For some reason that reminds me of this Calvin and Hobbes comic strip: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1994/03/28
Kor
Picard's wisdom:
- Thread starter Discofan
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Kor
The problem is that the writers need to come up with reasons for Picard to do what he does simply for the sake of the show and the reasons they come up with are often pure bullshit. Like when he's a kid again and he can't wait to go back to his former state and his reason is.... that he likes to move forward and his being a kid looks like a move backward... I mean in real life you'd have to be a perfect imbecile to pass up the chance of being a kid again with all your adult knowledge at that when you're old and close to death! I am sixty for example and if I were given the chance of being twelve again and getting forty-eight more extraordinary bonus years... If someone even suggested that I'd be old again, I'd have killed them where they stood.
Instead, they should have made it impossible for Picard to remain a kid, eliminating thus an idiotic explanation.
Instead, they should have made it impossible for Picard to remain a kid, eliminating thus an idiotic explanation.
He wouldn't re-experience the same childhood, he would remain a Starfleet captain with all the rights and privileges that entails, all the while, having his twenties and his thirties before him, instead of far behind... Most people would give everything they have for a ten-year bonus... Fifty years is just... ecstatic!!!
It beats talking about gazelles.
I think you missed my point.
If someone has a bad experience with something, they may not want to repeat it even if the circumstances would, objectively speaking, be drastically different. It's not about logic, it's about emotional baggage.
Ever tried to make up fake ones, just for laughs?
"When you don't know what you're talking about, it's hard to say something of significance."
"Older people have wisdom, younger ones have impatience."
"Diplomacy is only efficient with people open to it."
My childhood wasn't a bed of roses, far from it, my parents were very poor and the environment was rather rough (constant fights with other kids, nothing to call my own, except maybe what little I could get doing menial tasks for very little money. I had to work hard at school to be one of the best (the best actually until I got to college level), I was injured quite a few times...) I'd still like to be young. In fact, there's nothing I'd like more.
So there.
Well, when you're offered the choice you can make it for yourself.
Sounds like something Picard could have said...
Even though I wouldn't want to die anytime soon, I wouldn't want to live forever - at least not as I currently understand life. Living a thousand or perhaps a million years, fine. But when contemplating the idea of living more than, say, a G64 number of years (G64 being Graham's number) the idea sounds horrific to me. Especially if it would turn out that after a certain amount of time there would be nothing new to experience anymore, nothing to learn anymore.
Not having enough time to learn everything there is to learn, experience everything there is to experience is what makes the time we do have precious. I think it's that thought Picard wants to convey.
So yes, I can live with those quotes
Not having enough time to learn everything there is to learn, experience everything there is to experience is what makes the time we do have precious. I think it's that thought Picard wants to convey.
So yes, I can live with those quotes
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Even though I wouldn't want to die anytime soon, I wouldn't want to live forever - at least not as I currently understand life. Living a thousand or perhaps a million years, fine. But when contemplating the idea of living more than, say, a G64 number of years (G64 being Graham's number) the idea sounds horrific to me. Especially if it would turn out that after a certain amount of time there would be nothing new to experience anymore, nothing to learn anymore.
Not having enough time to learn everything there is to learn, experience everything there is to experience is what makes the time we do have precious. I think it's that thought Picard wants to convey.
So yes, I can live with those quotes
It's not eternity. It's "you can put an end to it whenever you want". Picard chose to leave the nexus after five minutes, you could stay a little longer, like five million years maybe...
Same thing about being young again (the transporter accident). The process can be repeated as many times as you'd like but we all know that the universe itself will not last forever, after a while everything will turn into black holes and there won't be anything like a planet or a space station to live on. So no eternity, that's for sure.
It's not eternity. It's "you can put an end to it whenever you want". Picard chose to leave the nexus after five minutes, you could stay a little longer, like five million years maybe...
Same thing about being young again (the transporter accident). The process can be repeated as many times as you'd like but we all know that the universe itself will not last forever, after a while everything will turn into black holes and there won't be anything like a planet or a space station to live on. So no eternity, that's for sure.
If you'll eventually tire of the nexus, what's the harm in it? You can exit any time you want, and you can exit into any time you want, so Picard could then as well have stayed for those few million years, and then still saved Veridian four. Eventually he would have come to the realisation 'nothing you do matters here', but there would have been no reason whatsoever to rush it. Taken together with the observation that there seems to be no direct relation between the passage of time outside the nexus and inside it (Kirk 'just arrived there' from his point of view and just was discovering this place, while he was MIA for 80 years), he probably could spend a subjective 'eternity' there.
This is also what Soran seems to believe:
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Yes, it would appear that no matter when you leave the "normal" world to the nexus you get there at the same time as everybody else. Assuming the nexus ever passed near Earth you could probably meet neanderthalians there who would have just arrived. Let's hope their first reaction wouldn't be to club you over the head.
Picard loved to wax poetic and philosophize, but he may have been off his rocker in this movie.
The concept of "time" might simply be analogous to "Q", without magical powers but with more proverbial acid than anyone in the middle of Woodstock could ever have dreamed of. (The 1969 one and only, not the sequels later on editions that charged for everything instead.
)Mortality doesn't define us as such, it's just a point in time when the culmination of biological bits that have "worn out" prevent the continuation of the biological construct. What's beyond that is probably, and oddly, best told by Picard in "Where Silence Has Lease". But even then he's saying "I don't know but as an observer I'll point out any number of possibilities since none of them seems disingenuous." Amazingly, Nagilum didn't fall asleep during his lecture...
The truth of the existence is not in any form of time, of which mortality is a tangent therein and thereof. Picard did not know in WSHL and nothing happened since that would have him knowing it all in order to tell Soran to stop being so cynical. (Soran is almost an Eeyore-like mirror opposite of Picard in some ways... wish that had been developed more...)
Maybe the learning along our individual journeys has more to do with existence. Everything may be in books but the book is just one small piece.
Lastly and this is a fun tangent, horse manure in of itself makes a passable, but not perfect, fertilizer for growing vegetables in due to the quantity of nitrogen in the undigested material.
also,
muh rocking chairs
It's funny, I never noticed that you can hear Erik Satie in the background.
Thankfully, we are shown moments where Picard was very wrong with his "wisdom". His speech about stopping the Borg and making them pay in First Contact. The forced re-location of the native american tribe in an episode of TNG (notice his stance on forced relocation has totally changed in Insurrection?)
Grand words are still just words in the end. It has been shown that Picard has been wrong in the past. And going from the events of Insurrection, that he can learn from these wrong choices as well. Although I wish there was a line of dialog that referenced that episode in the movie, showing some character growth.
Grand words are still just words in the end. It has been shown that Picard has been wrong in the past. And going from the events of Insurrection, that he can learn from these wrong choices as well. Although I wish there was a line of dialog that referenced that episode in the movie, showing some character growth.
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