Who knows? Amanda may be the descendant of a scientist who worked closely on the Voyager 6 project, allowing Spock to be entangled through the human "blood" the Vulcan matriarch mentioned just before (or was it after?) she melded with him.
Let's Scientifically Nitpick the Movies
- Thread starter Argus Skyhawk
- Start date
That's exactly what makes it harder to understand. There is no universal language of thought. Every brain encodes its thoughts, memories, and concepts in a unique web of associations grounded in its own experience. Read someone else's thoughts directly and they'd be gibberish to you. The only way two minds can communicate ideas to one another is if they agree on a common set of symbols to represent those ideas. Language is how we read other people's minds.
As far as images go, if we're talking about direct sensory perceptions, those are probably universal enough to be communicated. But that would be more empathy than telepathy.
I'm using the word more figuratively and broadly. I'm not speaking of the continuity of a specific work of fiction. I'm saying that people in real life have taken ancient beliefs in magic and mysticism and tried to retroactively redefine them -- "retcon" them, as it were -- as something more scientific-sounding by sticking Latin and Greek-derived names like "telepathy" and "telekinesis" onto them.
The visuals of the film make it explicit. The shots of Regula show that the Mutara Nebula is some distance away; the planetoid itself is surrounded by empty space. Besides, the script makes it clear that Regula is not inside the nebula. When the ship is orbiting Regula, Spock refers to "the Mutara Nebula at 153 mark 4," and Kirk asks if they can make it inside -- thus conclusively proving that they are not inside the nebula while orbiting Regula. But the Reliant is definitely deep inside the nebula when the Genesis torpedo inside it detonates.
Isn't Mutara a planetary nebula, anyway? I mean, it's like pea soup in there.
I concur. Although fwiw, I think the original notion of Vulcan touch-telepathy is perfectly capable of existing, requiring little more than a belief that they are capable of interpreting variations in electrical signals in the nerves or specialized organs in the skin. Not much of a stretch. Betazoid radiotelepathy (if that's what it is) is plausible too. Look at those black eyes--those are receivers.
Telekinesis on the other hand is always dodgy. Ocampan "pyrokinesis," for example, is pretty much nonsense and probably violates conservation of energy, on top of involving weird action at a distance. Pretty sure throwing a starship 10,000 light years violates conservation laws. I mean, how many donuts would Kes need to eat to do that?
And FTL anything is always going to be a stretch, and should imo be used extremely sparingly. We need it for warp--nothing in Trek works without warp. But beyond that FTL should never be invoked without a truly compelling reason.
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Christopher said:
I concur. Although fwiw, I think the original notion of Vulcan touch-telepathy is perfectly capable of existing, requiring little more than a belief that they are capable of interpreting variations in electrical signals in the nerves or specialized organs in the skin. Not much of a stretch. Betazoid radiotelepathy (if that's what it is) is plausible too. Look at those black eyes--those are receivers.
Telekinesis on the other hand is always dodgy. Ocampan "pyrokinesis," for example, is pretty much nonsense and probably violates conservation of energy, on top of involving weird action at a distance. Pretty sure throwing a starship 10,000 light years violates conservation laws. I mean, how many donuts would Kes need to eat to do that?
And FTL anything is always going to be a stretch, and should imo be used extremely sparingly. We need it for warp--nothing in Trek works without warp. But beyond that FTL should never be invoked without a truly compelling reason.
Yep, and I'm fine with that (I mean, physical contact is intermediated by some boson anyway, and at our level of perception usually a photon, so the laser beam case is a half dozen of one, six of the other
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Yes, but here's a world of difference between retroactively defining and retroactive continuity - hell, even 'retroactively' here also works. Retcon isn't a figure of speech that is used metaphorically, it's rather consistent as a neologism in its application to fiction.
A "planetary" nebula has nothing to do with planets aside from being vaguely spherical (the name was coined before their nature was understood). It's a huge, diffuse bubble of hydrogen sloughed off from a dying star.
From its color, Mutara was clearly meant to be an HII region, a nebula consisting of hydrogen ionized by radiation from stars or protostars within. In reality, such nebulae are typically hundreds of light-years across and no denser than the solar wind within the Solar System, i.e. effectively vacuum. The depiction of the Mutara Nebula is highly fanciful. In order for it to be reachable at impulse power within a few minutes, it would've had to be much less than an AU from Regula, and its density was comparable to that of a gas giant's atmosphere. No known real nebula is like that. I think it's conceivable that there could be undiscovered "micronebulae" similar to this -- after all, they'd be too small and dim to detect easily -- but there's no way such a nebula could exist close to a sun. It would be blown away quite quickly in cosmic terms. So there's really no way to make scientific sense of TWOK.
Come to think of it, what would've been much better was if Mutara had been a gas giant orbited by the planetoid and the space station. That would've allowed for the "ocean battle" scenario, the dense gas filled with electrical discharges. And it would've justified the Genesis Planet as a terraformed moon of the gas giant.
Sure, if they'd evolved to communicate in that way, it stands to reason that they'd have some built-in coding scheme to allow mutual comprehension. But it would only work among Vulcans, not across species.
Betazoid radiotelepathy (if that's what it is) is plausible too. Look at those black eyes--those are receivers.
Too small to be radio receivers, unless we're talking pretty short microwaves.
Oh, for Pete's sake, get a sense of humor. I was deliberately using the word out of its proper context for humorous effect and sardonic commentary.
Why would quick dispersal be incompatible with what we saw? We're not talking about days, now are we?
Besides, whatever created such a dense cloud of gases might still be in the process of creating it, constantly replenishing the nebula. Perhaps one of Regula's less rock-solid planets is in the process of being torn up? A "planetary" nebula in a more literal sense, then...
Switching frames of reference, it's also possible that the star Regula (with at least one sizeable planetoid in tow) was in the process of plunging into the preexisting nebula at high speed, and was having limited success in dispersing the nebula so far.
Timo Saloniemi
C'mon, Chris, I know what a planetary nebula is. 
I'll bow to your superior wisdom on the matter, as I've not done much research, but I think we can say that it's not a standard nebula, regardless of what the intent was supposed to be.
Mutara could maybe be a very young planetary nebula. I still don't think it'd be opaque (not at ~10^6 particles/cm^3), but it would be ionized and mean. To the best of my knowledge, if Regula were as far out as, say, Pluto, it would not be engulfed for several human lifetimes.
It'd also explain where that nearby sun came from--in the words of Xander Crews, apparently it's been there the whole time.
That said, the Genesis sun would be very hot and not particularly suitable for life, so that's a strike against it.
Another possible strike is that Sharpless 2-216 is the closest (afaik) to Earth, but it's still like 400 LY away, and even it isn't really suitable because it is also very old.
I don't know of any stars capable of forming a planetary nebula remotely within the time frame we would desire. I mean, yeah, wait five-six billion years, and we'll have one right here, but that's not the time scales we're talking about.
However, I don't see any reason not to assume that Mutara is a fake nearby red giant that is in the process of shedding its atmosphere and becoming a fully-fledged planetary nebula and white dwarf. There are hundreds of fake Star Trek stars, and dozens of stars that are named after real stars but are demonstrably not they (have some fun in the sun on lovely Rigel VI, but remember to bring your SPF 1 X 10^6.).
Anyway, this is apropos of little, but I went looking for even remotely suitable local stars (which include ours, Procyon/Andor, Epsilon Eridani/Vulcan, and Tau Ceti/actually mentioned in TWoK dialogue, which is a shame as it'd be a good place to put Tellar). I found this thing which is very cool:
http://kisd.de/~krystian/starmap/
I want to see Geoff Mandel or somebody do a Trek Star Charts like this. It gives that real stellar cartography feel.
I'll bow to your superior wisdom on the matter, as I've not done much research, but I think we can say that it's not a standard nebula, regardless of what the intent was supposed to be.Mutara could maybe be a very young planetary nebula. I still don't think it'd be opaque (not at ~10^6 particles/cm^3), but it would be ionized and mean. To the best of my knowledge, if Regula were as far out as, say, Pluto, it would not be engulfed for several human lifetimes.
It'd also explain where that nearby sun came from--in the words of Xander Crews, apparently it's been there the whole time.
That said, the Genesis sun would be very hot and not particularly suitable for life, so that's a strike against it.
Another possible strike is that Sharpless 2-216 is the closest (afaik) to Earth, but it's still like 400 LY away, and even it isn't really suitable because it is also very old.
I don't know of any stars capable of forming a planetary nebula remotely within the time frame we would desire. I mean, yeah, wait five-six billion years, and we'll have one right here, but that's not the time scales we're talking about.
However, I don't see any reason not to assume that Mutara is a fake nearby red giant that is in the process of shedding its atmosphere and becoming a fully-fledged planetary nebula and white dwarf. There are hundreds of fake Star Trek stars, and dozens of stars that are named after real stars but are demonstrably not they (have some fun in the sun on lovely Rigel VI, but remember to bring your SPF 1 X 10^6.).
Anyway, this is apropos of little, but I went looking for even remotely suitable local stars (which include ours, Procyon/Andor, Epsilon Eridani/Vulcan, and Tau Ceti/actually mentioned in TWoK dialogue, which is a shame as it'd be a good place to put Tellar). I found this thing which is very cool:
http://kisd.de/~krystian/starmap/
I want to see Geoff Mandel or somebody do a Trek Star Charts like this. It gives that real stellar cartography feel.
If I were a telepath, I could now transmit images, even music, into your mind. Stuff that is impossible to describe with words. If I see a tree, and point at it and say "'l'arbre", you probably wouldn't know what I mean. But if I see a tree and that image in my mind, you know exactly what I'm talking/thinking about.
That's telepathy between humans, because they all have the same brains. Between humans and aliens some kind of translation would be needed.
But in Star Trek, Vulcans can mindmeld with whales, so it can't be too hard to translate.
Two computers can't talk to each other just because they both have an ethernet cable shoved in the back of them--they have to be programmed to speak in a lingua franca. This is how IP/TCP makes the Internet possible (and someone do correct me if I'm drastically oversimplifying or just plain wrong).
At any rate, I don't see why two brains could automatically communicate just because a "file" that one is attempting to send to other is technically readable by that other. The transmission protocol is vitally important, and has to be mutual.
Vulcans, I suggest, are very good at quickly sussing out and modifying their transmission protocols for use with other individuals and other species, although it's questionable that recipients can be talked to when, if they're anatomically like we are, they lack specialized structures for receipt of message packets.
(And to quote that god of a man, SF Debris, Betazoids can do this for those they've spread for.
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Oh, I see what you're saying. You know, that actually kind of makes sense. It still requires some fudging; even a nebula that's very dense by nebula standards would be just a dirty vacuum on a human scale, far thinner than Earth's atmosphere and essentially invisible from within. And it probably wouldn't have the characteristic colors of an H II region as Mutara did. But it's the least nonsensical explanation of Mutara, Regula, and Genesis that I've ever come across.
If you point at a tree while you're saying "l'arbre," I think I can pretty easily figure out what you mean, so long as I'm a life form with sufficient anatomical similarities to a human to comprehend the gesture of pointing. That's no different from sending me the sensory image of a tree from your mind. And neither form of communication will allow me to decipher your memories and thoughts pertaining to the concept of trees unless you communicate them to me through some sort of mutually understood code.
For that matter, I might not even understand the sensory image you sent me. Different brains don't necessarily encode sensory information in the exact same way. The brain is a neural network. It doesn't have preprogrammed software for processing information; it has to learn, to train itself by developing the proper pathways. And different brains might develop those pathways differently. The way that sensory information is encoded in your brain might not be entirely comprehensible by mine. The way the color green looks to you may not be the same way it looks to me. The way your brain processes depth, perspective, shading, and motion might have differences from the way mine does. What I got from you might be a distorted, Picassoesque version of a tree.
And that's even if I could filter out the purely sensory information from the broader web of neural associations that are triggered when you see a tree -- associations with your memories of earlier trees, with your memories and abstract concepts of other things in the categories "green," "plant," "tall," "branching," and so forth. When I think of "tree," it branches (ha) to connections with that really tall pine tree in our backyard that I used to climb as a kid, with that tree on the university grounds where I had a good day with some friends and a pretty lady once, with Charlie Brown's kite-eating tree, with the cat tree in our old living room, with the verse "I talk to the trees but they don't listen to me," etc. If I tried to think the image of a tree to you, it might be hard to sort it out from that whole wider constellation of cognitive associations which is how the brain stores information. Our thoughts and memories aren't defined as discrete clumps of data, but are formed out of such complex webs of associations to earlier precedents and analogies.
Thanks.
At least with a red giant's shed skin, you can kind of tweak it to where it's just a VFX error. Btw, I did really like your gas giant idea. I think that would've worked out much better--and added an element of hazard to the "hide in the cloud" move, since after all it is diving into a gravity well. The only thing is that it might have foreclosed that DS9 episode. You know, the one with Space Farmer Hoggett.
You are using the big MIGHT BE here, Christopher. I say we are all humans, using the same hardware, running on the same OS. Why would a newborn, who sees the color red with the same eyes every other newborn has, suddenly encode the color differently? There's no reason to assume that, since we are all alike. Reflexes, for example. Everyone has them, from the very beginning. Why would those be encoded differently in different human beings? That would only create a mess. So there has to be a basic plan how the human brain encodes signals, and that plan has to be the same for every human.
If every human encoded signals differently, you wouldn't be able to transplant organs from human A to B. How would the brain be able to understand the information coming from that transplant, and how would the transplant be able to react to commands coming from the brain?
And now if humans were telepaths, there would be a working communication protocol, because stuff like visual perceptions, pain, emotions, would be encoded the same way.
The file system is probably different from human to human, because you learn different things at different times and hence create different categories and classifications (folders and file names, so to speak), but that isn't important.
If every human encoded signals differently, you wouldn't be able to transplant organs from human A to B. How would the brain be able to understand the information coming from that transplant, and how would the transplant be able to react to commands coming from the brain?
And now if humans were telepaths, there would be a working communication protocol, because stuff like visual perceptions, pain, emotions, would be encoded the same way.
The file system is probably different from human to human, because you learn different things at different times and hence create different categories and classifications (folders and file names, so to speak), but that isn't important.
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Because that's how a neural network operates. The "OS" analogy is facile and invalid, because neural-network computing is a very different process. Our "hardware" is not a fixed, unchanging thing like a hunk of plastic and silicon, but a complicated, dynamic, ever-changing network of cells and tissues. It's alive and growing and messy and wibbly-wobbly, and so any computer analogy is a gross oversimplification. It's "programmed" by experience, testing out pathways and connections by trial and error, keeping and reinforcing the successful pathways while the failed ones die off. Yes, there are some basic overall similarities of structure and performance between brains, but on the more detailed level there's a lot of individual variation. In the same way that every tree of a given species will have overall structural similarities but still be uniquely shaped.
The only software analogy that might be valid is a situation where every programmer is given an open-source base code and allowed to modify and refine it for his or her own needs -- but without any communication or sharing among programmers. They all start with the same potential but they all develop it in unique and individualized ways to fit their own processing needs and their own evolving hardware setups. And so they end up with a bunch of different, idiosyncratic programs that can't really understand each other or run on each other's systems, at least not well.
In fairness, a telepathic species would probably along the lines of having compatible transmission protocols between minds. If telepathy is active during fetal and infant brain development, the mother (and perhaps the father, and siblings) could be reasonably inferred to be able to configure a connection. Long-term companionship should also work.
Probably ought not work with random strangers or insulting alien doctors.
Deanna Troi-like radio-empathy or whatever it is is probably doable--reading electromagnetic signals signifying certain types of brain activity would be essentially the same as learning a language. Particularly among humanoids, broad emotional "statements" might be the same, interpreting the sensory input "that part of the Klingon's brain is lighting in somesuch particular fashion" as "that Klingon is hiding something." We do much the same thing, but cannot see the electromagnetic changes in the brain, only the changes in the way light bounces off the body. Like with our own ability to "read emotions" by bare sight or "hear thoughts" by sound, tele/empathy should take significant practice and socialization, though, and like Christopher implies, ought not be used as a dodge for real communications problems.
Probably ought not work with random strangers or insulting alien doctors.
Deanna Troi-like radio-empathy or whatever it is is probably doable--reading electromagnetic signals signifying certain types of brain activity would be essentially the same as learning a language. Particularly among humanoids, broad emotional "statements" might be the same, interpreting the sensory input "that part of the Klingon's brain is lighting in somesuch particular fashion" as "that Klingon is hiding something." We do much the same thing, but cannot see the electromagnetic changes in the brain, only the changes in the way light bounces off the body. Like with our own ability to "read emotions" by bare sight or "hear thoughts" by sound, tele/empathy should take significant practice and socialization, though, and like Christopher implies, ought not be used as a dodge for real communications problems.
Actually, if you want a scientifically plausible way to read emotions, I suggest infrared vision. You could see changes in someone's skin temperature, heart rate, blood flow, etc. Ultrasound or sonar is another way of reading changes in pulse and circulation, maybe muscle tension as well, though it works better underwater.
As far as reading electrical or EM signals from the brain, that's something you need either close contact or very large sensors to do effectively. And it won't work well unless the subject is holding very still. Plus it would be limited to gross activity; the kind of resolution you'd need to read the states of individual neurons would require a really huge antenna.
Thus, if there were a species that had evolved something like telepathy, it wouldn't really be direct mind-reading, but simply another form of communication mediated through a type of sending and receiving apparatus that humans don't have.
As far as reading electrical or EM signals from the brain, that's something you need either close contact or very large sensors to do effectively. And it won't work well unless the subject is holding very still. Plus it would be limited to gross activity; the kind of resolution you'd need to read the states of individual neurons would require a really huge antenna.
Thus, if there were a species that had evolved something like telepathy, it wouldn't really be direct mind-reading, but simply another form of communication mediated through a type of sending and receiving apparatus that humans don't have.
Which would make Troi not particularly useful when dealing with someone over a viewscreen.
Oh well, that's a good point.
Yeppers, that's the key issue I think we're dealing with.
Of course, we could imagine a viewscreen that also sends infrared images.
Which would make Troi not particularly useful when dealing with someone over a viewscreen.
I don't know why you would want to send that when they have an infrared-spectrum mindreader on the other side, but yes, you could...Of course, we could imagine a viewscreen that also sends infrared images.
Which would make Troi not particularly useful when dealing with someone over a viewscreen.
Actually there's no reason psychic empathy should work over a viewscreen either. I've always figured that it's more a matter of Deanna reading body-language and voice cues and maybe some types of EM output that get included in comm transmissions but are undetectable to humans.
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