this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
1020 points (99.5% liked)
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
5280 readers
996 users here now
/c/TenForward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags. This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'
~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.
Fun will now commence.
Sister Communities:
Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!
Creator Resources:
Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)
Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Quaint isn't "frowned upon", that's two different states. A 1950s pompadour hairstyle is quaint, certainly no one frowns on it like they would, say, to teardrop tattoos near your eyes.
It's just that, in my sci-fi reading experience, the attitudes towards radical life extension always seem to be very conservative, even in a universe tossing black holes around and engineering galaxies, that's all great fun, but someone wants to live longer? Oh no, let's go back to the 18th century!
Like even the '90s show The Twilight Zone, or was it The Outer Limits, a scientist works on life extension with science, and the "moral" of the story was that the universe would punish you with supernatural retribution. I found that episode very stupid.
Of course I want my 25 year old body back. Anyone rational would want that. Even in a modest non-black-hole-tossing universe, imagine the health care savings. It would be unethical to NOT reverse aging.
Yet somehow giving birth in hospitals is OK, as are antibiotics... etc etc etc
It makes little to no sense to me. Of course life extension is desirable, especially anti-aging.
But then again we live in a world in which people actively cheer on, and fund, endless wars.
Despite all our posturing as a society about choosing life, etc, we are just a species of death-loving mortalists. With spaceships for some reason.
(I think that our present infatuation with AI will eventually lead to having enough computing power and mathematical models, to understand every atom in a cell, what reactions they participate in, and therefore how to deal with the unwanted, or long-term undesirable, chemicals. Which well then require yet an even larger simulation to see what effects that will have. I have little hope for the wilder consciousness transfer ideas, I think "me" is inextricably linked to the present state of my brain, and therefore extending the meat life is what needs to happen.)
I think this reflects our current culture. A lot of people seem to really think that death is what gives life meaning, and that bitter experiences are good because they make sweet experiences better. (They really need to understand The fable of the dragon-tyrant)
On top of that, even for people that don't see death as a "positive", many tend to think of life extension as making aging simply last longer, that you'd continue to get more frail and dotty (or whatever) for another decade or two.
There is fiction that celebrates radical life extension, but it is at least as rare as people that want radical life extension. And, even then, many of those people (myself included) as captured by the idea of uploading or otherwise separating the consciousness from the body, which doesn't seem to be what you want. https://www.fullmoon.nu/Resurrection/PrimarySpecies.html
We have plenty of examples of consciousness running on meat. I have none of consciousness separate from the body.
I am unconvinced of "meat" being a uniquely-suitable substrate for anything remotely like consciousness. I think the crazy amount of silly things that turn out to be Turning-complete is sufficient evidence that meat is unlikely to be unique.
Tho, certainly, I'm not ready to be the first volunteer to be digitized or whatever.