I do wish CBSAA would develop a 'Star Trek: New Frontier' series. Mack Calhoun might be a morally grey captain, but IMO he's also one of the most badass Starfleet captain in both Alpha and Beta canon
Now think about it from the perspective of the past. In the forties my family were running around with no shoes on their feet, out of school before they were out of puberty, fresh bomb craters on the ground as they queued for a bit of bread from the church. In the same time period, you could get a death sentence for things, go to prison for being gay. Sweets were still on rationing. Now, even with the problems we do have, poverty is in no way as comparably bad. Food banks, though a horrible thing to need in a society, are a bit more advanced than a slice of bread and dripping. Gay people have the protection of the law. Further education can by funded well into adulthood. I can download books from the internet for the price of maybe six large educational tomes in the old days. There’s no death sentence. They are taxing sweets because we eat too much of them. If you explained today to people suffering then, and didn’t think it was utopia, they would think you are bonkers. We do t have to worry about the bomb craters, because it’s not really safe for kids to play in the streets anymore, so it’s one step forward two back there. It’s all a matter of perspective. There’s always something more to be done, something more to be had; but from a twentieth century perspective Trek is a utopia. Making Trek too much like ‘real life’ misses the point sometimes. Edit to add: and you don’t have to do it with time travel either, there are places in the world where the developed west alone is a utopia. Hence ‘first world problems’ and the ever increasing attempt at raging an the finer details without a sense of perspective.
I’m not certain you understand what the word means. It’s not a matter of perspective. A utopia implies we have figured everything out. The definition is literally: Ignoring the imaginary part, there has never been a time in my life where everything is perfect. We have never figured everything out. We always have problems. Sure, we’ve solved problems. We’ve managed to make the world a little bit of a better place. But poverty, disparities, corruption, greed... they are all very much there. You can’t have a utopia if there are still people suffering.
From what was said, I assumed that he eventually suffered the same fate as Lal; positronic cascade failure. He was just a prototype after all and I think it's mentioned elsewhere that Soong's other prototypes were similarly flawed.
Sociologically, there will always be poverty...the line moves...there will always be deviants (there has to be, it’s a function of society) to a greater or lesser degree. You end reclassifying suffering. Fifty years ago, no shoes, around about thirty years ago that turns into cheap shoes from Tesco vs Nike’s. From the perspective of time or place, we are living in a Utopia. (Assuming we’re are in the developed world somewhere, U.K for my example) When people are still suffering we get angry about it, because it’s not normalised as once it was. This is not an argument to stop working on it, far from it; but pretending the suffering is the same is naive. Being gay in the forties and fifties meant prison or worse. Now it means court cases about the baking of cakes for a gay wedding. Pretending these things are the same is silly. The law, the rules of society, are improved so much as to be a utopia in perspective. (Same if you go to somewhere on the planet where you could be stoned to death or slung off a crane.) Trek has to look like a Utopia from the perspective of now, that’s baked into the formula. As is the idea that humanity stagnates in a basic Utopia, that’s why we are out on the final frontier.
I have to agree to disagree wholeheartedly. Sorry, I don’t see a utopia in anything today. It’s an idea of something to strive for. But we are not even close to achieving it and we never have been.
Do we though? We continue to move to the Right in Western countries, cutting funding again and again for programs to help those who are suffering. I haven’t seen anything that qualifies as Utopia in my lifetime.
Oh we should never stop striving, but Trek was a utopia from the perspective of when it was made. Uhura was on the bridge of the Enterprise, not the back of the bus. We are in a Utopia now (believe me, I think the nineties were better in so many ways, but I can’t ignore the medical and technological advancements of the last twenty years, but no one wants to hear my theories on the decline of civilisation....probably not even this spin on it) from the perspective of the past. As a society. The arseholes, generally speaking, don’t have the letter of the law behind them. They do seem to have proliferated across the arsehole spectrum and got louder however.
Older people have. That’s one of the weird things about this whole ‘boomer’ thing. And like I said, no one wants to hear my theories on decline (which you touch on there...we have got worse in so many areas over the last ten or twenty years, some parts of the developed world more so than others.) but even right/left is just an ideological gap over the form of utopia being striven towards. To put a positive spin on both, is it a meritocratic one? You get what you work for if you are smart enough or work hard enough? Or does everyone get exactly the same no matter how hard working or clever the individual? Sometimes, on a good day, those two things work well together, but I would agree it’s been a long time since those good days were more common. But even with our division and unpleasantness rearing it’s head again, it’s *still* significantly better, on paper at least, than the middle of last century, or the century before. That we are worried about sliding backwards, is better than worrying that we already have.
Honestly, that only applied to white males for the most part. I doubt you’d ever find a black person who would describe America as a utopia at any point in our history.
I would stand to reason a utopia is for all. Not just for some. @jaime can believe what he/she wants in regards to if we are there or have ever been there, but a lot of people, and I do mean a lot would disagree with him/her. By its very definition: a utopia is perfection. We do not have a perfect world.
As I said, it depends on place. America has a real race issue deeply ingrained in it, truly deeply...from an outsider perspective. I wouldn’t say the U.K is perfect, but we haven’t had things like legal segregation (or, for a very long time on the british isles itself at least, legal slavery.) which gives us a different spin. We tend to have class problems deeply ingrained instead, and race just bubbles in with that. It’s also why I said ‘on paper’. Because someone can still be a rascist arsehole here (I got to hear terrible accent impressions from a family member because we have an Indian Master and a Black Doctor in Who. It wasn’t pleasant.) but the law is not at their shoulder, and nor, for the most part is public opinion. (Brexit, immigration, intersectional politics and fundamentalists of all flavours aside. Though there seems to be more than they used to be.) It’s complex to be honest. Globalisation hasn’t helped. Especially as American Cultural output is at the forefront of that, with all its built in difficulties. (Hence Maga hat wearing weirdoes over here lionising Trump, and similar odd behaviour around Obama at his time. Humans do love their messiahs.)
I just say that perfect is impossible, but the state of perfection is relative. We also go up and down. Outside of the context of discussing Trek as a utopia in the future, I would agree that now is not a Utopia...however, my point is one of perspective. From the perspective of the past, or certain other countries, we are indeed a utopia.
They were 1000 years away because they were fundamentally incapable of recreating Soong's work/Data. Maddox did an end run around the problem by finding a way to salvage Data's design from what was left of him instead of trying to recreate it.
In R&D its as much about finding out if something is even possible in the first place, once you know its possible it just becomes a matter of proving it. With Data's existence they knew it was possible and that is half the battle won right there, then its just a matter of trial and error until they find out the trick and recreate Soong's work. They also had access to Lal, B4 and possibly even Lore, maybe even Data as we never saw the body or proof of destruction, we even saw the Borg demonstrate it on Data in First Contact. The whole 1000 years is bullshit and just a throwaway line to keep the population calm and deflect attention, she may even be a synth herself but its too early to say.
I probably should have editted this to my other reply as I touched on there, but this is another example of perspective coming in: When Obama was elected, The Voice ( the newspaper for ‘black britons’, a concept I admittedly find disheartening in many ways) ran a headline ‘would the last black person in Britain please turn out the lights’. The idea that America had suddenly become precisely a Utopia for ‘black’ people. It was depressing frankly. But America has always sold its dream. The same way now we have the Faragist mobs wishing dearly and vocally that they could have Trump as their leader. The way pop culture has shaped that can’t be overlooked tbh. You can be Black and be a star in America. That’s not so common here. (It’s not exactly impossible, especially these days.) That sells. Thing is, outside of occasional breakthroughs leading to a boom (anyone with a scouse accent in the sixties, Mancunians in the nineties.) it’s not race/ethnicity sewing up stardom here... it’s class. Guitars ain’t cheap. Tuition ain’t cheap. ‘Working class boy done good’ is still a news story because it’s still a rare enough occurrence to be a thing. Acting is not for the working class, and depending on your background, not lower middle class either. It’s changing, but America is still seen as the dream.