And coercion. And tying into the nervous system.
Spoilers Coda Trilogy Discussion Thread
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Which is implicit in "parasitism."
With totally different results. A victim of the flying parasites could never participate in a secret conspiracy, since they'd be driven obviously mad with pain and compulsion and couldn't pass for a normally functioning person.
It's bad reasoning to cherrypick a few similarities and ignore the differences. You might as well argue that a chair is related to a giraffe because they both have four legs. You have to consider the whole, not just isolated parts.
My personal headcanon is and was always the federation once the crises of the 24th century conclude, ends up on a roll, unifying the alpha and beta quadrants, and then expanding outward, joining with the dominion and eventually encompassing all four quadrants. By the 31st-32nd centuries, the federation had a substantial intergalactic presence as well as the time police. Inter universal contact was common and from there it only grew ever more advanced, ever more dynamic, ever more triumphant.I am doing the same
I realize this isn’t a very viable framework for storytelling(at least it requires a lot of imagination and writing discipline), but the essence of the idea-unbridled optimism and ever new horizons and the triumph of the federation through voluntary union with all including its former most bitter enemies-is the heart of Trek thematically.
Or simply-I see the federation as the protagonist of Trek more than its characters in some ways.
(I know I’m not the only one that thinks this way, but I do realize it’s a somewhat idiosyncratic viewpoint).
I don't think that would ever work, or even be a good idea. The larger a single political body gets, the more exponentially difficult it becomes to manage it and hold it together. Stretch it too thin and it collapses.
What would be better would be for the Federation to be part of a larger network of alliances among similarly benevolent and democratic regional powers. That was kind of the original thinking behind the Typhon Pact. A lot of readers jumped to the conclusion that they were just the latest bad guys, but the intent when Marco Palmieri conceived them was that their formation paralleled that of the Federation itself, a group of formerly rival powers realizing they'd be stronger in partnership. The idea was that they had the potential to become like the Federation, if their more positive influences (e.g. Praetor Kamemor, the Gorn, the Kinshaya reformers) prevailed over the more negative ones just using them to create trouble (the Breen, the Tholians, the Kinshaya fundamentalists). Ideally, they would've become like the Federation in intentions and positive influence, but still independent from it politically and culturally, and that kind of diversity in combination would be more beneficial -- and more attainable -- than trying homogenize everybody into a single, unmanageably vast political union.
From a purely distance related perspective, the federation had been developing many new forms of FTL-trans warp, slipstream, artificial wormholes and so on. Presumably these advances in FTL method and speed would have mitigated some of the issues you speak of here.
As for diversity-I believe in Fearful Symmetry an alternate universe is presented where the federation had absorbed just about all of its rivals and allies.
Even so, what your saying and what I’m suggesting need not be mutually exclusive, a loose alliance of Democratic states across the galaxy and the quadrants could grow ever closer politically, culturally, and economically.
Such a process would no doubt take centuries, but it could and in all likelihood would happen.
Which is basically what the Federation had done by the 31st century and why they were so screwed over by the Burn.
It's got nothing whatsoever to do with distance. It's about complexity. The more entities you have under a single governing structure, the more exponentially difficult it gets to manage them all and serve all their needs.
Which is a horrible idea. In this post-colonialist era, we know better than to buy into that outdated Manifest-Destiny fantasy of a single culture assimilating everything. "Absorbed?" What an imperialistic notion. It's not diversity if everyone's under a single governmental structure.
That is profoundly underestimating the vastness of the galaxy. Given how many different civilizations are known to exist just in the tiny percentage of the galaxy known to the UFP in the 24th century, there would be far too many civilizations in total to be brought together under any kind of single political or social structure. It would take centuries just to meet representatives from that many millions of worlds. There's no possible way that many entities could cooperate or coordinate with each other all at once.
Sure, one power could interact with its immediate neighbors, and they could interact with their neighbors, and so on and so on, and maybe eventually an effect or idea could propagate through the entire galaxy through that chain of successive interactions; but those on one end of the chain wouldn't even know of the existence of those on the other, since there are just too many different worlds for anyone to be aware of them all. And with no direct interaction, whatever ideas or policies propagate from civilization to civilization along the chain of alliances could end up transformed beyond recognition by the time they get far enough away. So it would be far too simplistic to try to define all of that as a single alliance. That's like expecting the entire Earth to be a single uniform climate zone. Yes, the different climate zones interact and affect one another, but they can hardly be treated as uniform.
To an extent, perhaps, but I interpret the dilithium shortage as something that was galaxy-wide. After all, if there were other powers that still had abundant dilithium, surely they would've traded it with the Federation over the ensuing 120 years and restored things to normal that way. So it must have affected all the galactic powers, large and small alike.
And I thought you said it wasn’t a factor of distance? Why would a federation in say 2490 that has mastered transwarp and trans galactic communication(as Barclay was working on in Voyager) not be able to handle this? Why couldn’t such technologies be disseminated allowing easy travel and communication between the alpha and delta quadrants?
The earth itself has multiple climactic zones yet a global government uniting humanity is-technologically speaking, within reach this century(if not politically). The same principle-technological advances in communication and travel speed make these things overcome.
By the 29th century, they have a time ship that can head to a certain location in space time with a click of a button. I see no reason why instantaneous intra galactic travel would be any more difficult by the 29th century.
Perhaps not absorbed, that would be a poor or inaccurate choice of words? Joined, united, incorporated? And no one is saying all these groups would need to fold into some sort of homogeneous “federation” culture and not one remain distinct, and two influence the federation by their union.
I referenced Fearful Symmetry’s prologue because that’s in text evidence of what I’m proposing.
I really fail to see the problem here. The federation is composed of geniuses and by the end there are ever more AIs that exist as federation citizens. What your describing is a difficult problem but it can be surmounted with sufficient brain power(organic or computer).
The issue is not that the timeline ends, but that any previous events have been erased from the in-universe multiverse too. So when you read a 2016 post-2373 novel, it’s about events that have never occurred in the first place (to paraphrase Tessa Omond).
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I wondered about that, is Memory Beta going to change anything or will they do what Wookieepedia did and simply make two classes of article, legends and canon?
I suspect one of the issues of trying to run a familiar franchise over long periods of time, is that it ignores the passage of time because humans are really bad at measuring it. The idea that the federation exists in any form in 3188 when we've last seen it onscreen in 2380 or so is about as ridiculous as suggesting the Eastern Roman Empire of 1214 has any business existing in 2022. And our historical experience has been that the shelf life of empires and civilizations only shortens as we advance - Rome lasted, in one form or another as Kingdom to Byzantium, for over 2,000 years, the British empire a quarter of that and in the modern era, we're running the clock on how long you can be a world hyperpower, but it's not looking like 500-2,000 years.
In the end it doesn't really matter of course - if they had jumped ahead 800 years or 80 years from the TNG era, the burn and all the rest of it could still work, and tech moves at the speed of plot anyway.
In the end it doesn't really matter of course - if they had jumped ahead 800 years or 80 years from the TNG era, the burn and all the rest of it could still work, and tech moves at the speed of plot anyway.
It isn't. I explained this. It's about how many civilizations there are in the galaxy. Look at it this way: There are 330 million people living in the United States. Imagine that every single one of them sent you an e-mail. Those mails would all arrive instantaneously... but how long would it take you to read and reply to every one? Even if you answered one per minute, it would take you more than 600 years to get through the list.
It's possible for everyone to be connected in the same network, but not as a single uniform grouping -- rather, as a vast number of smaller, more local interactions that interconnect with one another. Each person has their own finite web of contacts, and each person has contacts that other people don't. The global connection is on a separate, higher level of organization than the more local connections, and the local groupings can be quite distinct and separate from each other while still being part of the same larger-tier network of interactions. For instance, one person might have a bunch of contacts on a sci-fi bulletin board, and one of those contacts might have a bunch of contacts on a recipe-trading mailing list, and one of those contacts might have a bunch of contacts on their extended family's private Facebook group, and one of those family members might have a bunch of friends on a fantasy football league, and one of those friends might have a bunch of contacts in a political activist movement, and so on. All interconnected, but far from united or uniform or even aware of each other.
Civilizational groupings and alliances in the galaxy would be the same way. Not a single, unmanageably large whole, but a network of contacts between smaller groupings, each of which in turn is a network of contacts between still smaller groupings, and so on.
Yes, and that's just one planet. The Trek galaxy has probably hundreds of millions of inhabited planets, every one of which has just as much complexity as the entire Earth. You can't expect Earth-based analogies to scale up to something as impossibly vast as the entire galaxy. That's like assuming that if you can pick up a small rock in one hand, you can pick up an entire hill of gravel in one hand. There are dynamics and complexities that come into play on a larger scale that have no analogy on the smaller scale.
More realistic to have a large number of independent entities that are mutually amiable. They don't have to be formally allied to be at peace with one another and to cooperate locally when it's to their mutual benefit.
It is meaningless to cite something in an imaginary story as "evidence" of anything. I could write a story about the Moon being made of green cheese, but that wouldn't be evidence that it's actualy possible or realistic.
My point is that it isn't a problem, because there's no good reason to even want what you're proposing. It's not just that it's an unattainable goal -- it's an unnecessary one, and an undesirable one. It's defining the problem the wrong way. As I've said, it's possible to have a network of mutually peaceful and amiable interactions among the different civilizations of the galaxy without them all being assimilated into a uniform political entity or even being mutually aware of one another. It just makes more sense to have nested levels of organization and complexity, local groupings interconnecting into larger groupings which interconnect in turn into still larger groupings.
Complex patterns in the universe generally arise out of the operation of local rules, whether it's ants in a colony or neurons in a brain or water molecules in a snowflake or stars in a galaxy. Individual entities interact only with their immediate neighbors in relatively simple ways, and the patterns propagate outward to form higher levels of organizational complexity that are not perceivable on the local scale. In short, as long as each civilization maintains friendly relations with its own neighbors, then you can have all the different civilizations in the galaxy at peace with each other even if any single one isn't aware of most of the others. A single union of all the civilizations would be impossibly, unmanageably complex, so it's better for each one to focus on a more local, manageable scale of interactions, being friendly with its neighbors, and allow a higher level of peace and cooperation to self-organize out of the sum collective of all those local alliances.
None of it occurred, man, it's fiction.
And lots of science fiction is about events that are "erased" at the end of the story -- see "Yesteryear" or "Yesterday's Enterprise" or "Visionary" or First Contact or "Twilight." It's still narratively significant regardless of whether it's forgotten within the fictional "reality" of the series.
What a strange thing to say. TrekLit has never, ever had a single uniform continuity, but Memory Beta has always covered all of the books, even when they disagreed with each other -- the '80s continuity, the many '70s-'90s standalones, the Shatnerverse, Crucible, etc., not to mention all the comics and RPGs and computer games that have never been mutually in continuity. Memory Beta has never represented a single uniform continuity, nor should it, because that would be a gross misrepresentation of how Trek tie-in fiction works. It's nonsensical to call something "irrelevant" just because it's in a different continuity. Just present it the way most wikis do, as an alternative account.
Oh, how very Western of you. Pharaonic rule in Egypt lasted for over 3000 years. Imperial China endured on and off for over 4000 years. There were certainly many rises and falls and changes and interregnums, but the Chinese today consider themselves part of a single civilization that's endured for millennia. Eastern civilizations often think of their history and cultural identity stretching back through the ages, in a way that Westerners have difficulty comprehending.
This is true.
The issue is not that the timeline ends, but that any previous events have been erased from the in-universe multiverse too. So when you read e.g. a 2016 Trek post-2373 novel, it’s about events that have never occurred in the first place (to paraphrase Tessa Omond).
Why does that matter? Memory Beta has never been about presenting a single continuity or a single "correct" version of events. It's a wiki about Star Trek tie-in materials in general, and those have always been in many mutually contradictory continuities, all of which Memory Beta has acknowledged. None of them occurred in each others' versions of the continuity, but that's irrelevant, because It's all just stories. It doesn't matter if they reconcile with each other. They exist for the readers' entertainment in the real world.
Yes, specify which of the alternate continuities a set of events take place in. But it's all part of the fictional narrative of Star Trek tie-ins. The fact that an event was "erased from the timeline" does not erase its narrative relevance. You can't discuss "City on the Edge" without discussing the timeline where McCoy saved Edith Keeler. You can't discuss "Yesterday's Enterprise" without discussing the Klingon war timeline that was erased at the end. You can't discuss First Contact without discussing the Borg-Earth timeline that was erased at the end. It's ridiculous to worry about what's "real" in a work of make-believe. It's all unreal. And it's all part of the narrative, so it all needs to be included in a discussion of that narrative.
Yeah but like... how does that matter when they're not reading the novel within the in-universe multiverse?
You're reading the novel. You can either hold it physically or download the e-book or insert third method for reading novels here. Just because an event "never happened in-universe" doesn't mean you can't enjoy it anyway. DC Comics destroyed their multiverse in '85 but my god if Silver Age Batman comics don't still give me any number of jollies. The fictional book depicting a bunch of fictional events starring fictional characters still exists here.
Why would they have to? Memory-Alpha for example has plenty of articles about people, things and events from timelines that no longer exist. M-B should just have a disclaimer saying that the events in the following section are from a former reality or something. Which they already do for other things.
And as Christopher has pointed out, M-B already has articles detailing stuff from several different continuities. If you go to some Mirror Universe pages, there's usually several sections covering the different versions of the Mirror Universe that have shown up in the licensed works over the decades.
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