...You mean the same people who say "We as a species do not lie"?
Regarding Surak/Archer, I wasn't intending to disagree much with you. Instead, I wanted to postulate that whatever remained of Surak was not a "living self", an active self-aware being with a goal of survival, speaking through Archer's vocal cords (a situation which logically would make all Vulcans very eager to reserve an appointment with T'Lar), but merely a collection of phrases and catchy ideas that greatly influenced Archer's behavior. Surak lived on as a particularly vivid meme; any Vulcan would no doubt want to do that, as vanity must be universal, but modern Vulcans have far better ways of creating immortal memes than this arcane toying with their katras. Thus, no lines up the stairs of Mount Seleya.
Perhaps Surak indeed was able to equip his meme with an exceptionally great will to perpetuate/multiply; and perhaps there's a bit of Surak inside every modern Vulcan skull, through a variety of meme transfer methods and not just through fingertip-to-temple katra transfers. The key concern would be that this not be particularly enjoyable or effective eternal life, since it's not observed more commonly. A combination of it requiring a Surak-level superhero and it only offering fragmented and unsatisfactory eternity would be sufficient to do the trick.
Timo Saloniemi
I meant to get to this earlier.
I actually think I like this, that theoretically, a Vulcan could contain and maintain another's whole mind, but that he'd have to be as badass as Surak to do it, and the other person might have to be as wicked as Surak to hold on.
Praetor said:
First of all, that's all beautiful.
Danke.
Second, I can't help but wonder if Vulcan's civil wars had something to do with it being a barren wasteland in 'modern' times? 'Old' Vulcan might have had birds in the traditional sense, allowing the Romulans to be inspired by more traditional birds as in their logos, which then gave way to vulture/pterodactyl type flying creatures. This might also help explain why Romulans don't seem to be as strong as Vulcans - which could of course be equally explained by Romulus having lower (Earth-type) gravity and the Romulans weakening.
I dunno. I don't think even a really bad nuclear war could actually cause such widespread ecological effects as to desertify a whole planet... I'm one of those who doesn't believe a nuclear war would even spell the end of human civilization, though, and ymmv.
A flare from the supposedly nearby 40 Eridani C might do the trick, which iirc is what Duane posited. I'm not sure how much I like this explanation, since if the flare is capable of burning up a green world, it seems like the ionizing radiation damage to genes is going to be intense. 40 Eridani C's dangerous nature kind of makes me wonder if the 40 Eridani system is really Vulcan's location, Gene Roddenberry or no Gene Roddenberry.
At any rate, I figured continental Vulcan had always been a desert. Heck, I figure this is why the Romulans left--Vulcan is probably the worst place in the galaxy that humanoid life actually evolved on. I sometimes wonder if the Romulans weren't necessarily so ideologically opposed to Surak, but opposed to his (logically flawed) notion that the environment of his planet didn't matter just as long as you had the willpower and grace not to crack someone's skull open for a skin of water...
Of course, thinking on it, it
can't be a world totally without carbon dioxide-breathing plant life that frees O2 from water, for the reasons I laid out that Romulus must have aerobic animal life. We know Vulcans metabolize oxygen, so all animal life on Vulcan almost definitely metabolizes oxygen as well. (Even if we do go with the assumption that "Vulcan after the rain" doesn't have birds, they've still got sehlats.) Whence the oxygen cycle? We don't see any plants, but we know there must be plenty.
Beware--below is a semi-coherent tract about the Vulcan ecology and other points of very questionable interest. Anyone who values their time should skip ahead.
At the same time, aerobic or oxygen cycle-supporting photosyntheic biomass on Vulcan is likely to be smaller than on Earth, not just because of crappy conditions, but because of the "thin" atmosphere. Whether this means "thin" as in "less dense" or "thin" as in "less molecular oxygen" is debateable, but no one seemed to develop the bends in Amok Time, just hypoxia. In either case, it does mean less oxygen. (One of the few things they accidentally got right was that a copper-based respiratory pigment can be more efficient than an iron-based one, but this isn't because of the chemistry, but because copper-based pigments don't need to be contained by cells in order for the analogues of kidneys Vulcan animal life must have to filter the blood without jamming up, and hence more molecules can be present in the bloodstream).
Very unfortunately, I'm not a biologist--I wonder if the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere is consonant with an assumption that the reddish hue of Vulcan is the result of a crust binding large amounts of oxygen with iron (as ours is a crust binding large amounts of oxygen with silicon)? I hope so, as an iron oxide surface not only explains the color, but is fully consistent with the fact that Vulcan is a planet with a very high surface gravity (and hence denser than ours).
So where are all the Vulcan plants? In the oceans? But there aren't oceans, or, if there are, they're no healthy color... at least for Earth life, they may use different photosynthetic pigment on Vulcan, red perhaps (although since photosynthetic pigments' makeup and color depend on the peak spectrum or spectra photons are emitted in by the life-giving sun, this doesn't, if I'm not mistaken, jive well with a K-class star like 40 Eridani A either!).
Tract over
I think you're right on target about the Romulans adjustment to their (evolutionarily speaking) new world, Praetor. Compared to the Vulcans, the whole species likely suffers from muscular atrophy. They're probably still stronger and built tougher, and no doubt have a greater potential for strength.
Again, below is a section with too much thought devoted to the biology of a fictional planet.
The copper-based blood alone allows significantly greater potential respiratory capacity, although increased capacity means an increased viscosity, which increases workload on the heart. Greater oxidization of glucose also means more waste products, stressing the circulatory system further. And of course more oxygen has to be intaken, requiring more energy expenditure in pulling air in.
All this would, I believe, permit a copper-pigment creature--as correctly but I suspect randomly pointed out in
Enterprise in regards to the Andorians, whose
blue blood is actually the correct color for a copper-based pigment--to tire more readily in states of extreme exertion than a human, even if the copper-pigment creature can do more before his cardiovascular system reaches its limit.
I have some serious and perhaps unresolvable questions--Does anyone know what would make copper-based blood green? I'm assuming hemocyanin with perhaps some sulfur compound of unknown provenance and purpose, but if there's a respiratory pigment that is both 1)copper-based and 2)green, I'd love to hear about it.
)
But Vulcan probably continues to have flying life to fill the ecological niche that our own class Aves fills on Earth.
