Do you think paranormal activity (that can't be explained by science) still goes on in Star Trek?

Well, according to Star Trek lore, they're basically the same thing. Sargon's spirit in the sphere is stated to be a disembodied consciousness, yet it has the power to take over Kirk's body at will. That takes a lot of energy to accomplish, especially when it's then possible to put Kirk back in his body when Sargon is done.

 

Yes, of course. The same goes in many other sci-fi franchises. Psionics, alien abilities, advanced technology, and super-evolution are routinely used as a handwave for things that are functionally and narratively indistinguishable from magic. Invoking "science we don't understand yet" is a venerable way to have your cake and eat it too, to include impossibilities but pretend it's still scientific rather than mystical. Countless franchises have super-evolved aliens or telepaths with effectively magical abilities -- Trek, Doctor Who, Space: 1999, Battlestar Galactica (the original -- the revival went for outright mysticism), Babylon 5, Stargate, you name it. But within the narrative, it is treated as the operation of natural scientific laws on a level beyond present-day understanding. It's not claimed to be magical or divine, just a manifestation of Clarke's Third Law.

 

He's real. This was explained in the New Frontier novels.

 

Hmm. Trying to decide if I'm disappointed or not.

 

Science cannot explain everything, thus paranormal activity.

 

Haven't we been through this? Science expands. Its whole function is find explanations for things it hasn't explained yet. There are countless things that were once unexplained but that science found explanations for. That is literally its job. So it's impossible to say that science can never explain something. You can't prove a negative.

Indeed, as I said before, the original users of the word "paranormal" considered themselves scientists and applied the term to phenomena that science had not yet explained but that they were specifically attempting to find explanations for. It wasn't meant to assert a permanent divide between the known and the unknowable, just a placeholder label for things not yet codified, with the confidence that they eventually would be.

After all, "normal" doesn't mean "universal." It just means ordinary, common, well-understood. So "paranormal" just means "beyond what's ordinary and familiar." Probing beyond the familiar is the entire purpose of science. So the idea that "paranormal" means the opposite of "scientific" is a fundamental misunderstanding of the word.

 

Well, it's true enough that science is unlikely to explain absolutely everything, since there will always be questions left to answer. But it is arbitrary and impossible to assert that a specific thing can never be understood by science, since there's no way of knowing that an explanation won't be found in the future. Saying "It's impossible to know the answer" is just a cover for being too lazy or incurious to bother looking -- or for being a charlatan who's afraid of being exposed if people ask too many questions.

All we can say is that there are still open questions, and that the best known mechanism for seeking answers to those questions is science. The number of unanswered questions will never be zero, but that's only because every new answer that science finds raises new questions.

 

Each genre also has its own feel for such things.

Chronicles of Riddick seems to split the difference between SPACE 1999 and Star Wars. Dr. Who will let you have The Satan Pit.

Movies like GRAVITY are (in some ways) harder.

Trek is the easiest Sci-Fi setting for travel and super beings, and Andromeda won’t allow anything but one FTL mode and no ‘spooks’

Living stars? They’ll allow it.

Jump in this dismal ‘verse, you won’t get back out

 

What I disliked about Chronicles of Riddick was that it was in a different genre than its predecessor. Pitch Black was set in a relatively grounded and plausible universe, lived-in and without any overtly fanciful elements. Aside from a couple of minor implausibilities like the planet's two ring systems at an angle to each other, it was a moderately hard-SF future by cinematic standards, and Riddick was obviously a human criminal with no special abilities beyond his surgically enhanced vision. But then Chronicles came along and reinterpreted Riddick as a humanoid alien in a sprawling and poorly explained fantasy space-opera universe rife with mysticism and supernatural powers and ludicrously grandiose production design. It was like doing a sequel to The Maltese Falcon that reveals Sam Spade is actually a wizard on a quest to save a magic kingdom from a dragon invasion.

 

If you don't start small, it's harder to hook your audience. For instance, the chapter that got me into the Potterverse was the first chapter of the first book. You know, the one about Vernon Dursley wondering why there are so many owls flying about in the daytime but not really asking about it.

It would have been much harder to draw me in if it had started with Harry on the train to Hogwarts.

 

I guess Halloween is no longer fun in the Star Trek universe. The triumph of science, I suppose.



In the Halloween-themed TOS episode, "Catspaw", Kirk and Spock didn't get spooked by the paranormal theatrics that they encountered on that eerie planet.

Kirk even called out the paranormal theatrics as illusions and then referring to them as "mumbo-jumbo". Things that go bump in the night don't seem to have any substance to Kirk and Spock.

Interestingly, in the real world, three Star Trek actors (that I am aware) have hosted tv shows that give credence to, or at least give the appearance of lending credibility, to various paranormal phenomena.

Nimoy hosted "In Search of ..." back in the day. Quinto was host of the recent version of "In Seach of ...". And of course, Shatner has been the host of his own non-fiction show about the paranormal called "The UnXplained." I wonder what Kirk and Spock would think of that.

 

Huh? The fun of Halloween doesn't depend on actual belief in the supernatural -- if anything, just the opposite. Scary things are only fun if you know they're harmless fantasies.

Actors do the jobs they're hired to do, whether that means playing a brilliant scientist or hosting a trashy pseudoscience mockumentary. Neither should be mistaken for a reflection of who they actually are or what they believe.

 

Sure, to some people, it doesn't depend on it. To others, belief to some degree or another in the supernatural is part of their Halloween celebration, if that's the right word to use.

Some people enjoy the Halloween season because they do believe that paranormal phenomena of the Halloween sort are real. Some people deliberately seek out alleged haunted locations. Some people mess around with a particular board game that supposedly is a conduit to other worldly entities. They get a thrill out it. It may be fun and exciting to them.

People have their own individual reason as to whether they enjoy, or not enjoy, Halloween.



But my post was not about that.

The way Kirk, Spock and McCoy spoke somewhat dismissively about Halloween in "Catspaw" led me to speculate that Halloween in the TOS universe may no longer exist, or perhaps not in the form as we would recognize it. Maybe the enlightened humans of the Star Trek universe outgrew Halloween, like the Greeks outgrew gods like Apollo (per "Who Mourns for Adonais?"). Of course, Star Trek is fictional like Apollo. You can speculate however you want.

I didn't think anyone would take my comments, about Halloween not being fun in the Star Trek universe, seriously.

Yes, actors do what they are paid to do. Or they could turn down jobs they don't want to do.

I don't know whether Nimoy, Quinto, or Shatner actually believe the message that their shows espouse. Nor do I care. (But I have read an interview where Shatner describes himself as "an agnostic" when it comes to the paranormal.)

What I am interested in, is whether they do a good job hosting the show while I am watching it.

But my point wasn't even that. Kirk and Spock had a dismissive attitude about the paranormal theatrics that they encountered in "Catspaw". I found it amusing that the actors, who played Kirk and Spock, actually hosted shows that lend credibility to various paranormal phenomena, nothing more than that.

 

I'm kind of alarmed at your dismissive attitude towards In Search of... I mean, maybe that describes the newer Quinto episodes, but the original wasn't just about ghosts and aliens and Bigfoot. You had episodes about climate change (in an era where it was otherwise mocked and ridiculed), killer bees, the search for Troy, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the hunt for Josef Mengele (who died six days after it aired), and numerous other things that fall out of the spectrum of pseudoscience and were legitimate topics of interest and research brought into the homes of millions who might never had been exposed to that before. And you yourself brought up the fact that ESP was an explored science in the 1960s and '70s, hence its use on Star Trek, before being discredited after a fashion. In Search of... explores ESP and other paranormal ideas prevalent at the time of course, but never really drew solid conclusions.

It wasn't Nova, but I don't think it was as trashy as you remember. Nimoy himself wrote an episode exploring Vincent Van Gogh's supposed madness.

 

I don't remember it well enough to say -- and I was so gullible at that age that I would've believed whatever they told me anyway. It probably wasn't as bad as the pseudoscience crap on "educational" cable these days, but it may have been a harbinger of that trend. And it did indulge in some pretty silly stuff along with the more plausible stuff. I think standards matter; if they're too credulous about the pseudoscience things, it raises doubts about their credibility regarding other stuff. After all, even grounded, down-to-earth mysteries can be subject to bad research and fringe theories.

 

Spock in Turnabout Intruder:
"This crew has been to many places in the galaxy. They've been witness to many strange events. They are trained to know that what seems to be impossible often is possible, given the scientific analysis of the phenomenon."

Kirk in The Corbomite Manuver:
"Those of you who have served for long on this vessel have encountered alien lifeforms. You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, an irrational fear of the unknown. But there's no such thing as the unknown, only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood."

 

I believe there would still be "paranormal" and other events (even if you don't believe in the paranormal). Here's why. While it is true that scientific knowledge is growing and expanding, science is good at explaining repeatable and testable events. Many events people experience aren't repeatable for any number of reasons. If I come out of a house claiming it is haunted and I've seen a ghost, I could have been hallucinating, it could be a hoax, I could have seen something natural that I misinterpreted, or I could have seen a legitimate ghost. If the event doesn't repeat, maybe Bev Crusher can rule out hallucination with medical scanners, and Geordie can rule out some artifact of faulty wiring, but if the event doesn't repeat, there wouldn't be anything to test. In this case, if the person truly believed that they had a supernatural encounter, science still can't confirm or deny the event since it isn't repeatable. This becomes even more true in a galaxy where telepaths, empaths, and shapeshifters exist and can play with your perceptions.

 

^Just because nobody can find an explanation for something doesn't mean it genuinely lacks one.

 

Yet.

Paranormal activity is not real.