STID: The Ethics of the Ending

I highly doubt the Augments can be fixed or rehabilitated. It's literally in their DNA to be what they are - ruthless conquerors. They can't be anything else. So the only safe and humane thing would be to either keep them frozen, or put them on an uninhabited planet where they can't threaten anyone ever again.

 

Who put them in stasis? It's my understanding they put themselves in that state as part of their escape.

 

If one were to examine the morality of just sticking Khan back in his can, it might be a it off, but this is one of those things where "looking cool" and "dramatic license" outweigh what would actually occur. Unfortunately.

Oh, and I take some exception to the idea that death and cryo-stasis can be compared, primarily on the basis that cryo-stasis can be reversed with a few button presses. Death can't, though I wish to God it could. Morally speaking, it's more like a kind of life imprisonment, except that unlike actuallife imprisonment, the prisoners won't have to live with the various problems with imprisonment, like crap food, bad guards and eventually dying of old age. Plus, they can be woken up one day. It's basically what they put themselves in for anyway.

 

The 'advanced' Feds of Picard's time had no problem disassembling Lore. I have no problem seeing a 'Vulcan-destroyed' timeline of 1 century prior to Picard doing whatever they wanted.

 

And given what Khan could do regardless of being centuries behind the curve. I don't even think it's a good idea to give them their own planet.

 

They were also still at the point where they questioned whether Data could be considered a person at all. It's easy to justify disassembling a dangerous machine.

 

No, Data had already been judged as a sentient being and with all the rights that entails.

 

^ But it did come up again, as recently as "Measure of a Man".

But like I said, Ceti Alpha V had absolutely no technological base. It was basically just an empty wasteland, and that was even before its neighbor exploded. There would be nothing - ever - out of which Khan COULD have built a starship.

 

On what are you basing your understanding of Ceti Alpha V?

My own, which may have been influenced by Greg Cox's novel on the subject admittedly, was that originally Ceti Alpha V was a pretty hostile planet, but not a wasteland...at least not entirely. Off the top of my head I imagine it being a rather more hospitable version of Skull Island, minus the natives.

As I think I mentioned above, it's not that Khan and his followers couldn't have eventually developed the technology for spaceflight there, it's that they'd be starting with raw resources.

 

Kirk and Spock agree with you.

 

Not Khan, but his descendents two or three generations down the line would have built some pretty bitchin ones.

 

This actually has me wondering how long it might have taken them to develop spaceflight given that they had the knowledge but lacked the developed materials.

Makes me wonder how long it would take ordinary humans too, actually.

 

I guess has Khan had '5 times the strength' of humans it's reasonable to assume he's x5 with everything else too, so a fifth of the time? Whatever that is...

 

I don't know exactly how the TNG timeline went, whether Lore was disassembled before or after Data's trial, but my main point wasn't really about the exact legal status of Data. It was about the fact that 24th century humans still naturally assume that a machine is not sentient, unless and until proven otherwise.

 

Lore was disassembled by Data himself (offscreen) at the end of Descend Part 2 I think.


Well, if it were up to me, I'd have offered Khan a deal of pleading guilty and swearing an oath of accepting the full punishment of the law in exchange for a pardon of his people as soon as a suitable colony world could be found.
And have him record a message to them not to ever try to free/avenge him so his sacrifice remains meaningful and their freedom untouched.
Or maybe even let them know in person.

 

Out of WHAT? If you took Khan's people and stuck them in the middle of a forest or a meadow, what could they possibly use to make a starship? They could make a house, but that'd be it, really.

 

I dunno, normal humans managed to come pretty far by essentially being stuck in the middle of forests and meadows...

 

Yes, if you know what you are aiming for, its a lot easier to get there. How long that takes is harder to gauge but it wouldn't take forever.

 

How about handing Khan over to Kronos for some Klingon justice?

 

^ Presumably he knows too many Starfleet secrets to just be handed over in such a manner.

... But I don't care how brilliant you and your buddies are, if you're starting out from scratch on a deserted planet, even if you do know how to build spaceships and can preserve that knowledge, it'd still take generations and generations to create a population large enough to build the necessary foundries, factories, mines and computers necessary to make a ship. Based on what we saw of augments on Enterprise, that level of cooperation would be extremely difficult for Khan and his pals. If their descendants ever did succeed in rebuilding space flight, they'd almost certainly be an entirely different race from the one originally marooned.