Perhaps.. bears?
Star Trek and the Meaning of Life.
- Thread starter truespock
- Start date
Perhaps.. bears?
teacake, Eddington's speech is one of my all-time least favorite things about DS9.
EDIT: truespock, take a pill will ya? You're losing faith. And this isn't a bad board - don't miss out because you're clashing personalities. YARN and I have disagreed in other threads too yet look - no fireworks here.
Because they’re terrorists. Terrorists' ships were chased. Somehow, I can’t see the Enterprise chasing the 3:15 shuttle to New Brooklyn through the Badlands because it’s against Maquis public transportation.
That’s bad why, you racist bastard?
That’s one interpretation. If the Cardassians don’t want to join, oh well. But if they do, they’ll have their own REPRESENTATION in the Federation DEMOCRACY. Unlike:
This is utter nonsense. I think the DS9 writers are worse than Hitler.
All the cultures in Star Trek are mono-cultures. I don’t like it either. Ever notice how all the Cardassians all have exactly the same skin tone too? I hope that in the next movie they'll work on both homogenous cultures and (as the ST '09 make-up artists were discussing about the movie's Klingons) homogenous appearances.
Without addressing Federation-Ferengi relations, I’d like to point out that although they’re precious while they do it, the Ferengi are not nice people. They’re conniving liars and cheats and thieves who subjugate half their population and let their illiterate children die in the streets. It’s cool to like whatever the counterculture may be, but how many people actually choose to live it?
EDIT: truespock, take a pill will ya? You're losing faith. And this isn't a bad board - don't miss out because you're clashing personalities. YARN and I have disagreed in other threads too yet look - no fireworks here.
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I wouldn't say it's without possibility, but the human animal has a lot to overcome and it won't happen in my lifetime or yours. Just think what we have done in the last 1,000-500 years. The cannibalism of the Aztecs and Myans. The religious wars fought by the Christians. The inability to contain the Black Death.
We have a whole science that has developed that studies the human animal and its responses. It is the norm to value every life. Remember the Greeks used to throw their children onto the dung piles, sell off their girls to appropriate males. And they were the enlightened ones.
Still, we are only 70 years removed from the last World War. Every technological advancement has been met with equal advancements in death machines. The airplane and mass production gave us to the Blitzkrieg over Britain. Understanding the building-blocks of life gave us to the atom bomb. Understanding disease and eliminating them has led to germ warfare. Like Star Trek II explores, every technological advancement can be exploited to kill people.
But this science that I talked about, psychology, gives us the tools to understand each other on a level we never have before. It allows us to more effectively communicate.
We now have the most eglatarian society in the history of the world. It is not dominated by one sex or the other. That isn't much of a compliment, but we try. We try to respect all life and put people in prison who don't respect that life. We have forensics that allow us to prosecute free of frailty of memory and other motivations besides the truth.
We have overcome so much in the last 200 years. We spread the word of our freedoms and values. We have the first world government. We try and help everyone even if we don't succeed. Don't write-off mankind just yet. Some people just can't see it yet. Star Trek wasn't perfect in its explanation of what needed to change.
Here's what I see:
First, we have to stop thinking that individual merit is measured with money. We have to think of sucess outside of how much money or material possessions we can acquire. This is left over from a competition for resources. If we can have renewable, perpetual sources of food, clean water, medicine, and energy, it's possible we could eliminate the need to acquire things. Wouldn't that be a concept? No wars over resources. How did you put it? We could apply ourselves to better means, absolutely. But it's never been tried before. Marxism talked about it, but Russia was simply about a dictatorship. Socialism hasn't really been tried and we would need more resources for it to work. We have learned to hate it. Therefore, it will have to be called something else.
Look at it this way. You are sickened by the status-quo. You are not the only one. We could try to work towards that. We need to stop ruining the planet, first. We need to share our abundance of resources. That's the way to get there.
TNG definitely had an Utopian attitude. They made it pretty clear-food is free, no one catches the cold, humans don't settle differences with fist fights, there's no poverty at all, etc, etc.
But then again, that was the main premise of the show.
And at the same time it did come off as pretty bland. Classic music was the norm. It looked almost conformist in a way.
I remember reading a comment from Youtube concerning a scene in a TNG movie;
"how come young 20 year olds always dress like they're sixty?!?"
But on the meaning of life issue, I'm beginning to think having a personal, subjective meaning to life is probably more gratifying than trying to find some grand, objective meaning to life.
But then again, that was the main premise of the show.
And at the same time it did come off as pretty bland. Classic music was the norm. It looked almost conformist in a way.
I remember reading a comment from Youtube concerning a scene in a TNG movie;
"how come young 20 year olds always dress like they're sixty?!?"
But on the meaning of life issue, I'm beginning to think having a personal, subjective meaning to life is probably more gratifying than trying to find some grand, objective meaning to life.
TNG had a utopian attitude in that every beings NEEDS are met...meaning bills, food, clothing, housing and medical. You know, things that people who live outside their parents' basement have to worry about on a daily basis.
Yeah, I'd take that's utopia and the bordom that goes with it anytime!
Yeah, I'd take that's utopia and the bordom that goes with it anytime!
Sure, in real life the Federation's utopia would be fantastic, but in fiction it leads to some dull stories. As much as I enjoy TNG, the perfection that humanity had achieved brought the show down quite a few pegs in quality. Thank god DS9 came along and screwed the human race up.
Although I recognize the tongue in cheek nature of your comment, it serves as an excellent launching point for me to bring up the idea that DS9 actually did more to further the ideals of Trek than any other show.
TNG was largely about living in a near utopia and bringing that to the unwashed masses. DS9 however was about how does one hew to ones values while dealing with life in a larger galaxy? What things are bedrock and what things are open to compromise? In many ways DS9 I think speaks to those of us who devoutly wish we lived in the 24th century but have to deal with the fact that we live in the 21st.
DS9 seemed to sacrifice Trek's utopian image for more adventure and intense stories.
Replicators, holodecks and computers got pushed into the background, and now it was religion, politics, and war- the three things you should never talk about in a conversation, lol.
The first two seasons of TNG went a little beyond just the ordinary Utopian ism and almost hinted that that 24th century humans were more psychologically and even biologically evolved than older ones.
(I have to find those episodes again)
Later on, they had to bypass some of it to give the stories flavor and interest.
With the replicator being common, they had to create artificial motives for why some humans were greedy or tried to make profit.
One thing is true; if they ever created anything like the replicator, the structure of society would definitively change as far as impressing other people.
High powered jobs, wealth, won't mean much of anything.
Replicators, holodecks and computers got pushed into the background, and now it was religion, politics, and war- the three things you should never talk about in a conversation, lol.
The first two seasons of TNG went a little beyond just the ordinary Utopian ism and almost hinted that that 24th century humans were more psychologically and even biologically evolved than older ones.
(I have to find those episodes again)
Later on, they had to bypass some of it to give the stories flavor and interest.
With the replicator being common, they had to create artificial motives for why some humans were greedy or tried to make profit.
One thing is true; if they ever created anything like the replicator, the structure of society would definitively change as far as impressing other people.
High powered jobs, wealth, won't mean much of anything.
Well, some people are just full of themselves.
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Green Shirt -- Happily Married, unretired Postal Worker, Somewhat Above Average Intelligence (IMHO), "Untimate" Fan of Many Things.
