Clones don't work anyway. They easily deteriorate. At least the Feds don't have the tech for them -- not even in the 24th century. .
Where was the probe in The Voyage Home from?
- Thread starter KelisThePoet
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I gave that possibility in the post, when I said
In fact I never actually made mention of either being unaware at all. You have me confused....
While time travel in this movie might appear wrought with danger and complication, it still works just fine - despite being massively handicapped by substandard equipment, time pressures and general lack of resources. If anything, this ought to reinforce Starfleet's faith in time travel by the slingshot method, a technique they semed to consider downright humdrum back in "Assignment: Earth" already!
On a similar vein, why should clones not work? Even primitive ones from the 21st/22nd centuries seemed to be doing relatively well in both "Up the Long Ladder" and "The Infinite Vulcan" - again despite massive plot-specific handicaps that should not afflict the general user of the techniques.
Timo Saloniemi
On a similar vein, why should clones not work? Even primitive ones from the 21st/22nd centuries seemed to be doing relatively well in both "Up the Long Ladder" and "The Infinite Vulcan" - again despite massive plot-specific handicaps that should not afflict the general user of the techniques.
Timo Saloniemi
Yeah, you can definitely point to the substandard equipment, etc. as complicating the time travel. The writers could have done an even better job of limiting time travel, to prevent the question of why it isn't regularly used, but I still think they did a good job, particularly in contrast with stories like "Assignment: Earth."
I'm not familiar with either of the cloning episodes you mention, at least not by their titles and off the top of my head. If they're Next Generation episodes, I've seen them once at most. I've never been very into that show. My skepticism of the idea clones would work is based on my real-world understanding that you need a sufficiently diverse gene pool to keep a species viable; but my knowledge of real-world genetics is about as vague and spotty as my knowledge of The Next Generation to be honest.
I'm not familiar with either of the cloning episodes you mention, at least not by their titles and off the top of my head. If they're Next Generation episodes, I've seen them once at most. I've never been very into that show. My skepticism of the idea clones would work is based on my real-world understanding that you need a sufficiently diverse gene pool to keep a species viable; but my knowledge of real-world genetics is about as vague and spotty as my knowledge of The Next Generation to be honest.
I thought you were responding to a previous post about the probe's awareness of other life. My mistake.
Well, at least the ones in "Up the Long Ladder" ultimately weren't doing relatively well, hence their abduction of Riker and Pulaski. That said, it took them a couple of centuries(?) to get to the point where the cloning was becoming a serious issue. That would be a couple of centuries that Earth (or at least a lot of lifeforms on Earth) didn't have at the time.
I'm reasonably sure Our Heroes figured bringing two humpback whales (hell, they might have settled for one, and they got a bonus with Gracie being pregnant) was the best they could do at the time. If it worked, they could worry about full repopulation later. If it didn't work, then repopulating the whales would probably be a moot point.
That five castaways from a colony ship crash were cloning themselves with such success is suggestive of a method that might have been viable in better circumstances. Then again, the episode suggests that our regular heroes abhor cloning, and consider murder the proper response to any cloning attempt - so it might be implied that the art of cloning was actively forgotten in the intervening centuries, at least on Earth.
Artificially diversifying a bunch of clones into genetically robust populations sounds like a Herculean effort: it involves rewriting the entire genome of an organism, after all. But then we learn that our TNG heroes can do that very thing at will! Or at least reverse the effects of such a swap done by somebody else.
More realistically, whenever the genome of the cloned population proved vulnerable to a threat, that specific threat could be countered by altering a single gene or whatnot. It would be government work, too, so probably not restricted by the rules that got Richard Bashir jailed.
Timo Saloniemi
Artificially diversifying a bunch of clones into genetically robust populations sounds like a Herculean effort: it involves rewriting the entire genome of an organism, after all. But then we learn that our TNG heroes can do that very thing at will! Or at least reverse the effects of such a swap done by somebody else.
More realistically, whenever the genome of the cloned population proved vulnerable to a threat, that specific threat could be countered by altering a single gene or whatnot. It would be government work, too, so probably not restricted by the rules that got Richard Bashir jailed.
Timo Saloniemi
I rather interpreted the situation as them abhoring the non-consensual cloning of an individual.
An alternative in regards to the whales; Starfleet going back and gathering not whales, but whale DNA, and then making fresh clones of a diverse population and turning it loose into the oceans to propagate and flourish the way their ancestors did.
I'd always thought that ever since Enterprise came along, that the Xindi aquatics could communicate with whales as they sound similar.... Maybe they or a similar species sent the probe.
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