I think what bothers me most in this discussion is that it's not about diversity as such but about how to best accomodate other species to humanoid standards. That is not what I would call diversity.
...
What I would like to see is at some point is a series about a humanoid having to adapt to living on a ship/station with non-humanoid living conditions. That would be different, that would be more about diversity as I see it than having non-humanoids having to conform to human(oid) living conditions.
I'm puzzled by this statement. As I've mentioned two or three times already,
Titan and the
Luna class in general are specifically designed so that their technology can accommodate nonhumanoids. The turbolifts are bigger than normal so people like Ree and Chaka can fit in them, the consoles and seats are more adjustable, etc. And I'm pretty certain I stated in
Orion's Hounds that the ship's environmental conditions are set to something of an average of the member species' environments, so that the temperature, humidity, etc. are no more perfect for humans than they are for any of the other species aboard.
A lot of people seem to have a preconception that
Titan's interior is designed exactly like every ship we ever saw on TV and the movies, even though the books themselves have explicitly stated otherwise. I don't understand that. I mean, it's not like this was a pre-existing starship class that was designed for humanoids and then suddenly had a change in crew composition. The books explicitly establish that it was designed from scratch to accommodate a wider range of life forms, that the ship was customized before launch with the needs of its crew in mind.
I guess the visuals from the shows and films create powerful expectations that are hard to overcome, even when there's explicit textual evidence to the contrary.
Christopher - you are obviously a "Champion for Diversity" in the Star Trek world so why can't you accept the diversity of opinions in this thread? Do you see the irony there?
I trust you're joking, but unfortunately there are plenty of people out there who use just such oxymoronic rhetoric in earnest to attempt to legitimize their bigotry. "How dare you be intolerant of our right to be intolerant?" Rights, of course, are something that apply to other people, not just to oneself. People have a right to believe whatever they wish, but they shouldn't expect everyone else to bend to their will, and they're not being oppressed just because other people assert their own rights too.
And of course there are some things that are opinions, and thus are open to debate, and other things that are simply facts, and thus are not. For instance, it is a fact that white people make up less than 1/5 of the human race and will cease to be a majority in the United States by mid-century. So a depiction of a supposedly global future humanity that depicts it as mostly white and Euro-American -- and uniformly heterosexual, while we're at it -- is not simply a valid alternative opinion, it's a factually inaccurate portrayal. Or else it's a portrayal that implies a high degree of inequality, in which case it's factually questionable to present it as an enlightened and egalitarian future.
By the same token, if we're told that the Federation has 150-plus member species, yet Starfleet is portrayed as overwhelmingly dominated by humans, that's questionable from a purely factual and logical level. It's not even a matter of opinion or belief, it's a matter of the consistency and credibility of the presented facts. Either the presentation is flawed, or there are additional facts being glossed over. The diversity of the Federation, like that of humanity, is an objective fact rather than an opinion, and thus it
must be taken into consideration.
