Saturday, December 11, 2021

Why Star Trek has become obscene


I used to be a big Trek fan, or at least of some of the franchise elements.
Mostly the feeling of fantastically advanced technology really existing. Specifically, the incredibly cool starships and high-level interactions with aliens. I never cared about the characters' personal issues, more the settings they inhabited and all the implied stuff in the background.
Unfortunately, Star Trek has become almost totally irrelevant and obsolete.
The reason is not the quality of the basic storylines or the acting or the special effects. The problem is the Big Picture - or rather the total lack of it. There has not been the slightest progress since the 1990s.

The series concept as written by Gene Roddenberry almost sixty years ago was original. The new series forbids any analysis or deeper exploration of the setting or background.
They should have looked into what is really going on; instead, they just exploit the franchise to extract maximum value (kind of like how Miscavige exploits Scientology without making up new stuff).
That's too bad. There are so many basic questions and apparent goofs that could be flipped into deeper storylines.

I already gave a clever reason why the Trek aliens look like humans: warp drive only allows faster than light travel to distant areas that are ontologically similar.
This also means the aliens don't really live in our galaxy at all! Each alien species lives around a different star, in a different version of the milky way where they are the only intelligent life that evolved. Because of the warp effect, they can act like they all live in the same galaxy.

And why was there no Singularity in Star Trek?
But there was! Only instead of moving into a higher dimension, it expanded INWARDS.
All the subatomic particles in each solar system were converted into a type of computronium years ago, without changing their relative interconnections. These particles are still controlled by their original creators.
Only the top level remains humanoid. This provides the seemingly supernatural intelligence needed for transporters to work, the universal translator, and more important, behind the scenes mission planning and management.
Otherwise it would be statistically impossible to survive as many perilous missions as the various casts always manage to do.

After half a century, I would have expected more intelligent storylines like that. We NEED to find ways to increase intelligence, or at least to simulate it like the Flynn Effect; but things just aren't improving.
Star Trek and other scifi is about simple feelings, not deep thought.

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