Does interesting/weird stuff happen on ships we never hear about?

[Timo]

"Fairly insignificant" just means it's not the talk of the day, by definition. People here appear to be claiming that these big adventures would warrant talking about. That the talk never takes place on screen is proof of one thing only - that V'Ger was less important to them than WWII is to us, by sheer weight of dialogue statistics (every week, a discussion here brings up WWII whilst the Great Recession or any given Summer Olymics pop up fairly seldom). But it cannot be used as proof that umpteen other incidents as big as or possibly bigger than V'Ger didn't also take place, unrelated to anything we saw onscreen, and unrelated to any of the heroes.

Wholly separately, there are incidents where hero set B speaks of an adventure identical to one experienced by hero set A without mentioning hero set A, or even outright denying knowledge of hero set A (as in "Where Silence Has Lease", say). That could be used as proof that A and B exist in different universes altogether, as otherwise their common employer would insist on B knowing about A. But again we can ignore this if we assume that both A and every other letter of alphabet back then had zillions of adventures, too many for B to memorize (even when their very lives depend on them remembering).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[C.E. Evans]

"Fairly insignificant" just means it's not the talk of the day, by definition.

It actually doesn't. "Fairly insignificant" means fairly unimportant.

People here appear to be claiming that these big adventures would warrant talking about.

Why wouldn't they? Why would everyone everywhere ignore them?

That the talk never takes place on screen is proof of one thing only - that V'Ger was less important to them than WWII is to us, by sheer weight of dialogue statistics

That isn't proof at all. There are lot of things that people don't talk about at any given time, but that doesn't mean they aren't important to them.

 

[Timo]

It actually doesn't. "Fairly insignificant" means fairly unimportant.[/qujote]

Which is what V'Ger is if our heroes don't talk about it, and they don't.

9/11 is fairly insignificant, too - it happened a long time ago to other people in a distant place, doesn't impact on daily lives much, and certainly isn't the talk of the day if anything more interesting such as a video about kittens is available. Significance doesn't correlate much with magnitude on the Richter scale, or people would still be talking about Krakatau.

Why wouldn't they? Why would everyone everywhere ignore them?

Partially for the same reason we ignore Krakatau: it's insignificant. We lost nobody when Danan blew. Okay, somebody here may have lost a distant relative, but that was then, and this is now.

The bigger reason is that interstellar disasters are already assuredly and literally dime in a dozen: any of us can name twenty-five of them from within a couple of hundred years of TNG. Why talk about something that's as common as foul weather?

Okay, sure, some loonie somewhere talks about Krakatau even now. But then again, there's somebody talking about his telepathic alien cats and their nightly trips to the far side of the Moon.

There are lot of things that people don't talk about at any given time, but that doesn't mean they aren't important to them.

We have witnessed hundreds upon hundreds of hours of our Starfleet heroes discussing their work. They don't just skip V'Ger - they never touch upon any of these past adventures of supposed significance. To claim that they were significant to our set of heroes, and not just to the crazy cat lady of Arcturus Prime, would require extraordinary proof when such massive amount of evidence points to the opposite direction.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[C.E. Evans]

It actually doesn't. "Fairly insignificant" means fairly unimportant.

Which is what V'Ger is if our heroes don't talk about it, and they don't.

That's not true.

9/11 is fairly insignificant, too...

I think we're done here.

 

[Ithekro]

The V'ger Incident resulted in the known loss of three Klingon battlecruisers (Federation wouldn't note this very often, and I don't think the Klingons boast over defeats that much), the Epsilon Nine station, and four other members of Starfleet (two in a transporter accident, and the "missing" Captain Decker and Lt. Illia. Plus perhaps an issue with Earth's defense system being shut down by an alien cloud that could originally be around the size of a good piece of the entire Solar System.

Earth itself was in danger, but not actually harmed. The whale probe probably did more damage to Earth than V'Ger did even if it didn't vaporize any of the starships it passed on the way to Earth. And the Xindi prototype weapon and superweapon did more damage than both. The Breen attack was said to be rather daring as even the Klingons had not tried to attack Earth and yet the cloaking device equipped Breen only managed to do a little damage to the San Francisco area relative to what we've seen other species and starships be able to do to planets in the past.

 

[Autistoid]

Make no mistake the enterprise is 1 in a million.

Two reasons for this are data and spock.

Also keep in mind they're likely behind the scenes actions made by starfleet intelligence that directs there experiences.

Spock and Data are one of a kind, and if you follow most episodes plots have a significant effect on beating the odds.


Assuming Starfleet has approximately 1 billion space craft.

1 million that are something approaching flag ship worthy, and maybe only a 1000 of these ships with the perfect combo of senior staff it's not really that surprising.

Remember the federation is across 8,000 light years, and cubic. With each cubic 1,000 light years, you have 1 billion star, you have a total of around 50 trillion star systems.

Remember DS9 and Voyager are dealing with different quadrants.

And things may be happening to multiple ships at the same time(running into Q etc)

Also it's highly likely that starfleet is actively involved in covering up a whole lot in the galaxy for security reasons.

Just think what would happen if the klingons made a deal with the Q etc.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Of course it does. Space is vast and infinite, so other crews are always going to come across things no one else has seen, have life-changing events and swash-buckling adventures.

If it was only our hero ships then the crew would be rotated every six-twelve months in order to increase the experience of more of its officers.