The Burroughs estate can't change copyright law, and a goodly portion of his works have indeed passed into the public domain.
Can 'Omega Glory' ever be fully restored?
- Thread starter Mr. Laser Beam
- Start date
The Burroughs estate can't change copyright law, and a goodly portion of his works have indeed passed into the public domain.
Revisionism is a very slipperly slope, however well intentioned it may be.
I disagree. The Trek universe HAS no reality apart from what we see on screen, or read on the page. What we see is what we get. If the episode says they were Romans - and it did - then that's what they were.
And in the end, who cares? Anything like this can be quickly and easily rationed away. Preservers, probably.
^Perzactly!
Can I see your ration card?
True. Then again, we don't really know what Preservers can do. Perhaps they are able to "copy and paste" whole planets, possibly "reloading them from backup"... which would also explain why Kirk's Earth and Miri's Earth are identical. They shape entire worlds, entire societies, just like we would in a computer simulation - except that Preservers are doing it in real-life. Why Kirk recognizes the Omegan constitution? Because Preservers shaped the society of Earth to resemble Omega; in order to get a similar set of starting circumstances, they duplicated as much as they could, including languages and important historical events.
Sometimes they duplicate whole worlds, other times they just isolate a piece of the code to see how it could evolve under different circumstances (Miramanee's people).
But I agree, that's not even science fiction anymore, that's more like "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meets the Church of Scientology."
All we really know about the Preservers is that they relocated a small population from one planet to another and were able to build tractor beams and memory-erasing beams -- and that they were so royally incompetent that their idea of "preserving" a population was to stick it in the middle of an asteroid field with only a single tractor beam for defense (what if an asteroid came from the opposite side of the planet?). People ascribe all sorts of magical powers to the Preservers simply because so little is known about them that it's easy to project anything onto them. But every ability they've canonically been demonstrated to possess (space travel, tractor beams, memory erasure, a reckless disregard for redundant safety systems) is well within the capability of the 24th-century Federation. There's no reason to assume they're any kind of godlike superrace.
And the idea that the founding principles of the United States of America were "shaped by aliens" for the sake of some sort of game or experiment is frankly rather disgusting. The Constitution of the United States is probably the greatest document of its kind ever conceived, a testament to the capacity of the human species to strive to better itself. It goes against everything Star Trek stands for to say that the Constitution is some alien contrivance.
And the idea that the founding principles of the United States of America were "shaped by aliens" for the sake of some sort of game or experiment is frankly rather disgusting. The Constitution of the United States is probably the greatest document of its kind ever conceived, a testament to the capacity of the human species to strive to better itself. It goes against everything Star Trek stands for to say that the Constitution is some alien contrivance.
Indeed, the closest match to the Preservers would probably be folks like the Briori (slavers from VOY) or the Stags (slavers from ENT), with the ability to abduct primitives, the plan to use them as labor in shady enterprises, and the final fate of disappearing from the picture while only leaving behind some random artifacts. Godlike from our point of view, perhaps, but common criminals from where Kirk would be looking.
The example does show, however, that it's easy to be god to a primitive population in the Trek universe - especially if you can play one population group against the other, and dish out heavenly benefits in addition to divine punishment, even though the Preservers apparently didn't bother with such finesse. It only stands to reason that this would happen a lot, resulting in numerous cargo cults among the vast pool of near-human populations. And humans themselves would be a likely party to resort to such trickery, John Gill style. Just enter a time machine...
Timo Saloniemi
Erm, I'm pretty sure that planets rotate
^Yes, exactly. Planets rotate, so if the tractor beam happens to be rotated around to the wrong side of the planet at the optimal time for deflection, you'll be out of luck. The asteroid isn't a stationary target, after all. It's moving fast, and from the time it comes within range of the deflector to the time it hits the planet will be a pretty small window.
In time to deflect an incoming asteroid? That would depend on things such as the range of the deflector beam, the speed of the asteroid, and so forth. And unless the thing was situated on the equator, there'd always be a zone it could never reach.
Only if your Medicine Man is asleep at the wheel, though. Had there been a competent operator to the device, the countermeasures could probably have been taken days before the near-impact.
However, if we abandon the idea that the deflector was a defensive system, and instead decide that it was part of the Preservers' evil scheme that also involved enslaving the Earth primitives, the picture becomes much clearer. Asteroid mining without over-the-counter resources becomes easy when you install a single powerful deflector that can bring asteroids down to an encampment you have hastily terraformed so that your slaves can go to work on the downed asteroid without having to wear expensive protective gear...
Indeed, the asteroid rains on the planet could be an unnatural phenomenon to begin with - part of the mining scheme of the Preservers. No need to massively terraform the planet, then: it always was largely inhabitable, and the Preservers just went the extra mile to generate an environment where humans could live unprotected (a non-permanent one, to be sure) before launching the asteroids towards the planet.
Timo Saloniemi
^Timo, you always see the happy side of things
We can't know what the optimal point of deflection is without knowing the power of the beam, but as the episode portrays it literally pushing the asteroid away, let's just presume it can push it away at the last instant.
So, assuming that....
Comets crossing Earth orbit may go as fast as 72km/sec, or about 259,000kph (155,000mph), and asteroids about 108,000kph (64,800mph). The latter traverse the distance from the Moon's orbit to the Earth in about four hours.
If this were true of the planet in that episode, and...
- if that planet had a rotational period the same as Earth, and
- if the asteroids traveled at speeds to comperable to those in our system, and
- if the Preserver deflector can fire at any angle within a 180 degree hemisphere...
Naturally, if the asteroid is approaching the planet headlong (retrograde) then the beam range needs to be higher as the relative approach speed would be increased.
But why "preserve" them by putting them on such a routinely imperiled planet in the first place? Why not choose a star system with a more diffuse debris disk so the odds of catastrophic impact were negligible? Heck, if the Preservers were as magically advanced as many assume without evidence, they could've cleaned the system entirely of debris instead of relying on a measly tractor emitter.
So I'm skeptical of any theory that ascribes godlike power to the Preservers. The evidence only suggests that they had technology at a 24th-century level.
So I'm skeptical of any theory that ascribes godlike power to the Preservers. The evidence only suggests that they had technology at a 24th-century level.
Because they saved the prime real estate for themselves.
Similar threads
