It will always be a tug of war between how can the future look versus being reflective of the here and now.
For me, I would hope by the 23rd century people having to live with vision issues would be in the far past.
It will always be a tug of war between how can the future look versus being reflective of the here and now.
For me, I would hope by the 23rd century people having to live with vision issues would be in the far past.
Even if current conditions and their causes are resolved by Trek's future science, exotic alien syndromes operate on different principles and complicate treatments.
The problem is that this is a view where bipolar, autism, etc are things to be fixed instead of seeing them as things to be accommodated and even embraced.
I really like Peter Watts' works of Blindsight and Echopraxia because they basically posit that the origin and eventual pinnacle of the overlaps of autism and sociopathy is the post-human form of the super intelligent vampire. These things are born of an inhumanity and yet they are what enable humanity to go beyond its limits;
was such a stand out line to me.
The thing is letting people who have these forms of difference contribute to the storytelling about the future in the here and now. It is not to suppose these things by the same name in the same form will exist in the far future.
I have massive anxiety, I would love to have it fixed. It is another thing I hope people in the future don’t have to deal with it.
Right, so anxiety is an emotion. You are suffering from an excess of a feeling, like someone who is overwhelmed by despair. That is different from conditions like bipolar and autism, which are different ways of being.
Those conditions have notably moments of extreme upside for the people who have them. Manic episodes come with an amazing creative and social energy that allows the bipolar individual to go out and do things that they normally could not, yet while having the ability to relate to the baseline experience thanks to this being temporary. The tendency for people with autism to be able to understand mechanical or abstract systems better than the typical person is a well known stereotype.
Heck, even anxiety could be useful in a space exploration context. Meeting the unknown means that having someone prone to imagining the worst possible thing could be helpful, because there is a real chance that weird nebula has that gosh darn Where Silence Has Lease jerk in it.
In all honesty, I simply don’t know what the perfect answer is.
What I do know is that you can’t put people with certain conditions in certain situations. It isn’t just about them but the people around them as well. Much like, as much as I love it, I no longer drive. I can still pass the vision exam but know that it isn’t safe for other people for me to be on the road driving.
Like in Starfleet Academy, you can’t have someone eating their combadge every time there is a red alert.
Unfortunately I’ll just repost an earlier thought: no matter how noble and just a society is, there are going to be certain endeavors that certain folks simply aren’t going to be compatible with.
I mean, it absolutely sucks. But sometimes life is that way. I’ll never get to be on a NASA rocket exploring space, just something I have to live with.
For clarification, I don’t believe everyone who have mental obstacles should be forbidden from serving in an organization like Starfleet.
To me it would come down to four things for pretty much anyone wanting to serve.
To me it would come down to four things for pretty much anyone wanting to serve.
- Can you do the job safely?
- Can you do the job competently?
- Can you do the job both safely and competently during possibly intense and extended emergencies?
- Can you do the job within the structure of Starfleet?
but then again, you might be allergic to retinax v
That's only true for people with high functioning autism. For people like my barely verbal nephew, there's no upside.
When Science fiction assumes there are certain "Cures" for things, without taking a broader context it can be pretty harmful.
It reminds me of Sheri S Tepper's "The Gate to Women's Country" which was a Hugo nominated novel, and should be remembered as a great pioneering post-nuclear-holocaust feminist fiction. Except in the novel LGBTQ identities are treated as a medical disorder which is screened and "Removed" before such children are born. This is not handled as a negative thing. It's fairly clear in Tepper's mind this was some future solution.
In more recent times there has been resistance from some in the Deaf Community to the cochlear implant as a device that is rapidly destroying their own progress.
At some point the question has to be asked: at what point are we allowed to not let technology put us on a level of "normalicy" that everyone else is comfortable with, or for that matter, will be be allowed to let technology give us improvements that other's are not going to be able to receive. The latter has been a real ethical problem for some time.
Star Trek skirts that issue by universal health care (good), and making any kind of genetic and often but not always cybernetic improvements unlawful or at least a bad idea (Bad).
It reminds me of Sheri S Tepper's "The Gate to Women's Country" which was a Hugo nominated novel, and should be remembered as a great pioneering post-nuclear-holocaust feminist fiction. Except in the novel LGBTQ identities are treated as a medical disorder which is screened and "Removed" before such children are born. This is not handled as a negative thing. It's fairly clear in Tepper's mind this was some future solution.
In more recent times there has been resistance from some in the Deaf Community to the cochlear implant as a device that is rapidly destroying their own progress.
At some point the question has to be asked: at what point are we allowed to not let technology put us on a level of "normalicy" that everyone else is comfortable with, or for that matter, will be be allowed to let technology give us improvements that other's are not going to be able to receive. The latter has been a real ethical problem for some time.
Star Trek skirts that issue by universal health care (good), and making any kind of genetic and often but not always cybernetic improvements unlawful or at least a bad idea (Bad).
Tough to come up with a satisfying answer for a world that we’ve barely scratched the surface of.
and I think its alright to imagine a future with ethics different from our own, to some degree. A person from the Greco-Roman world would probably as appalled by some of our customs as we would, rightfully, be by many of theirs.
I think this has always been to stop the eugenics potential of the setting from becoming an issue. Trek, especially with Roddenberry, was about the New Man, or a better kind of humanity. "Look how not insanely racist everyone is in the future, we can actually hangout with a black woman and not harass her endlessly." says TOS. "See, even the East Asians and the Russians will be friends with the Iowan American" it says.
But this needs to be cut off somewhere. The Peter Watts' vampires are lurking out there, in the potentials of a desire for a superior human, with their longing to cannibalize the parent species and denounce their parents as the real evil of the world. It's the shadow cast by Khan and his "Superior Intellect", of a better humanity that is made via a means that is not the uplifting of what already exists through a better social environment but via changing the interiority of people with surgery or genetics.
And Strange New Worlds makes a point that, when applied to planetary colonization (WHY DO THIS?) it makes about as much sense to genetically engineer the population going to the planet as it does to engineer the planet to the population.
I can't agree enough. Why are human and other Fed species populations so out of control by the 23rd century that the Marcuses (Marci?!) have to invent a peaceful doomsday weapon to tackle issues of food supply. One would think that Tarsus IV was a one-off issue but apparently not. Fixed by the next century, of course.
Even if people didn't want to live in them, orbital habitats could make growing food easy and essentially automated and unlimited even if people didn't want to live in them (which, according to Beyond, many do) . But that's one of those issue with Star Trek being essentially 1950's level sci fi with the occasional bolt-on added, in the way way Star Wars is a 1930's movie serial still chugging along now, too.
As much as I love TWOK, sometimes I think it casts too long a shadow.
The out of control population growth is a natural symptom of the setting. Medical advances are drastically slowing the death rate and Federation Socialism had removed the economic baggage of having more children. Big families are now affordable again. It's like deer when you kill all the wolves.
Except they don't really seem to live that long. McCoy was 137 but didn't look a day over 120 by then*. We get some people living in their eleventies IRL now, so its hard to see that as much of a leap. Since it's a show about Starfleet we generally don't get to see elderly people unless it's a touching episode about elderly people. Maybe everyone has made the active choice to "age gracefully" and die but it sounds more like longevity science hit a brick wall at some point. Probably just as well since Starfleet forces retirement at age 75.
*not counting his previous resurrection.
Since when? Wasn’t Admiral Jameson in his 90s?
It's not about people living longer, it's all the people who don't die prematurely of cancer and heart disease, the flu, war, starvation, car accidents etc. That's like 60 million people every year. Now there are premature deaths on Future Earth, but we are supposed to assume that number has gone way down, utopia and all. Now a bunch of those people have kids who wouldn't have, and people are having more kids in general and your growth rate is solidly over 1%.
If you have those illnesses resolved, especially the heart, people continue to live. There's not some magic "dying of old age" at least not as far as is known.
since TAS. April faced the mandatory retirement age.
And yet… Admiral Jameson was in his nineties. Of course, it’s a later era, so things could have changed by then — but at that point, there’s clearly no longer a forced retirement at 75. (Likewise Picard himself, of course, once he returns to Starfleet in PIC.)
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