What's the big deal about the destructive power of Genesis?
- Thread starter Vandervecken
- Start date
Yup; let's remember that Stage II worked like a dream, creating a seemingly perfectly stable jungle inside that asteroid cave.
If we assume that hitting is not a prerequisite, and that getting some rock in the path of the wave will suffice, then it's rather likely that the Genesis planet is simply one of the planets around the Regula star, redone. For all we know, it's the same Class D rock that we already saw:
1) Spock calls that rock "Regula", without any Roman numeral, suggesting it might be the only rock worth naming in the vicinity. ("Regula One" is the name of the space station, apparently. And Regula might be the name of the star; we have other apparent instances of the star name being also used for the name of the lone planet, such as "Omicron Theta".)
2) The Genesis planet certainly is "in the vicinity", as the detonation took place within low impulse range of the Regula rock.
3) We can even see the star in the sky. It must be the same star that Regula orbits, or else the Genesis detonation not only created a new star, but somehow made the old one disappear!
4) The Genesis planet is small, like the Regula rock, judging by its weird close horizons. (Also note that its sunsets and sunrises take place at the same spot on the horizon!)
Possibly so. We can't really tell; we never see, say, Carol take umbrage on the protomatter issue, so she and the entire team might well have been aware of it.
Timo Saloniemi
I always wondered even more why the Klingon ambassador in STIV was allowed to rant non sequiturs as long as he did. Along with objecting to the development of Genesis technology, he starts carping about the existence of the Genesis planet itself, which would be used as a secret base to ... say what again?
Come to think of it, the ambassador appears ready to lay the entire blame for the Genesis project at Kirk's feet and give the rest of the Federation a free pass. Kirk's lucky that the UFP didn't take the Klingons up on that and let Kirk twist in the wind. Especially considering that two movies later they were offered the same choice and they did it.
Insert "no money in Star Trek" joke here.
There's also the ... factor that the atoms of your family and friends might be reconstituted into a bowl of petunias and a rather surprised sperm whale ... a Douglas Adams "WTF?!" factor.
Oh, no, not again.
I dunno -- did the original Bible authors turn over in their graves when Peter Gabriel & co. got together in the '60s? (Possibly!)
Maybe the Genesis device is particularly easy to make. If so, the plans and prototype must be kept a tight secret, lest anyone can make one in his toolshed. Starships, otoh, are impossible to build by anyone but multi-planetary governments.
But is it? It easily did an entire nebula when detonated! That the result was just a single lush jungle world (with occasional bouts of ice age and built-in obsolescence) may be more a reflection of what was lying around within the radius of effectiveness than of what Genesis can really do within that radius, let alone what this radius might be.
Also, you need a well-working warp drive to escape the Genesis wave, whereas the trilithium detonation of a star rather explicitly created a wave of destruction that only moved at or below lightspeed (even if a harmless wave of darkness appeared to move FTL ahead of it). Might be a significant factor when you try to catch fleets of ships by surprise, "By Inferno's Light" style...
...Maybe that's why the DS9 nova bomb contained protomatter. Then again, it also had trilithium.
Timo Saloniemi
Nightmare fuel...
Program the Genesis Device to function like a Van Neumann machine. Once launched, it converts the mass of its target into a near equal mass of new Genesis Devices. They fly to their next targets and then...repeat the process.
Game over, man! Game over!!!
Sincerely,
Bill
Program the Genesis Device to function like a Van Neumann machine. Once launched, it converts the mass of its target into a near equal mass of new Genesis Devices. They fly to their next targets and then...repeat the process.
Game over, man! Game over!!!
Sincerely,
Bill
I always assumed the nebula was just a pretty small one.
True and some 90 years or so later proto-matter seemed to be used quite succesfully to reginite a dead star. So it is possible the use of proto-matter wasn't what caused the failure but rather it wasn't used as intended.
But as others have said whilst a starship is said to be capable of destroying the surface of a planet, but that would take time, meanwhile one Genesis torpedeo would wipe out life and leave a fresh Class M planet which could be colonised.
I never thought about doing that. I am uncertain that the Genesis device can make the protomatter out of what was available.
How much longer would it take for a coordinated starship attack to drop 4-5 destabilized warp cores on a planet? Not a whole lot longer than launching Genesis, I'd say. A difference of seconds at most.
Why would a starship carry destabilized warp cores? Of course you'd need four or five starships in the area to pull that off. With Genesis you need just one to launch it.
What good would a destabilized warp core do anyway? We have seen starships explode when their warp cores fail. The explosions are pitifully weak, failing to even vaporize the starships themselves (instead, debris is seen flying around). You'd need something like a million Yamato death scenes to really hurt a planet.
Somehow, the tiny photon torpedoes manage to pack a bigger punch. Although the preferred bombardment weapon seems to be the death ray anyway: those were used for non-precision work in "The Die is Cast", too, and they generated hypersonic blast rings the size of Australia (assuming an Earth-sized planet, of course; probably the Founder hideout world was much smaller, and her gravity was as artificial as her atmosphere and her stars).
Timo Saloniemi
Somehow, the tiny photon torpedoes manage to pack a bigger punch. Although the preferred bombardment weapon seems to be the death ray anyway: those were used for non-precision work in "The Die is Cast", too, and they generated hypersonic blast rings the size of Australia (assuming an Earth-sized planet, of course; probably the Founder hideout world was much smaller, and her gravity was as artificial as her atmosphere and her stars).
Timo Saloniemi
They'd be carrying them for the specific purpose of destroying a world's inhabited surface. Obviously they wouldn't be so much warp cores as antimatter bombs, but I use the phrase warp core because I'm thinking specifically of the spectacular annihilation of the Yamato in the TNG episode "Contagion."
Ok, you'd need a few ships instead of one ship. Or one cargo ship could carry them all, and be shepherded by 2-3 starships, and the one cargo ship could drop them as the planet rotates--or better yet have a launcher that gets them to a significant fraction of lightspeed, so we have that monster kinetic energy on top of the antimatter blast.
I doubt the amount of protomatter needed to make Genesis can be gotten together in sufficient quantities often enough to make Genesis a weapon that can be turned to as reliably as antimatter for planetary surface destruction--that is, there probably can't be an assembly line of Genesis devices. You'd need to make them each time you find a specific planet you want to terraform (I assume Genesis was designed with an earthlike matrix), and it might take years to get the necessary protomatter together. Wars don't wait.
Kahn could have threatened exactly one world in TWOK; he and his peeps were smart, but they didn't know damnall about Genesis and would probably have destroyed themselves trying to experiment with it.
.."ALWAYS room for some "Aliens" quotes...
"We're in some real pretty shit now, man!"
Your Van Neumann idea would obliterate every. thing.
Pretty. Fast.
So to destroy the Universe, all we have to do is make one tiny point near us expand exponentially fast again, even just for a tiny fraction of a second (~ 10-30 seconds), and that will remove everything we know of entirely, creating a new Universe in its wake.. Source: Ethan Siegel Science Blog
I see the above quote as a sort of parallel idea to yours...but with your idea being more of a "Genesis Juggernaut" than an all-of-a-sudden thing...
YARN
Fleet Captain
What's troubling about Genesis is that it is a perfect colonization device.
And colonization matters in Star Trek. Species and organizations are always fighting over who will have rights over the next alien world.
Sure, you can bombard a planets with high energy weapons, but what you're left with is high energy devastation. Not much point in trying to colonize a charcoal briquette.
Indeed, one can imagine defeated races "scuttling" a planet by making it unlivable for the new landlords.
Genesis shifts the balance of power by combining creation and destruction. Wiping out one world and replacing it with a new, immediately ready for new inhabitants. This provides space for your growing population and leaves you with an immediate "fort/port." One can leave garrisons there, extract resources, and immediately project power in your region from that site.
And colonization matters in Star Trek. Species and organizations are always fighting over who will have rights over the next alien world.
Sure, you can bombard a planets with high energy weapons, but what you're left with is high energy devastation. Not much point in trying to colonize a charcoal briquette.
Indeed, one can imagine defeated races "scuttling" a planet by making it unlivable for the new landlords.
Genesis shifts the balance of power by combining creation and destruction. Wiping out one world and replacing it with a new, immediately ready for new inhabitants. This provides space for your growing population and leaves you with an immediate "fort/port." One can leave garrisons there, extract resources, and immediately project power in your region from that site.
...While OTOH there are free worlds for the taking, a seemingly unlimited supply of them. In "Sanctuary", finding a completely empty world for the Skreeans to settle on was a matter of a couple of days of searching. And nobody seems truly interested in ousting the scores of teeny weeny farmer settlements, one per planet, that qualify for colonies in both TOS and DS9 eras.
People fight because people love fighting. It's not about a shortage of real estate, or even a shortage of real estate with perks such as rare minerals.
In the general case, you can conquer a planet by creating a crater two kilometers wide and one deep in a single spot on its surface...
...Now that is something where Genesis would be of great help. In achieving that, I mean.
Timo Saloniemi
But IT IS. It creates planets with life which, given time, can evolve into sentientness and reach the technological level to make Genesis. It's just a matter of time.
