Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Season 3 Viewing (Spoilers)

[Ruin Explorer]

Overall on the episode, I was kind of glad at the reveal, because I was thinking the somewhat silly mouth on the ship looked like something only humans or, well, 40K orks would have built.

It was a good episode generally, fun performances, especially from Scotty. Very watchable.

I felt like they really didn't land the ending for a few reasons:

1) They tried to claim the people who left on this vessel were "the best of us".

Nah. Nope. They weren't. They both assumed Earth was going to die, and that they should just escape and "rebuild humanity" (which pretty much inevitably means "with our descendants as the rulers"), whilst leaving everyone else to burn or suffocate or whatever. What mental traits does that kind of thinking link to? Pessimism and ruthlessness.

And how did the "scavengers" behave? Totally ruthlessly and pessimistically! The latter in the sense that they made absolutely no effort to communicate. Even angry Klingons, even the Borg try to communicate! These people were already well within the bounds of the galaxy, they had eaten ships from all over, they must have encounter live-able planets, probably a lot of them, and did they try to talk? No they did not. Just mass-murder on a scale the Nazis would have blanched at.

2) So this made the whole "we could become like them unless we guard against it" thing seem a lot weaker than it could have been. Because the core issue is that you need to avoid pessimism and ruthlessness, not just that you need empathy (though I always appreciate emphasizing empathy, esp. when we have trash like the NYT and The Atlantic publishing multiple articles implying it's bad*, actually, to care about others). These people didn't even get to the potential empathy stage, because the ruthlessness and pessimism was preventing it. It's all still good Star Fleet values but I think it's a little different to what the writers thought.

And I feel like this is the same "NYC in space" flaw SNW has bumped against a few times (and that Disco expressed when it lauded Elon Musk), in a different from. The idea that because these guys who got on the ship were the academic and skill (and no doubt money/resources) elites, they were "the best of us". Again, no. Being the foremost expert on this and that, and/or knowing how to pilot a spaceship real good do not make you a good person in any way, shape, or form. Abandoning Earth and the people on it because you're afraid (baselessly as it turned out!) does not make you a good person. Also, they put a nationalistic flag on their ship after a war that destroyed most of the nations on Earth... and you guys think they were good people? I get that the people in Star Fleet might not understand how deadly nationalism can be though I guess, because they haven't seen it in action. Need better education!

(I don't fault them for picking the US btw - "The nation that made the show" is pretty much the only choice if you're going to say "This nation sent out a ship that became monstrous!", and you don't want to do a racism or a nationalism/xenophobia yourself.)

EDIT - Actually, y'know what, Pike is right, empathy is the key. Sure pessimism and ruthlessness are a big factor, but I just listened to an anti-empathy article from 2015, and it could basically have been written by whoever was captaining the scavenger ship! I still think "the best of us" doesn't land but empathy does.

3) 7000 dead wasn't weighed against the 100 million they were about to kill, like, shortly, or the untold billions they might kill in future. This really surprised me - did I miss something? Maybe it wasn't seen as relevant because it didn't come close enough to happening?

4) But there was a way out of this where they could have made their point!

They could have used had the last guy, the one who died on the Enterprise, to say or do something that indicated they were essentially slave-soldiers/slave-scrappers to some kind of elite class who were basically intentionally not communicating with outsiders so they could retain their elite status. Then suddenly those 7000 deaths kind of hit. It would also make complete and total sense that the hereditary descendants of the kind of people who ditched Earth because they were afraid would also be the kind of people, who, over generations (especially of privation, as a generation-ship might well have), would place themselves above others, and then even when they had got so successful they didn't need to kill to survive, decided to keep doing it anyway because otherwise they'd no longer be the princelings of this vessel, but like, "just people" (also they might well have been pretty unpleasant to the others, so facing retribution). Suddenly it becomes particularly important not to engage in unnecessary blowings-up if you realize a lot of the people you're blowing up don't agree with the people in charge (or don't really have any choice).

(It is a hell of a choice to one-sidedly decide to "Go full Mad Max bad guy", and keep up that bit for hundreds of years, I must say!)

5) I am a little surprised no-one went looking for these guys. With the eugenics wars, it makes more sense - they were intentionally not telling people where they were going, and had managed to shroud the SS Botany Bay's launch in so much mystery it was considered a bit of a conspiracy theory or myth. But these guys were after that, and surely said "Yo we're headed to Alpha Centauri" or w/e, and at sublight speeds, even incredibly high sublight, would have taken decades to get to wherever. If only like, 40 years elapsed between them launching and there being a lot of warp-capable vessels it seems like someone would have followed their trajectory, caught up to them and gone "Er okay you can calm down now". I mean, maybe they'd just have found a ship full of feral children fighting each other with crude spears for human flesh, but still. There are plenty of excuses - I kind of assume they got sucked through a wormhole given they left at sublight speeds and seem to be coming IN from the EDGE of the Milky War (from the stories), I just felt like that was a little hmm.

My headcanon re: "the best of us" is that Pelia was hamming it up and then laughing to herself that everyone bought it! (again!)

* = They actually stopped doing this now, I just checked, but from like, 2015 to 2022 they did so fairly regularly, before people realized the key proponents of anti-empathy stuff (also called, rather disingenuously "effective altruism") were people like, well, Elon Musk and convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. It is genuinely a mindset fully antithetical to that of the Federation, in that it treats everything as a zero sum game, a post-apocalypse-type deal, where resources are treated as if they were stretched incredibly thin even when they clearly are not and we should only help certain people and only the ultra-elites get to determine who those are. Again, this is basically the people who build a spaceship to ditch Earth.

 

[Ryujin]

Overall on the episode, I was kind of glad at the reveal, because I was thinking the somewhat silly mouth on the ship looked like something only humans or, well, 40K orks would have built.

It was a good episode generally, fun performances, especially from Scotty. Very watchable.

I felt like they really didn't land the ending for a few reasons:

1) They tried to claim the people who left on this vessel were "the best of us".

Nah. Nope. They weren't. They both assumed Earth was going to die, and that they should just escape and "rebuild humanity" (which pretty much inevitably means "with our descendants as the rulers"), whilst leaving everyone else to burn or suffocate or whatever. What mental traits does that kind of thinking link to? Pessimism and ruthlessness.

And how did the "scavengers" behave? Totally ruthlessly and pessimistically! The latter in the sense that they made absolutely no effort to communicate. Even angry Klingons, even the Borg try to communicate! These people were already well within the bounds of the galaxy, they had eaten ships from all over, they must have encounter live-able planets, probably a lot of them, and did they try to talk? No they did not. Just mass-murder on a scale the Nazis would have blanched at.

2) So this made the whole "we could become like them unless we guard against it" thing seem a lot weaker than it could have been. Because the core issue is that you need to avoid pessimism and ruthlessness, not just that you need empathy (though I always appreciate emphasizing empathy, esp. when we have trash like the NYT and The Atlantic publishing multiple articles implying it's bad, actually, to care about others). These people didn't even get to the potential empathy stage, because the ruthlessness and pessimism was preventing it. It's all still good Star Fleet values but I think it's a little different to what the writers thought.

And I feel like this is the same "NYC in space" flaw SNW has bumped against a few times (and that Disco expressed when it lauded Elon Musk), in a different from. The idea that because these guys who got on the ship were the academic and skill (and no doubt money/resources) elites, they were "the best of us". Again, no. Being the foremost expert on this and that, and/or knowing how to pilot a spaceship real good do not make you a good person in any way, shape, or form. Abandoning Earth and the people on it because you're afraid (baselessly as it turned out!) does not make you a good person. Also, they put a nationalistic flag on their ship after a war that destroyed most of the nations on Earth... and you guys think they were good people? I get that the people in Star Fleet might not understand how deadly nationalism can be though I guess, because they haven't seen it in action. Need better education!

(I don't fault them for picking the US btw - "The nation that made the show" is pretty much the only choice if you're going to say "This nation sent out a ship that became monstrous!", and you don't want to do a racism or a nationalism/xenophobia yourself.)

3) 7000 dead wasn't weighed against the 100 million they were about to kill, like, shortly, or the untold billions they might kill in future. This really surprised me - did I miss something? Maybe it wasn't seen as relevant because it didn't come close enough to happening?

4) But there was a way out of this where they could have made their point!

They could have used had the last guy, the one who died on the Enterprise, to say or do something that indicated they were essentially slave-soldiers/slave-scrappers to some kind of elite class who were basically intentionally not communicating with outsiders so they could retain their elite status. Then suddenly those 7000 deaths kind of hit. It would also make complete and total sense that the hereditary descendants of the kind of people who ditched Earth because they were afraid would also be the kind of people, who, over generations (especially of privation, as a generation-ship might well have), would place themselves above others, and then even when they had got so successful they didn't need to kill to survive, decided to keep doing it anyway because otherwise they'd no longer be the princelings of this vessel, but like, "just people" (also they might well have been pretty unpleasant to the others, so facing retribution). Suddenly it becomes particularly important not to engage in unnecessary blowings-up if you realize a lot of the people you're blowing up don't agree with the people in charge (or don't really have any choice).

(It is a hell of a choice to one-sidedly decide to "Go full Mad Max bad guy", and keep up that bit for hundreds of years, I must say!)

5) I am a little surprised no-one went looking for these guys. With the eugenics wars, it makes more sense - they were intentionally not telling people where they were going, and had managed to shroud the SS Botany Bay's launch in so much mystery it was considered a bit of a conspiracy theory or myth. But these guys were after that, and surely said "Yo we're headed to Alpha Centauri" or w/e, and at sublight speeds, even incredibly high sublight, would have taken decades to get to wherever. If only like, 40 years elapsed between them launching and there being a lot of warp-capable vessels it seems like someone would have followed their trajectory, caught up to them and gone "Er okay you can calm down now". I mean, maybe they'd just have found a ship full of feral children fighting each other with crude spears for human flesh, but still. There are plenty of excuses - I kind of assume they got sucked through a wormhole given they left at sublight speeds and seem to be coming IN from the EDGE of the Milky War (from the stories), I just felt like that was a little hmm.

My headcanon re: "the best of us" is that Pelia was hamming it up and then laughing to herself that everyone bought it! (again!)

I was hoping that (if human) they would have been converted to basically the biological operating system of robot suits, and that's where my head canon would like to go, but you're right about the goofy maw on the ship. Also, the guy in the suit was far too clean-shaven for my preferred origin story. Opportunity missed so that they can use the "We have met the enemy and they are us" trope.

And who would have gotten to leave Earth? Billionaires. "The best of us" could have just been ad spin, that also sucked in Pelia as well at the time. If I can't have my preferred head canon, I'll take that instead.

 

[Morrus]

I thought this week's episode was really good, but was anyone else annoyed by the term "low geostationary orbit"?

First off, only Earth has a geostationary orbit - the "geo" refers to Earth specifically, not any old planet. For instance, if you wished to establish an orbit of equivalent characteristics around the Moon, it would be a selenostationary orbit.

Eh. Once a civilisation spreads into outer space, it's perfectly reasonable to extend the use of words like 'geography' and 'geology' without having to remember a different specific word for each of the 40,000,000 stellar bodies in known space. Language evolves, and that is a completely believable--and, I'd say, inevitable--linguistic evolution.

Second, even if we allow that the term has become colloquially applicable to orbits around any planet, there's no such thing as a low geostationary orbit. There is only a maximum of one distance around any given body at which your orbital period will perfectly match its rotational period, such that you appear stationary relative to any given spot on its surface - go any closer or further away and either you're not matching its rotation or you're no longer in orbit but are instead in powered flight.

Yeah, it would be a flight path, not an orbit.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Geostationary orbits are relatively low orbits - 36,000 km for Earth. That's low enough to have very slight atmospheric breaking. The Moon's orbit is roughly ten times the distance. So "low geostationary orbit" can mean the orbit is both low and geostationary (true). It's doesn't imply the existence of a high geostationary orbit.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Yeah, it would be a flight path, not an orbit.

True, however "orbit" can also be used loosely in non-scientific language, to indicate one thing going round another "The M25 is the London Orbital Motorway".

 

[Umbran]

Theoretically, if you built in a basically earthquake-free zone (most of Britain, say), built away from flood or strong winds or similar erosive forces, and used Incan or Greek construction methods you could probably have a structure that was still standing and in very good (not perfect, but very good) condition after early 5000 years, perhaps far, far longer. I expect there will be structures standing today which will still be standing 10000 years from now if no human or environmental event knocks them over.

Note, as an example, that much of the deterioration of the Pyramids of Giza came from human action looting the outer layer of the structure.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And who would have gotten to leave Earth? Billionaires. "The best of us" could have just been ad spin, that also sucked in Pelia as well at the time. If I can't have my preferred head canon, I'll take that instead.

I feel like Pelia would not have survived thousands of years just wandering the Earth, if she was the sort of rube who genuinely bought spin like that, but also she is 100% confirmed as a ham who loves a moment of drama so I don't fault her for pretending like it did, so long after it no longer mattered! I imagine about half the stories she tells are like not very true, given she doesn't seem to have photographic memory or anything.

Note, as an example, that much of the deterioration of the Pyramids of Giza came from human action looting the outer layer of the structure.

Excellent example yes.

 

[Umbran]

Geostationary orbits are relatively low orbits - 36,000 km for Earth. That's low enough to have very slight atmospheric breaking. The Moon's orbit is roughly ten times the distance. So "low geostationary orbit" can mean the orbit is both low and geostationary (true). It's doesn't imply the existence of a high geostationary orbit.

1) There is no appreciable atmospheric drag in Earth geostationary orbit. Atmospheric density at that altitude is some 4x10^-19 kg per cubic meter. If I have done my math right, that means about 3 molecules of air per cubic centimeter. Solar wind will have a larger impact than the atmosphere at that altitude.

2) There is no "low" or "high" geostationary orbit. For each body, there is ONE altitude at which the orbital period will match the length of the sidereal day. If you want to stay geostationary at any other altitude, you must run your ship's drive. Some may call that a "powered orbit", but commonly "orbit" is used to describe the un-powered path of bodies under the force of gravity.

 

[Ryujin]

Geostationary orbits are relatively low orbits - 36,000 km for Earth. That's low enough to have very slight atmospheric breaking. The Moon's orbit is roughly ten times the distance. So "low geostationary orbit" can mean the orbit is both low and geostationary (true). It's doesn't imply the existence of a high geostationary orbit.

After a little over 60 years on this planet I find that most of my recollections about early life could be categorized more as feelings, than actual memories. I can't imagine what that might be like after, say, a thousand years.

 

[Umbran]

The issue is the DNA is evolved, not designed.

Nanites, presumably, would be designed.

So you could have much stronger and more reliable error-correction, which doesn't evolve, because it just doesn't matter that much so long as a creature doesn't get terrible errors before it reproduces.

If you somehow had the tech to build nanites that could build and maintain structures and themselves, then frankly the error-correction would be absolute child's play compared to that first step.

With respect, it ain't that simple. Because error correction means keeping around the data that defines "without error", and that data is subject to the degradations of time, too. One cosmic ray going through your data store, and you no longer have pristine data.

So you keep a backup of your backup, right? And when cosmic rays go through both the original and the copy at different points, which copy do you trust? You technically need to keep a number of backups so large that the probability of bit-rot over enough of them becomes vanishingly small over the expected lifespan of the structure.

And then, you need to have an energy source that lasts as long as well - correcting errors and making repairs cost energy.

Overall, the laws of thermodynamics amount to: You cannot win, you cannot break even, and you cannot quite the game.