Orville: New Horizons (Spoilers)

[Argyle King]

I'll just come out and say it, then.

Some groups need representation in our culture. It's a tired, predictable, and selfish trope when random cis white men object to that representation because they don't want 'politics' or whatever in their entertainment. And this isn't the first time I've seen you espouse such opinions. I've seen you do it in the RPG forums too. Hell, I blocked you for about a year due to it, unblocked you and the very first thing I saw?

There it was again.

Tell you what -- don't do it. Easily solved.

FWIW,

I generally felt that Orville provided commentary without the overly "woke" pitfalls of sacrificing the story to do it. (The notable exception being the last episode -trying too hard to squeeze something into where it didn't fit.)

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Overall, we liked the new season.

Things we've noticed:
darn near every episode had a song. like a whole song performance. That was kinda weird. This is not a talent show.

the pacing was very meandering, especially the pre-intro starts. Way too much wandering around and not drilling into what the ep is about (We're picking up a passenger from Season 1!). Star Treks of old nailed this pacing down for a 45 minute ep. The problem is less about the time limit, and more about the feel of not getting to the point.

For this last ep, the A and B plot did not align/complement/mirror each other. TNG usually did a good job of this (ex. Brothers. the ep where these 2 kids get in trouble AND Lore gets data in trouble).

What I assume is the B plot, interfering with primitive cultures was predictable, and oddly enough too much Telling, rather than Showing.

A big deal was made about the holodeck instead of Movies. And what we get is you can visit other places. Not actualy story telling (interactive movies). That would have shifted the needle for Lcea(sp?). Because A, she needs a career, and holo-novelist could have been it. B, the solution to her problem was being told in a presentation that if we give primitives tech, the mess it up. Imagine if they'd set the simulator up to take her back home and SHOW what happens. Lcea racing to try to counter each step her people took to misuse the tech she'd brought.

Even if she knew it was a simulation, like a game player, she'd still see how she couldn't make it work out as the game modeled jerks being jerks with new toys.

Even the very point told to her, that the people have to change first, could be discovered/realized by Lcea as she tried that move instead.

What we got was simply folks who knew better telling her the answer in different ways, including a scare video.

Just a missed opportunity.

I kinda expected this to be a twist - she decides to go back, takes her toys with her, and hands them out to her people, and sees how everything goes bad. And then, when the quantum core bombs hit the city, the simulation ends, and Kelly explains that they knew what she was doing and decided to let her see the outcome for herself.
I guess it doesn't quite work, because the simulator works in real time and can't do fast forward. If they instead had some kind of virtual reality simulator where you just get some "neural headset" it would work better.

Wouldn't be surprised if something like this was the original idea but they couldn't make it work.

On a meta-level, obviously this is the fiction behind Star Trek's prime directive and Orville's cultural contamination restrictions.
But neither show really bothered to show the development. I imagine because that's atually difficult to write and show.

And perhaps... It's wrong? The claim is that social and technological development must and will happen hand in hand. I think to some extent it's true - to build nuclear bombs or reactors or the internet it's not enough to have one smart person in a basement. You need a lot of them, and they need a lot of resources that won't be made in their basement. This requires a level of social development where you can even collect such a "critical" mass of people that can build this, which requires a large social group that is able to support them so they can spend all their time with math and experiments rather than growing crops or fending off wild animals or whatever it is that might have plagued most humans in earlier times.

But does it mean we're socially also ready to use them responsible? We worried about a nuclear holocaust for half a century basically. To our credit - so far we averted it, despite a few close calls. Maybe we are more ready than we think? But we also have been very slow to deal with climate catastrophe, and the jury is still out that we can manage that - and that would suggest our technological development was too fast for us.
So, I don't know?

Either way, actually telling that story of how a society destroys itself because it got its hand on alien tech might be worth doing.

 

[Horwath]

But does it mean we're socially also ready to use them responsible? We worried about a nuclear holocaust for half a century basically. To our credit - so far we averted it, despite a few close calls. Maybe we are more ready than we think? But we also have been very slow to deal with climate catastrophe, and the jury is still out that we can manage that - and that would suggest our technological development was too fast for us.
So, I don't know?

Either way, actually telling that story of how a society destroys itself because it got its hand on alien tech might be worth doing.

Well, we did use nuclear bomb nine years before we connected 1st nuclear power plant to the grid.
So, that's us...

If someone gives us star trek replicators, we would make an anti-matter bomb out of it.

 

[Umbran]

The claim is that social and technological development must and will happen hand in hand. ...

But does it mean we're socially also ready to use them responsible?

The claim isn't that if you develop them yourselves, you will be ready. It is that if you don't develop them yourselves, you won't be ready.

 

[Stalker0]

But does it mean we're socially also ready to use them responsible? We worried about a nuclear holocaust for half a century basically. To our credit - so far we averted it, despite a few close calls. Maybe we are more ready than we think? But we also have been very slow to deal with climate catastrophe, and the jury is still out that we can manage that - and that would suggest our technological development was too fast for us.
So, I don't know?

Power
The issue with superweapons is it allows an individual greater ability to inflict harm on the masses. There are always "fringe" or "extreme" elements of any society, that believe things woefully different than that society's core. There are for example people on this planet today that would love nothing more to wipe out the entire species.

Back in the day of swords....well they couldn't do too much damage. Today with super plagues and nuclear weapons, should such a group or individual obtain those weapons, the damage they can do is astronomical.

That is the real societal question when it comes to power. Its not about how to have the middle control such power responsibility, that is "relatively easy" in the grand scope (its not easy, but in comparison), it's how do you control or contain the extremes in your society when access to such power is always a risk?

Greed
While power is a bigger question of the fringe, greed is something that infects us right down the middle. The climate crisis today is a symptom of a bigger general problem.... exponential growth. Every modern system today relies on it, systems that do not grow collapse. Yet it is simple to show mathematically that such growth is absolutely not sustainable. There is a wonderful article here that outlines it: Galactic-Scale Energy | Do the Math. The TLDR, even at a modest growth rate of 2.3% (which is low by today's standards), we will be consuming the ENTIRE GALAXY's energy output in a meer 2400 years. And of course, earth will have been completely sucked dry long before that.

The big societal question is whether we can materially "ever have enough". Can we craft a lifestyle that is simply "good enough" and allow everyone in the world to enjoy it? That is the crazier question that Star Trek and Orville push, far crazier than laser guns and subspace communications. Can we as a species fundamentally change our drives?

At the end of the day we have three paths we could follow:

• Live in a system that constantly grows and then collapses back down. You might assume this is the scenario we live in today, but we control the collapses in our economies well enough that we are more on path 2. A true path 1 scenario would be collapses so great we effectively reset civilization and "start again", which gives earth time to heal and replenish so we can do it all over again.
• Consume all resources and enter a permanent state of collapse. This is the current path we are on, the direction is very clear, its just a question of how fast we run out of gas.
• Build a steady state economy that does not require growth. This is a huge shift, and would likely be a lifestyle most of us would have trouble reconciling with, for it would be a very different state of being.

 

[Ryujin]

On a meta-level, obviously this is the fiction behind Star Trek's prime directive and Orville's cultural contamination restrictions.
But neither show really bothered to show the development. I imagine because that's atually difficult to write and show.

ST: Enterprise explicitly showed when Archer first considered the development of a Prime Directive.

 

[Umbran]

ST: Enterprise explicitly showed when Archer first considered the development of a Prime Directive.

Yep:

 

[Aeson]

Holy cow! The conversation went way beyond the show. lol

It's now on Disney + here in the US. That's a chance for those without Hulu to see it.

 

[Umbran]

Holy cow! The conversation went way beyond the show. lol

Well, we ran out of show, so...

It's now on Disney + here in the US. That's a chance for those without Hulu to see it.

Yep. And that's a chance for it to get popularity enough for another season. One can hope, though I feel it is a long shot at this point.