Neither is canon, but the book explanation is newer and less stupid.
Michael Chabon vs Trekkies
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
Except it seems even Michael Chabon realizes, going by his #trekimponderables tag response, that Spock destroying Romulus' sun to save Romulus doesn't make any sense.
Yes it does and we have gone over about seven thousand times why.
A Hobus supernova that makes no sense--how can it suddenly supernova, propagating at faster-than-light speeds?--is much less satisfying than the Romulan homeworld's star going supernova with warning of the disaster years in advance. Hobus has to be contrived to be at all threatening; the Romulan homeworld's sun going is an obvious immediate threat.
As for how the red matter was to have worked, I imagine it was something like the scenario I imagined.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromIn...ks_goal_was_never_to_save_the_sun_of_romulus/
Suffice it to say that if the Romulan star had been collapsed immediately into a black hole, without going supernova, not only would this have spared worlds outside of the Romulan system the effects of the supernova, but the planet Romulus would have physically continued in its orbit. There would have been time to evacuate people who would otherwise have been vapourized, and it might even have been possible to build shelters for others using the Romulans' high technology.
With all due respect, I remember your posts now and I didn't before. And strictly speaking I assume you realize that just repeating the same argument multiple times doesn't mean the opposing side will agree with it any more than the first time. Let's leave it at that.
How the physics work really doesn't depend on your agreement.
Seriously? You're going to argue physics with someone who worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with Professor George Smoot and Saul Perlmutter (look them up if you don't know them, though if you are a physics expert I assume you would) and got a Physics degree from UC Berkeley (BS Engineering Physics Class of 2005)?
How many quantum mehcanics classes have you taken?
Probelm is - he didn't really based on Laris comment on "Romulans DON'T study Cybernetics; our coupters only perform numercal functions..."- which shows these writers have no clue RE: Computers as ALL ANY COMPUTER DOES is crunch/process numbers when you come down to it (1's and 0's) and no that won't change in 400 years) - but my point:
By her comment:
There ARE no Romulan Cyberneticists or ANYONE working on Android or A.I. tech for THOUSANDS of years. If it's such a societal taboo, no there wouldn't be ANY Romulan Cyberneticists anywhere in the Empire - and none certainly bankrolled or acknowledged by the Romulan Military to the point an Admiral would make such an off hand comment to an Enemy.
Laris was speaking explicitly of artificial consciousnesses, whether in android physical forms or not. The Romulans may have complex computer systems which simply lack the capacity for self-awareness/consciousness.
As Jarok pointed out at the time, Data would not at all want to be close to a Romulan cyberneticist. If there is a retcon, it is the smallest one, based on the viewer's assumption that a Romuulan cyberneticist would want to build an android.
This even fits with Beta canon: The only mention made of Romulan AI, in the Titan novel _The Red King,_ suggests that the Romulans regularly monitor their starship computers to make sure they are not developing consciousness, deleting any emergent AIs.
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
Ha. I have a Ph.D. and work in the theoretical division of Los Alamos national lab. (Snow day today). I won’t touch this argument with a ten foot pole.
Forget what I wrote here earlier in this post (now replaced with what I'm writing here), I mistook you for @Longinus who wanted the physics debate.Ha. I have a Ph.D. and work in the theoretical division of Los Alamos national lab. (Snow day today). I won’t touch this argument with a ten foot pole.
Yeah, Star Trek physics is baloney. It works however the writer of the episode wants it to work.I'm not really sure one can apply real world physics to Star Trek consistently.
Kor
Sound advice. Besides, it’s Star Trek. Wonky physics is in the fabric of the franchise.Ha. I have a Ph.D. and work in the theoretical division of Los Alamos national lab. (Snow day today). I won’t touch this argument with a ten foot pole.
No, I'm not an expert, but if you are, then you'd know exactly why a black hole would be preferable to a supernova so I really don't understand what the disagreement is about.
As I mentioned, the debate was that a magical out of system supernova makes more sense. All the material linked to the 2009 movie pointed to that. Spock's black hole doesn't equate to "saving the planet" that he promised the Romulans in the film.
The argument shouldn't be black hole vs supernova in Romulus' system because the supernova should never have been placed in Romulus' system when it originally wasn't. Correcting bad science created more bad science. At some point you take which bad science makes more inherent sense, and magical supernova does (especially as STO explained why it was magical i.e. Iconians).
Rather than promising to save a planet by destroying its sun (which renders the promise meaningless as it really means he promised to buy a little bit more time)
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Nah, you weren’t mistaken. Longinus was the one debating Physics, I just chimed in on cue when someone mentioned a ‘credential’ war.
No it doesn't. By definition magical superluminal novas do not make sense.
Not really. There is very little information in the film, and most of it doesn't make much sense.
Fair. It is super unclear what Spock's original plan is. It clear he was too late, something happened that fucked up his plans. Perhaps originally the red matter was supposed to stabilise the star, and the black hole was just a plan B once saving the star was too late?
'Originally' it is unclear. The film doesn't mention anything about the location of the star and in Abrams films it doesn't matter because Abrams doesn't have a faintest clue what space even is. And further details come from the now overridden comic.
Does it? Even the clip does not suggest that.
From Spock's perspective, it looks as if his perspective zooms in from a planet that appears to be Romulus, past an asteroid belt to a star that explodes, then cutting back to that planet as it is destroyed.
It originally was given no location, at least not in the movie.
A supernova destroying a neighbouring planet makes sense, and has happened at least twice in Trek that I can think of. (Three times, sort of, if you include the original destruction of the Veridian star in Generations.) A supernova destroying a distant planet almost as soon as it explodes does not.
It is a classic piece of understatement: Romulus, in fact, would have been physically spared as a planetary body had Spock's plan worked.
First of all, the supernova being anywhere but the Romulan home system was never, ever canon. The movie never specified where the supernova was or that it was of some star named "Hobus". That was a non-canon comic, that had already been partially contradicted by the very movie it was meant to lead up to.
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