Weird or "no shit" moments in Star Trek

I can't think of another way either, then again the transporter is a rather iffy concept, to say the least.

 

I have found that every episode has its "that can't happen" moment. I just take it as one of those things we must accept because it's fiction. From the obvious "according to science, no one could possibly travel beyond the speed of light" (I do like the inventive idea of a warp field as a solution to this, and scientists can be a bunch of party poopers)), to the wide-spread, long-time quandary of..."If a person who is out of phase.. or a ghost...any being who can pass through walls and bulkheads, how is it that the floor will support them?" [The next Phase]. As Captain Picard quipped and we see him laughing for the first time: "Sometimes, Number One, you just have to bow to the absurd" [Up The Long Ladder] (I love this episode: Picard has been discovered to have a sense of humor..though he doesn't really show it, and Doctor Pulaski and Worf are developing a strong bond as well as introducing the romantic and poetic mind of the Klingon. Unfortunately, Doctor Pulaski's character-development came too little, too late.)

However, I do know what you are talking about. Sometimes there is "the reach too far". We are going along with the story and enjoying the journey, then something happens that violently yanks us out of the tale and brings us, unceremoniously, back to our living rooms. We allow the writers and the directors our faith to take us by the hand and lead us into a world of fiction. It's like reading a period novel and the major protagonist starts chatting away in modern-day grammar and jargon (Like "I'm sorry for your loss." which happens quite a bit in current day self-publication. That phrase started being used in common language in the late 1970s not the 1870s)

Back to Star Trek, this doesn't happen as often for me, most likely because the story is in the future. They do have a bunch of wiggle-room. Hmmmm, I'll have to think about this. Let me get back to you.

Ah I do have a problem with Troi's caution when they meet people for the first time "Be careful, Captain. He's hiding something". Well, duh. EVERYONE, when they first meet, are hiding something. If she could extrapolate, it would be very helpful....like "he's hiding something that will do you harm." or "he's planning to manipulate you".

 

A thing that's almost a cliché in Star Trek and is quite stupid in my opinion is monomaniac alien cultures... Like Klingons obsessed with honor (or rather their particular conception of it), Ferengi obsessed with the acquisition of wealth, the Bajorans with their religion and a sort of austerity, Vulcans with "logic" (which is not what we call logic, BTW), etc...
I am dead certain that if there is anywhere in the Universe other beings capable of inventing technology those beings will be as diverse, antagonistic with one another, multilingual... etc as we are. Thinking otherwise is an incredible hubris!!

 

"An 'incident'?!"
"Do we report that, sir?"
"Nah, I'm sure nobody will notice. Tuvok, get me another tea. Stat!"

 

Exqueeze me? "I'm sorry for your loss" is plain informal English, not a buzzphrase like "touch base" or "reach out." I can assure you people were using it when I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s, and probably much earlier.

It's not just Star Trek; it's a sci-fi cliché in general. We know it as the Planet of Hats.

 

Since it's a TV show I give a certain amount of leeway in this. Mostly I chalk it up to we the viewers not knowing enough about alien civilization to know diversity when we see it. Would squid aliens be able to see the difference between China and England?

 

Birds are not exactly our genetic cousins but I can assure you that in the Park where I go regularly they can tell a person from another. Especially one that feeds them from one that doesn't. If birds (without great intelligence) can tell the difference between people, I guess highly intelligent aliens would too, given enough time to get used to our cultures and ways of life that is.

 

To be fair, sometimes more intelligence can be a hinderance.

From a Stargate SG-1 episode

I've seen this kind of RL.

 

Intelligence does not automatically mean success. You need other skills for that, like sociability, practical sense etc... The best example of that are the idiot-savants who can be extraordinary intelligent but socially inept and incapable of putting that intelligence to good use. I've seen a documentary about someone that could learn any language picked randomly in less than a week, meaning in a week he went from total incomprehension to having a lively conversation with three people about diverse matters. But he was more helpless than a child and needed people to take care of him.

 

Right. I've seen incredibly intelligent people be so stunningly clueless about people and life.

 

Scorpion (the TV show, not the VOY episode) illustrated this.

If somebody who wasn't Human looked at and encountered many of us, what would they think we were obsessed with? What is the main thrust behind Human society?

Would having supposedly lived a certain length of time as a species tend to distill our culture into one main obsession?

 

One man's trash is another man's treasure. As a species, we're the opposite of what you could call singleminded. We're as diverse and conflicted as can be. I know people who'll talk to me at length and with a passion of things that I find boring as hell and I bet the opposite is true!

 

Pretty much all of Schitzoid Man. It was like...WTF was that all about and how did it make this series better? It didn't take a genius to figure out he had to not do what his future self was so intent on doing. We didn't really learn anything and it was just...bad.

I do remember finally most probably giving the writers a huge leap and benefit of the doubt; somehow a deep-thinking writer sneaked into the room and wrote an episode that questions "Do we really ever learn from our past mistakes?" nahhhhh, they were all high.

 

Do you mean Time Squared?

Schizoid Man is the one where the old friend of Data's creator hijacks Data's body because he was dying.

 

I don't see why he couldn't make a "mindless" Data to download his mind in without anyone objecting to it. After all, they basically did the same with Spock and what amounts to a clone.

 

We did get some interesting back story on Picard, the episode made him more Human than most episodes did.

 

When Picard said that Fermat's Last Theorem was never solved. I thought :

"For once that they genuinely tried to say something real, they still got it wrong, although they couldn't know it at the time."

 

Along the same lines (but this has little to do with Trek anymore), I've often wondered about how limited we could be in understanding/perceiving the world around us, without realising it. And I'm not even talking about us having limited intellgence. Could it be that there are concepts, thoughts (relatively simple mathematical truths for example), we literally can't think because our brains simply aren't wired that way - things that to another, approximately equivalently developed species -not more intelligent than us, generally-are immediately obvious, but can't explain to us because our brains literally won't allow us to understand?

 

There are already theorems that can't be demonstrated without computer assistance (basically because the number of possibilities is too high for a human being to list in his lifetime, computers can work billions of times faster than any human being).

 

^I know that (being a mathematician myself by education), that's why I explicitly talked about things that would be immediately obvious to another species, otherwise not more intelligent than us. I don't expect those theorems would fall into that category, unless there is a fundamentally different way to prove them, a way we cannot conceive of, not even in principle.

Could it be that there are truths that elude us, and that we also won't discover by any (future) A.I. built by us, since the same limitations wouldn't allow us to build an A.I. that could grasp them -- somehow transferring our own limitations into the very construction of such A.I.'s without even realising it ?