Imagine the shock he’d be in for if he ever met Q.

Russia is even funnier, given that they don’t even do that anymore.

I’ve not seen much of lower decks tbh. I’ve tried watching it a couple times, trying different episodes in case its just a case of it taking a few to get in stride, but I’ve just not liked it the same as other trek shows, the characters just seem annoying and everything happens too fast.

While I do generally enjoy discovery, I do think It’s still pretty flawed. Not because of the spore stuff, but because of the way that they have to deal with so many “danger to the entire galaxy/universe/multiverse” type events back to back. Like, doing a few is fine, I generally enjoyed the xindi arc in Enterprise for example, but having so many starts to feel very forced after awhile.

I especially find that bit with the spore energy extractor in the mirror universe that could kill all life in the multiverse if not stopped jarring, because, if you have a potentially limitlessness number of alternative timelines, and the massive expanse of space, to develop that tech in, the odds that nobody else ever built one of these drops to essentially zero, except that the existence of the plot at all implies nobody else ever has.

I just use the thing in Firefox where you can attach a website link to the home screen so that it acts like an app and doesn’t show the url bar when opened, that seems to result in the feed being composed of pages (though going back a page isn’t an option at the bottom, just going to the next one.)

To be fair, our ancestors, evolutionary speaking, didnt resemble us that much if you go back far enough. A system that just considers a few key features a “child to be protected” is probably more adaptable than if every change in appearance had to be accompanied with a corresponding mutation to whatever gives us our mental picture of what our young should look like, for them to still get taken care of.

that huge fruit slice is a bit interesting, because it seems like the AI cant decide if its generating a slice of watermelon or red pomelo

I remember a certain episode of batman beyond as a kid giving me a strange fear of “using powers to phase through walls and ending up accidentally falling through the ground”. On second thought though, thats the least of your concerns; you wont actually hit the ground or anything and more importantly you’ll phase through the air molecules as well instead of breathing them

If the romulans on that one ship were able to mentally break an entire cube by just having really bad memories in their heads, maybe the lore would actually allow for something like this

We don’t even know if there is a reason or not. If stuff like cause and effect are properties of the universe itself, they they don’t necessarily have to apply to it coming into existence (and if time and space are merely a part of the universe with no equivalent beyond, then the concept of it being caused by something runs into the issue of there being no time before it for a cause to occur and no place before it for that event to happen in).

There could be some equivalent of all those things of course, that the universe exists within, but we can’t just assume that.

to be fair, if youre arguing about the effectiveness of agencies like the FDA, im not sure that this is really relevant. You can make greasy, sugary, carb laden food out of the safest, purest, most well researched ingredients without any additives and it will still be an unhealthy diet. The FDA cant reasonably mandate that people have to eat their vegetables after all, at least not and actually expect people will listen to them. Im not saying that the FDA actually does do its job better or worse, I dont know that, but I feel like food quality in the sense that an agency like that can control is more a “does this stuff contain toxic ingredients” rather than “does the culture of this area like a well rounded diet”.

looking it up, yeah, thats the one. I dont mind tube noodles, but I prefer smaller tubes that can actually hold their shape

I forget the name, but the one that’s kind like penne rigate, but a much wider diameter tube, with ends cut straight instead of angled. That one literally always falls apart and turns to kinda mushy strips when I’ve tried to cook it or had it cooked by someone else.

Those are the ideas I was referencing as taking decades tbh. Technically a few, especially the laser sail, can potentially get to high enough fractions of lightspeed to get that noticable time dilation effect, but given that makes something that already costs a huge amount of energy, much more expensive than it already is, I’m not sure if you’d actually want to go to those speeds very often.

I mean, saying it would take half of forever with existing technology, when we do not have the technology to do it in the first place, seems a bit redundant. There are any number of hypothetical technologies for travel to relatively nearby stars that, while we don’t have them presently, at least do not violate physics and are more an issue of requiring a civilization of much larger scale than ours to afford to build them rather than one of if they’re physically possible.

An analogy I once saw was this: suppose you were to go back in time to meet a medieval blacksmith, and you show him the blueprints for a modern jetliner. You might, with a lot of explaining of the relevant physics and engineering behind all the parts, be able to convince the guy that the machine could work if constructed. But, he’d have no idea of the process for how many of the parts are made, or the materials they’re made from, and if you included all that information too, the whole process would be so expensive and the size of the economy back then so small that in all likelihood, not even the richest kingdom on earth in his day could possibly afford to actually build and operate one. However, if the blacksmith took all that information and concluded “this can never happen, it’s just too hard”, time would prove him wrong.

Terraforming would seem a bit unnecessary if you can send a crewed ship there. Manned interstellar travel, unless we’re wrong about the whole speed of light thing, is going to take decades at least to reach the very nearest stars (I’d imagine that it is more likely we’d go to those stars first, and only reach Trappist when people from those stars later launch their own ships, until eventually the outer edge of settled space reaches 40ly).

That implies that, if you can send some colony ship to another star, you necessarily have the technology to build a space habitat that can sustain large numbers of humans in sufficient comfort to run a small civilization and all relevant industry, self-sufficiently using only the materials available in space from asteroids and such as inputs. You have this tech first, because the colony ship is itself just one or more of these habitats, on top of some massive propulsion system.

As such, why even bother with terraforming planets? That’s a process that may potentially take millennia to truly finish, longer than it took your ship to even get there with some of the possible propulsion options, will only be viable on a fraction of worlds, and will still get you a place that probably does not have an earth like day or gravity or any number of other differences. You would then be back in the bottom of a gravity well, which requires a ton of energy expenditure to get back into space again. Why not instead, find some asteroids and comets in your target system, there’s probably going to be some around somewhere if our solar system is any indication, and build more of those habitats as needed.

To be fair about that last bit, isnt having engaged in nuclear war at some point relatively common for species in the star trek verse? I seem to recall the Vulcans having done similar?

The species of betta commonly associated with that name has been domesticated for centuries and refined by selective breeding into something quite different from the original form that best suits the role as ornamental fish that people intend them to fill. As such, they’re surely full-release fish by now.

That variety of Sardinian cheese that contains live maggots.

Something something banality of evil