Where is the Diversity of Starship Crews?

Or All Vulcan, e.g. the Intrepid or ship from the DS9 baseball episode.

Oh, and the very simple fact that this is a production with a limited budget and hiring extras to just stand in is cheaper than hours of make up.

 

As mentioned..
You have a ship with a Human Centrist life support and layout. Some species work well in that environment. Some need extra life support systems like a breather, or a chair. while some species can't operate at all in that environment.
I'm pretty sure there have been a number of aquatic species discovered. They can have areas, like Ceatation Ops, or they can have a whole ship with other aquatic or amphibians species.
Certain ships, like say the Enterprise is a plum assignment, and other speices may endure some extra burden to serve on her. but otherwise, wouldn't bother.
Another explanation would be, Humans are young, and want to explore, some of the older species may have already done there exploring, or are just not interested. You get the ocasional person that joins, but in all, they may join there own ship service. I doubt there is a "Quota" of people they must recruit. exept in war like the Draft.

 

The show seemed more closer about human nature and using metaphor and analogy via alien species as as reference or accessibility point. Since then, it increasingly became a more literal phenomenon.

And, of course, the elephant tooting briskly in the room: Budget also plays a factor. Humans wearing twenty pounds of latex is certainly adequate, though if this were the 1960s they'd stick with ounces and save the rest for gloves, mattresses, prophylactics, and so on...

 

Seems to me they could have done that in TNG but they didn't.

 

Realistically, all we really had was Deanna & Lwaxanna Troi as regular & recurring guest character.

Not exactly a huge diversity of characters.

 

But really TNG squandered the Betazoids. Having a main character, and a prominent recurring character, of the species makes you think they might have delved into Betazoid culture to some extend, but in the end all we got was jokes about mature women with raging libido and the men who run from them, and a visit to a botanical garden in California with some ugly looking "alien" houses painted into the background.
The Betazoids are pretty much untouched ground, we don't even know what "Daughter of Fifth" house means.

I even delved into the novelverse to at least get something on the Betazoids, but both Imazadi and Battle of Betazed (aside from having really unspectacular plotlines and characterization) failed to show anything remotely interesting about Betazed or it's culture (except for the brief mention that at some point they had telekinesis, I think, but they refused to explore that).|

Bottom line is, a species where almost every member becomes a telepath at the onset of puberty ought to be really interesting, but so far the Betazoids just weren't.

 

Right. Exactly. And that's why not developing races makes them little more than window dressing. Betazoids, as presented in ST, have almost no depth. However, creating new cultures to any significant depth is damned hard to do.

 

I would love to see a Lower Decks episode that features a crew exchange, where Mariner or somebody is the lone human - among an "alien" crew of Betazoids, El-Aurians, Ba'ku, Angosians, and every other humanesque species, just to poke fun at the improbable similarities.

 

I would love to see a Betazoid / Brekkian hybrid.

The power of Telepathy / Empathic-Abilities / Electro-Kinesis / Tele-Kinesis.

That would be a powerful hybrid with amazing abilities.

Even if they weren't very powerful in each category, but to have average or above average mastery of each capability would be amazing.

 

Would like more Human diversity shown too.
Not just American Centric..
Go over the world, Filipino, Vietnamese,Chinese,Kazakhstan,Russian,Hungarian,brazillian,etc. Not just a bunch of ameraicans.

 

Yes, that would add to the future Star Trek shows...

The Federation may called it genic engineering...

 

It's the fault of those aliens, really.

After all they are the ones that decided to evolve silly mono-cultures (unlike humans) so tthere's really no use for more than one Klingon, Ferengi, Romulan, or even many Federation species, you name it, in Starfleet. They're all the same anyway. And of course they don't end up all on the same locations so many crews will be conspicuously free of them or at best have one or two.

 

Aliens are people to.

 

Yes, they're people buried in makeup.

 

Soylent green is aliens!

To me, that actually sounds even more repulsive than the original

 

I’d rather see people. Humans. Sure, an occasional alien character is great, and having some in the background reminds us of the multi-species makeup of the Federation…but at the end of the day let’s see some humans doing human stuff.

It’s TV, not reality.

 

I think you hit the crux of the issue. It comes down to budget. The animated shows have lots of aliens. The live action shows, fewer of them.

 

Indeed. I like aliens but prefer humans more. Aliens are always used as a plot point to emphasis some aspect of humanity, either positive or negative. So the aliens don't function in any meaningful way as a people apart.

 

You've met one and they actually refer to themselves as people?

 

On the flip side, the 'aliens' refer to us as 'peeeeeple'.