The Orville Season Two - Thoughts?

Maxperson said:

Yeah. I remember it being said in at least one other episode. Last season I think.

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That was the episode where they found out the John was way smarter than they realised. They talked about how with no money, wealth comes from reputation much as they mentioned in the last episode.

Nutation said:

I never bought the claim in the Star Trek universe that the Federation had evolved beyond money, and I don't buy it here. (Have we heard of this before on The Orville?) Replicator technology makes most resource shortages disappear, but it's still damned efficient to have a means of tracking the exchange of value.

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Utopian/post-scarcity economics is only now being discussed seriously, in part because of the impacts of technology on the job market. Right now, the discussion don’t have much in the way of solutions since they’re just now describing the problems and recording the effects.

The first real warning sign I can think of was a circa 2012 (I think) prototype modular robot that could be programmed to do @200 manufacturing jobs for the price of 5 years’ labor of an Indonesian factory worker.

Fast forward to today, we have driverless automobiles threatening any job involving driving for a wage, cashierless retail stores, specialized software that can generate basic legal documents for a growing number of jurisdictions, and medical diagnostic “AI” programs that are about 60% accurate compared to actual MDs...and improving.

A 2017 article estimated 800 million worldwide jobs are in danger of being eliminated by technology in the near future- mostly concentrated in modernized countries. Another (from Forbes, as I recall) claims tech will eliminate 6% of the jobs in the USA by 2030.

These trends are more likely to accelerate than decelerate.

So the question you have to ask is, what good is money when increasing numbers of humans can’t find a job?

The original Star Trek episode “The Squire of Gothos” has a scene in which Kirk rejects the temptation of piles of gemstones as worthless baubles, claiming the Federation had been creating them for years. As of the 1980s, you could buy a rod of synthetic corundum (ruby, sapphire) more than a foot long for @$50. Those rods had clear indicators that they were lab grown. Better ones from that era were indistinguishable from the natural ones. Manmade diamonds- not stimulants like CZ ot YAG, but actual diamonds- are a fraction of the costs of natural ones, but still have telltale signs they’re artificial. With enough time...

Nutation said:

Replicator technology makes most resource shortages disappear, but it's still damned efficient to have a means of tracking the exchange of value.

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I think the point is that physical commodities have zero value because of zero rarity.

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Legatus_Legionis said:

One thing they did not explain was that one planet's "year" are not the same as another planet's "year".

For example:
Earth orbit's our Sun every 365 Earth days.
Venus orbit's our Sun every 224.7 Earth days.

So even if one celebrates their "birth day" in the following week, the actual sign based on when/where they were born could differ planet to planet.

To easily say every planet in the union has a year of 365 days is wrong.

To say instead, "On my home world I would be celebrating my birthday next week" would have been more accurate. And it should have been something Mercer and the crew should have realized.

But if one then looks back at what sign Bortis or Kelly was actually born under, and it might easily be something else from what this planet thought.

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I thought the silliest part of that episode was when the Orville captain didn't understand a word (the name of a constellation, I believe) and the world's leader said "You must have a different word for it."

Tonight's episode was The Orville saying to Trek "This is how you do it", and doing it better.

LaMarr is kind of the anti-Geordie, at least that's the thought I've been having recently. He gave some pretty solid advice here. Of course, when it came time for the breakup I thought, "Yup, we're going to get the full Seth here." And we did, heh. And then he tops it with Ed giving advice on how to fix things.

Seeing Yaphit get jealous was funny, as was his attempt to cheer up Claire later.

Other random musings: Bortas's mustache was funny, and predictably enough Klyden hated it. Even more funny, their son liked it. I like how they had the symphony in the shuttle bay with the orchestra playing with space behind them. Another one of those things things Trek would never do, but kind of makes things feel more real here.

The mustache was bow-chicka-wow-wow worthy.

As for the Isaac/Claire storyline? Well, much like the analog with ST equivalents, I can’t help but think of...

[video=youtube;YlHnpoVYbHE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlHnpoVYbHE[/video]

That mustache would have gone well with his porn binge.

Orius said:

That mustache would have gone well with his porn binge.

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Yep, and THAT means...SETH, YOU MISSED ONE!!!

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