Actually, Starfleet Academy already seems ridiculously and unnecessarily elitist with its requirements.
Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2x02 - "Ad Astra Per Aspera"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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Actually, Starfleet Academy already seems ridiculously and unnecessarily elitist with its requirements.
One bad incident by humanity when countless other species and plenty of individual examples have shown that Genetic Engineering has done alot of good. Just because one bad seed created a dictator when the people who stupidly misused Genetic Engineering to "Enhance Aggression" where humanity had plenty of aggression naturally was like giving people Rocket Acceleration when they can barely handle Sports Car Acceleration.
You're bound to get yourself into trouble when you are tampering with things you haven't thought about the long-term consequences on. Certain personality traits and features don't need tampering within the a persons Genetic Code.
Other aspects should be fine.
Don't mess with a persons natural aggression, leave that in default human range values and you should be fine.
Same with other more negative traits in humanity, don't touch them, leave them as is.
We might even learn to live with them.
The Klingons almost destroyed themselves using the same technology.
The Klingons were using them to make "Super Soldiers", and as a consequence lost their ridges.
If you weren't trying to make "Super Soldiers" or Ultimate Super Powered Beings like X-Men, choose to go a simpler route and do modifications that weren't nearly as harmful, I think most people would choose "Life Extension" and wanting to live longer, and be younger physically on the inside and outside.
That would be the most popular genetic modification. Natural Long Life.
Imagine humanity having a natural life-span of 130+ years old as the minimum and you can look and function like you're modern day 65 y/o once you hit 130 y/o.
That slowed down physical and internal biological aging.
Improving on the "Quality of Life" would be FAR more valuable than having Super Powers or Becoming the next X-Men like Mutant.
It's interesting that other near-future and far-future scifi of note also have genetically engineered humans as a matter of course. In Foundation, they serve only on spacecraft for example. Trek kind of missed the boat
Of course. But there will always be the motives with those who want to even use that technology for some nefarious purpose.
I think one of the challenges of GE is that it removes the rights of the child, or embryo, at whatever stage they are at. Especially, it deligitimises certain people born in a certain way, by essentially removing the traits that make them who they are - thus ensuring that person doesn't exist - a decision made before birth, perhaps even before conception. It can create a form of eugenics, therefore.
I am no ethicist, but Genetic Engineering is a minefield - and one which in trek world is magnified by the sheer magic power of Trek's technology.
It is also comparable to General Order One - but in a way the show didn't draw a line to. Non-interference is the guiding principle of the federation, to not interfere with those at a more 'innocent' stage, but GE is interference with such innocents to reach an agreed end.
Challenging, and certainly something I am not sure I know any answers too.
I am no ethicist, but Genetic Engineering is a minefield - and one which in trek world is magnified by the sheer magic power of Trek's technology.
It is also comparable to General Order One - but in a way the show didn't draw a line to. Non-interference is the guiding principle of the federation, to not interfere with those at a more 'innocent' stage, but GE is interference with such innocents to reach an agreed end.
Challenging, and certainly something I am not sure I know any answers too.
Once?
Sure.
If it just happens once, you're just the victim of a crazy situation.
But what if your medication was used to kill another 10 people?
And then another ten people.
Something you are doing has got to change because your lack of precaution with your medication is complicit in the death of the next ten people, and the next ten people.
I thought the attorney was deliberately trying to get April's testimony struck from the record.
I just want to say that I can tell how good an ep is by the level of thoughtful conversation here. You all are being awesome so it was fantastic.
Except the court itself was an illusion. So...
It also emphasised how starship captains choose to break the highest federation laws in specific circumstances to do the right thing, and the brass agrees with those choices. The law isn't inflexible, if it needs to be broken, then it must be.
I thought the attorney was deliberately trying to get April's testimony struck from the record.
I just want to say that I can tell how good an ep is by the level of thoughtful conversation here. You all are being awesome so it was fantastic.
April kept breaking general order one, over and over again.
He should have been jailed punitively a dozen times over for his complete disrespect of the Starfleet rule book.
That testimony needed to be on the record.
I'm not sure you got the right message from The Handmaid's Tale.
What I like is that it also showed how absurd the Prime Directive can be. It's simply insane to be a vessel of the Federation, part of their mission being to assist, to sit and watch a civilization die with no conscience other than that they didn't interfere. There is simply no way I can think of a ship's Captain or crew to be happy with that result.
In the final season June is going to kill a lot of people, then sit on a throne of bones just like King Conan, without a lick of guilt.
Gilead will fall.
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The Federation thinks the Prime Directive is a cool and possibly the best idea ever. It's safe to say that the Federation doesn't always think twice before codifying a law.
It's probably meant a reference to "The Drumhead," where Admiral Satie tries to use the fact that Picard has violated the Prime Directive NINE times as evidence that he didn't truly believe in Federation values.
Both the Prime Directive and Star Trek's position on genetic engineering come out of the 1960s, where the Prime Directive was the show's response to the Vietnam War and the idea of how great powers sometimes shouldn't meddle in other cultures, and eugenics was associated with Nazis and government policies that called for forced sterilization.