Shore Leave and Talosians

[balls]

Watching Shore Leave right now. I know at the end of the episode the caretaker explains the purpose of the planet. It struck me that it seems like whoever created the amusement park has great power. Not only can they read the minds of the visitors, they can create lifelike versions of people and things. Think about the briefing room scene in The Cage/Menagerie when discussing the Talosians powers. If in the wrong hands, would this ability prove to be more dangerous (or equally) than the Talosians? Visit Talos 4, get the death penalty. Visit this place and have a cool vacation. Should Starfleet be concerned about this place?

 

[Starflight]

TAS' "Once Upon A Planet" says the Shore Leave planet ended up being operated by a big computer, which briefly does go nuts and tries to steal the Enterprise so it can look for other computers, but which Kirk and crew eventually manage to persuade to go back to its original purpose.

It seems like the computer pretty much directs things itself from that point; I guess someone could come along and talk it into doing something dangerous again but Kirk's persuasive power was just so good that it's not considered a possibility.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Watching Shore Leave right now. I know at the end of the episode the caretaker explains the purpose of the planet. It struck me that it seems like whoever created the amusement park has great power. Not only can they read the minds of the visitors, they can create lifelike versions of people and things. Think about the briefing room scene in The Cage/Menagerie when discussing the Talosians powers. If in the wrong hands, would this ability prove to be more dangerous (or equally) than the Talosians? Visit Talos 4, get the death penalty. Visit this place and have a cool vacation. Should Starfleet be concerned about this place?

The Shore Leave people were robot makers, like Harry Mudd's planet, but their only known goal was to operate an amusement park. It's stunning that they would dedicate an entire planet to it, which is tens of millions of square miles, but sci-fi aliens operate on big budgets. Obviously, Kirk was getting a free trial in the hopes of selling tickets to the entire Federation.

Or was he? What if the park is always free to everyone, for a reason? I never thought about any Talos-like danger, and we weren't supposed to, but the little mind-reading antenna that's always scanning the guests, that's a HUGE red flag! Talk about privacy issues. That thing could harvest all your knowledge. The price of admission is your privacy.

The Shore Leave planet can't control your mind like the Talosians, but if you take one vacation, they'll know more about you than the dark web. When this 1966 episode is seen in the light of modern privacy and security issues, it's a different thing. It might be the prequel to a story arc about data mining.

How did we never think of this before?

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Building an archive of human (person) nature and literary archetypes, modifying their understanding based on the individuals' reaction to seeing their thoughts and memories come to life.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Building an archive of human (person) nature and literary archetypes, modifying their understanding based on the individuals' reaction to seeing their thoughts and memories come to life.

Someone downloaded Facebook into it.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Building an archive of human (person) nature and literary archetypes, modifying their understanding based on the individuals' reaction to seeing their thoughts and memories come to life.

That's Machine Learning in action for you. Someone is using Kirk's crew to train their AI model. It doesn't "know" it isn't supposed to gore McCoy in a one-sided joust until the problem happens and the software is modified.

 

[Shawnster]

The Shore Leave people were robot makers, like Harry Mudd's planet, but their only known goal was to operate an amusement park.

This is funny because just this week I started pondering/retconning a idea that all the TOS androids are related in that they or their creator civilizations were either the same or were contemporaries. Then I threw in the "Shore Leave" planet as either a base or recreation facility for one of these civilizations.

The mind reading technology doesn't seem as deep or developed as the Talosians. It seems purely surface thoughts. I each instance the target or guest was thinking about whatever was produced that next
moment.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

The mind reading technology doesn't seem as deep or developed as the Talosians. It seems purely surface thoughts. In each instance the target or guest was thinking about whatever was produced that next moment.

You mean like when you mention lawn mowing in an email, and then lawnmower ads follow you around the net for two weeks? Because that "less developed" technology is doing a number on us already. Imagine the data Disneyworld would be selling if they had the Caretaker's little silver antenna.

 

[Shawnster]

You mean like when you mention lawn mowing in an email, and then lawnmower ads follow you around the net for two weeks? Because that "less developed" technology is doing a number on us already. Imagine the data Disneyworld would be selling if they had the Caretaker's little silver antenna.

Yeah, pretty much.

There is some kind of mind reading. They pulled the images of Ruth and Finnegan out of Kirk's head. Just because someone mentioned a samurai or a WWII era plane doesn't mean the Shore Leave tech would have those images already on file


It would be more like Facebook if the Shore Leave planet could access Federation databanks. But this is alien technology.

Or it's very, very, very sophisticated computer tech able to hack Starfleet and Federation databases without being detected and without any delay.