williams_482

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I would have struggled to date the station given just the exterior, personally. A 2260s (or earlier) origin seems well within the bounds of possibility.

How many Starbases does Starfleet have? It seems that their numbering system is not truly sequential, as SB343 was existant in 2256, while SB173 was brand new in 2365. SB80 could be quite old, or relatively new but using a repurposed spaceframe from an older space station which had received a major upgrade.

 

This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Lower Decks 5x05 Starbase 80?!.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

I really liked this one. I think it did a good job making Starbase 80 fit into the universe as more than just a joke (why does starfleet have a starbase that everyone knows just totally sucks? Well, because of a bunch of weird circumstances, and also it's more complicated than the reputation).

Interesting, although unsurprising, that Mariner apparently didn't hang around SB80 long enough to figure out that there was more there than met the eye. A lot of the stuff uncovered in this episode should have been noticeable to a new transfer.

Who actually was Bargh? He's the "leader of the Klingon Oversight Council," who are supposedly tasked with approving the eligibility of officers. That doesn't sound like a body which would actually command ships or fleets directly, but Ma'ah describes his ship as being part of Bargh's fleet. Bargh's death is also not presented as something that would significantly shake the Klingon government. Kor had been on this council (and rejected Martok) in 2345, but Kor would have been approaching 100 at that point and likely wasn't especially active in day-to-day military command.

So is Bargh essentially a minor administrator on a power trip, or a person of significant status and power who commands fleets but also has a role on this relatively minor council? My inclination is the former, and Ma'ah is expressing some sour grapes in referring to "his" fleet, but it's not clear.

[–] williams_482@startrek.website 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How did you do this?

 

This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Lower Decks 5x04 A Farewell to Farms.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

[–] williams_482@startrek.website 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Transporter clones appear to be vanishingly rare. We're aware of two (Thomas Riker and William Boimler), and the circumstances around Thomas Riker's existence were clearly unheard of to any of the people investigating. Clearly this is not a thing that transporters normally do, or are even capable of outside of extremely unusual circumstances.

It also seems pretty dystopian to require the insertion of artificial genetic markers to make a person more easily recognizable. Would we expect "normal" identical twins to be treated similarly? Or actual clones?

I think the larger lesson on this incident from Starfleet's perspective is that they need to beef up their internal security practices. Big shocker, that. Thomas Riker is neither the first nor last person to successfully impersonate a starfleet officer and cause major troubles in doing so, and most threat vectors can't be solved by preemptively identifying likely perpetrators (such as this likely very offended transporter clone) and modifying them specifically to make infiltration more difficult.

 

This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Lower Decks 5x03 The Best Exotic Nanite Hotel.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

Starfleet seems to have an interesting relationship with the media, giving privileged access to reporters who are willing to make at least some of their subjects look bad. Low-ranking officers also evidently know a whole lot about weird and embarrassing things that other crews have done, so at least basically mission logs must be relatively easy to access.

There are counterexamples, but on the whole, it doesn't seem like the kind of information that would matter to that magazine is controlled much at all.

 

This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Lower Decks 5x01 Dos Cerritos and 5x02 Shades of Green.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

 

It's easy for us to understand that The Doctor is a sapient being.

After all, he acts like one! He's got a slew of odd personality quirks, balances irritating behavior with kindness and sympathy, behaves in a similarly slightly erratic manner as most of us flesh and blood creatures, and responds to difficulties with every appearance of genuine emotion. It's extremely easy for human audiences to look at the early seasons Voyager crew as bigoted for their slow acceptance of him as a "real" member of the crew, and react very harshly to later challenges to his personhood from people outside of the crew. It's not uncommon to see that behavior referenced as proof that 24th century people are no more "enlightened" than the obviously flawed people of today. And maybe they aren't; that's not my topic for today.

But the element I think that argument is missing is something these 24th century people have been exposed to all their lives, and we in 2024 have only begun to encounter: soulless, unconscious entities capable of impressive imitations of a real person.

24th century holograms appear as perfect copies of physical humans, with perfectly recognizable voices, normal human mannerisms, and convincingly human speech that responds naturally and automatically to nearly any expected or unexpected input. Any of us unknowingly tossed onto a 24th century holodeck would be totally convinced that these people projected around us and interacting with us are as real as anybody we meet today: nothing they do will clue us in to the fact that we're interacting with philosophical zombies.

Most of us first encountered something like this when ChatGPT and it's ilk suddenly got really good and easily accessible just a couple years ago. Suddenly a computer could create text that read like a human had written it, responding to context and occasionally interjecting very human behaviors (like making up answers to stuff it didn't know, and attempting to gaslight anyone who called it out for being wrong). A shocking number of modern people seem to genuinely believe that these bots show real consciousness (even some who really ought to know better). And it's not hard to understand why, when these bots can spoof every text-based indication of humanity that most of us look for.

People of the 24th century have spent their entire lives interacting with bots that smash the Turing Test even more thoroughly, and on every level imaginable. They can walk onto a holodeck and spin up a person from scratch who looks, smells, feels, and sounds completely real, who talks coherently and shows perfectly ordinary physical mannerisms. And they also know, with ironclad certainty, that these creations are no more human and no more alive than a tricorder or a hyperspanner. Just about all they have to definitively prove if someone is real or not lies in if they can exist outside the holodeck.

Enter The Doctor. He's very definitively a hologram. When first activated he's no more real than any other holographic creation, and only slowly grows in unanticipated ways which slowly convince his crew that he's become something more than that. This process is slow, but it's actually a bit of a surprise that it happens at all. Excepting Kes and Neelix, everyone on Voyager is quite accustomed to holographically generated people who act human but are purely a facade. That this very reasonable prejudice could be overcome at all should be seen as a triumph of empathy. It's not at all surprising that the people back home on Earth aren't buying it, and can't even be persuaded beyond a bare minimum threshold of plausible uncertainty.

I theorize that people who are growing up right now in an environment of very convincing AI chatbots will find it easier than we did to recognize holographic beings in Star Trek shows as sophisticated extensions of those internet bots, and will mirror the slow acceptance by Voyager's crew that The Doctor is something more than that.

So what does that mean for us? What do we do as more of our instinctive indicators of another person's humanity are effortlessly aped by machines? This is a difficulty which Star Trek shows had only begun to grapple with, but it's fertile ground for future episodes and undeniably a relevant question for our day.

[–] williams_482@startrek.website 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Apparently your tap water is dramatically colder than any house or apartment I've lived in.

[–] williams_482@startrek.website 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Yes, putting ice in water does make me enjoy it more, and no, letting the tap run doesn't do nearly as much to cool it down as ice cubes do.

[–] williams_482@startrek.website 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It's really depressing how any internet discussion about global warming is full of comments like this which only exist to downplay small but existent improvements that others have made. It's whataboutism, plain and simple, and only serves to discourage people from doing anything at all.

This guy getting a more efficient stove isn't going to save the planet, but at least it helps. Your comment (and many others in this thread) doesn't do anything at all about our climate problem, and mostly serves to make other people feel stupid and inadequate for even trying to do something.

There is so much, so fucking much, that needs to be done to save our planet. If you think that political change is the only thing that will "really" matter to save the planet (it's obviously going to be a huge factor), and you are so deeply committed to the ideal that the only things worth doing are those which directly further said political change, then you have serious work to do on your messaging strategy because what you had to say here clearly isn't causing global change.

Alternately, if you think the situation is so impossible that nothing can be done to save it, go find a different void to yell into and stop trying to drag down those of us who still have some hope.

[–] williams_482@startrek.website 3 points 2 months ago

Voyager's original CMO was a Lieutenant Commander, which is presumably pretty typical for a ship of Voyager's size. Bashir was commissioned as a Lieutenant Junior Grade to be the CMO on a backwater space station, so that's presumably the bare minimum.

I would expect the Doctor's first official rank (whatever that might be) to stick with him, plus promotion as appropriate. Adjusting it up and down based on posting would be a bizare thing to do for any other crewperson, and I'm sure The Doctor would object vigorously to such a thing.

[–] williams_482@startrek.website 1 points 2 months ago

Unfortunately, there was definitely more going on than that. The genetically modified children were telepaths who could move physical chess pieces with their minds.

[–] williams_482@startrek.website 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm very fond of Jack Frost. It's as corny and delightfully bizare as one could want from a Russian mythology movie made in 1965 USSR, and the riffs are obviously great.

 

Darwin Station was an explicitly Federation genetic research facility which was creating human children with telepathic and telekinetic powers, rapid physical maturation, and immensely powerful active immune systems (the last of which unwittingly killed the crew of a transport ship). This seems like precisely the sort of genetic engineering which has been banned in the Federation since it's conception, in regulations which are repeatedly referenced in TNG, DS9, and VOY. And yet, nobody even hints at there being an ethical, legal, or regulatory issue with what these researchers are doing. Dr. Pulaski even says of one augment child, without any apparent concern, "We could be looking at the future of humanity."

One would think that if one has a broad reaching policy against genetic augmentation principally motivated by the genetic wars, and by subsequent reinforcement of the idea that arbitrarily enhanced people are likely to be dangerously unstable, this sort of genetic program is exactly what that policy exists to prevent. And yet, there is it.

So, what happened here? Was this the product of a brief lull in Federation policy regarding genetic augmentation? A Federation research team going way off the rails, meeting an Enterprise crew feeling unusually liassez-faire about Federation law? Or something else?

 

Brentford's defense held up alright, but they really struggled to move the ball through midfield or spring any really dangerous looking counters against a team that has had shown some real defensive frailty this season. Of course it's hardly a shock that a squad missing Norgaard and Jensen was lacking in midfield technical ability, or that Saman Ghoddos might be imperfect defensively while moonlighting at left back.

All things considered, this could have gone much worse.

 

Domination.

 

The injuries just keep on coming, don't they?

Hickey is out with a hamstring injury until 2024, leaving the team with midfielder Vitaly Janelt as seemingly the only remaining option on the roster to play left back. I imagine his primary backup would be Ghoddos, or possibly Ben Mee? Mbeumo has been frequently deployed in that spot when chasing games, but surely he won't be used there under normal circumstances.

Hopefully Flekken's "dead leg" is a strictly temporary issue and he'll be back out there against Liverpool on Sunday. He hasn't exactly impressed this season, but Strakosha's only start of the season was disastrous and he was barely challenged in goal on Saturday (although his distribution was pretty good).

 

This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Lower Decks 4x10 Old Friends, New Planets.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

 

Lucky to be a full 2-0 for sure, but Brentford were the better side.

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