers.

[Timo]

if nobody on your planet has any privacy at all, that means they're all having sex, giving birth and using the john while elbow to elbow and shoulder to shoulder

Which is how humans in Europe did it for the past couple of thousand years, too.

Privacy in that sense is an extremely recent invention, basically a luxury afforded through conquest of more habitable and sheltered space by technological means.

the entire species is composed of complete morons

Well, they did make it explicit that they refuse to consider contraceptives because of abstract philosophical reasons, or "love of life". It's not something they can get over without ceasing to be.

They could just as well say we're complete morons for having to seek privacy for sex. That sort of self-imposed idiocy is life-hindering masochism at its worst, lacking rational basis.

Timo Saloniemi

[Crazy Eddie]

Timo wrote:

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Which is how humans in Europe did it for the past couple of thousand years, too.

Bullshit.

Gideon depicts a society so overcrowded that the bodies of the population are literally pressed up against the walls of the building just because they have no place else to go. Such conditions never existed in Europe, not thousands of years ago, not ten years ago. Even modern cities, which have a higher population density than any time in history, aren't that tightly packed.

The people of this planet are essentially humanoid cattle: crammed so close together it's hard to imagine they have a lot of room for a lot of difficult industrial labor or intellectual prowess (how many poems can you write while standing in line for six hours to use the bathroom?). They are conceived, born, live and die in a planet-sized corralle and they're too stupid to take even the simplest measures to improve their situation.

So post a giant sign on one street that says "Walk this way for breathing room" and put a meat grinder underneath it. They're packed so close together that they won't notice they're walking into it until right before they fall in... and then they'll probably jump in anyway because of their "love of life."

They could just as well say we're complete morons for having to seek privacy for sex. That sort of self-imposed idiocy is life-hindering masochism at its worst, lacking rational basis.

Sex IN GENERAL lacks a rational basis, so that's a nonsequitor. More to the point: you don't see a lot of that sort of behavior in sentient species -- e.g. walking down the street, pause for thirty seconds so some random stranger can impregnate you, then go about your business. Animals, yes, but not sentient creatures in control of their own cultures and destinies.

[Timo]

Gideon depicts a society so overcrowded that the bodies of the population are literally pressed up against the walls of the building just because they have no place else to go

...Inside one building, an important one where many people would be doing business. Obviously, the same isn't going on outdoors, on a world with actual open terrain and bodies of water.

http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x...deonhd0006.jpg

People today live in conditions exactly as cramped as that. In a busy street, it's literally shoulder to shoulder. In a standard apartment in a really big city, it's easily twenty people living in five square meters of floor space, not just wandering through it on their business.

you don't see a lot of that sort of behavior in sentient species

Forgetting for now that we only have one species to meet the specs...

...What behavior? Sex? We certainly do. Out of those twenty people living in the five square meters, any two might be having sex, with the other eighteen politely ignoring the noises. Going out is an option only with terrain and weather permitting, and in a big city, or in a rural setting in winter, that's not often.

Timo Saloniemi

[TheRoyalFamily]

newtype_alpha wrote:

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Klingons have relatively long lifespans, though; if Kang and Koloth are any indication, 14 Klingon years would be about 30 Earth years. Reposition that into, say, a human being raised by someone like, say, the Salarians from Mass Effect who typically live about thirty to fourty years. A fourteen year old human might achieve a relatively high rank only because he has more life experience already than a middle-aged Salarian of superior rank. On the other hand, Klingon childhood and maturation is implied to be jaw-droppingly quick; Alexander gives a date for his birth as Stardate 43205, which corresponds to a couple of months AFTER Worf's holodeck bootycall in "The Emissary." It really sort of depends on which calendar we're using.

Either way, Worf's emotional immaturity is a matter of hormones and biochemical urges (he's horny all the time and he's ready for a fight) but he's dealing with those hormonal changes in the position of someone who has the life experience of a middle-aged human.

We don't really know how old Worf was when Khitomer was massacred, but he evidently remembers enough from his Klingon past -- and enough of Klingon culture -- that he didn't have to go off and re-connect with his heritage later in life. Seems the Rozhenkos raised him simply because too few of Mogh's living relatives survived the massacre to care for him or otherwise weren't contacted until Worf was already an adult... so I'm guessing he would have been about 5 or 10 Earth years at the time. In the Klingon lifecycle would have made him a grade schooler, but at that age he would have BEEN a grade schooler for almost the entirety of that decade before slowly growing towards puberty (which, curiously, he did not fully experience until Insurrection).

Memory Alpha has Worf being born in 2340; Khitomer was attacked in 2346, so he was five or six. Apparently he went back to Qo'nos at 15 do do his Klingon adulthood rites (that's about the age most human cultures traditionally have them too, but it looks like Klingons are completely physically adult by that point). TNG starts in 2364, so he was 24 or so.

Alexander is eight years old when he's in his teenage/young adult rebelliousness/getting his father's attention when he shows up as a new recruit in DS9.

[Pavonis]

It's hard to say how a Human/Klingon hybrid will mature. It could be that the hybrids of any species mature and develop differently from the norm for either parents' species, and possibly different from other hybrids. For example, a hybrid with a Klingon mother might develop differently than one with a Klingon father.

Alexander was 3/4 Klingon, and 1/4 Human and was adolescent at about 8 years of age (assuming, among other things, that 1000 stardates is about one Earth calendar year). B'Elanna was 1/2 Human and 1/2 Klingon, and what little we saw of her childhood indicates that she didn't age as fast as Alexander, but that even she, at the age of 5, looked older than a typical Human 5-year-old.