Is T'Pol still around ?
- Thread starter Relayer1
- Start date
Why not?
I think it's high time that Trek got with the times and used their highly advanced tech for life extension (next to all the other breakthroughs they made, this would be a piece of cake)
Again I have to suggest reading "The Collectors" if you want to see some in-universe commentary on this. Among other things it's a great critique of the Federation's technological stagnation.
You might want to remove the speculation after that because they are all story ideas.
Huh? How would a character from one Star Trek script be encumbered by the copyright on another Star Trek script? Aren't all the copyrights owned outright by Paramount?
And "The Terratin Incident" posited the transporter reversing -- by default -- the effects of spiroid epsilon radiation.
Funny you should describe "The Counter-Clock Incident" as an "incoherent mess" that is best ignored: Foster, if you recall, turned it into an illusion crafted by advanced aliens who call themselves "The Wanderers Who Play."
Funny you should mention that.
I just started to.
As for the Federation displaying technological stagnation... this never made any sense in Trek and is largely due to writers (much like their messing about with Warp... making it to be as fast as crossing 1000 ly's per day in TOS - which is actually realistic considering the type of society the Federation is, to slowing it down to 42 ly's per day in S1 of TNG, and subsequently to 2.74 Ly's per day by Voyager).
The Feds seems quite advanced in some areas and yet completely dumbed down in others.
Hopefully this novel will provide an in-universe explanation (however, there's a limitation to going around show writers who messed things up real nice due to 'drama' factor who evidently shunned the 'highly advanced and radically different paradigm shift civilization' factor on many occasions because they didn't know better or those ideas might have been tossed to the side due to station officials, or time constraints... or perhaps a combination of factors).
Fortunately, the novels do manage to extrapolate better in terms of technological capabilities than the TV shows do.
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It's not about copyright, it's about royalties. Writers for Star Trek (or any US television series) operate under work-for-hire contracts, which means they cede ownership of their characters and concepts to the studio -- but their compensation for doing so is that they get paid royalties every time those characters or concepts are used. The studio doesn't need their permission to use their characters, but it still needs to pay them for the use. So it's cheaper for a new show to create new characters than it is to make regular use of a character created by someone outside the show's staff.
I thought it was the Klingons? As *I* recall, ADF was fond of shoehorning the Klingons into pretty much every TAS story he novelized, whether or not the plot could conceivably have had anything to do with them.
Ah. That explains how Paramount would have to pay royalties on something it owns outright. Never even thought about the possibility that a work-for-hire contract could be written to give the author royalty rights on characters. Sort of like selling a parcel of land, but retaining the mineral rights.
I thought it was the Klingons? As *I* recall, ADF was fond of shoehorning the Klingons into pretty much every TAS story he novelized, whether or not the plot could conceivably have had anything to do with them.
Actually, what he did (according to something I just read today) was combine CC/a with his own unsold TOS script (that would have been submitted for the 4th season, had thare been one) involving the Klingons. I have no idea whether the ending, in which the "Wanderers Who Play" reveal themselves (and the illusory nature of the "Gypsian" society) to Kirk and Kumara, came from that script, or was added to the novel.
And yes, now that you mention it, in Logs Seven through Ten, ADF did add the Klingons to three of the four (in Log Eight, he added a previously unknown silicon-based sentient race, and a non-sentient species that rather resembles a benign version of the Vom, from his own Bloodhype. [Then again, it seems to me that the Armus from "Skin of Evil" is so much like a watered-down Vom that ADF could have probably had grounds for a lawsuit.])
I see it more as a matter of compensation -- the royalties are what they give you in exchange for you giving them the right to the characters. Although that makes it sound more equitable than it probably is...
And it only applies to TV or movie authors where Trek is concerned. I don't get royalties if another Trek author uses T'Ryssa Chen or Rennan Konya.
Well, at the time, Klingons and Romulans were the only major bad-guy races in Trek, and the Klingons had more than twice as many appearances as the Romulans. It's pretty natural that they'd be the go-to bad guys. They showed up in a lot of the Bantam novels too -- Spock Must Die!, The Starless World, Trek to Madworld, World Without End, Perry's Planet, and as a background threat in The Galactic Whirlpool. (Man, a lot of the Bantam novels had "World" in the title.)
What's weird about the main Klingon baddie in the Log Nine "BEM" followup story is that he's named Kor but is not the same Kor from "Errand of Mercy" and "The Time Trap." He's with some other division of the Klingon military and he and Kirk have never met before.
I liked the Klingon that was Kirk's roommate. But we're pretty off-topic now.
That's not really 'expanded' given their level of technology.
150 is already considered a theoretical limit (as far as current understanding goes, but we don't know if this is the actual limit) in the real world and peer review suggests it could be achieved (maybe even surpassed) with proper nutritional balance, etc. (unless you studied peer-review, you'd be almost amazed at the deficiencies occurring in the general population, especially in the elderly which contribute to cognitive decline, skeletal and immune problems, not to mention cancer - Vitamin D3 in particular seems like a major factor, as does glutathione, but are of course not the only ones).
The Human body in this sense is nothing more than a biological machine that really needs proper maintenance - and the more we learn about nutrition and how it impacts our health, our lifespans also seem to increase (of course, medical science impacts this as well considering it is able to lower the incidence of death from infectious diseases and various injuries).
150 is measly at best for Trek.
I don't think any Human since the FC events (after Humanity started getting its act together) should have died of natural causes given that they could probably slow down the biological process of ageing to the point until newer technology/knowledge became available to further extend lifespan (this is effectively what we are doing today)... unless people decided to die of their own volition (which might be possible for some to have this desire, though likely not all - and this desire usually develops out of ignorance and fear, so people project bias and worst possible scenarios, even though there's little to no evidence to support these views).
Look at our own knowledge/research today, and now compare that with what is available in Trek. They are leaps and bounds ahead of us, and yet, 150 is the best Humans can do?
Not really convincing - besides, a lot of what we know today was available when TNG, DS9 and VOY aired (in preliminary stages, but available regardless) - but I guess preliminary research mainly extended to starships and overall science.
Stem-cells don't appear to be a controversy in Trek (neither they should be), though they aren't exactly mentioned anywhere in medical use either (except in some novels which aren't considered canon) - probably due to the subject being sensitive in the real-world, and the network executives didn't want to touch up on it too much?
Nanobots were indicated in TNG, but never saw any real use - which is odd, considering that Wesley was able to create 2 nanites which subsequently 'procreated', etc.
So evidently... the technology to make them exists, but its not used.
It is silly that the Federation hasn't made more use of the life-extension methods we've seen in various episodes and films, but it's the reality we're stuck with. Given how badly some life prolongation experiments have turned out -- see "Miri" and "Too Short a Season" -- maybe there's skepticism toward other methods. And the focus of people in the Federation seems to be on making the most of the time you have -- living a rich and fulfilling life, rather than simply a long one.
Anyway, if you ask me, too many TOS characters have already survived into the TNG era, either canonically or in prose. We don't need ENT characters to start showing up in the 2380s as well.
Anyway, if you ask me, too many TOS characters have already survived into the TNG era, either canonically or in prose. We don't need ENT characters to start showing up in the 2380s as well.
He didn't create them, he just modified them. It seemed like they were established medical technology - they were described as being produced at a plant in Senegal in a context that certainly sounded as though it was en masse production - and they were mentioned once in Voyager in that respect, which does make it a bit stranger that they weren't used more heavily in a preventative care role.
Yup. Early TNG set up a lot of futurism that later writing staffers failed to follow up on. We started out with a really advanced 24th-century medical science that had cured headaches and colds and could often reverse death itself, and we eventually ended up back at a level that was hardly more advanced than TOS had, except when it was convenient for a specific plot.
Although DS9 was particularly annoying at setting up remarkable medical advances and then ignoring their ramifications. Between the apparently well-established quick-cloning tech of "A Man Alone" and the consciousness-transfer tech of "The Passenger," it should've been possible to achieve immortality. Not to mention the nanite-induced immortality of the aliens from "Battle Lines." The only limitation there was that the nanites were programmed only to work on that moon, so why not just reprogram them?
I tend to agree with this. If you want T'Pol in a 23d or 24th century story, have it start in the 22d century, use some time travel techniques or one the future DTIs, or have someone seek out her thoughts from her vrekatra.
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T'Pol was born in 2088 (worked out from Zero Hour) making her 66 in the episode E2. In that the ship was sent back in time 117 years to 2037, and then waited those 117 years to meet the present-day NX-01. And T'Pol was still alive, now aged 183, and she looked like this-
So working it out, in the normal time line, 2154+117, so she'd look like that in 2271, about the time The Motion Picture. So she could have easily been alive for TOS and the movies, but I seriously doubt it for TNG era
So working it out, in the normal time line, 2154+117, so she'd look like that in 2271, about the time The Motion Picture. So she could have easily been alive for TOS and the movies, but I seriously doubt it for TNG era
Wasn't T'Pau alive in the post-TNG era in a New Frontier novel? And she was ancient in Kirk's time. If she can cling to life that long, T'Pol can too.
Yeah, T'Pau has a lot of Heart and Soul.
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