Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 4x12 - "Species 10-C"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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Not really, it was obvious from the get go that the organic molecules were both their language and a lot more complex then the crew of Discovery assumed given it would be impossible to become a technological species without complex language of some kind.
The mental gymnastics Tarka does to absolve himself of any responsibility are truly scary. He's so hell-bent on succeeding that he even casually dismisses the very thing he claims is trying to avoid - even more planetary destruction. I still don't think he's been just lying through his teeth to keep Book on his side though; the way he immediately started bullshitting about how even if the risk of everything going boom like Reno said is true, he still thinks his plan will go through without a hitch and there would still be time to evacuate Earth and Ni'Var if it didn't... it all made me think he feels at least some faint sliver of guilt over throwing people under the bus and doesn't want to feel responsible for all the suffering he knows this will cause. It kind of reminds me of those people who gladly sacrifice members of their own group on the altar of "saving the group as a whole."
When Reno was watching him fiddle with his flowcharts, it sort of seemed like to me he was enraged by some projected results there and immediately ragequit, unwilling to accept the reality that his plan won't work. Even if stopping the DMA from blowing up more inhabited planets is not his primary goal here, it feels like it's an actual beneficial side effect he expects to happen and isn't just some empty bullshit he makes up out of the whole cloth to convince people to help him. I might be reading him completely wrong though... I'm not exactly known as a good judge of character, I'm afraid.
When Reno was watching him fiddle with his flowcharts, it sort of seemed like to me he was enraged by some projected results there and immediately ragequit, unwilling to accept the reality that his plan won't work. Even if stopping the DMA from blowing up more inhabited planets is not his primary goal here, it feels like it's an actual beneficial side effect he expects to happen and isn't just some empty bullshit he makes up out of the whole cloth to convince people to help him. I might be reading him completely wrong though... I'm not exactly known as a good judge of character, I'm afraid.
Or- Admiral Vance was lying and knows more about Tarka than he told?
I'm never gonna forgive Disco for flying right past those Dyson rings without even trying to investigate.
I want to yell at their writer's room so bad
I'm never gonna forgive Disco for flying right past those Dyson rings without even trying to investigate.
I want to yell at their writer's room so bad
I know... it was like 5 seconds mention and off to the planet.
The Dyson Rings actually reminded me more of Ring Worlds... so, wouldn't 10-C be living there instead?
Leave it to Disco writers to gloss over something like that.
I'm actually thinking the UFP could appropriate those Dyson Rings with 10-c permission (along with the Sphere they found in the Milky Way 800 years earlier) and have a base of operations just outside the Milky Way (a long range starbase of sorts if you will so they could launch missions to other galaxies from there and offer ships a safe port to stay at before going through the galactic barrier into the Milky Way or just when they exit it (to offer repairs if needed).
But I'm sure like most things, they'll end up forgetting about it very fast.
Would Vance have a reason to lie about meeting Tarka?
Doesn't seem likely.
Stupid writers and their stupid stupidness !I'm never gonna forgive Disco for flying right past those Dyson rings without even trying to investigate.
I want to yell at their writer's room so bad
I still wanna yell at the Next Gen writers for wasting a Dyson Sphere on a B-plot!!!
I still find it odd that the sphere is pretty much regulated as an oddity. File that away for the second contact team to check in on in 500 to never years.
Yes, but building a Dyson sphere is not the only way to become Type II. There are many other ways to be Type II.
According to wiki, here are the main ways to be Type II:
Type II civilization methods[edit]
- Type II civilizations might use the same techniques employed by a Type I civilization, but applied to a large number of planets in a large number of planetary systems.
- A Dyson sphere or Dyson swarm and similar constructs are hypothetical megastructures originally described by Freeman Dyson as a system of orbiting solar power satellites meant to enclose a star completely and capture most or all of its energy output.[16]
- Another means to generate usable energy would be to feed a stellar mass into a black hole, and collect photons emitted by the accretion disc.[17][18] Less exotic would be simply to capture photons already escaping from the accretion disc, reducing a black hole's angular momentum; this is known as the Penrose process. This, however, may only be possible for a Type III civilization to achieve.
- Star lifting is a process where an advanced civilization could remove a substantial portion of a star's matter in a controlled manner for other uses.
- Antimatter is likely to be produced as an industrial byproduct of a number of megascale engineering processes (such as the aforementioned star lifting) and, therefore, could be recycled.[citation needed]
- In multiple-star systems of a sufficiently large number of stars, absorbing a small but significant fraction of the output of each individual star.
Note that you can be Type II by collecting energy from a large enough number of planetary systems (basically your total energy output from all your planets combined is equal or greater than the energy output of a star). So a vast interstellar civilization like the Federation could also be Type II by the sheet number of star systems exploited, without building a Dyson sphere.
I know I shouldn't, but I always equate the name Dyson with vacuum cleaners. And that sucks...
I always cringe when I mention a Dyson Swarm to someone, and they jump to a vacuum cleaner (I also secretly want to slap them because of that and start hating on our existing society that doesn't educate people about these things, and instead fills their heads with useless commercials for the purpose of money making).
Its an insult to Freeman Dyson for one thing and degrades one of the most inventive theoretical stellar engineering projects to date.
In real life, interstellar travel using FTL is not yet doable (but we're getting increasingly closer with refined energy requirements for Alcubierre's Warp drive which shrunk them down successfully to a fission nuclear reaction even), and colonizing other planets in our solar system (including the moon) would also be time consuming and resource intensive - especially if you consider the challenges of settling on other planets and if you may want to terraform some of them. Though, you can just as easily send construction bots up there to construct everything upfront... including use Geothermal for energy, along with solar and some nuclear if needed, and they can use local materials on those planets to construct habitats and whatever else is needed (all these ideas for manual construction of stuff on other planets are utterly stupid and ridiculous - nothing would ever get done in any appreciable capacity as a result).
In Trek, FTL travel and colonization of other habitable planets maybe child's play... but that's not the point here - the point is to HARNESS the energy output of an entire star so you can do all kinds of scientific experimentation with literally massive amount of neverending power (or at least, one that won't run out for billions of years).
Also, I don't think you are correct in thinking it would take too much time and resources/power to make a Dyson Swarm.
Unlike a Sphere, a Swarm is comprised of millions upon millions (billions even) of massive solar collectors (roughly 10km in size for each). And while that sounds like a mind boggingly largre number, it was suggested that we could have disassembled Mercury using self replicating automated construction bots to get enough matter for the bots and the swarm itself. Disassembling Mercuery wouldn't affect SOL system at all because the planet is too small to have an effect.
Also, the process is mostly plug and play. Once you launch a few bots into space, they do all the work and might need occasional monitoring... and that's usually a waiting game.
Because the process is fully automated, construction would proceed at an exponential pace (self-replication)... and a full Dyson Swarm could have been constructed in about 50 years time with the technology we had in 1990 at our disposal (machines building other machines has been a thing for a VERY long time and computer algorithms existed since 1970-ies)... today it would take 10 years.. maybe 20 at most because we developed molecular manufacturing technology in 2015 and atomic scale manufacturing in 2018... so equipping construction bots with those would be a boon (also, those bots would be upgrading themselves continuously, and R&D new materials and construction techniques using simple algorithms which would progressively REDUCE construction times - so, even the original 50 year projection with tech from 1990 would have likely dropped by quite a lot - and by networking them together to share that data with each other and Earth, you end up with a floating supercomputer in space that would be FAR more powerful than any supercomputer on Earth by orders of magnitude - and ours have demonstrated a while ago that algorithms can do the work humans do at least 1000x faster - that's a bare minimum btw... meanwhile, simple algorithms that do research in hours can be run on regular computer systems).
In fact, we should actually make use of all that space junk in our orbit... aka, harvest it, convert it into base elements/recycling and reconstitute them into needed materials for the bots to self-replicate and start constructing a first space based solar collector... a portion of the bots could focus their efforts in cleaning up the orbit and making use of raw materials from the space junk to do the work here, whereas a second portion of the bots would go to Mercury and start disassembling it for raw material to make more of themselves and make other solar collectors... and so on and so on.
Now, it may be simplified somewhat, but the process CAN be achieved in real life with some effort.
For UFP, this would be a proverbial piece of cake. SF already had more advanced construction technologies in the mid 22nd century which would have made the work far easier for them than for us.
And by the 24th century... they could easily use replicators to convert solar energy into matter (because replicators were described in the 24th century to convert energy into matter).
Send just one industrial grade replicator (powered by a star) to start churning out other industrial grade replicators in pieces (and automatic assembly) which would then combine to start replicating the Dyson Swarm.
For UFP, construction of a Swarm would proceeed even faster in the 24th century. They could probably finish a Dyson Swarm like that in far less than a year... and if each UFP member planet launched just 1 industrial grade replicator towards their own star at the same time... the ENTIRE UFP would have the collective power of over 150 stars for energy and do whatever the heck they wanted with it in under 1 year... and they would have a MASSIVE amount of industrial grade replicators in each star system. They could send just small portions of those to other uninhabited viable star systems in UFP space and construct Dyson Swarms there (or, the Dyson Swarms themselves would have replicators, transporters, sensors, etc. integrated on the side that's not facing the sun - replicated ad nauseum across 10km surface area no less and fully networked to augment their capabilities - meaning they could probably end up replicating a new dyson swarm in another star system from the get go (lets say you have a finished Dyson Swarm in SOL - it could replicate and transport say a quarter of a Dyson Swarm around Vulcan's star... and so on)... in a decade or few, UFP could have a hundred thousand to a million stars surrounded by Dyson Swarms in just its own space (its spread over 8000 ly's... there's 971 stars within 50 light years of SOL... depending on the distribution of stars within 8000 Ly's, the UFP would have around 3 million to possibly 7 million stars in its space - and while obviously not all of those would necessarily have to be used... there would be a fair amount of G-Type stars and blue giants that could be used - so, even if UFP covered only 10% of its space in Dyson Swarms... that would result in around 300 000 to 700 000 Dyson Swarms - mind boggling amount of energy - but that's pretty much how I envision the UFP would be in late 24th and early 25th century).
By the 31st century (aka, when the Burn happened - although in my head that thing would never have come to pass because UFP would have abandoned dilithium and M/AM in late 24th century or early/mid 25th century in favour of other more powerful and efficient generators such as Tetryon Reactors, Kriega Waves, Thermionic generators, etc.) this would easily encompass all of UFP space in the Milky way and closest Dwarf Galaxies, along with possible portions of Andromeda.
Again, most people severely underestimate what can be done in real life alone (nevermind what the UFP could do if the writers actually TRIED).
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They seem to be making quite massive jumps of logic while interpreting the messages.
"Atmosphere + dma = terror"
"Great sadness"
"Oh, they're sorry, of course!"
Yeah... or they're saying, "bet you're sad about all that dying you're gonna do."
Or "boo hoo, whomp whomp."
Or "not as sad as you're about to be."
Or "we're sad so we're going to make the rest of the universe sad too."
Or "you guys mean you're sad, not terrified, right?"
Or "we're sad you're so pathetic."
Or "yassss, that sure does suck for you."
Or "we're super bummed you have to die and all. You seem nice. But we gotta do what we gotta do. Besides, you had the opportunity to view our construction plans at the intergalactic planning office for six months, and if you couldn't even be bothered to come by, well..."
"Atmosphere + dma = terror"
"Great sadness"
"Oh, they're sorry, of course!"
Yeah... or they're saying, "bet you're sad about all that dying you're gonna do."
Or "boo hoo, whomp whomp."
Or "not as sad as you're about to be."
Or "we're sad so we're going to make the rest of the universe sad too."
Or "you guys mean you're sad, not terrified, right?"
Or "we're sad you're so pathetic."
Or "yassss, that sure does suck for you."
Or "we're super bummed you have to die and all. You seem nice. But we gotta do what we gotta do. Besides, you had the opportunity to view our construction plans at the intergalactic planning office for six months, and if you couldn't even be bothered to come by, well..."
Damn good episode, I liked it a lot.
I agree with what seems to be the general consensus. The scenes trying to communicate with 10C were great but the Tarka scenes not so much. The bad guy this season is not 10C but Tarka, so he is used to create conflict and some action scenes.
But I am going against the grain regarding the season arc. I am enjoying it greatly and I think it's paced right. I am glad they didn't try to finish the arc in 4 to 6 episodes. Looking forward to the season finale next week.
I agree with what seems to be the general consensus. The scenes trying to communicate with 10C were great but the Tarka scenes not so much. The bad guy this season is not 10C but Tarka, so he is used to create conflict and some action scenes.
But I am going against the grain regarding the season arc. I am enjoying it greatly and I think it's paced right. I am glad they didn't try to finish the arc in 4 to 6 episodes. Looking forward to the season finale next week.
An entire episode of standing around talking. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it means that writing has to be top notch to carry the show, engross me in the talking-in-front-of-green-screens to the point I don't even notice it's that.
Not shockingly, the writing here didn't do that. 6 for a decent enough core idea boringly executed.
Tarka is getting ridiculous at this point, I just don't get his motivation to go to such devastating lengths. He has to cling on to the idiot ball to drive his plot forward, and it doesn't suit how they've established the character. It would make slightly more sense for Book, but they're clearly wanting to maintain him in the audience's good graces.
The blocking choices, everyone stand in a circle, are beginning to stand out as very repetitive and flat.
Not shockingly, the writing here didn't do that. 6 for a decent enough core idea boringly executed.
Tarka is getting ridiculous at this point, I just don't get his motivation to go to such devastating lengths. He has to cling on to the idiot ball to drive his plot forward, and it doesn't suit how they've established the character. It would make slightly more sense for Book, but they're clearly wanting to maintain him in the audience's good graces.
The blocking choices, everyone stand in a circle, are beginning to stand out as very repetitive and flat.
I tend to agree. By the 32nd Century the Federation should definitely have then a Type II civilization; and given the Hyper-Feld, and V DMA, the 10-C species would be Type III.
The DMA is 5 light-years in diameter. Also they can power it from outside of our galaxy. If that's not indicative of a species that can wield power on a galactic level I don't know what is. Just because they don't exercise that ability to a degree that damages and entire Galaxy in a even worse fashion then the DMA, doesn't mean they couldn't; it just means they choose not to.
Here's something to think about:
So, we know 10-c have a hyperfield and are able to create a DMA the size of 5 Ly's from outside the galaxy by maintaining the wormhole (and we know they are definitely a type II)... for all we know, they might have reached high efficiency levels, and even 1 G-Type star would equate just over 30 million Galaxy class starships in power output - plus UFP was already experimenting with artificial wormholes in the 24th century... on DS9 it was a successful test... by VOY's 6th season, Barclay was able to create a micro wormhole that was stable for a bit of time and allow real time comms with VOY... having 30 million times more could be more than enough to make a DMA the size of 5Ly's and maintain a wormhole to power it (but of course, there is 0 indication its the only one in existence).
Also, 1 star is probably not the only power source for 10-c. Since they are mining Boronite, its possible 10-C is supplementing the power of the star with Omega Molecules.
When VOY encountered the Omega Molecule in the Delta Quadrant, one of the scientists who made it said they managed to synthesize 200 million omega molecules (which is a pretty huge number).
Since it was mentioned that 1 molecule = 1 warp core... and we know that the Galaxy class warp core power output is around 12.7 exawatts (per TNG 'True Q'), 200 million omega molecules would be roughly on par with 6.6 G-Type stars in terms of raw energy output (1 G-Type star like ours = 384.6 Yottawatts).
Heh... that DQ species managed to achieve and surpass Type II status by making Omega Molecules with who knows how much Boronite (but it stands to reason it couldn't have been a huge amount because it its relatively rare substance - and they seemed technologically on par with VOY at least... plus we know UFP managed to synthesize its own molecule in the 23rd century which remained stable for a fraction of a second).
This species managed to synthesize and stabilize them on the other hand (possibly because they were using 24th century tech as opposed to 23rd century equivalent).
Now, if 10-C are doing the same thing, then they could easily be a Type III civilization contained to a single star system... because you can have billions/trillions of Omega Molecules in a tiny space).
If a DQ species made 200 million Omega molecules with relatively small quantities of Boronite in the 24th century already, the 10-C would likey be able to make a heck of a lot more with the Boronite they collected using DMA type technology.
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V
Vale
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There's a vast difference between being able to control an anomaly 5 light years across and being able to control one that's 100,000 light years across. Being able to control and power something from outside the galaxy doesn't automatically mean that you're a Type III civilisation and more than our being able to run power grids between continents today means we're a Type I civilisation. In fact if anything the fact that the 10-C still need to conduct localised mining for necessary resources means they can't be a Type III civilisation.
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