The Preservers, Outside of TOS?

[Timo]

True, but I got the impression McCoy and Kirk were describing smells of well-known things

Point taken - yes, transplants from Earth. Or from wherever Earth got those things when the Voth became starfaring and started messing with Earth's biosphere big time.

I don't think they'd put a larger rock together, but use one Ma nature provided.

Depends on the identity of them - the Kalandans apparently built planets "from the core out", without yet being godlike.

Anyone that advanced would find manual labor by animals (even humanoid ones) relatively inefficient compared to robotic labor, IMO, so slave labor seems a daft reason to me – far less plausible than raw ingredients, anyway.

But if the transplanters are separate from the planetmakers or the terraformers, they could fall nicely within the common category of folks who do kidnap primitive humanoids for labor in Trek. Whether they are also separate from the asteroid diverters then becomes an interesting question - such diverting supposedly isn't difficult in Trek (VOY "Rise").

And anything the size of our moon would likely be spherical. It would have to be stronger than steel straight through to hold a non spherical shape if it's that big.

So we have the number of our rock from the episode right there - nonspherical yet the size of our Moon. All we're missing is the approach speed and direction. Very high relativistic speed, to account for the high speed and long duration of Spock's outward flight (and perhaps for the difficulty of diverting, as force vectors behave funnily at relativistic speeds, making that "little push to the side" harder when at nonrelativistic speeds there should be no resistance to sideways push)? Grazing the local star, so that the shadow precedes the rock by the necessary ten minutes or so?

The wind that precedes the approach must be something unrelated to the object anyway, unless the planet has very odd tidal phenomena that amplify the pull of a Moon a full AU out. Perhaps a warning sign emitted by the obelisk, like you say? But the darkening could be related: perhaps the obelisk doesn't (just) warn the Medicine Man, but in fact erects a shield bubble above the settlement, and this directly darkens the sky and moves the air?

[And mining in space is likely to be cheaper than mining on a larger planet (particularly if you need to take the material back into space).

Trek has its sets of curious circumstances for making seemingly nonoptimal things desirable. We could always assume that a criminal endeavor has a different set of criteria, say. The Skags and the Briori used forced labor exclusively down on the surface as far as we know, but if you do establish a mine and a refinery there, then perhaps it's a good idea to boost the production by bringing in space rocks, too?

Only if the planet is big and hot and has cooked the minerals a long time to help concentrate them would mining on a planet be better, and that paradise planet wasn't like that (too new).

Robbing a kiosk is a better idea than robbing a bank, though. And if the Preservers stumble onto a "recently" built Kalandan planet, then the very act of building may have made the planet a cornucopia of atypical riches. Clearly the outpost from "That Which Survives" would be a great source of superstrong materials, if one could invent an efficient mining method. But before the Feds got to that, some Mudd relative could swoop in with five hundred slaves and their pickaxes and Get Rich Quick.

Also, I doubt the same asteroid keeps returning. Why would it? It must be a new one each time.

I don't see a reason to argue one way or another. An orbit that results in many happy returns is entirely possible and, in some scenarios, desirable as an artifically effected one.

And since the skies darken ahead of time, long before the asteroid could be doing that, I think the obelisk does that to warn the natives something is coming and it's time to push the button. It's not fully automated, however, since only if the natives are sill there to push the button is there a point to deflect any asteroids, and if the natives are gone or couldn't be bothered to remember the Preservers and their gift, then the asteroids will take a natural course since the unworthy species will have died out or proven themselves unworthy.

We don't see signs of the button-push being necessary, though. There's some hassle, and then the deflector does its job. Was the hassle relevant? We never learn.

My problem is all that code has to be not just hidden in the vast complexities of advanced life, but it is supposed to even be on the smallest single cell life form. And it has to be self-replicating, too. I don't think that's possible by any known means, and like the quantum nature of the universe, you can't get small enough to write that vast code in so small a space.

That's sort of the point, though - it's impossibly advanced, and needs to be in order to work. And Trek has no interest in currently "known" limitations anyway: if something cannot be squeezed into the required space, just push it in subspace. Odo, a thoroughly biological entity with DNA, breaks all known conservation laws in turn, in series and in harmony, apparently because Alternate Realm or whatnot.

If the Progenitors left hidden machines around to more actively tweak life as it evolved to more "interesting" stages, that would be more believable, but to hide the puzzle, the awareness of surrounding species on the planet, to select one and drive it toward humanoid form, the ability to alter the hardware of some random device like a tricorder, and play a complex hologram, all written and hidden on the simplest life form is, IMO, impossible and ridiculous.

Yeah, and computers should be big mainframes. What the Progenitors do here is sort of tame in comparison with what we've done with information in the past century - often with reckless breaking of previously accepted natural laws involved.

Humanoid form was THE goal of the progenitors. They, themselves, had not yet apparently achieved a non-corporeal form when they did this.

That's one possibility. The other is that this pure nostalgia project was conducted after the fact, by beings now sufficiently advanced to replicate their former type of existence with relative ease. Talking to humanoids, they'd of course praise the humanoid form. Talking to young lightbulbs, they'd praise that stage of the fake evolution. Talking to their actual peers... Would not involve the Project at all, but would be a regular Tuesday for them. And perfectly well understanding that there were even higher forms of existence around, even if the Progenitors couldn't currently perceive them, should be something they would have learned to believe in through the process of the Project.

If the universe tends to favor noncorporeal life, that would happen without that code's assistance.

And with said assistance, too. If it doesn't, then the assistance would be vital. Just as with humanoid life.

But it could be "forced" by a means other than ancient genetic manipulation. Opposable thumbs are useful. So they, or something similarly useful, will be forced on the species if they survive and will become tool users. Other things in the universe might "naturally" favor the humanoid shape for advanced, tool using, scientific, space faring species, and not having something similar naturally makes it far less likely (not impossible but less probable) to arise as an intelligent space faring species.

This is a classic scenario in scientific speculation. But in Star Trek, our heroes seem to reject it outright, as they grasp at all sorts of straws to explain the prevalence of humanoids by other means, by any other means. And it does sound awfully self-centered, especially considering how Earth is teeming with successful life that isn't humanoid.

Did it evolve in the Pak race, or despite Niven's common origins, were the Slavers and the Pan Protectors two separate creations of his, or in the same fictional universe but separated by a great deal of time?

Niven ties it all together: the Slavers put their food algae everywhere, some of it evolved into the Pak, and we're Pak breeders gone awry. The Pak are not native to Earth, but since they're native to the common Slaver food goo, nobody notices that Homo habilis is in fact an extraterrestrial implant.

There's a billion-year time window after the death of the Slavers, and the Pak are rather literally a Holocene species.

But it demonstrates more fully writers lack sufficient depth to write alien "Shakespearian" quotes or have scientific discoveries attributed to other alien scientists.

Or then they grasp the fact that the human heroes wouldn't much care for the alien contributions. The Space Shakespeare would be lost in translation (the ST6:TUC scene where the heroes anguish at not understanding foreign jokes is an excellent example), and there'd always be a human alternative to go to with contributions, no matter how inferior or inappropriate (I trust Emory Erickson invented zip about the transporter, but if he did hack the biocompatibility lock in the Vulcan machine, he'd get remembered).

Sure, it's quite human centric and earth centric, but I would hope to see more "quotes" and "discoveries" from other non-Earth cultures and non human species in the Federation.

No disagreement there.

You would just expect, all other things being equal, the Andorians to have similar possible stories of Greek-like-god-like visitors, etc., and maybe they do, but we don't get to hear about them enough, so it makes earth look more unusual than it probably should.

Then again, there are two separate sets of Space Romans, one of them a major player even...

I do wonder how long Apollo was sitting on his arse waiting for his children. Was it just a few thousand years since the Greek were worshiping them, or Tens of thousands and the Greeks we know of were worshiping their memories and the stories of even their ancient ancestors? I'd have taken the time to gather a few laurel leaves just to learn that much.

As Apollo is just fishing for compliments there, we don't even learn whether Earth was a big gig for his folk, or one out of fifty dozen but in this case the only one that matters, considering the identity of the potential worshippers.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JRTStarlight]

Point taken - yes, transplants from Earth. Or from wherever Earth got those things when the Voth became starfaring and started messing with Earth's biosphere big time.

Actually, we don't know the Voth did that. Their recorded history starts about 20 million years ago. No one suggested it, but it's entirely possible, and IMO even more likely, the Voth ancestor primitive dinosaurs were transplanted off the Earth (by the Preservers or a race like them doing this same old trick - galactic gardening) and they finished their evolution from that primitive dinosaur form toward humanoid form sometime, anytime, long after they had been transplanted. They would still show genetic origins on Earth, but not have evolved to a humanoid form or a space faring race there, on Earth, or even in the Alpha quadrant. And since there is no archeological record of such a highly advanced race, on Earth, or in space anywhere in our solar system, or in the Alpha quadrant (that Trek has ever mentioned finding even with advanced instruments) I would tend to think this has to be the case. So the Voth may not have even begin to think ahead or use tools until 45 million or more years after their ancestors had been taken from Earth. And as a more primitive dino-species, no one cares what they were doing in those 45 million years. Mostly eating and having sex.

The fact they have a culture that has records that go back 20 million years, however, is damned impressive. That's a long ass time for a civilization to exist and develop - we have nothing comparable, and even a paltry few thousand years seems incomprehensibly old and ancient to us, as far as civilizations go. And the Voth are still resisting basic science and adhering to religious dogma - but that may just be the current government/Theocracy and they have a cyclical pattern or something over that huge span of time. Millions of years? Governments probably home come and gone countless times. Anyway, the way it was presented was a bad story, IMO, but I'd like to think I fixed it a little by adding "The Preservers" or, more likely, a different race like them doing the same sort of thing.

What's that? A huge asteroid will wipe out most advanced life on Sol 3? Well, hmmm, these dinos show the most promise - let's transplant them and some of their flora. Yeah, how about that lovely spot in the Delta quadrant? That was nice and quite suitable for this species. Dum dee dum dee dum.

Depends on the identity of them - the Kalandans apparently built planets "from the core out", without yet being godlike.

True, and yet they had tech far beyond the Feds, hurling starships 1000 light years (well, let's say just 10 LY to make more sense Spock got back so quickly) in a blink, read minds, kill with a touch, etc. I do suppose if you have that kind of tech, then you don't really have to put a planet together with manual labor or "move" things with force, but simply "beam" the appropriate mass up from one location and to another location, maybe even light years away, then reintegrating it not in its original form or elements, but in whatever form you desire, with whatever energy/heat you like. It just takes energy (and in Trek, sometimes it looks like it doesn't even take that).

Just as Apollo's people were judged gods by our primitive ancestors, that level of tech might have us judge the Kaladans as gods by Fed standards - except we have learned from experience not to call them gods anymore, but god-like beings, or just a powerful alien species, since even the Q are not considered Gods by the Feds, though you have to admit, with the power over life or death and power over time and space, how much more do they have to do to qualify for Godhood? Short of having actually created the universe, I mean.

Of course if you have that kind of tech, you might not even transplant species so much as reconstruct them from bio-patterns you recorded. Oh, that's cute. Make a computer record of that species' bio-pattern. We'll knock off a few copies next time to see a nice spot for them. Dum dee dum dee dum.

Since the point of the preservers was to preserve, and the thought is they do this via transplantation, I would tend to think they were not creating planets, or species, or recreating them with tech or even genetically manipulating them, but actually scooping them up from one place and transplanting them elsewhere, either in a place Ma Nature already made, or one that was close enough and only needed minor tweaking. Since they felt the need to install a deflector, rather than beam the mass of the asteroid belt (or whatever) or all near paradise planet orbit intersecting asteroids into the mix of the planet and be done with it, I don't think of them or their tech as too god-like. They were more likely Fed-like, but nomadic, and without the prime directive, since they felt a transplant was better than non-existence for an endangered species, and why should an indifferent mother nature wipe them out when we, the preservers, are part of the cosmic consciousness – WE are mother nature, too. So we take it upon ourselves, as the intelligent part of creation, to preserve more of that and increase the galaxy's overall intelligence. Ta da. Dum dee dum dee dum. Or whatever.

But if the transplanters are separate from the planet makers or the terraformers, they could fall nicely within the common category of folks who do kidnap primitive humanoids for labor in Trek. Whether they are also separate from the asteroid diverters then becomes an interesting question - such diverting supposedly isn't difficult in Trek (VOY "Rise").

I find it difficult to believe any species capable of interstellar flight are not past the point where "slave" labor would be practical. But assuming interstellar flight is easy compared to robots or androids (or even holograms, apparently) for mining and manual tasks, then maybe it would still be worth it. Or better, non directed growth of a civilization to figure out for itself how to exploit the stellar system they were transplanted to, and then the Preservers coming back to plunder the value, which might be far more than they, themselves, would have ever dreamed doing. But go light years to kidnap a species and drag it to another star system to dig in the dirt for you instead of just using a machine seems doubtful to me since you probably have better tech.

Sex trafficking or for other amusements, like the Orion syndicate, however, might serve a form of entertainment or twisted need to feel superior to "lesser" races. Even the "Gods'" needing to be worshipped is a dubious desire. After all, didn't Apollo want a slave population to essentially do that very thing? Anyway, mere labor just seem inefficient.

So we have the number of our rock from the episode right there - nonspherical yet the size of our Moon. All we're missing is the approach speed and direction. Very high relativistic speed, to account for the high speed and long duration of Spock's outward flight (and perhaps for the difficulty of diverting, as force vectors behave funnily at relativistic speeds, making that "little push to the side" harder when at nonrelativistic speeds there should be no resistance to sideways push)? Grazing the local star, so that the shadow precedes the rock by the necessary ten minutes or so?

Its mass would resist any sidewise movement, as mass does, which is to say it would take force. Relativistic speeds shouldn't affect this since the ship would be stationary relative to the rock. There is NO WAY I can make any of these numbers work – the distance at warp 9 for 1 hour, the size, the shape – nothing. It's hard to fix by assuming exaggeration, too, since they crippled the ship – though they found it easy to ignore at the end (we're light years away from anything, and our warp capability is gone without any hope of repair. Dum dee dum dee dum.

The wind that precedes the approach must be something unrelated to the object anyway, unless the planet has very odd tidal phenomena that amplify the pull of a Moon a full AU out. Perhaps a warning sign emitted by the obelisk, like you say? But the darkening could be related: perhaps the obelisk doesn't (just) warn the Medicine Man, but in fact erects a shield bubble above the settlement, and this directly darkens the sky and moves the air?

At that distance or speed, the wind, the darkness, all of that must either be unrelated, or artificially generated to alert the faithful to the detection of an incoming rock.

Trek has its sets of curious circumstances for making seemingly suboptimal things desirable. We could always assume that a criminal endeavor has a different set of criteria, say. The Skags and the Briori used forced labor exclusively down on the surface as far as we know, but if you do establish a mine and a refinery there, then perhaps it's a good idea to boost the production by bringing in space rocks, too?

There may be other reasons than slave labor to make it worth the while of some alien races – religious, cultural – the need to hunt them, for example, or a race that captured higher transportation tech and doesn't really understand it so well they can build cheap androids. You can always invent a reason. I would just tend to think, more often than not, a more highly advanced civilization wouldn't use inefficient slave labor.

Robbing a kiosk is a better idea than robbing a bank, though. And if the Preservers stumble onto a "recently" built Kalandan planet, then the very act of building may have made the planet a cornucopia of atypical riches. Clearly the outpost from "That Which Survives" would be a great source of super strong materials, if one could invent an efficient mining method. But before the Feds got to that, some Mudd relative could swoop in with five hundred slaves and their pickaxes and Get Rich Quick.

The material that even phasers couldn't cut? Yeah, let's set a bunch of primitives with pickaxes on that task. We could give them tools to cut that high tech stuff, but then they'd probably use them on us. I have to think anyone who takes the time to recently build a planet isn't just going to let you take it (unless they died off, of course), and then you'd probably need higher or comparable tech to really plunder its materials.

Too many advanced space faring cultures seem to easily die off in Trek. I mean, the point is spread the eggs around in many baskets, so why are whole civilizations dropping like flies just because one star went Nova or something, or one disease arose (have they no notion of quarantine)? Must have been an insidious disease, highly contagious, and showed no signs of infection for years and years to give it a chance to spread to everyone before it just killed them.

I don't see a reason to argue one way or another. An orbit that results in many happy returns is entirely possible and, in some scenarios, desirable as an artificially effected one.

Desirable? And the deflector puts it back just to come crashing down again in X years? Far more likely, IMO, the "shooting gallery" of which McCoy spoke made it random and frequent and that specific deflector system necessary to allow them to survive there in the first place. And when a big enough rock shows up, the system darkens the skies, shakes the ground, and if the faithful are still around, they'll push the button and justify the continued existence of the system. Then it'll push that rock into the sun or an orbit that will never bother them again. But there are countless others, so life goes on - for now.

We don't see signs of the button-push being necessary, though. There's some hassle, and then the deflector does its job. Was the hassle relevant? We never learn.

What? You mean you think if they didn't push the button, it would have waited but finally done it itself at the last second? I don't think so. Spock had to push the button. It seemed designed to have somebody push it. But it also seemed designed to play with memories, so the chief medicine man would likely be taught everything he needed to do by the system, and the new CMM would be similarly indoctrinated when the old CMM thought it wise to show it to him. Silly blighter must have accidentally died before he could clue Shamish in (or whatever his name was). No back up. Moron.

That's sort of the point, though - it's impossibly advanced, and needs to be in order to work. And Trek has no interest in currently "known" limitations anyway: if something cannot be squeezed into the required space, just push it in subspace. Odo, a thoroughly biological entity with DNA, breaks all known conservation laws in turn, in series and in harmony, apparently because Alternate Realm or whatnot.

Science fiction tends to extrapolate on known science and imagines going beyond it (and not being confined by it, but not ignoring it, either). It does not tend to say it's 100% wrong, not on one but two fronts (evolution and quantum mechanics), just to make one story work. And if it does, then it should be foundational to the whole work, the entire series, and a premise of the fictional universe in which it is placed. It should not simply have water running uphill for one story without explanation or apology.

I may have crafted the definitions myself in my experience as a fantasy game master, but that definition between science and magic is essentially that point when you have to bring other dimensions of existence into it – go beyond the prime material plane. That's fine, but it's fantasy.

I'm not sure Odo, getting smaller, for example, also meant he was losing mass. His density may have simply been quite high. Or do they clearly contradict that? I don't recall that they do or must, but perhaps you can recall a scene where that must have been the case.

I also got the impression Doctor Crusher, however, was explaining the puzzle and message as "normal science" and but stuff hidden in the regular DNA code by known laws of science to her, even in the simplest examples of life since life began - which suggested to me who ever wrote that episode didn't try to use science, or go beyond science, so much as they were more likely scientifically illiterate and didn't see any real difference between techno babble and jargon and sheer gibberish. I might even suspect them of being a creationist or one who subscribes to the "theory" of Intelligent design, which is just a backhanded form of creationism. QED.

In such endeavors, fantasy and magic is the same as technology – it doesn't just seem that way to the primitive mind, and rather than use science or an extrapolation of science or the fictional universe's accepted premises to explain it to today's audience, it assumes we are too primitive to even begin to understand and we just have to accept it on faith. But that's fantasy again – not science fiction. But lest I get into an argument with anyone or everyone, I admit YMMV and you may wish to draw the lines elsewhere. That is your right and I am not saying or even suggesting otherwise.

Yeah, and computers should be big mainframes. What the Progenitors do here is sort of tame in comparison with what we've done with information in the past century - often with reckless breaking of previously accepted natural laws involved.

I disagree. One goes beyond current tech, the other violates fairly well understood limits of the physical world and contradicts well establish and foundational principles of science. These hidden computers needn't be bigger than a microdot – that's still more believable than writing on an electron or using other dimensions to explain that stuff. Warp engines the size of a walnut, or a brain transplant seem easy and like child's play compared to cramming that much information and ability to be aware, self replicate, and manipulate the world around it and deliver a message all on the smallest package of even the simplest form of life.

That's one possibility. The other is that this pure nostalgia project was conducted after the fact, by beings now sufficiently advanced to replicate their former type of existence with relative ease. Talking to humanoids, they'd of course praise the humanoid form. Talking to young lightbulbs, they'd praise that stage of the fake evolution. Talking to their actual peers... Would not involve the Project at all, but would be a regular Tuesday for them. And perfectly well understanding that there were even higher forms of existence around, even if the Progenitors couldn't currently perceive them, should be something they would have learned to believe in through the process of the Project.

Since the progenitors were allegedly the first intelligent race to evolve here, no one had time yet to evolve into a non-corporeal form. But if you wish to go so far beyond the story and suggest they are lying about various facts to accommodate whoever they find themselves talking to, that's fine – but it's way past talking about THAT story – and its talking about other story ideas.

This is a classic scenario in scientific speculation. But in Star Trek, our heroes seem to reject it outright, as they grasp at all sorts of straws to explain the prevalence of humanoids by other means, by any other means. And it does sound awfully self-centered, especially considering how Earth is teeming with successful life that isn't humanoid.

Indeed. I think it's a call back on wanting to think we are special or unique and not just one of millions. And maybe it can and should explain some of it, but mostly, I think the majority of humanoids would have to be explained as independent evolution of life and the universe tends to favor that form a lot, though there are other possible forms, too.

Or then they grasp the fact that the human heroes wouldn't much care for the alien contributions.

So Klingons quote Shakespeare and even claim it as originally written in Klingon as a joke, or with appreciation the humans they are talking to would never appreciate Klingon playwrights, though they happen to be well acquitted with earth ones? It just seems a little off, but I have no real solution apart from attributing new or original human creations for the show as alien creations instead.

As Apollo is just fishing for compliments there, we don't even learn whether Earth was a big gig for his folk, or one out of fifty dozen but in this case the only one that matters, considering the identity of the potential worshippers.

Well, he does look human, too, and not just humanoid, so it's unlikely they visited
Andoria or Tellerite or Vulcan and got the same reception. Unless they can alter their appearance, but again, without evidence of that, the speculation goes a little far afield.

 

[Timo]

Actually, we don't know the Voth did that.

True enough - it's just amusing that the things quoted, such as coniferous plants or sweet-smelling flowers, are specific to the late dinosaur stage in Earth's real biological past.

...they finished their evolution from that primitive dinosaur form toward humanoid form sometime, anytime, long after they had been transplanted.

One wonders how much toil and trouble is really involved in making a transplant take root. Vulcans supposedly were dumped on what today is a hellhole for humanoids, and they thrived and supposedly even developed a special eye mechanism to cope with local conditions. Let's accept some of the suppositions - did Sargon's folks or Preservers in this case take the easy way out and introduce certain coping modifications into the species before dropping them on Vulcan, instead of modifying the entire world? (Is the telepathing arranging of marriages another such adaptation to defeat inbreeding in desert villages?)

And since there is no archeological record of such a highly advanced race, on Earth, or in space anywhere in our solar system, or in the Alpha quadrant (that Trek has ever mentioned finding even with advanced instruments) I would tend to think this has to be the case.

The scifi challenge is to think of a way for this to be possible. Either the Voth civilization was largely coastal (lots of coast to choose from back then!) and now resides in Earth's mantle, or the Voth were extremely neat (aka recklessly destructive) and tidied up (perhaps with the help of big iridium bombs?) when they left.

After adopting the generic starfaring humanoid lifestyle, what distinct record would they leave? Space must be littered with the remains of such generic civilizations, not identifiable by anything much. The fossilized remains of a colony might include millions of futuro-photographs of the dinosaurs, but just two references that might connect them to Earth specifically, and the archeologists would step on the first reference and use the other to light their campfire.

[/quote]And the Voth are still resisting basic science and adhering to religious dogma[/quote]

Still? Wouldn't that be a logical conclusion of millions of years of development, with everything sorted out, all the right answers written down, and at least ten million years of careful empirical research to ascertain that the dogma are correct?

(For all we know, they are, and the stuff uncovered by flimsy research in the episode was but wishful thinking and misunderstood evidence.)

What's that? A huge asteroid will wipe out most advanced life on Sol 3? Well, hmmm, these dinos show the most promise - let's transplant them and some of their flora. Yeah, how about that lovely spot in the Delta quadrant? That was nice and quite suitable for this species. Dum dee dum dee dum.

Sort of the antithesis of what the Preservers actually do with "civilizations threatened by huge asteroids"!

...how much more do they have to do to qualify for Godhood? Short of having actually created the universe, I mean.

Few of the Gods on Earth are Creators, though. The criteria vary a lot, but qualities typically absent are creation of the universe / Earth / mankind, any interest in what mankind is doing, and presiding over afterlife. OTOH, meddling is almost mandatory, and the likes of Q are very good at that.

No doubt UFP science would have introduced a Scale or Class system for sorting out the superbeings they encounter. But perhaps only Astral Anthropology specialists are interested in this, just like our main heroes don't mention Hodgkins' or Richter's systems in every episode (or indeed ever again!).

Since the point of the preservers was to preserve

...Or so they claim, and perhaps also believe. But were they doing a good job at it? The one example doesn't really convince. Perhaps what they were efficiently doing is a bit different from how they phrase it or how Spock reads it - instead of perpetuating a lifeform let alone a lifestylem, they are utilizing their abductees in cruel survivalist challenges in order to improve the galactic stock. Say, possibly the Obelisk is but a chocolate-covered manhole cover, as in that Niven story: either you learn to make use of it and transcend your original limitations, or you die.

I find it difficult to believe any species capable of interstellar flight are not past the point where "slave" labor would be practical.

Practical isn't the point, though. The keyword appears to be "trivial" instead: if you have a teleporter in your pocket, a FTL spacecraft, and a lazy Saturday to burn, what motivation is there not to abduct farmers and livestock and then analyze or otherwise exploit them? It seems the Skags and the Briori were past the technological threshold needed for this, but not much further; the Preservers could be a slightly more capable species making use of the terraforming etc. of others, or a vastly more advanced species, and the aspect of triviality would just grow in importance step by step.

Heck, what I mean is that neither the Skags, the Briori nor the Preservers need to be considered a "species" at all, or even a "culture". More probably, they'd be a group of a dozen like-minded individuals with nothing better to do; at best, they might be a "movement", and quite possibly a counterculture one.

Or better, non directed growth of a civilization to figure out for itself how to exploit the stellar system they were transplanted to, and then the Preservers coming back to plunder the value, which might be far more than they, themselves, would have ever dreamed doing.

This would take things beyond the group or movement level, as it would require long term thinking, which is unlikely either across generations or in the long and winding life of individuals blessed with longevity. A culture-wide lifestyle of such sowing and reaping would appear to be required. The Borg are content to just reap, even if they occasionally nudge, tickle or otherwise promote preexisting growth. Would one need to be more advanced than the Borg in order to also sow, and would you then still be interested in reaping?

Its mass would resist any sidewise movement, as mass does, which is to say it would take force.

...And a slow asteroid at a distance could be diverted relatively easily, even if possessing immense mass, because the diversion would only need to be minimal. Were our Moon on an impact course two months away, at which speed would a diverting by 0.0013 degrees be insufficient for avoiding disaster?

The equation becomes more challenging at high speeds, because the forward force vector would begin affecting the transverse vector in a manner not familiar from elementary school textbooks - a sideways push would become more challenging than Newton would have us believe.

More importantly, increase speed and you increase distance, making Spock's high warp dash outward from the planet more credible. Then suggest that the rock approaches from the direction of the local star, so Spock takes that direct route, too, and you now have the Trek phenomenon of high warp actually being very slow, indeed sublight ("Tomorrow is Yesterday", ST4:TVH).

The side benefit would be that a rock (and a ship) moving at such high speed would experience less than two months of utter inaction when Kirk experienced those sixty days. McCoy wouldn't strangle Spock in his bed yet for said inaction, not in the compacted timespan.

Relativistic speeds shouldn't affect this since the ship would be stationary relative to the rock.

Both would be moving in relation to the one thing that mattered, though: the frame of reference involving the planet. So what the ship thought it was doing to the rock from the local POV would not be sufficient in the external POV because of aid relativistic concerns.

There is NO WAY I can make any of these numbers work

But the great thing is that we can take each of them at face value and still assign arbitrary/desired values to them, thanks to a combination of real-world and Trek conceits. The mass of the Moon might be given at the supposed high speed, say, being much less at rest (and thus in agreement with the irregular shape).

You can always invent a reason. I would just tend to think, more often than not, a more highly advanced civilization wouldn't use inefficient slave labor.

Just to repeat myself, it wouldn't be a "civilization" using said labor. It would be individuals or groups for which efficiency would not be a concern - perhaps akin to the Lords of country houses employing deaf and blind butlers for muttering "Dinner is served, Milord" out of sheer charity, perhaps akin to the Lords of the ghetto employing local kids for washing their cars five times a day out of sheer thrill of power.

The material that even phasers couldn't cut? Yeah, let's set a bunch of primitives with pickaxes on that task. We could give them tools to cut that high tech stuff, but then they'd probably use them on us.

Sounds good to me. The heroes did eventually carve a very nice tombstone for poor D'Amato, by unknown but limited means. Put ten times the number of people on it and you can escape with valuable loot before Starfleet catches you.

...then you'd probably need higher or comparable tech to really plunder its materials.

Is that really true of any plundering here on Earth, though?

Too many advanced space faring cultures seem to easily die off in Trek. I mean, the point is spread the eggs around in many baskets, so why are whole civilizations dropping like flies just because one star went Nova or something, or one disease arose (have they no notion of quarantine)? Must have been an insidious disease, highly contagious, and showed no signs of infection for years and years to give it a chance to spread to everyone before it just killed them.

That's probably an illusion of timescales. That the Homeworld blows doesn't mean everybody dies that day - it just means that the former Overlords are now Underdogs, and others will make short work of them in the centuries to come. And those who don't get hunted down survive by blending in, which is trivially achieved in the great unity of Trek. The individuals may live, but the culture dies, in an eyeblink only when compared to the time separating that eyeblink from our heroes.

Desirable? And the deflector puts it back just to come crashing down again in X years?

For all we know, the interaction is used for adjusting the orbit of the planet... In combination with a "drive-by mining" effort, or not.

And when a big enough rock shows up, the system darkens the skies, shakes the ground, and if the faithful are still around, they'll push the button and justify the continued existence of the system.

A good idea. But what follows might be different, then:

Then it'll push that rock into the sun or an orbit that will never bother them again.

If the approaching doom is a test for worth, then why not repeat it at regular intervals?

What? You mean you think if they didn't push the button, it would have waited but finally done it itself at the last second?

Waited? We don't get confirmation that there was a wait or a delay involved. For all we know, it always happens as seen - them Injuns wouldn't necessarily know better, as they told Kirok the skies darken many times annually yet nothing bad happens, and the idea of having somebody push the button is but a "legend".

Spock had to push the button. It seemed designed to have somebody push it. But it also seemed designed to play with memories, so the chief medicine man would likely be taught everything he needed to do by the system

Those are just cargo cult interpretations, though. Buttons were pushed and stuff happened, but the connection might not exist. And indeed there's no reason to think it would exist, because pushing the button has not been necessary in this asteroid alley for a long time.

If the button-pushing were some sort of a special measure required with the rare Moon-sized rocks, then we might believe our heroes when they say they have divined from the texts and equipment that this is the case. The thing is, though, they don't say anything of the sort.

Science fiction tends to extrapolate on known science and imagines going beyond it (and not being confined by it, but not ignoring it, either). It does not tend to say it's 100% wrong, not on one but two fronts (evolution and quantum mechanics), just to make one story work.

That, again, is a matter of timescales. For the 1980s, "The Chase" might have been a tad ambitious. But for the 1880s, the modern take on Sherlock would break far too many well-established laws of nature to work as science fiction (they even have an episode on the issue!). For the 2000s, "The Chase" reads just fine for me, as per that mainframe vs. cloud analogue - meddling with the macroscopic or using external means is soooo 20th century when you can simply manipulate the information itself.

I'm not sure Odo, getting smaller, for example, also meant he was losing mass. His density may have simply been quite high. Or do they clearly contradict that?

Frequently, and from the get-go. Odo's first trick of impersonating something is as a bag that is easily carried by a Cardassian. Later on, he becomes a transparent glass that is easily carried by Rom on a tray of four other like glasses. He also flies as a seagull - either losing mass or then transforming into an antigravity machine inside a seagull form, which may be one and the same thing conceptually, or then not.

I also got the impression Doctor Crusher, however, was explaining the puzzle and message as "normal science" and but stuff hidden in the regular DNA code by known laws of science to her

And the puzzle and the resulting release of the message would be that. But those would be facilitated by the more subtle mechanism that Crusher had no idea existed - indeed, she had no idea there was a story requirement for such a mechanism, because all she knew existed was the crude puzzle, not the billions of years of manipulation.

I disagree. One goes beyond current tech, the other violates fairly well understood limits of the physical world and contradicts well establish and foundational principles of science.

Hogwash. Well established and foundational principles are the very thing that science never gets right, and information technology is an excellent example of that in practice.

Since the progenitors were allegedly the first intelligent race to evolve here, no one had time yet to evolve into a non-corporeal form.

Well, the first intelligent humanoids, at any rate.

But if you wish to go so far beyond the story and suggest they are lying about various facts to accommodate whoever they find themselves talking to, that's fine – but it's way past talking about THAT story – and its talking about other story ideas.

I'm not sure going beyond would mean going beyond the story. After all, the story is about going beyond - the Progenitors are done being humanoid and thinking of the next step, regardless of whether there's still some corporeal life left in them or not.

Well, he does look human, too, and not just humanoid, so it's unlikely they visited Andoria or Tellerite or Vulcan and got the same reception. Unless they can alter their appearance, but again, without evidence of that, the speculation goes a little far afield.

...Apollo can't alter his appearance? Say, from human height to divine height?

Looks would be deceiving - indeed, they would be nothing but deceiving, as they have no other purpose for a creature that has no looks by nature.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JRTStarlight]

One wonders how much toil and trouble is really involved in making a transplant take root. Vulcans supposedly were dumped on what today is a hellhole for humanoids, and they thrived and supposedly even developed a special eye mechanism to cope with local conditions. Let's accept some of the suppositions - did Sargon's folks or Preservers in this case take the easy way out and introduce certain coping modifications into the species before dropping them on Vulcan, instead of modifying the entire world? (Is the (telepathic) arranging of marriages another such adaptation to defeat inbreeding in desert villages?)

The Preservers and Sargon's people were pretty far apart (the last preservers a mere few hundred or few thousand years ago, while Sargon's group has been down for 600,000 years. Oddly, even the latter time is small compared to how long we figure it takes evolution to mount up significant and numerous changes. Considering the primitive looking androids they were building, I'm not sure Sargon's people were really all that advanced technologically before they went noncorporeal. I suppose it may just seem inconsistent, but I got the feeling they could have done better if they were more knowledgeable about genetics - and made quick clones or just flesh and blood constructs the way we've seen lesser civilizations doing in Trek.

As for Preservers in general, I don't think they'd be tweaking the genes much since that's not really preserving a species so much as altering them or making new ones. And transplanters tend to put things in places they figure will already support those species. It might be easier/faster to tweak (terraform) the place to fit the species than the species to fit the place. Otherwise, set it free and let evolution and survival of the fittest and natural selection make adaptations at its own pace. So I doubt the Vulcans were genetically altered to fit in a desert, or given inner eyelids, greater strength, telepathy, a mating cycle, or even green copper-based blood to better survive there. They were a desert species, possibly with millions of years of evolution to go, that were either transplanted there, or they evolved there separately, and maybe much later visitors left things, or tweaked things, and that would explain Spock's mysterious elements of Vulcan pre-history, what ever those were.

The scifi challenge is to think of a way for this to be possible. Either the Voth civilization was largely coastal (lots of coast to choose from back then!) and now resides in Earth's mantle, or the Voth were extremely neat (aka recklessly destructive) and tidied up (perhaps with the help of big iridium bombs?) when they left.

That brute force approach is only the Sci-Fi challenge when a more eloquent solution can't be found. I found one, IMO. They were transplanted away from Earth long before their advanced civilization arose and they become humanoid much later (this explains their DNA and Earth origins and the lack of signs of advanced, spacefaring civilizations here).

Even coastal destruction on the planet wouldn't explain the lack of evidence in the solar system, unless they deliberately decided to meticulously wipe out all traces of their existence in space. Litter on the moon doesn't blow away even in millions of years - debris in high enough orbits doesn't go away and would stay there that long, too. Or maybe we have not just The Preservers travelling the galaxy, but The Reclaimers, who go from stellar system to stellar system picking up trash and returning everything they find to a natural state, maybe because they feel that's prettier, but mostly so newly evolving species are fooled into believing they were the first or only more advanced species in existence for a long, long time – at least until somebody makes contact with them or they venture into space themselves and find others. Seeing how modern tricorders know way too much way too easily, I think they'd pick up even minute traces of past civilizations like that in our own solar system if they had existed for countless millennia before leaving.

Oh, wait. That's silly. The Preservers just don't tend to leave a lot of trash on their nomadic existence - like spelunkers - but take samples of endangered species away and leave the rest unsullied, and The Reclaimers are a stupid idea.

" And the Voth are still resisting basic science and adhering to religious dogma "
Still? Wouldn't that be a logical conclusion of millions of years of development, with everything sorted out, all the right answers written down, and at least ten million years of careful empirical research to ascertain that the dogma are correct?

Not really. First, the evidence their dogma WAS wrong stands in stark contrast to ten million years of "careful empirical" research, and the scientific method purposefully and wisely avoids the belief we have EVER or could EVER reach the FINAL and ONLY correct answer on anything and so we can stop looking. It's called keeping an open mind, and always being willing to look at new evidence or take better measurements.

(For all we know, they are, and the stuff uncovered by flimsy research in the episode was but wishful thinking and misunderstood evidence.)

What stuff? The genetic evidence that said they had common ancestry with species from Earth? You think that was all just wrong? Well, I guess it could have been, and I'm O.K. with saying a story was mistaken in some of its assertions, but if they were that badly mistaken, then there's little point in talking about the story until we agree what parts of it were even valid or worth talking about. However silly I think the story was, or unlikely I feel transplanting things that distance might be, it could be an easy thing to those who can blink across the galaxy in a second, or even just hold open a portal on Earth and herd a bunch of dinosaurs through their interstellar gate onto a new world, like the Iconians.

Whoopee ti yi yo, get along little dinos
It's your misfortune ain't none of my own
Whoopee ti yi yo, get along little dinos
You know the Delta Quadrant will be your new home.

Sort of the antithesis of what the Preservers actually do with "civilizations threatened by huge asteroids"!

True, deflecting that one rock would be easier, but rocks are also good things and help other species arise past some that showed no improvement for millions of years, so maybe they refuse to deflect rocks or interfere with the natural evolution of a planet with life, or a stellar system with life, on that scale. But for a garden they made or transplanted things to, it would be fine to deflect asteroids to preserve their own crop, particularly if it were necessary since the place was a shooting gallery. It's not hard to imagine a variety of motivations that could account for both practices - one hands off - one hands on.

Few of the Gods on Earth are Creators, though. The criteria vary a lot, but qualities typically absent are creation of the universe / Earth / mankind, any interest in what mankind is doing, and presiding over afterlife. OTOH, meddling is almost mandatory, and the likes of Q are very good at that.

I didn't mean to qualify as God for past humans in more primitive cultures, but today, and given the rampant spread of monotheism, I wondered what it would take today. I mean, for me, even if somebody appeared and had Q-like powers, I don't think I would be prepared to call them God, or feel inclined to worship them, or even believe them without proof they created the universe (if they made that claim).

No doubt UFP science would have introduced a Scale or Class system for sorting out the super beings they encounter. But perhaps only Astral Anthropology specialists are interested in this, just like our main heroes don't mention Hodgkins' or Richter's systems in every episode (or indeed ever again!).

Indeed. They do tend to have letter/number designations for planets and cultural developments, so why not alien god-like species, too? In fact, the Q don't really call themselves that, but could see the Federation soon would, so they did it for them first and beat them to the punch. Ha ha.

...Or so they claim, and perhaps also believe. But were they doing a good job at it? The one example doesn't really convince. Perhaps what they were efficiently doing is a bit different from how they phrase it or how Spock reads it - instead of perpetuating a lifeform let alone a lifestyle, they are utilizing their abductees in cruel survivalist challenges in order to improve the galactic stock. Say, possibly the Obelisk is but a chocolate-covered manhole cover, as in that Niven story: either you learn to make use of it and transcend your original limitations, or you die.

Anything is possible, and their motives (and perhaps many other cultures doing similar things) could be wide-ranging. But I would be hard-pressed to imagine what they are doing sometimes when survival of the transplanted species seem apparent and no other purpose comes to mind.

Practical isn't the point, though. The keyword appears to be "trivial" instead: if you have a teleporter in your pocket, a FTL spacecraft, and a lazy Saturday to burn, what motivation is there not to abduct farmers and livestock and then analyze or otherwise exploit them? It seems the Skags and the Briori were past the technological threshold needed for this, but not much further; the Preservers could be a slightly more capable species making use of the terraforming etc. of others, or a vastly more advanced species, and the aspect of triviality would just grow in importance step by step.

True, the more powerful they are and the more effortless it is to do something, the more likely somebody might do it even for the most trivial of reasons. Maybe some species transplants are little more than ant farms. Wow, watch them dig and make all those tunnels. Look at how they kill each other over that yellow metal or those shiny stones. That's so cool! Then they lose interest and are off to do other things, and what becomes of what they left behind or their old toys, who cares? Not them. Anything is possible. It's just hard not to ascribe to them what our motives might be if we had that power. And yeah, a culture, a group, or even an individual with power could do it, and for nothing more than a lark.

This would take things beyond the group or movement level, as it would require long term thinking, which is unlikely either across generations or in the long and winding life of individuals blessed with longevity. A culture-wide lifestyle of such sowing and reaping would appear to be required. The Borg are content to just reap, even if they occasionally nudge, tickle or otherwise promote preexisting growth. Would one need to be more advanced than the Borg in order to also sow, and would you then still be interested in reaping?

Depends on what you reap. Ideas, art, discoveries, unexpected tech? How long do noncorporeal begins live? What is wearing out if they die? Do they even reproduce any more? Might all that effort be little more than intellectual interest and/or entertainment?

...And a slow asteroid at a distance could be diverted relatively easily, even if possessing immense mass, because the diversion would only need to be minimal. Were our Moon on an impact course two months away, at which speed would a diverting by 0.0013 degrees be insufficient for avoiding disaster?

Making the moon miss might not be enough since if it gets close enough it could break up or alter our own orbit. Something that massive has to miss by a lot if damage is to be avoided. But even at near light speeds, 1 hour away at warp 9 is still like 729 light-hours away, or 146 times the distance from our sun to Pluto. At normal stellar system speeds it would take years for that to get to the planet, but to get there in 2 months' time would take relativistic speeds. I won't work out any hard numbers for your problem, but the farther out, or slower the asteroid, the smaller the required deflection, of course. Closer in or much faster would take greater deflection. A moon-sized rock traveling at relativistic speeds would probably be beyond a Constitution Class starship's capability to move far enough. In Deja Q even a Galaxy class starship couldn't so easily move a moon, but I'm not sure how big or how far that moon was or needed to be moved. I suspect if the numbers were closely scrutinized it wouldn't hold up or be consistent with many other facts, but the story didn't require given those details and we might assume the moon was on the smaller side, anyway.

The equation becomes more challenging at high speeds, because the forward force vector would begin affecting the transverse vector in a manner not familiar from elementary school textbooks - a sideways push would become more challenging than Newton would have us believe.

What are you talking about? Even the significant relativistic effects are only along the one vector. Lateral movement would be independent and probably non relativistic, and if the distance is sufficient, or the larger velocity vector slow enough, it wouldn't take much to miss a distant object. But vectors are independent of one another, regardless.

More importantly, increase speed and you increase distance, making Spock's high warp dash outward from the planet more credible. Then suggest that the rock approaches from the direction of the local star, so Spock takes that direct route, too, and you now have the Trek phenomenon of high warp actually being very slow, indeed sublight ("Tomorrow is Yesterday", ST4:TVH).

What? Distances tend to contract along the high velocity vector, not increase, relativistically speaking. Slow? Look, none of these numbers really work – they just don't. And if that rock is indeed travelling at some peculiar high relativistic speed, and the Enterprise is with it and without warp capability, should you invoke time dilatation, then very little time would pass on the Enterprise compared to Kirk's two months, or the Enterprise's two months might be years for Kirk – take your pick. I'll assume the rock isn't travelling at near light speeds since that would be incredibly weird, and time dilation effects are negligible, and two months on the ship and two months on the planet were essentially that same since the rock is traveling at speeds normal for stellar system material. If Spock were forced to take an indirect but much longer route, that might help explain matters, but I can't imagine why he would.

The side benefit would be that a rock (and a ship) moving at such high speed would experience less than two months of utter inaction when Kirk experienced those sixty days. McCoy wouldn't strangle Spock in his bed yet for said inaction, not in the compacted timespan.

Both would be moving in relation to the one thing that mattered, though: the frame of reference involving the planet. So what the ship thought it was doing to the rock from the local POV would not be sufficient in the external POV because of aid relativistic concerns.

So you pick Kirk to have the two months – fine. And less time on ship, but enough for McCoy to finally admit he was wrong, and to have to get on Spock's case for working too hard and not getting rest, etc. Oh, and contradict McCoy's dialogue when he said Spock was trying to decipher those symbols for the last 58 days. That story in no way accounts for or was meant to suggest relativistic length contraction, time dilation, or different time frames of reference, and trying to force them in might be clever if they worked to solve some issues, but they really don't here.

But the great thing is that we can take each of them at face value and still assign arbitrary/desired values to them, thanks to a combination of real-world and Trek conceits. The mass of the Moon might be given at the supposed high speed, say, being much less at rest (and thus in agreement with the irregular shape).

Any lateral movement on that rock would probably not be at relativistic speeds. The main velocity vector may be moving near c, but that only affects times and distances along that vector – not the others. But since time may be affected, how much time they have to do this may seem different to both inertial reference frames.

Just to repeat myself, it wouldn't be a "civilization" using said labor. It would be individuals or groups for which efficiency would not be a concern - perhaps akin to the Lords of country houses employing deaf and blind butlers for muttering "Dinner is served, Milord" out of sheer charity, perhaps akin to the Lords of the ghetto employing local kids for washing their cars five times a day out of sheer thrill of power.

Yes, a smaller group or even an individual could be this, but if they have access to that kind of tech, they would probably more easily have access to the kind of tech that would do the job of manual labor quicker and better, too. However, there are always possible exceptions, or unusual or even irrational motives could be employed that smaller groups or individuals might have that larger cultures would tend to discard or reject.

Sounds good to me. The heroes did eventually carve a very nice tombstone for poor D'Amato, by unknown but limited means. Put ten times the number of people on it and you can escape with valuable loot before Starfleet catches you.

No they didn't, did they? IIRC, they gathered up some of the artificial rocks and covered him in those and wrote on one, maybe with D'Amato's own blood – no carving. The phasers couldn't cut it at all, and that was 8,000 degrees C. But if ask me, and you're sure I'm dead, I might just as well have my body vaporized by a phaser than buried under some rocks. YMMV. Unless they plan to come back and reclaim the body later for the family. They might want it for visitation now and again.

Is that really true of any plundering here on Earth, though?

Like when Hager the Horrible plundered the water faucet and brought it home to Helga. That's funny. It poured water out before. Or capturing the computers but not having electricity. Oh, I'm sure there's some stuff you can use, but to fully utilize or appreciate it, you'd probably have to know something about it. What good is a Tritanium bulkhead for my wall, anyway, that normal drywall won't suffice? I've got to be able to work the material, and even need it, to make plundering it really valuable.

That's probably an illusion of timescales. That the Homeworld blows doesn't mean everybody dies that day - it just means that the former Overlords are now Underdogs, and others will make short work of them in the centuries to come. And those who don't get hunted down survive by blending in, which is trivially achieved in the great unity of Trek. The individuals may live, but the culture dies, in an eyeblink only when compared to the time separating that eyeblink from our heroes.

Ah, yes. The top dogs becoming weakened and losing to their former lower competitors. Good thought. And with deep time, even if it would happen once every million years, over the last 65 million years that's still 65 dead cultures to find in the here and now, so it will look like a lot.

For all we know, the interaction is used for adjusting the orbit of the planet... In combination with a "drive-by mining" effort, or not.

I don't like to speculate that far afield, so without any evidence of that, I won't go there. All one need say is anything is possible, but one tires of saying that just because it's true. I'd rather stick to the probable, the likely, the plausible, but base even that on some evidence. I don't mind speculating beyond that for fun, but to explain "the story" or discuss the motives, we should stick to what we see. The natives weren't interested in gathering up rocks or preparing sacrifice for the wise ones, or anything like that. They were just living.

If the approaching doom is a test for worth, then why not repeat it at regular intervals?

The "test" is to see if they are still around, and if so, keeping the faith to push the button. But in a shooting gallery, if they fail the test, that garden's time is up and the universe goes on. Why keep an automated system designed to protect the faithful people running if the people are gone or are no longer faithful? Let it die a natural death. It might even send out a signal telling the Preservers, wherever they are, their garden is still flourishing. Failure would indicate that crop had failed. It's nice to know what's going on in your garden.

Waited? We don't get confirmation that there was a wait or a delay involved. For all we know, it always happens as seen – the natives wouldn't necessarily know better, as they told Kirok the skies darken many times annually yet nothing bad happens, and the idea of having somebody push the button is but a "legend".

They didn't say this was an annual event. It just happens sometimes, and when it does, it happens in the same way (which again suggests to me those are artificial events to warn). And the chief medicine man takes care of it – he always has – but he died this time before telling the secret to Salish. It may have been years or a decade or more since the last great shake. And there is a button to push – Spock pushed it – so I would tend to think somebody is supposed to push it, the implication being the chief medicine man or his successor in a line of succession – like Questor, only humans instead of androids.

Buttons were pushed and stuff happened, but the connection might not exist. And indeed there's no reason to think it would exist, because pushing the button has not been necessary in this asteroid alley for a long time.

If the button-pushing were some sort of a special measure required with the rare Moon-sized rocks, then we might believe our heroes when they say they have divined from the texts and equipment that this is the case. The thing is, though, they don't say anything of the sort.

They have memories of the last time the CMM saved them – they have seen the Blue Flame before, or have heard stories of it. Miramanee even knows they were transplanted by the wise ones, and the wise ones gave the temple secret to the CMM to use when the skies darken, and this secret is and has been passed from father to son for generations. I don't know how often it happens, but often enough to keep the tradition alive and well and not die out – but then I'd expect that in a shooting gallery. It's just a cosmic coincidence that Kirk and company showed up during the time the normal cycle had failed with the premature death of the CMM. But Kirk has a talent for showing up in these narrow windows like that - it's amazing.

 

[JRTStarlight]

That, again, is a matter of timescales. For the 1980s, "The Chase" might have been a tad ambitious. But for the 1880s, the modern take on Sherlock would break far too many well-established laws of nature to work as science fiction (they even have an episode on the issue!). For the 2000s, "The Chase" reads just fine for me, as per that mainframe vs. cloud analogue - meddling with the macroscopic or using external means is soooo 20th century when you can simply manipulate the information itself.

But they are going well beyond the ability of genes to carry that level of information, not just beyond our ability to encode it or read it ourselves, but also beyond what we understand to be a fundamental property of the universe for it to even exist. If you wish to break such things in a fictional universe, then make it a premise of that universe. Do not break such laws just to make one story work. And even if you think that's fine and acceptable, you should make mention you are doing that, like wow, how do they do that? Instead, it's just taken as hidden information in the genetic code and it's well understood. You may be able to encode an entire encyclopedia in the space of the human genome, but you'd need far more storage than that, and we aren't talking about the human genome, but all of that information hidden in even the simplest single cell life form. But Crusher acts like it's not breaking any rules - it's just stuff that was artificially hidden in life and has been a part of all life since life began. Even when it takes a few species to put it all together, it has to be able to encode each piece of the puzzle, and its share of the massive humanoid/awareness/manipulation/self replicating portion, and do all that on a single cell life form in each place. There just isn't the room, and it can't be done with base pairs and genes, but something far deeper that violate fundamental laws of the universe, the uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, etc. and they don't even find that aspect of it surprising.

I think whoever wrote that lacked a basic understanding of how difficult that might be, erroneously feeling one could easily hide that level of information in the genes at the genetic level, and make it do all that. It's nonsense. But if you insist on doing it, have the characters mention it is beyond their understanding. Otherwise, it looks like it was just beyond the author's understanding and they didn't know any better. Gene Roddenberry knew current science said nothing can travel faster than light, but his universe allows it, and that's a premise, and it's mentioned and "explained" how they are doing it, demonstrating he isn't ignorant of science, but supposes "what if" we could go beyond that? So we can accept it as part of the fictional universe. But when an author doesn't mention the violation of known science, and it's not part of the fictional universe's premise but a story element for one story, it looks like ignorance of science, and Deus Ex Machina – so poor fiction.

Frequently, and from the get-go. Odo's first trick of impersonating something is as a bag that is easily carried by a Cardassian. Later on, he becomes a transparent glass that is easily carried by Rom on a tray of four other like glasses. He also flies as a seagull - either losing mass or then transforming into an antigravity machine inside a seagull form, which may be one and the same thing conceptually, or then not.

In a world where antigravity is nigh effortless, how Odo might apparently hide his weight is not impossible to explain, but it would be nice had they mentioned it or worked more consistently with it. He may also simply nullify the artificial gravity on him, but we can't be sure. I do not deny some things look magical about him, but they are more or less part of the premise of that character's race, and not just a badly conceived one off for a single story or a single problem.

And the puzzle and the resulting release of the message would be that. But those would be facilitated by the more subtle mechanism that Crusher had no idea existed - indeed, she had no idea there was a story requirement for such a mechanism, because all she knew existed was the crude puzzle, not the billions of years of manipulation.

Then some mention of this fact by them (the characters) would suffice to show the author wasn't just ignorant of science. Crusher doesn't even have to explain it. She just has to acknowledge it's beyond all known science and it should be "impossible" by anything she understands. She doesn't. In fact, they take time to explain it as something well understood by science, albeit it was just the puzzle part, which I don't have a problem with, but no mention is ever made they went beyond their understanding later. As such, to me it looks more like the author was scientifically illiterate, or didn't care, perhaps under their theory it's fiction and it doesn't have to make sense, or magic is fine to use in science fiction, or any gibberish is identical to jargon and are interchangeable terms, or something like that. If you like it, that's fine, but I have a lower tolerance for that level of apparent ignorance, or lack of concern for fictional universe, or the genre in general.

Hogwash. Well-established and foundational principles are the very thing that science never gets right, and information technology is an excellent example of that in practice.

For example? I'm not talking about some vague belief you'd fall off the earth if you went over the horizon, or smashed to bits if you reached the speed of sound, or violated some layman's understanding of science, but violated a fundamental principle of science. Here, for example, hiding information at the sub atomic level. But again, even if I'm wrong, I'm still looking for an acknowledgement by the author via the characters that what they are witnessing is beyond their understanding and beyond known science to demonstrate they at least know it, but are asking "what if" we can go beyond that. Faster than light? Done - it is acknowledged and explained. Information hidden at the subatomic level? Not acknowledged, not explained, not even part of the fictional universe to be used in countless other stories. Instead, it scoffs at known science and says it's fundamentally wrong and no one seems bothered by that or feels the need to rethink their entire universal or scientific point of view.

I'm not sure going beyond would mean going beyond the story. After all, the story is about going beyond - the Progenitors are done being humanoid and thinking of the next step, regardless of whether there's still some corporeal life left in them or not.

Their next step, according to them, was probably non-existence – they figured they'd be dead and long gone by the time anyone found that message.

...Apollo can't alter his appearance? Say, from human height to divine height?

Yeah, both apparently human in shape, and not Cardassian, or Andorian, or Vulcan, etc. but human. If he can alter it beyond that, I didn't see it.

Looks would be deceiving - indeed, they would be nothing but deceiving, as they have no other purpose for a creature that has no looks by nature.

For a noncorporeal being, they would be, as Spock said, conventionalizations for the benefit of the viewer. I'm not sure Apollo was noncorporeal (with the extra organ in his chest, I would think not).

 

[Timo]

That brute force approach is only the Sci-Fi challenge when a more eloquent solution can't be found. I found one, IMO.

Nothing against that one. Just trying to find out the other ways this can work in the Trek context. As very much opposed to the real world...

Even coastal destruction on the planet wouldn't explain the lack of evidence in the solar system, unless they deliberately decided to meticulously wipe out all traces of their existence in space.

Why should we assume there's no trace of them? Earth beyond the 20th century is not explicitly ignorant of the existence of ET intelligence (past or present), and indeed the government of the USA knows of such existence as a solid fact with photographic evidence, in-depth interviews and all. For all we know, the stasis box with the secret of antigravity in it was found on the Moon right where the Voth left it, in a big pile of ET litter, complete with evidence of Lizard Men that obviously tied it to the Slavers mentioned inside.

It's just that everybody leaves the same sort of trash, down to DNA traces. It might take centuries for somebody to go back on the evidence and decide it points in some other way than we originally thought.

First, the evidence their dogma WAS wrong stands in stark contrast to ten million years of "careful empirical" research, and the scientific method purposefully and wisely avoids the belief we have EVER or could EVER reach the FINAL and ONLY correct answer on anything and so we can stop looking. It's called keeping an open mind, and always being willing to look at new evidence or take better measurements.

Which is fine for ignorant people who don't yet know everything and like to delude themselves that this is fine.

It isn't as if the universe would have introduced challenges in the past twenty million years that the Voth wouldn't have already tackled in the preceding 45 million. If empirical research shows that empirical research no longer is needed, then disbelieving in this would be unscientific.

What stuff? The genetic evidence that said they had common ancestry with species from Earth? You think that was all just wrong?

Quite possibly. It's just one nutcase doing this research, after all, and doing it all wrong if 65 million years of experience isn't to be dismissed - and everybody has Progenitor-designed genes anyway. (We never learned if the Voth knew of the Progenitors and whether they were part of their "belief system" aka "body of correct knowledge".)

True, deflecting that one rock would be easier, but rocks are also good things and help other species arise past some that showed no improvement for millions of years, so maybe they refuse to deflect rocks or interfere with the natural evolution of a planet with life, or a stellar system with life, on that scale.

...Heck, perhaps big rocks are their thing, and they plow with those right after reaping to promote the growth of the next crop?

Perhaps the native American lookalikes were in fact what was left on that planet after the last harvest, with most of the population grown there now transplanted elsewhere but a bunch of luddites left to wander in the woods playing Injuns even though the makeover meteor was already on its way.

It's not hard to imagine a variety of motivations that could account for both practices - one hands off - one hands on.

Indeed. But it's equally easy to split the evidence among a number of players...

I didn't mean to qualify as God for past humans in more primitive cultures, but today, and given the rampant spread of monotheism, I wondered what it would take today. I mean, for me, even if somebody appeared and had Q-like powers, I don't think I would be prepared to call them God, or feel inclined to worship them, or even believe them without proof they created the universe (if they made that claim).

OTOH, there might be perfectly rational reasons to agree to worship of a demonstrably higher being, even if one insisted on calling the act by some other name. What "past humans" did wrt Gods was no doubt extremely rational for them, too - this should not change even given monotheism, atheism or assorted future-isms.

Making the moon miss might not be enough since if it gets close enough it could break up or alter our own orbit. Something that massive has to miss by a lot if damage is to be avoided.

Well, the distance of the Moon today should be a good start. The extra momentum of a pass at that distance would only start to matter at extreme speeds - something like 1000 km/s (or what would be a "high speed" extrasolar visitor today) would probably still be a minor bump, and the tidal effects would only depend on the distance.

I suspect if the numbers were closely scrutinized it wouldn't hold up or be consistent with many other facts, but the story didn't require given those details and we might assume the moon was on the smaller side, anyway.

I trust that with that many degrees of freedom, we could work out at least one solution that fits the plot and the visuals both. But we don't need to know what extra parameters the solution would spit out - the speed of the rock is irrelevant to anything but giving the right solution, the size likewise, etc.

So you pick Kirk to have the two months – fine. And less time on ship, but enough for McCoy to finally admit he was wrong, and to have to get on Spock's case for working too hard and not getting rest, etc. Oh, and contradict McCoy's dialogue when he said Spock was trying to decipher those symbols for the last 58 days.

Kirk days, that is. McCoy worries about Kirk, after all.

Why doesn't Spock fly to the planet to save Kirk, or send a shuttle there? Why does he just coast in front of the rock at evident freefall (butt first, even)? Making the rock relativistic would help with that, too - whatever velocity Spock added to that of the rock, it would amount to very little from Kirk's point of view, making the effort "relatively" futile.

Spock says they will arrive four hours before the rock no matter what, and that can't be the four ship-lengths we see separating the ship and the rock. So Spock does plan on doing a STL sortie forward at some point. If the speed is high, then launching away from the rock early and launching late might only alter the ETA on the planet between 4.5 and 3.5 hours, in either case enough to locate and save Kirk if he's locatable and not enough to do so if he isn't.

Any lateral movement on that rock would probably not be at relativistic speeds. The main velocity vector may be moving near c, but that only affects times and distances along that vector – not the others. But since time may be affected, how much time they have to do this may seem different to both inertial reference frames.

Exactly. For diverting the rock, the summation of the velocity vectors is the thing that matters, and a relativistic along-the-path vector makes the transverse one seem "harder to do" than in a Newtonian case.

No they didn't, did they? IIRC, they gathered up some of the artificial rocks and covered him in those and wrote on one, maybe with D'Amato's own blood – no carving.

The point being, the one on which they wrote was a perfectly rectangular block, the kind of which was not previously around anywhere on the planet. Nature may not really abhor vacuums or microwaves, but it does hate right angles.

It's not even as if Kirk managed to chip some sort of a suitable crystalline structure along fortutious planes - the actual lines of chipping are curved.

Whether that rock was shaped by Kirk's party, or was a piece of construction debris left over by the Kalandans, the bottom line is that even pickaxes might be overdoing it - just collect this freely available material in these easily handled lumps, like Kirk did!

But if ask me, and you're sure I'm dead, I might just as well have my body vaporized by a phaser than buried under some rocks. YMMV. Unless they plan to come back and reclaim the body later for the family. They might want it for visitation now and again.

D'Amato might have left instructions. But perhaps the folks coming back wouldn't be family? Kirk and friends had not found anything to eat on the planet yet...

Oh, I'm sure there's some stuff you can use, but to fully utilize or appreciate it, you'd probably have to know something about it.

Very true. But you can also utilize stuff less than fully. Or bring what smarter people order you to bring, and get paid. Which is how waste processing today often gets done. Hacksaws or bare hands stripping beached ocean liners, bonfires refining used computers into rare metals, the works.

The natives weren't interested in gathering up rocks or preparing sacrifice for the wise ones, or anything like that. They were just living.

Which is what you'd find in most slave camps before the work began.

The "test" is to see if they are still around, and if so, keeping the faith to push the button.

Yes. So, why not keep repeating the test? Otherwise, it won't test properly for "still", and you have to find an all-new rock for testing that.

They didn't say this was an annual event.

No, they said it happened three times since last harvest. That is, the skies darkened and they did nothing and everything went fine.

We don't know if thrice a year is standard, but random would sound more plausible. We don't know if thrice a year is so much it feels threatening, but it sounds a bit as if this motivates the telling. It's not as if the locals should be worried about "only thrice - why don't we get more dark skies, like when I was young?".

And the chief medicine man takes care of it – he always has – but he died this time before telling the secret to Salish.

But everybody thinks that the Medicine Man does nothing - if something needs to be done, a God sent by his superiors descends and takes care of it. Salish doesn't admit to handling those recent three alarms, and indeed he apparently can't handle them. So if the preceding Medicine Man handled them, he must have died very, very recently. Which might be a workable scenario if not for the fact that only the aforementioned divine intervention should involve the obelisk working as far as the villagers know, and it's pretty difficult for the villagers not to witness the obelisk working even if the Medicine Man tries to be secretive about it.

Or then everybody is right, and the Medicine Man does nothing. Only when the deflector fails do they get a Repairman, and Kirk's arrival is not the arrival of a Repairman but a random event, so the deflector probably isn't broken.

[quoAnd there is a button to push – Spock pushed it – so I would tend to think somebody is supposed to push it[/quote]

But that's cargo cult again. There are always buttons. Them requiring pushing does not follow. Spock may have activated the superfiring frammistat, or deactivated the coffee beam, but the deflector may still have fired on its own - the temporal coinciding is no coincidence, as Spock deliberately pushes exactly when the deflector would be about to start working in any case.

They have memories of the last time the CMM saved them – they have seen the Blue Flame before, or have heard stories of it.

This also works fine for the scenario where the Blue Flame fired thrice since the last harvest, always on its own. But it's late this time around, and even the last one was a bit hairy with more darkening than usual, so the Wise Ones sent a God to fix the problem.

That the secret passed on would be crucial at all, let alone be crucial to the day-to-day (threat-to-threat) operation of the device, isn't supported by the fact that numerous darkenings have gone by and nobody associates the Medicine Man with dealing with those. If they're counting darkenings and somehow knowing that only the seventh is the charm that will finally require the Blue Flame, why isn't this number seven ever mentioned? And why are they babbling about this God and not about the Medicine Man?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JRTStarlight]

Why should we assume there's no trace of them? Earth beyond the 20th century is not explicitly ignorant of the existence of ET intelligence (past or present), and indeed the government of the USA knows of such existence as a solid fact with photographic evidence, in-depth interviews and all. For all we know, the stasis box with the secret of antigravity in it was found on the Moon right where the Voth left it, in a big pile of ET litter, complete with evidence of Lizard Men that obviously tied it to the Slavers mentioned inside.

I'd assume there's no trace of them since it's not mentioned. Without that, you are just inventing it, which is fine if your story is accepted as canon, but until then, most instances of alien life in our solar system pre first contact are crashed single ships or time travelers or both, or alien visitors hundreds or thousands of years ago or longer and who were not indigenous to the Terran system.

We are only told the slaver box that contained the flying belt, which was the basis for the artificial gravity starships use, was discovered some time before 2269 when Spock spoke of stasis boxes left by the Slaver race. It is not said when, where, or even who discovered it. It may have been a Federation ally. I'd assume so, and the Vulcans discovered it or traded for that tech long, long ago, maybe even before the Romulans departed from Vulcan. Except someone insists the Botany Bay had AG so Humans had to have it by the 1990's and long before first contact. This is inconsistent, of course.

The other explanation is we got our AG from reverse engineering one of those crashed ships some time before the 1990's, and that ship got their AG via trade or the slaver's stasis box. Voyager: Future's End, may have been the basis of that when Starling stole a lot of Tech from the crashed time ship the Aeon. However it came about, they never say. Wasn't that even your theory?

Anyway, a single instance of this or that is easy enough to miss, but traces of a whole civilization is, I would think, impossible to miss, unless they used advanced tech (better than Federation tech) to locate every trace of themselves and wiped it out just before leaving. But why would anyone do that? Certainly not to hide their existence from future evolved intelligence from the same stellar system that might arise millions of years later, if ever. So I'd expect countless artifacts to litter our solar system if a warp capable civilization developed here, and weathering would not, could not, account for its disappearance. I also don't understand why such an advanced civilization would leave the planet in the first place (or the solar system, anyway). Anyone that advanced would probably make permanent orbital habitats to house their civilization somewhere in the stellar system as long as the star remained. So I have to question the very motive for wanting or trying to make this square peg fit into a round hole. The eloquent solution avoids the need while preserving the VOY story Distant Origins, and explains why every Trek series never casually mentioned all the artifacts of an ancient civilization found in the Terran system – because they aren't there. So that's WHY I assume it.

It's just that everybody leaves the same sort of trash, down to DNA traces. It might take centuries for somebody to go back on the evidence and decide it points in some other way than we originally thought.

But we would at least already have the evidence, even if we concluded something different. And it's hard to misinterpret advanced tech space artifacts found on most planets in the Terran system, or orbiting them or Sol, as something other than a prior advanced space faring civilization.

Which is fine for ignorant people who don't yet know everything and like to delude themselves that this is fine. It isn't as if the universe would have introduced challenges in the past twenty million years that the Voth wouldn't have already tackled in the preceding 45 million. If empirical research shows that empirical research no longer is needed, then disbelieving in this would be unscientific.

Essentially you seem to be saying if they altered the meaning of the word, scientific, so it was now more like our word, Dogma, then rejecting what we'd call science as "unscientific dogma"? I again don't understand what you're trying to prove here. The Voth were wrong on the facts, and too arrogant or certain of their "facts" (proven wrong in the story) to even consider the possibility.

I, of course, and most scientists, proudly admit to our ignorance. It just means we don't know everything, and we know it. Knowing that is the beginning of wisdom. We don't know everything. Being ignorant of something is not the same as being an ignoramus. One thing we have learned, however, is how dangerous and stifling those who think they do know everything, or everything worth knowing, probably will be to the advancement of knowledge and learning. Their core belief is they have learned enough or already know everything, after all, so learning new things is impossible or pointless or dangerous, and certainly inconvenient, and if you happen to be or have one of those new things, you become a problem. And, sadly, such people so convinced of their truth hardly ever alter their opinions to fit the facts, but tend to alter the facts to fit their opinions, which is unfortunate when you happen to be one of those facts. The story was quite clear, IIRC and from my POV, at the arrogance and injustice and ignorance and perhaps even the evil of the Voth theocracy and its leaders, but if you took away a different message, so be it.

Quite possibly. It's just one nutcase doing this research, after all, and doing it all wrong if 65 million years of experience isn't to be dismissed - and everybody has Progenitor-designed genes anyway. (We never learned if the Voth knew of the Progenitors and whether they were part of their "belief system" aka "body of correct knowledge".)

Voyager's own scientists confirmed the nut job's analysis, didn't they? So it's not just one.

We don't really know their current belief system is 20 million years old, either, do we? Their records go back that far, but this current government and prevailing beliefs might just be the latest upswing of this faction of society – they are in control, now, and will ruthlessly try to retain it, even if they have to threaten and enslave or coerce or maybe even kill others. But they may not always have the upper hand.

But this is, again, one of those near unfathomable things – a civilization that is millions of years old. We have, and know of nothing comparable.

...Heck, perhaps big rocks are their thing, and they plow with those right after reaping to promote the growth of the next crop?

It's an idea, isn't it? But I wonder what crop they harvested and what quality made it ripe enough.

Perhaps the native American lookalikes were in fact what was left on that planet after the last harvest, with most of the population grown there now transplanted elsewhere but a bunch of luddites left to wander in the woods playing Injuns even though the makeover meteor was already on its way.

That seems contrary to known facts. Unless the temple spirits knew of the CMM's demise, and could summon a rock, it seems like the CMM was always there since the planet's inception and no giant rocks have hit it yet, as observed by McCoy who noticed there were no meteor craters – a strange thing in such a shooting gallery.

OTOH, there might be perfectly rational reasons to agree to worship of a demonstrably higher being, even if one insisted on calling the act by some other name. What "past humans" did wrt Gods was no doubt extremely rational for them, too - this should not change even given monotheism, atheism or assorted future-isms.

There are a variety of reasons to worship God – some to earn the rewards of Heaven and bask in his glory in an afterlife, some to avoid the pains of hell. Or in the here and now, just to gain favor, or avoid the wrath of a nasty being who seems appeased by the practice of kissing his ass. Doubtless if Q came down and said worship me or I'll make you suffer, most would. They may not think of Q as God, but that's beside the point.

Well, the distance of the Moon today should be a good start. The extra momentum of a pass at that distance would only start to matter at extreme speeds - something like 1000 km/s (or what would be a "high speed" extrasolar visitor today) would probably still be a minor bump, and the tidal effects would only depend on the distance.

Even a lunar sized massive object passing at speeds near c wouldn't effect Earth much since it wouldn't be around long enough to exert a decent pull, but slower speeds would (assuming it missed our atmosphere and planet itself). A quarter of a million miles is probably a safe distance for something like that to pass – maybe anything outside the Roche limit would be fine. For the Earth moon system, that would be anything farther than 12 or 13 thousand miles, but that's a pretty big miss.

Kirk days, that is. McCoy worries about Kirk, after all.

I highly doubt that's what he meant, and people usually speak of things from their own reference frame unless explicitly stated otherwise. 58 days ship's time, and Kirk's too, since the suggestion the rock is moving at relativistic speeds is stupid.

Why doesn't Spock fly to the planet to save Kirk, or send a shuttle there? Why does he just coast in front of the rock at evident free fall (butt first, even)? Making the rock relativistic would help with that, too - whatever velocity Spock added to that of the rock, it would amount to very little from Kirk's point of view, making the effort "relatively" futile.

Ah, another miss by me. I didn't think to send a shuttle ahead, but that only works if they are warp capable, and I'm not sure they are all supposed to be in TOS. I think we can surmise they are, but only for very short ranges and times, and they would lose warp capability quite quickly (fuel problems) and life support wouldn't last long enough to go 729 light-hours. So the shuttle won't work. I suppose they might gain a few hours if in the last short leg they sent a shuttle ahead when the planet came into range, but they would have no back up, no ship's sensors, no transporters, nothing, really. But they could look around for a couple more hours, probably. It may not have been worth it. This is for where warp 9 for an hour puts the shuttle out of range since shuttles don't travel at such high warps. I'm not sure how fast these TOS shuttles go. But it should work assuming we never leave this stellar system - they should have that range, so it is probably a mistake or plot hole they didn't think to use a shuttle to get back to the planet in short order.

Added velocity? Why would he add velocity? Unless you mean tangential or lateral velocity, which would be insignificant in comparison to its velocity vector toward the planet. He coast, as it were, since his warp drive is out – and backward or forward facing makes no difference in space. I suspect his impulse drive might be out, but in 58 days they could probably have repaired that enough to get quite some distance ahead of the asteroid. Maybe they did – we do not really know, but for the majority of the trip, the asteroid was only 4 hours behind them.

I don't why but I'm getting the impression you think adding velocity to the rock along the vector toward the planet would help. It would just get there sooner, and no relativistic effect would make that beneficial, so I'm not sure what you're thinking there.

Spock says they will arrive four hours before the rock no matter what, and that can't be the four ship-lengths we see separating the ship and the rock. So Spock does plan on doing a STL sortie forward at some point. If the speed is high, then launching away from the rock early and launching late might only alter the ETA on the planet between 4.5 and 3.5 hours, in either case enough to locate and save Kirk if he's locatable and not enough to do so if he isn't.

"Ship lengths" is hardly an accurate observation or realistic estimate of the distance between the ship and rock and you can't know that from the visual they gave. Whatever the relative distance, the rock's velocity would cover it in four hours. We know that. While that distance may have been maintained for most of the trip, Spock may have gotten a little farther ahead of it using impulse engines in the last leg. Ultimately, it didn't matter since they found Kirk, cured him, and got the deflector working in time to save the planet and its transplanted inhabitants.

Exactly. For diverting the rock, the summation of the velocity vectors is the thing that matters, and a relativistic along-the-path vector makes the transverse one seem "harder to do" than in a Newtonian case.

No it doesn't. Well, apart from having little time since it's coming in pretty damn fast, so you have to push it harder since you have less time than a slower rock. All of those calculations needn't consider relativistic effects at all.

The point being, the one on which they wrote was a perfectly rectangular block, the kind of which was not previously around anywhere on the planet. Nature may not really abhor vacuums or microwaves, but it does hate right angles.

So they left a few rectangular artificial blocks around, OR the topsoil and fake rocks strewn about were different, regular rocks and dirt used to cover the artificial surface, and not the "red rock" they couldn't cut with phasers that was hiding under the regular dirt. Gathering up that loose top stuff wouldn't profit anyone.

D'Amato might have left instructions. But perhaps the folks coming back wouldn't be family? Kirk and friends had not found anything to eat on the planet yet...

I hadn't considered that, and I should have since he was even pre tenderized and everything. I wonder if they would have eaten him rather than starve. But without water, too, it wouldn't matter. They'd die of thirst before hunger, so I bet they would not have eaten him.

Yes. So, why not keep repeating the test? Otherwise, it won't test properly for "still", and you have to find an all-new rock for testing that.

The environment naturally keeps testing them, and quite frequently, perhaps on average once every generation, more or less – no need to set up an artificially repeating one.

No, they said it happened three times since last harvest. That is, the skies darkened and they did nothing and everything went fine. We don't know if thrice a year is standard, but random would sound more plausible. We don't know if thrice a year is so much it feels threatening, but it sounds a bit as if this motivates the telling. It's not as if the locals should be worried about "only thrice - why don't we get more dark skies, like when I was young?".

Right, the "warning" repeats itself, probably when a rock is coming in, and the CMM knows how much time he has left before the optimal time to push the button. First time, half a year left, second, 3 months left, third, 2 months now, fourth, time to push the button (or something like that). It might take him some time to come home from the hunt, or time to teach the replacement CMM, and it might take some convincing the CMM is a vital part of their survival, so RESPECT HIM, and thus they get several warnings. So the system gives him a heads up, perhaps several months or more in advanced, WHEN a rock is coming, but not every year.

I'm pretty sure Kirk and company would have mentioned that damn deflector just pushed it to a place where it's going to come back in short order, so what was the point? They didn't, so it didn't, probably.

But everybody thinks that the Medicine Man does nothing - if something needs to be done, a God sent by his superiors descends and takes care of it. Salish doesn't admit to handling those recent three alarms, and indeed he apparently can't handle them. So if the preceding Medicine Man handled them, he must have died very, very recently. Which might be a workable scenario if not for the fact that only the aforementioned divine intervention should involve the obelisk working as far as the villagers know, and it's pretty difficult for the villagers not to witness the obelisk working even if the Medicine Man tries to be secretive about it.

No, I don’t think you got that right. The precursors are just warnings – there is no handling them. The CMM will take care of the real problem when the time comes, as he always has, but the tribe knows they are just warning signs – but the end is coming unless the CMM does his job. The old CMM may have been dead for years.

Their legends speak of a time when the wise ones will return, or maybe they assumed that, so Kirk appearing fits one of the open ended prophecies, but that was just luck it happened when their CMM had died. The CMM's job and the return of the wise one were unrelated things. And who says the CMM is secretive about using the obelisk? They probably aren't allowed to be close enough to hear the music (that's a secret), and certainly not allowed to go inside (that's a secret), but they might watch him play the song and go inside and send out the blue flame – they might witness all of that, or most of it. Miramanee speaks of these details, so she has either seen it, or heard the tales of it from those who have seen it. Only the fact Kirk showed up when their old CMM died and Salish was clueless is different, so the assumption the wise ones would return and have done so now that the old CMM died is natural, or that Kirk was fulfilling prophecy obvious.

Or then everybody is right, and the Medicine Man does nothing. Only when the deflector fails do they get a Repairman, and Kirk's arrival is not the arrival of a Repairman but a random event, so the deflector probably isn't broken.

Who says it is broken? The CMM is a necessary part of its function, however, so the human element has failed, but the obelisk and its mechanics are fine (unlike the controls of the Yonada which needed adjustment and repair). We have to assume the CMM is an active part of it since he had the secret of the temple he was supposed to share it or pass it on, but died before he did, so that's the failure.

But that's cargo cult again. There are always buttons. Them requiring pushing does not follow. Spock may have activated the superfiring frammistat, or deactivated the coffee beam, but the deflector may still have fired on its own - the temporal coinciding is no coincidence, as Spock deliberately pushes exactly when the deflector would be about to start working in any case.

I can't imagine why you'd think that, or assume everything Spock speculated was just pure BS, or be so willing to write off his pushing the button and the blue flame deflector happening together as mere coincidence. If the system is fully automated, then there is no point to the secret of the temple and no reason for the CMM to pass it on. I have to assume there was a good reason, and it was a necessary part of this well-balanced story.

This also works fine for the scenario where the Blue Flame fired thrice since the last harvest, always on its own. But it's late this time around, and even the last one was a bit hairy with more darkening than usual, so the Wise Ones sent a God to fix the problem.

There is no mention of the blue flame firing thrice, once for each of the 3 warnings. It only occurs once, at the final, optimal time, when the CMM goes into the temple and makes the blue flame come out, and all will be well again, probably for years to come (but in that shooting gallery, on average once a generation or so seems about right).

That the secret passed on would be crucial at all, let alone be crucial to the day-to-day (threat-to-threat) operation of the device, isn't supported by the fact that numerous darkenings have gone by and nobody associates the Medicine Man with dealing with those. If they're counting darkenings and somehow knowing that only the seventh is the charm that will finally require the Blue Flame, why isn't this number seven ever mentioned? And why are they babbling about this God and not about the Medicine Man?

4 actually seems to be the magic number in this case (not 7) and it may not be fixed at 4. The CMM and the secrets of the temple may indicate the time left, the number of warnings, etc. all by the intensity of the warnings or other signs. The secret is not crucial for the day-to-day living – it's a once in a generation thing, or something like that. And they do associate the CMM with those warnings. It will soon be time for him to do his thing. But Salish doesn't know the temple secret and everybody knows that, too, since they know the CMM died before telling him.

And they are babbling about the God because one showed up, and not about the CMM since the old one died, the new one didn't know squat, and the God became the CMM thanks to artificial resuscitation. Just as Kirk breathed life back into the boy, so he breathes life back into this transplanted society. We hope, after looking over the memory circuits, they pick a worthy man to be the new CMM (since Salish's attempted murder and bad attitude disqualify him, but if not, then Salish will do) and they expose him to the memory circuit and he acquires the secret of the temple. Then they can safely go knowing that society will be fine, probably, for generations to come.

Why it is kept a secret exactly, I'm not sure. Maybe not by design of the Preservers, but the selfish realization of a past CMM who figured he could live in the lap of luxury and have his pick of women if only HE had the secret.

 

[Timo]

Hmm.

1) The Voth becoming starfaring only after Preserver/Sargonian/similar intervention, somewhere off Earth, works. I just want to argue that you may be overlooking reasons why the story as given can also work, in the Trek context.

- Evidence of aliens should be everywhere around Earth, and we're never told it wouldn't be. When in contrast we are told about stasis boxes and frequent alien visitations to Earth, I feel this is the safer assumption. As per Rain Robinson, public SETI had not yielded results by 1996 (Because subspace? Who knows.), although governments knew of aliens. As of the WWIII era, we don't know whether aliens still were speculation or public knowledge. The first contact in 2063 wouldn't be decisive in that.

- Starfaring Voth emigrating from Earth en masse is in keeping with the Trek fact that loss of homeworld is bad for an empire. Earth was about to be lost, in whatever the K-T incident really was in the Trek context. The Voth are only unique in that they survive, and their mechanism for doing so may be common enough, and directly resulting in discovery being very difficult. (The Yridians were mistaken for dead, too - a similar case?)

- Evidence on Earth after 65 million years would probably be misinterpreted to fit existing theories. After all, that's what we did with the general fossil record for the first couple of centuries - proof positive of Noah's flood, etc. Reevaluation might happen eventually, but it apparently hasn't become mainstream in the 2370s yet, is all.

- So all I'm really positing is that telling the space remains of Voth presence apart from the space remains of assorted visitations is difficult. The rest is just Trek.

- You hit the nail on the head with 65 million years of civilization being alien and incomprehensible. What we can comprehend is that achieving this requires immense stability. What we can assume is that this not just requires but also allows for maturity in all fields of life.

- We don't know that the current Voth belief system would be 20 million years old, no. What we know is that they have had 65 million extra years to get their science, philosophy, politics and religion right, as compared to us. If flipflopping governments still remain a factor, then this is evidently good for longterm stability; flipflopping belief systems are an unlikely stability-boosting feature, though.

- The Voyager scientists would be extremely biased in their analysis, and not fully appreciative of the Progenitor factor, either. The Voth do not seem to have evolved much as individuals: they're still cavelizards just like we remain cavemen. So their science may have evolved to perfection, but that doesn't stop stupid inviduals from thinking they can do better.

I, of course, and most scientists, proudly admit to our ignorance. It just means we don't know everything, and we know it. Knowing that is the beginning of wisdom.

And it's fine and well at a certain stage where it applying can be confirmed. But if it's counterfactual, then it's just stupidity.

It's an incredibly narrow worldview, is all. And quite possibly one specific to the ape viewpoint, even. Lizards might have better ideas.

2) The model where the darkening of skies on Miramanee's planet is a warning sign doesn't work.

- If it's a countdown, the villagers would need to know whether to count to three, four, five or eleventeen. They don't - instead, they tell Kirok that it's been three darkenings since last harvest. Harvests are not a valid zero point for such a countdown, so they wouldn't give pertinent information to God in that fashion if it were a countdown.

- It's not even a case of the God already knowing and this allowing the villagers to be inexact. The villagers do "know" - they want to stone Kirok to death for failing during that one specific darkening, but they never stoned Salish to death for failing during the previous ones (including the one that so alarmed the Chief). Why? a) it's not a countdown, and b) the CMM isn't involved, only automation and the occasional repairGod are.

- Make no mistake, the CMM isn't supposed to do anything with the obelisk. Only God is, according to the legend. In fact, the CMM isn't supposed to do anything according to legend or tradition or observed facts, except heal wounded knees and little big horns and whatnot.

- There is no coincidence in the episode. Kirk lands on the planet at a fairly ordinary time, with the deflector doing its deflecting and the villagers worrying and the CMM supposedly telling them it's going to be all right again. Except this particular CMM is doing a piss-poor job at it because he never got the education. But this doesn't put anybody in jeopardy, not directly - it's all human interest, with the divine forces flinging asteroids doing their own, purely backdrop thing while humans with their petty concerns fling their own stones for all the wrong reasons.

- Kirok gets stoned because he's the rare repairGod who's expected to go in and do maintenance, as per legend. Nobody expects that of the regular CMM in the episode. And Kirok gets stoned during that particular darkening only because Kirok arrived just in time for that - it's the divine arrival that triggers the atypical, "legendary" reaction, not the number of preceding darkenings.

- In the end, Kirok achieves nothing. And this is supposed to be his goal - he's the God that makes Sun rise in the morning, the God without whom there might be trouble. The planet was fine without Gods. It was fine without those do-nothing Medicine Men, too (even if they concocted that story about their secret significance). It probably will continue to be fine for generations to come, as soon as the natives invent new legends to excuse what the blue flame/darkness/wind hassle is all about.

- The action being irrelevant doesn't mean the episode would become irrelevant. Just goes to highlight how even Kirk and Spock can succumb to superstition while sneering at the superstition of the locals. (See, I can do "message", too?)

- Sending shuttles ahead certainly doesn't call for warp. Doing any speed would be faster than the rock's natural freefall, giving the shuttle extra hours, days or weeks at the planet. And not just the shuttle, but no doubt the ship as well - she's not immobile, as Spock and McCoy debate the very issue of moving her.

- Warp is involved purely in Spock's mad 30-minute outward dash at the beginning. And this is where the preference for a very fast rock comes in:

A) High speed, or "just getting there sooner" as you put it, makes the rock be farther out at the beginning, what with the travel time being fixed at two months. This helps explain why Spock conducted the outward journey at extreme warp and still almost didn't make it - the longer, the better.

B) High speed raises the mass of the rock without actually making it Moon-diameter or calling for spherical shape or whatnot. And we need the high mass in order to understand why the starship cannot deflect the rock sufficiently when it's still two whole months out.

C) Shuttles or damaged starships should propulsively outperform an inert rock. But if the rock is moving very fast, then their greater performance won't make such a big difference after all, explaining why Spock doesn't shuttle back and forth between the rock and the planet during those two months, in search of Kirk or answers or whatnot.

In any case, clearly Spock is refusing to budge, regardless of whether he could move instead or not. So we're best off rationalizing Spock's decisionmaking. Perhaps he already has deduced that the obelisk is a deflector (it's pretty obvious that something is), and just doesn't tell McCoy until he's extra sure?

"Ship lengths" is hardly an accurate observation or realistic estimate of the distance between the ship and rock and you can't know that from the visual they gave.

Yup, just kidding there. But we do have to mind the visual facts that the ship isn't appreciably distant from the rock, never gets more distant, and isn't making any effort at being more distant, either, what with facing in the wrong direction and all. That's crucial to the interpretation of what Spock is doing.

Whatever the relative distance, the rock's velocity would cover it in four hours. We know that.

Except the visuals make that pretty impossible to believe, regardless of fine detail. So we're probably better off interpreting Spock's four hours in some other manner altogether.

The environment naturally keeps testing them, and quite frequently, perhaps on average once every generation, more or less – no need to set up an artificially repeating one.

But it's you arguing for a test involving pushing a button. And you want to test for "whether still". You need repetition for that.

I'm pretty sure Kirk and company would have mentioned that damn deflector just pushed it to a place where it's going to come back in short order, so what was the point? They didn't, so it didn't, probably.

Good point. Then again, we don't know why Kirk wanted to meddle with this faraway world in the first place. His starship, once repaired, could alter the facts of existence in this star system easily enough. Or then he might decide everything is fine after all, and the rock ought to return because that's how things were meant to be.

3) Feel free to assume there's rock on the Kalandan outpost that doesn't match the description of our heroes. But why would the heroes fail to comment on some of the nicely red rock being soft to the phaser?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JRTStarlight]

1) The Voth becoming starfaring only after Preserver/Sargonian/similar intervention, somewhere off Earth, works. I just want to argue that you may be overlooking reasons why the story as given can also work, in the Trek context.

As given? They do too many stupid things for it to be true as given. One, their doctrine says they were the first intelligent life to evolve in the galaxy, or that region of space at least, the Delta Quadrant, so they don't know about the Progenitors billions of years ago or anyone since then or even before them, apparently – despite the likely evidence that exists all over the galaxy. With their tech, they should be all over the galaxy, unless they are Xenophobes, too.

Chakotay's idea the Voth arose on an isolated island on Earth is mindless dribble since it assumes a spacefaring race would arise on one island and confine itself to just that island and leave the rest of the Earth alone and untouched, so that explains why there is no trace since, like Atlantis, that one tiny place sank or was utterly destroyed. It's stupidity beyond belief, but a nod toward the Atlantis myth if you like that, sure. But it ignores the likelihood they'd leave many traces in space in the Terran system, too.

Next, the nonsense there is one "probable" evolutionary form that last species known to have Voth DNA would evolve into the humanoid Voth sort of assumes evolution again has a purpose or goal to make humanoid-like species, and ignores or apparently doesn't require any parameters for what the countless environmental changes might be like to favor or disfavor those mutations for survival in a wide variety of circumstances. So how they might change or mutate to adapt to those environments is seemingly unimportant. It's all mostly rubbish and I'd guess written by somebody with a profound lack of understanding about evolution. Though that might use the Trek assumption the universe tends to favor the humanoid form for a technologically advanced race who will, one day, become spacefaring, and those parameters are "built in" to that program to predict evolutionary shapes to come.

Speaking of which, the idea the Voth share some DNA with humans and that's important enough to conclude an Earthly origin is also bogus, given the Progenitors, who scattered that DNA all over the place (not just Earth) and whose massive hidden program contains the humanoid template (for more than 47 markers, I'd wager). Even Chakotay said the Voth have DNA in common with lots of species (maybe he meant just Earth, but even they have a lot in common with any Progenitor based humanoid). So the Voth should have a lot of DNA in common with most of the progenitor's humanoid species – not just Earth's. 47 commonalties is unusual and astronomically improbable, but only if life evolved independently and naturally. If countless races are following the hidden humanoid template, they probably should have more than just 47 commonalities in many other non-Terran species, too. The very idea using some DNA in common with us no longer can be used to suggest common origin of planet when that DNA's common origin is the progenitors and however they tweaked it in ways we can't even see, apparently. In short, this story ignores and probably should ignore the very basis for the episode, The Chase, or at least seems at odds with it.

But as given, it is only speculated the Voth might have become spacefaring and then left Earth. There is no proof of that at all in the story, so it is not a "given," and due to the staggering lack of evidence of an older warp capable civilization on Earth, we have every reason to conclude it didn't happen there. Therefore, in the Trek tradition, it seems far more likely somebody like the Preservers transplanted them, if for no other reason than the great distance they transplanted them.

If they just needed to escape the Terran system, why go all the way to the Delta Quadrant, particularly since it happened so long ago there would have been few advanced species to get in their way or dispute their pick of planets in the Alpha quadrant? Or maybe they didn't choose, but the Preservers did, and the Preservers could span the galaxy with their tech, so distance isn't a consideration to them like it would be, probably must be, for a newly evolved spacefaring culture in crisis like the Voth.

Evidence of aliens should be everywhere around Earth, and we're never told it wouldn't be. When in contrast we are told about stasis boxes and frequent alien visitations to Earth, I feel this is the safer assumption. As per Rain Robinson, public SETI had not yielded results by 1996 (Because subspace? Who knows.), although governments knew of aliens. As of the WWIII era, we don't know whether aliens still were speculation or public knowledge. The first contact in 2063 wouldn't be decisive in that.

I reject the very notion we should assume just because nobody ever mentioned the fantastic or highly improbable, that means it probably does exist and nobody finds it fantastic enough to even mention it or ever mention it. I would think in countless episodes, they probably have mentioned things contrary to that thinking. Mulhall's comments, and probably many like them that would line up with current scientific thinking, would refute the very notion.

MULHALL: Our beliefs and our studies indicate that life on our planet, Earth, evolved independently.

I don't know how often Trek mentions evolution, but my guess is it mostly agrees with current scientific thinking or it would have pulled my focus more. Even Spock misstated it, or badly paraphrased it, in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, imposing a value judgment or desired direction or goal of evolution – "lower" forms to "higher" forms, but he might be assuming as an axiom that a humanoid form, for example, is intrinsically superior to a cow even in the opinion of the universe, or at least his opinion.

As for alien visitors, it seems likely they didn't tend to leave artifacts around and weren't around for countless eons anyway. "Mt. Olympus," for example, was probably their orbiting spaceship, or some place quite removed from the surface dwellers or where they'd leave countless artifacts laying around.

Starfaring Voth emigrating from Earth en masse is in keeping with the Trek fact that loss of homeworld is bad for an empire. Earth was about to be lost, in whatever the K-T incident really was in the Trek context. The Voth are only unique in that they survive, and their mechanism for doing so may be common enough, and directly resulting in discovery being very difficult. (The Yridians were mistaken for dead, too - a similar case?)

I would not disagree a race might have ample reason to pack up and leave their Homeworld (but short of its star's destruction, leaving their home stellar system completely seems dubious). And in an emergency they would do it quickly, but all the more reason to disbelieve they'd take the time to wipe out all traces of their existence before leaving. And Earth wasn't going to be lost – its environment, however, was likely to radically change – which is a killer for a primitive species who can't understand or cope, but just a huge inconvenience for a spacefaring race who could erect climate controlled habitats on the surface or in space. And if they did wish to leave Sol, why go all the way to the Delta Quadrant?

Evidence on Earth after 65 million years would probably be misinterpreted to fit existing theories. After all, that's what we did with the general fossil record for the first couple of centuries - proof positive of Noah's flood, etc. Reevaluation might happen eventually, but it apparently hasn't become mainstream in the 2370s yet, is all.

What evidence do you actually have in mind? Anything concrete? Or is it just some blind hope or assumption something somewhere will fit that generalization of misinterpreted evidence, and that it was so badly misinterpreted, we missed an entire spacefaring race on Earth (and in the solar system) before we came along?

So all I'm really positing is that telling the space remains of Voth presence apart from the space remains of assorted visitations is difficult. The rest is just Trek.

Difficult to tell the difference between a lone artifact or two left by short term visitors from the trillions of likely artifacts left by a civilization who lived here for thousands of years or more, the obvious signs or large scale mining or production, or any other number of obvious clues an advanced civilization lived here for a considerable time?

We don't know that the current Voth belief system would be 20 million years old, no. What we know is that they have had 65 million extra years to get their science, philosophy, politics and religion right, as compared to us. If flip-flopping governments still remain a factor, then this is evidently good for long-term stability; flip-flopping belief systems are an unlikely stability-boosting feature, though.

Depends if transitions are peaceful or violent. But we don't even know they have been stable those 20 million years – only that some records survived from that long ago – and many older ones apparently haven't, a full 45 million years' worth or more having been completely lost. So the Voth may have only recently crawled back out of a stone age after their last nuclear (or similar self made) devastation, and have been around in their current form for a mere few thousand years.

The Voyager scientists would be extremely biased in their analysis, and not fully appreciative of the Progenitor factor, either. The Voth do not seem to have evolved much as individuals: they're still cave lizards just like we remain cavemen. So their science may have evolved to perfection, but that doesn't stop stupid individuals from thinking they can do better.

Huh? Well, the bias to ignore the Progenitor angle does seem as if they don't really grasp why 47 commonalities would normally be impressive. Give the Progenitors reality, they wouldn't be impressive at all.

And it's fine and well at a certain stage where applying it can be confirmed. But if it's counterfactual, then it's just stupidity.

Admitting we don't know everything is counterfactual?

It's an incredibly narrow worldview, is all. And quite possibly one specific to the ape viewpoint, even. Lizards might have better ideas.

I'm not sure where you are at this point. I'd offer you another banana, but that's probably an ape viewpoint, too.

 

[JRTStarlight]

2) The model where the darkening of skies on Miramanee's planet is a warning sign doesn't work. If it's a countdown, the villagers would need to know whether to count to three, four, five or eleventeen. They don't - instead, they tell Kirok that it's been three darkenings since last harvest. Harvests are not a valid zero point for such a countdown, so they wouldn't give pertinent information to God in that fashion if it were a countdown.

Do you think "Harvest" meant some culling of the population? I thought it just meant since they picked their last crops (which Kirk was saying they could increase with better irrigation). And the number of warnings may not be consistent – there may be signs the CMM would know and recognize since rock size and orientation may be different and so the optimal time would be different. The detection system, too, may not be perfect, so late discoveries may shake harder than early ones where you have more time to show a sense of urgency. Anyway, it just seems to me they had their harvest, as normal, the warnings began, which is "normal" but not regular or scheduled like clockwork, and there have been three warnings this cycle, which Kirok missed since they happened before he came and he might like to know about them, so they told him, just as the CMM often made a point of talking about the number of warning signs (but keeping the secrets to himself, the exact nature of what they meant isn't clear to others).

It's not even a case of the God already knowing and this allowing the villagers to be inexact. The villagers do "know" - they want to stone Kirok to death for failing during that one specific darkening, but they never stoned Salish to death for failing during the previous ones (including the one that so alarmed the Chief). Why? a) it's not a countdown, and b) the CMM isn't involved, only automation and the occasional repairGod are.

Kirok admitted he didn't know how to get into the temple – even stupidly suggested the caves for shelter rather than doing the CMM's job – going into the temple and making the blue flame come out to quiet the land. But he went to the temple, and unlike all the CMM before him who went to the temple, he couldn't get in. So they threw stones at him and his obvious failure.

They wouldn't stone Salish since the others were just warnings that pass on their own and the CMM isn't supposed to do anything about them – aside from noting them and knowing his big job is coming up soon and reminding the people how important the CMM's job is, so never disrespect him.

Make no mistake, the CMM isn't supposed to do anything with the obelisk. Only God is, according to the legend. In fact, the CMM isn't supposed to do anything according to legend or tradition or observed facts, except heal wounded knees and little big horns and whatnot.

It's not a mistake. They've seen the flame before but they never had a god before, so thinking it was God's job to bring forth the blue flame is contrary to what you're suggesting. There IS a temple secret and the CMM holds it. If you say it is all automated, then what secret do you think he holds?

This is how it works, IMO:

The obelisk detects an incoming rock. Depending on size, angle of approach, time to impact, it will artificially shake the ground, cause the winds, and darken the skies (possibly in various degrees of severity or frequency with its weather tech, which would be part of the secret of the CMM so he would know when to go the obelisk, play his song, go inside and push the button). These warning signs alert all the people, and they know their CMM will, when the time comes as he will know, go to the temple, go inside, and make the blue flame come forth, which will steady the ground, calm the winds, lighten the sky, probably for years to come. That's his main job, but he has others.

But this time the CMM died, and before he told Salish the temple secrets (which might be many things, like how to get into the temple to pray for other things, like advanced treatment of a disease or other things in the memory banks, or other systems, like to make it rain during a drought, and not just the deflector). So Salish isn't a good CMM in other ways, too. Mostly he's concerned about who the CMM gets to marry.

Despite the CMM's early demise, they have their annual harvest. Shortly after, the warnings start. But Salish doesn't know what to do or what it all means. The first comes and goes, the second, even the third. But Salish is ignorant. The people know disaster is coming, but what can they do? Salish knows disaster is coming the same as everyone else, but he doesn't know what to do about it. His father died before telling him - probably because he was an evil little shite who only cared about himself.

Kirk appears. Behold, A god from the temple (and on an unrelated matter, the wise ones may have promised to return one day, or maybe they just hope for that and assume it will come true). Well, here he is. And what luck, our CMM isn't quite up to snuff, so it all makes sense.

The boy drowns, Kirk revives him – he becomes CMM. Now it's his job, but he's as clueless as Salish.

Two months pass and the final warning comes – it's time for Kirok to do the CMM's job. He suggests sheltering in the caves. WTF? Only the temple flame will save us at this point. We all know it. Go. Do you job. So he goes, but can't get in the obelisk like all other CMM have done at similar times in the past. They stone him out of anger, and maybe spurred on by Salish's hatred of Kirok and the woman who has repeatedly rejected him.

The Enterprise returns, saves Kirk, and they clever it out, enter the temple, push the button, and make the blue flame come forth. BOY! Does Salish have egg on his face. And he helped kill Miramanee, so he gets to live with that, but he's sort of self centered, so maybe he didn't love her all that much, anyway, so much as he loved the status of CMM and what marrying the chief's daughter meant for him.

They all flee in terror of what the God might do since they tried to kill him (and the other Gods, too, so they are scared $#!+(_$$. ). We never see them again. Maybe the Feds stick around to instruct a new CMM when things calm down, or maybe they don't. I would think if it was worth saving the people there once, it would be again, so they can either have some Fed types so up to push the button for the natives when it's needed, or train a new CMM. But first, the crippled starship had to be dealt with, and it may be years, a generation, or even more, before another rock will threaten that planet again. But in that shooting gallery, you can depend it's not a question of if, but when.

All your assertions never explain what the secret of the temple is supposed to be and why it needs to be passed from father to son. The way you tell it, it's a pointless thing. This makes little sense to me, or to the story teller to devote so much time to that if it's pointless.

Sending shuttles ahead certainly doesn't call for warp. Doing any speed would be faster than the rock's natural freefall, giving the shuttle extra hours, days or weeks at the planet. And not just the shuttle, but also no doubt the ship as well - she's not immobile, as Spock and McCoy debate the very issue of moving her.

It is weird they seem to suggest the ship isn't using her own impulse power to increase the distance between them and the rock. The shuttle might not have the range or really help much, but if it is warp capable, even in the last leg, it could save hours. And the ship should have increased the 4 hour window to many hours, even days, on impulse, so this is a plot hole I haven't reconciled in any way, but this story has a few of those already, so what are you gonna do?

Warp is involved purely in Spock's mad 30-minute outward dash at the beginning. And this is where the preference for a very fast rock comes in:

I thought it was an hour (out of the two hours they had). It would take a very fast rock to cover 729 light-hours in two months, but it makes little sense a rock from that stellar system would be doing that. It would be more like a rogue planet, but that is contrary to the shooting gallery and why the deflector is there in the first place since you can't count on regularly occurring rogue planets.

The numbers in the episode just don't work.

A) High speed, or "just getting there sooner" as you put it, makes the rock be farther out at the beginning, what with the travel time being fixed at two months. This helps explain why Spock conducted the outward journey at extreme warp and still almost didn't make it - the longer, the better.

But they needed him to fail for the story, so burning out the warp drive was their answer, but they failed to take into account travel at warp 9 (and honestly, for less than a hour shouldn't have burned out those engines) for an hour would take one well outside the stellar system and way past even the farthest planet's orbit. It's all badly contrived.

B) High speed raises the mass of the rock without actually making it Moon-diameter or calling for spherical shape or whatnot. And we need the high mass in order to understand why the starship cannot deflect the rock sufficiently when it's still two whole months out.

Its mass only appears more from the planet's POV, but from a starship's POV in the rock's reference frame, the mass is the same as if they were both stationary. So you won't get apparent "high mass" that way, or account for its non-spherical shape if it's that big.

C) Shuttles or damaged starships should propulsively outperform an inert rock. But if the rock is moving very fast, then their greater performance won't make such a big difference after all, explaining why Spock doesn't shuttle back and forth between the rock and the planet during those two months, in search of Kirk or answers or whatnot.

Yeah, they should be able to outpace the rock, however small the difference. Yes, if the rock were near c, and so are they, their impulse engines and shuttles would be less useful. But if you insist this is the case, then time dilation would be a factor without warp bubbles, and McCoy was wrong about how long Spock was working on the problem (58 days), or Kirk was on planet a lot longer than two months, but since the rock was due to hit it in two months, it was written and assumed two months for both planet and ship and the rock isn't traveling at relativistic speeds, and whoever wrote this contrived a bad reason WHY the warp engines failed and why Spock couldn't divert the rock enough.

I liked the story, but the numbers just don't work.

In any case, clearly Spock is refusing to budge, regardless of whether he could move instead or not. So we're best off rationalizing Spock's decision-making. Perhaps he already has deduced that the obelisk is a deflector (it's pretty obvious that something is), and just doesn't tell McCoy until he's extra sure?

Maybe he's determined the ship and planet will be lost, regardless, unless they can deflect the rock, and the only way to do it is with the deflector he has determined must be there (to account for the lack of craters in the shooting gallery, and the "incised" symbols on the obelisk). Even then, he might find a few more hours or days useful, but might determine those hours without ship resources and back ups would be pointless or more dangerous or far more likely violate the prime directive through discovery without transporters to yank the evidence out of there. So no. We won't go.

Yup, just kidding there. But we do have to mind the visual facts that the ship isn't appreciably distant from the rock, never gets more distant, and isn't making any effort at being more distant, either, what with facing in the wrong direction and all. That's crucial to the interpretation of what Spock is doing.

I'm not sure the direction makes a difference, though maybe since the impulse engines are at the back of the saucer section, they do need to be facing mostly away from the rock to open the distance between them. Do we know for a fact he didn't turn the ship around at some point in those 58 days?

Except the visuals make that pretty impossible to believe, regardless of fine detail. So we're probably better off interpreting Spock's four hours in some other manner altogether.

I disagree. For something that big, it might seem small and close but really be big and distant, and 4 hours isn't much. They do a lot worse elsewhere. Mostly how big ships still look,given their distance from one another.

But it's you arguing for a test involving pushing a button. And you want to test for "whether still". You need repetition for that.

The natural environment provides statistical repetition without requiring manufacturing an artificial one that worked like clockwork. Statically, once a generation is fine. And I only suggest it is there at all to send a signal (or its lack) to the preservers to alert them to a lost garden. The fact losing the garden will wipe out the evidence of the obelisk is just a side effect.

Good point. Then again, we don't know why Kirk wanted to meddle with this faraway world in the first place. His starship, once repaired, could alter the facts of existence in this star system easily enough. Or then he might decide everything is fine after all, and the rock ought to return because that's how things were meant to be.

We don't really know why they wanted to help in the first place, why they visited the planet first if there was such a time constraint, or what came after, but even a starship probably can't take the time to fix that shooting gallery from all asteroid dangers forever. Do you suppose the Federation decided it was worth their time to track asteroids in every stellar system with a primitive culture to protect them? With telescopes, even a primitive culture can see somebody is messing with the system, and that might violate the PD. Maybe that's why they had to visit the people first – to see if they were astronomically aware enough to notice their meddling, and if not, fine, we meddle, but if so, then they're on their own, even if it's clear they'll die.

3) Feel free to assume there's rock on the Kalandan outpost that doesn't match the description of our heroes. But why would the heroes fail to comment on some of the nicely red rock being soft to the phaser?

The surface rocks they gathered weren't the same. Why comment on it? They did, sort of, saying the stuff underneath was camouflaged by the surface stuff. They never said the surface stuff and hidden red rock under was the same stuff.

EDIT: I can't add a new post here, despite the fact it's been 11 days since the last post, so I have to append this or get a reprimand, or worse. Thus, it likely won't send out notices and if anyone interested in this thread looks at it, it would almost be a miracle.

But I am reminded from my review on FTWIHAIHTTS of this:

For what it's worth, I also once suspect the people of Fabrini are humans transplanted by the preservers - and therefore with the same DNA as humans 10K to 12K years ago when they picked a bunch up off Earth (or where ever). How else could the same diseases plague both species and the cures easily work on both, too? Lots of humans in the galaxy due to those preserver guys, and they were at work about 12K+ years or more ago, so they could have populated the Fabrini system and even helped build their asteroid ship, Yonada. You just can never tell with those guys. Or maybe after 2K years, they built it themselves since they had to. Well, it's just a small chance. Otherwise the similarities between humanoid races is too great.