Vulcans live by the logical ends justify the means. Sarek tells his young son when he is vulnerable, that he married his human mother for political reasons. Imagine telling your own child that! I am surprised Amanda did not divorce him on the spot.
Illogical Vulcans
- Thread starter thewanderingjack
- Start date
Where, which episode or film, was it established that that happened?
Star Trek 2009, The speech 'As Ambassdor to Earth it was logical to marry a human woman' etc
Spock was a boy, then? You said "young son when he is vulnerable." I thought Spock was an adult, no longer young, and besides not too long afterwards Sarek fessed up to marrying Amanda because he loved her, right?
And it's projected that in a century, most of those will be gone, because civilization. Romulans have lived through that century, and twenty more, by the time they meet up with humans.
Just you wait...
Timo Saloniemi
Or, The repressive tyranical government at some point forced all Romulans to adopt a unified language. Maybe the dialects are indicative of non-Romulaness (like, for the Remans) or a as part of a caste system.
Another pet peeve o my.... the home planet, races and languages of most species are generally human (Romulus is the human name for that star) names, and also the same for all three (or human derivative equivalents like... Klingonese isn't it?)
Nope its the scene after Spock beats up the bullies, he is a young boy at school.
Even if those languages are reduced to 100s instead of 1000s, in universe its still lot more than coming across alien species who only speak Klingon or Vulcan....
I liked the novel that stated the native name for the Romulan peoples is The Rhainsshu (spelling?). A pity the TV/Movies did not reflect this. The Star Trek universe should have established or show native peoples using their native names and not the Anglo-Terran derivatives. There is no way in universe any alien species would be so Terrancentric regarding themselves. More cultural blindness from the writers? Just as there is real world cultural White privilege/blindness in the West, the writers sub consciously show this in their presentation of the Star Trek universe with cultural Terran privilege.
In any high information age where one has access to a standard world-wide media, wouldn't there be a greater tendency to conformity than past cultures ever had who were severely isolated? Thousands of languages may begin dying out or falling into general disuse in favor of the most commonly used ones. Doubtless some few know them and scholars preserve them, but fewer people speak them with passing time, and soon the vast majority might be speaking something like only 3 languages or a few dialects.
It has also been said there is no canonical proof of that, or dialogue that was their reason - only they apparently left about then. We might assume they did so with warp drive, but that's an assumption, too. They could have taken off with multigenerational ships or sleeper ships, and with ion drive and continuous acceleration, gotten close to c and reached Romulus in a few decades.
I don't know. But if they can work together to war on another clan, to make atomic bombs, I'm confident someone could have made warp drive alone or worked together to do that, too. And warp drive may have been around for centuries before Surak, so they have all the time in the world. Nothing says the Romulans took off as soon as they developed warp drive.
Or maybe he didn't write them at all, but murdered the guy who did and he took credit for them, and his soul has been lying its ass off ever since. Maybe. I see little point in this level of "maybe" speculation without some decent foundation for it elsewhere.
To have that, one would have to almost have an identical genome and been separated by nearly no time at all, evolutionally speaking, like Romulans and Vulcans. If they've been apart from much longer, they could easily have wildly different behavior traits, like Chimps and Bonobos apart for 2 million years now, but virtually identical genome.
They didn't say they weren't related to lots of other species, too, but that is hardly worth mentioning. But discovering they were genetically related to Vulcans would be worth mentioning, and it would be wrong to call them proto-vulcans if they were related since you would call them vulcans, or a cousin or offshoot of that same species. They didn't. They aren't. It's just wrong to invent that stuff out of whole cloth without some dialogue to back it up. And no one used the term vulcanoid anywhere in the episode, either. Just proto-vulcans, and by that they meant they looked like them and resembled culturally them in some important ways.
What do you imagine a basic humanoid template to be, and where do they keep that information in a one-celled organism, let alone the puzzle program to help us find it?
Sure they did – they claim the human template is in what they seeded on the planet where life had already taken root. Crusher says it's been part of all life on earth for 4 billion years. This is demonstrably wrong on the real world level of science and genetics, so it's impossible. Though the story could be modified in ways to make it more plausible, I suppose, but not without having to contradict what they actually said or did to a fair degree.
The actual practice was not completely lost, but even the closest was off, a bit perverted, and to bring one back on track took years of study and work.
The dominant culture was reflected in the high command, which was way off, even if it embraced logic, it also embraced a martial philosophy and not pacifism.
About 100 years before Spock. So most of Vulcan has been bending back toward Surak's original teachings for the past 100 years by the time of Spock.
Murder is a legal definition, and I bet what they do there is legal. You may find it morally reprehensible, but most anyone involved would be found not guilty anyway by reason of temporary insanity in our culture. Even T'Pring, for while only Spock looks nutso, she may be, too.
Oh, is it? OK, thanks.
But, Sarek does eventually fess up that he married her because he loved her, yes?
Yes he does.
And indeed it's just numbers. The sentiment there is that languages are a nuisance humanlike civilizations will eventually get rid of. And humans today barely qualify as a civilization, having been in real global contact for barely a century, during which languages have been dropping like flies already. Romulans are assuredly old as a global (indeed, multiglobal) civilization.
Klingons, potentially. But nobody said Klingons only have one language. Since many distinct types of gibberish have been utilized as Klingon speech, we might do well to believe in "three dialects" there as well.
How so? The aliens can put stuff in our genes in small print. Today we can't read that small print. In the 2360s, we can. Nothing impossible there, and certainly nothing we could demonstrate as true or false.
This is not yer average classic panspermia in action. This is a techno-worm in our DNA, a foreign agent biding its time to perform alien acts. It climbs uphill to achieve what natural evolution would tend to undo. But since today we only have one tree of evolution to examine, there's no way we could declare it natural or unnatural, likely or unlikely. All we can do is declare it true, as its very existence means it's not false.
Of course, were, say, Vulcans of old to find out that their planet had once spawned intelligent sandworms with two hands and two feet and surprisingly compatible genitalia, and before that some intelligent cliffclams with two hands and two feet and surprisingly compatible genitalia, they would naturally have to acknowledge this as true, and would be entitled to declaring it natural as well. It's just that in broader examination, the latter declaration would be baseless.
Timo Saloniemi
The real death knell for most languages will be when we achieve world government, and have one official language for the world, however many others may still linger.
What was that coding they hid in the Klingon blood in the ENT opener? That was smaller than base pairs.
Why needless? The first ones were lonely, and so they didn't want others to be lonely. Just seed many worlds with life, even DNA so they'd have that much in common, and leave it to its own devices, just as they, themselves, evolved naturally. Then life will be abundant, that life won't be alone or lonely, and they'll have DNA in common if nothing else. Why do you need more than that to make this story work?
Only insofar as they spoke of the coding in base pairs, which we can see, and not as some coding on a smaller level not at the genetic level.
What was that coding they hid in the Klingon blood in the ENT opener? That was smaller than base pairs.
The whole of the story is evolution is not a natural process, and I think we'd see that if it were true. But it all scoffs at most everything we know (or think we know but are wrong) about the science. And it's all so needless.
Why needless? The first ones were lonely, and so they didn't want others to be lonely. Just seed many worlds with life, even DNA so they'd have that much in common, and leave it to its own devices, just as they, themselves, evolved naturally. Then life will be abundant, that life won't be alone or lonely, and they'll have DNA in common if nothing else. Why do you need more than that to make this story work?
But the DNA fragments were just the macroscopic puzzle pieces that drew the thing together - the 500-nanogram gorillas in the room for attention-catching. The actual programming was not stated to lie here nor there by the Ancientress.
Would be interesting to know. Although it probably doesn't and can't have a real-world name, alas.
I doubt that - after all, it only "directs" evolution at very specific points, turning troodons into the Voth or apes into humans. All the rest is supposedly natural, explaining why every planet comes up with different humanoids. (Although why every planet is a second California is probably attributable to the later terraforming rather than either natural or "directed" evolution.)
If the Code messed up with all of evolution, it should have very specifically culminated in the Voth and there should have been no opening for us humans. Unless we uniquely evolved naturally after the Code was done. But "The Chase" says we specifically did not. (Supposedly. Although the hologram might not have been aware of who was present, nor correctly complimenting those for their participation in the program.)
I think it's a pretty good idea to highlight the fact that we indeed know zip about how and why humans evolved (and, of course, about a zillion other evolutionary choices of lesser inherent interest). There's plenty of leeway in modern science for claiming that Poppa God did it even though everything else was Momma Nature; Trek just patches that leak with a cork of its choosing.
That'd be less realistic, though - after four billion years, we'd have pretty much nothing in common, and certainly not enough for the story to work as an excuse for the utter uniformity seen in Trek. Although the Ancients could then be reassigned a slot mere hundreds of millions of years in the past or whatnot.
For the part of the Ancients, they saw planets with life. They just didn't like what they saw. They didn't want smart octopi for kids, they wanted folks they could literally have sex with.
I wonder how often in history the pieces of the puzzle have been put together - and how often this has helped the humanoids actually get along with each other (and have that all-important sex)?
Timo Saloniemi
Vulcans aren't always as logical as they claim. Remember there was a Vulcan who believed that baseball was the best way to prove Vulcans are superior to humans.
I doubt it, consider today the information age is dominated by English, for some nations its the unofficial second language, but there is no way those same nation states are going to give up their native tongue and take on a foreign one, unless its enforced brutally by the state. If China becomes the number one superpower and culturally dominates the planet, do you see the USA forcing Mandarin on Americans?
Yes but look what it took for him to do so.
Not as long as a place called France exists on this Earth. I admire them for being determined to minimise as much Anglo cultural influence as possible. lol It might be a losing fight but at least they are fighting it.
In the Star Trek universe there is an official language for the planet, its called Standard and it seems to be nothing more than English. Maybe in universe its a mish mash of English, French, Mandarin and Russian.
Its a shame the TNG episode The Neutral Zone where they found 20th century people did not have those Americans waking up not understanding a word said by anyone, because the language had changed so drastically. What a missed opportunity by the writers.
Last edited:
Similar threads
