Kirk v Trump

Spelling error ... really?

 

How would retirement at 60 control the population? It would free up jobs, sure. It wouldn't lessen the number of people born.

If you mean enforced euthanasia at 60, that's a different thing - basically the "Logan's Run" solution, except people get a few added decades in which to be productive and add a few more offspring (the novel had Last Day pegged at age 21, whereas the movie had it pegged at age 30).

 

I think you meant the ep "Whom Gods Destroy", about the prearranged chess code. In "Bread and Circuses" Kirk ordered Scotty to go to condition green. That was a spur of the moment order given by Kirk.

Near the end of "Taste of Armageddon", just before Kirk told Scotty to beam him up, he gave Scotty the order to cancel implementation of General Order 24. If GO24 was indeed phony, it would have been odd that Kirk would feel the need to explicitly tell Scotty to cancel it. That and the way the story played out led me to think that GO24, like condition green, are options in the playbook that are available for captains to use.

 

Today there are about 7.4 billion people on Earth, removing the ones 60 and older would bring that number down to about 6.6 billion, and would have no effect on the birthrate.

If you wanted to have a real effect on over population (and were ruthless enough to do it), do a one time purge of everyone between 25 and 50, that would do it.

But it was a prearranged order, otherwise Scotty wouldn't have known what it meant.

 

Forced retirement also introduces a host of new or other problems...

Or Hitler's solution? What's the difference?

 

We were asked to keep real-world politics out of this, so I opted to mention Logan's Run - a novel in which everyone is implanted with a "life clock" which ticks down until they reach Last Day. At that point they have 24 hours to report to a Deep Sleep facility for euthanasia. If they don't, they're considered Runners, and therefore subject to execution by the Sandmen (one of whom was Logan, who decided to become a Runner).

I'd assumed that the original reference to age 60 was because of that episode in which Lwaxana becomes friends with a scientist who reaches this age and has to submit to euthanasia, regardless of how sound of mind and body he might be, and how important his life's work might be.

 

The euthanasia at 60 in TNG's "Half a Life" wasn't to control population. It was to keep old people from having to be warehoused when they became infirm because of old age.

 

Yes, brain fart.

 

Yes I was thinking retirement as in Blade Runner, Logan's Run, or Half a Life. Euthanasia of the elderly does help population control in that you know for sure how many are in from birth rates and how many are out from a defined death date, subject to variation from those who die younger from illness or accident but it's more a question of resources. The elderly are very resource intensive, and certainly don't give back as much as they put in if they live 'too long'.

You can bring the age down to wherever suits based on resources. 30 in Logan's Run was a bit silly when you look at how long it takes to train for some professions. 45 with a lower birth rate would have made more sense.

But the Eminians would be subject to the same issues as any other species if you remove the top predator. Population explosion, resource depletion, population collapse. They could take steps to avoid this of course, such as a one child policy. But 3 million deaths a year is a lot. It's more than the number of people killed by gun violence in the USA last year!

 

I'm fairly certain that 3 million a year is more than die every year in the United States due to ALL reasons.

 

I was having some fun with the word you invented.

 

Wow. How many elderly people do you actually know? Are you aware that there are "elderly people" (ie. over 60 years of age, or close to it) who are active posters on this forum? Are you going to tell them that they're a waste of resources and should be euthanized?

Would you have preferred the TOS actors to have been euthanized, rather than continue acting?

On a more personal note, what about the role grandparents play in our families and in society? I would hate to think what my own life would have been like if my grandparents hadn't been willing to raise me after my mother bailed on that responsibility. I grew up with elderly people, and while it's true that for many, there comes a time when their quality of life isn't that great - my dad is in that situation now, with dementia and is in a nursing home - there are also many elderly people who are of sound mind and most abilities well into their 80s.

William Shatner is over 80 and shows little sign of slowing down. The only reason Leonard Nimoy died is because he developed COPD; if he'd taken better care of himself in his younger years, he would probably still be alive.

For that matter, the Queen of England is over 90, and has every intention of remaining in that job until she dies. Since her family is long-lived, she could well last another 10 years.

The movie was based on the novel, and the novel had Last Day set at age 21. That would have been time enough to procreate, and otherwise the society in that universe was based on providing hedonistic pleasures for everyone. The novel's characters weren't confined to a single city, and the reason for Last Day was population control, not nuclear war.

We don't actually know why the people of Eminiar and Vendikar were at war. You'd think that at some point somebody from the Enterprise crew, or maybe the diplomat, would have asked, but I don't recall that anyone did.

I would presume that the people of Eminiar were producing offspring to counter the deaths and keep their civilization going. Of course we have no idea what Vendikar's society was like. We only know their computers were working. The people there could all have died, or reprogrammed their computer to make the Eminians' computers think they were obediently disintegrating themselves.

It's a shame this episode hasn't been revisited in some way (at least to my knowledge it hasn't; if it has in novel form, I'd appreciate knowing).

 

But not by much.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

• Number of deaths: 2,626,418
• Death rate: 823.7 deaths per 100,000 population
• Life expectancy: 78.8 years
• Infant Mortality rate: 5.82 deaths per 1,000 live births

 

I was playing devil's advocate on the euthanasia of pensioners, although after Brexit, I'm sorely tempted!

 

Your sarcasm got lost in translation. It seemed straight up serious and unconscionable to me.

 

Not funny.

 

Jonathan Swift would disagree.