Spoilers Could Tasha have survived in "Skin of Evil", if augmentation was still in use at that time?

Armus is...inevitable.

 

Data: "I am... Tinman." *SNAP*

 

I love that idea. Would have been great if they brought up the New Humans in the show. Was always fascinated by that concept, since i read the TMP novelization in the nineties.

By the way one of my first thoughts when we first saw Airiam was actually the idea that she might be a New Human...

 

I believe they were thinking about that idea. To what @Longinus has been saying, though, they didn't make that clear or even *strongly* imply it - and I believe that was intentional. Throw old grognards like me something that I can choose to believe what I want to about, but also leave it unspecified so as not to confuse anyone else, and ambiguous so they could pretty much decide to go in any direction if it suited the purposes of a story they decide to do later.

 

Not everyone might want to wind up augmented like Airiam, turned into a "new human", uploaded to the Valhalla, or put in the beep beep chair. Life ends. No doubt a good many Starfleet officers, knowing the high casualty rate of their profession, have "do not augment" type arrangements in their living wills in not be modified into something they never wanted to be. Pike could never have signed such a document, because he knows what he must become. Airiam for whatever reason, did allow herself to be modified to keep living.

Over the years I've gotten a kind of composite picture in my head that Starfleet is not where people who want a stable comfortable life go. Starfleeet attracts renegades, thrill seekers, and people who feel like they were born in the wrong century. Pity the life of Starfleet recruiter. He or she is reduced to looking for jerks with broken noses in bars with questionable legal records and high test scores.

The softer and cushier that life in the UFP gets, Starfleet must turn to recruits that embrace danger and don't really want to live forever, or even to old age, that and multi-generational Starfleet families who have turned it into the family business, and eventually can't really go anywhere else. If it keeps going down that line by 900 years later, it will be distinctly different culture from the one it protects and serves.

 

Not only Picard's heart and Geordi's VISOR (and later artificial eyes), but also Nog's leg. And let's see: Bashir offered to replace Martok's eye. And wasn't there a notable Klingon (was that also Martok or somebody else) who refused an artificial limb, but eventually consented to accepting a limb from a dead relative?

 

Exactly.

Let's say that Airiam's augments were a "thing" in TNG, and there was an Airiam-like crew member with Airiam-like augments. Even with all that, if the plot called for Tasha to die, she still would have died.

 

I think that was in the novels.

 

It was in the Gorkon novels. I think it was the captain of the ship with the arm.

 

Who says there is no medical augmentation 100 years later?
Picard had one.
Perhaps it was just so advanced that it’s lifelike enough to be unnoticeable.
Data looked lifelike, not like a robot.
Also Nog got a perfectly functional new leg.