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Yes. George Lucas would make a better movie about Star Trek expeditions' real mission, control over dilithium (for warp drives). The real nature of Star Trek's "post-scarcity" society, which is that regardless of how you characterize its politics on a domestic left/right or capitalism/communism spectrum, the Enlightenment thinking underpinning it demands colonial reaping like we see into Africa by large superpowers of various political powers today. Despite 'post-scarcity' for civilian needs, longer term interests remain non-fungible or replicable as goods. The Enterprise's real mission is control over that resource, much like oil, semiconductors, and so on and so on, in our actual world. e: the TOS episode "Elaan of Troysius" is perhaps one of the most honest about the real goal. The Enterpise is sent "Captain's Log: Stardate 4372.5 on a top-secret diplomatic mission" regarding marriage-brokering to secure peace between two planets at-odds. Kirk is told "PETRI: Another thing you should understand, Captain. You have as much at stake as I have. Your superiors made the statement that failure of this mission would be as catastrophic for Federation planning as it would be for our two planets." He eventually discovers the planet is rich in dilithium: "ELAAN: The necklace is supposed to bring you luck. It is of little value. They are common stones. SPOCK: These are common stones? (scans them) See, Captain? Here and here. KIRK: Common stones?. Now I see why the Klingons are interested in this system." The episode ends, though, without Kirk saying "Wait, this was a marriage-brokering mission to secure dilithium? They manipulated me into doing resource politics? Is this what we do? Arrange marriages and governments to get resources?" He continues to narrate every episode saying the mission is to boldly go where no man has before without ever addressing 'why'. Cinema Discusso fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Nov 9, 2025 |
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Nov 9, 2025 09:56
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Gnome de plume posted:I'm going to put forward the bold claim that writers living under capitalism working on a syndicated tv series aren't best equipped for perfectly imagining the realities of a post scarcity utopia Yeah that's why there's maybe an episode per season set on Earth and half of those are time travel stories.
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Nov 9, 2025 10:28
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Yeah that's why there's maybe an episode per season set on Earth and half of those are time travel stories. Gene Roddenberry suggested Star Wars was basically just escapism compared to the 'deep philosophy' of his work. On the other hand, political economy and philosophy is abundant throughout Star Wars but within a realist framework. The fact that it engages our world recognizably is why it works for both children and freaks like me who think the idea of showing prisoners making parts of the Death Star is awesome: it's more awesome if we have something to latch onto than a 'utopian' nothing. Time travel stories like "A Piece of the Action" really show how full of poo poo Roddenberry is. There's no political economy or moral realism to the crime as kitsch setting of the planet or the "sci-fi" framing. TOS philosophy is verbal and aesthetic, often shallow. Later stuff like DS9 pokes at Roddenberry's naivete, but struggle with the utopian framing. Star Wars philosophy is lived, consequential, and emergent from systemic structures, even if wrapped in adventure and myth. Luke’s awakening to the Force begins not in abstract debate but through lived, systemic consequences of Imperial power (seeing the charred, skeletal corpses of his aunt and uncle).
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Nov 9, 2025 11:09
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The Death Star civilians are fine, Phineas and Ferb rescued them all.
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Nov 9, 2025 12:11
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FunkyAl posted:Prime Directive stuff is a little better explored in the Ursula LeGuin books it is stolen from. The Law of Cultural Embargo/Leguin/Hainish Cycle does seem to address the systemic realities of this stuff more. But so does Star Wars in its ripple effects, consistently. Even Disney+ Wars shows the fall of the Empire doesn’t create peace; it creates a power vacuum, local warlords, crime syndicates, and Imperial remnants fill the gap. The New Republic is bureaucratic, overconfident, and blind to the lingering roots of tyranny. JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio can get hosed, but that is how Palpatine, like Pennywise returns as a representation of community rot. Cinema Discusso fucked around with this message at 12:32 on Nov 9, 2025 |
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Nov 9, 2025 12:30
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Gnome de plume posted:I'm going to put forward the bold claim that writers living under capitalism working on a syndicated tv series aren't best equipped for perfectly imagining the realities of a post scarcity utopia That’s the Trek delusion in action: the writers were attempting a ‘post-scarcity utopia’ but were prone to human imperfection, and so their vision features some tiny lil ideological failures because capitalism? Horse poo poo! Star Trek’s writers are unionized workers, with literally decades to have puzzled things out if utopia were the intent. Instead, they gave us volcano sacrifices. Cap Picard does acts of genocide on the regular. Like, it’s hosed up! You ever noticed how the term ‘post-scarcity’ is only ever really deployed as a meme surrounding Next Generation Star Trek? Like, it’s not a term that’s used in the context of reality, or even in the actual shows themselves. “Gosh, I wish there were something we could do about all this… scarcity!” It’s because in both reality and the fiction of Star Trek, it’s not a question of acquiring even more resources but of how those resources are distributed. Post-scarcity utopia in Trek is a fan meme with no basis in the text. Think of how much energy it takes to materialize an entire full teacup and saucer from scratch, every single day. And then Picard just immediately disposes of it when he’s done, instead of just doing the dishes. It’s an unconscionable waste! They create water from pure energy instead of just having tanks of water. Meanwhile Tasha Yar’s from the rape-gang planet. Teams of people wrote this, and kept writing it - consistently - for half a century. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 13:35 on Nov 9, 2025 |
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Nov 9, 2025 13:31
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1.0.1.0.1.0.1 posted:
Idk if you have seen it but the recent Indian movie Kalki 2898 is a Mahabharata / Star Wars mash-up (in part )
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Nov 9, 2025 13:37
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euphronius posted:Idk if you have seen it but the recent Indian movie Kalki 2898 is a Mahabharata / Star Wars mash-up (in part ) That's intriguing, I'll check it out. SuperMechagodzilla posted:You ever noticed how the term ‘post-scarcity’ is only ever really deployed as a meme surrounding Next Generation Star Trek? Like, it’s not a term that’s used in the context of reality, or even in the actual shows themselves. “Gosh, I wish there were something we could do about all this… scarcity!” It’s because in both reality and the fiction of Star Trek, it’s not a question of acquiring even more resources but of how those resources are distributed. Post-scarcity utopia in Trek is a fan meme with no basis in the text. Star Trek doesn't have the vocabulary to deal with the terror of abundance. Donut Economics, degrowth movement, the right to repair etc., would make them fly out of their chairs like ejector seats
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Nov 9, 2025 13:40
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Think of how much energy it takes to materialize an entire full teacup and saucer from scratch, every single day. And then Picard just immediately disposes of it when he’s done, instead of just doing the dishes. It’s an unconscionable waste! They create water from pure energy instead of just having tanks of water. Meanwhile Tasha Yar’s from the rape-gang planet. In DS9 they show that the replicators are assembling things out of tanks of material kept within the body of the machine using a transporter system. That is to say, replicated coffee is transported water mixed with various transported chemicals in a balance intended to recreate the taste of coffee. It's not being formed out of pure energy anymore than a transporter is making a person out of pure energy. This has the implication that, for instance, the Cardassion replicators on the space station are less good at making human food than Federation replicators, since the particular mix of source material they use isn't oriented towards human cuisine. This fits with DS9 being less up its own rear end about the whole post-scarcity thing. Sisko's girlfriend struggles to keep her ship operating and has to worry about satisfying clients. Sisko's dad almost kills himself running his creole restaurant. There's political strife over who gets access to the resources the Federation supplies to Bajor, since they can only provide so much: the "industrial replicators" are in limited supply because you can't just replicate a replicator. It's not exactly a deeply-thought out economic system, but it moves things a bit away from the everything's-free don't-ask-where-it-came-from mindset of TNG.
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Nov 9, 2025 14:02
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The replicators are more "magic" than many Force powers in Star Wars. https://youtu.be/YnNSnJbjdws?si=Tvl0b0fNiW3W-NfN&t=100 If you look closely in this scene, Darth Vader "chokes" this Imperial guy on the Death Star. It might seem like a 'movie mistake', because the eagle-eyed will notice that Vader's hands aren't around the guy's neck. But this is entirely intentional: we know this character doesn't share Vader's faith-based beliefs. He is 'playing along' because, as anyone who's ever sat in any kind of institutional meeting room knows, embarassing someone else too harshly is not something you'd want to have recorded on the 'Minutes' (and Vader is a metre from him and could choke him for real with his hands). So, what the viewer sees (an actor pretending to choke and constrict his neck) is what's actually happening in the scene. Vader's very convincing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV2DLkDPwM8 The films are cheeky enough with this to show Vader choking someone through a screen. You and I know that's simply not possible! But it's canon that this character, while dying: 'Ozzel thought back on his life, coming to the realization that he had willingly given over his entire life to authoritarians. He regretted his choices and wished he had been a rebel spy and shared a life with his fiancée. His last thoughts were remembering a memory from his childhood, one of him running up a mountain to come home for dinner.' Ozzel choked to death essentially willingly, ceasing breathing to play along, since he knew he'd chosen the wrong life - why resist when Vader wants you dead anyway? 'Force choking' is basically a meme/psychological phenomenon of suggestion.
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Nov 9, 2025 14:35
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Oh are we doing this stupid poo poo again?
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Nov 9, 2025 14:46
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Vader's response is more tasteful than telling that MFer he had a low midichlorian count/not too many good swimmers.
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Nov 9, 2025 14:50
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More funny that Tarkin is 'Yes yes you've got magic powers, are any of them actually of help in this situation?'
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Nov 9, 2025 15:00
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The original script's snapback, "You don't know what the gently caress you're Tarkin about" was deleted.
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Nov 9, 2025 15:19
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Sir Kodiak posted:In DS9 they show that the replicators are assembling things out of tanks of material kept within the body of the machine using a transporter system. That is to say, replicated coffee is transported water mixed with various transported chemicals in a balance intended to recreate the taste of coffee. It's not being formed out of pure energy anymore than a transporter is making a person out of pure energy. Actually, that’s exactly what a transporter does: it turns matter into energy, then turns that energy into matter again. Again, think about this for a moment: you have water in a tank somewhere, and you want to fill a cup with that water. Normally, you would just have a kind of faucet on the side of the tank - creating a hole that, when opened, allows the force of gravity to push the water out and into your cup. If the tank is located some distance away, a pump mechanism can push the water through a pipe until it reaches the faucet. Filling the tank with water uses some energy, and pumping it does as well, but not very much. Now, instead of just using basic plumbing, imagine that you have an absurdly expensive machine that fully disintegrates the water in the tank and converts it into pure energy. You then convey the incredible amounts of energy through some kind of electrical system, and then use an even more expensive machine to convert the energy back into matter. In this case, specifically keeping water in the water tank is totally arbitrary. The tank could be filled with literally any matter (though ‘preferably’ something extremely dense and/or easy to disintegrate). So why does the Federation keep tanks of individual component chemicals for the replicators? Because the Federation is a theocracy: they believe that the human soul survives transporter obliteration, and so - according to that same logic - energy derived from water retains its original ‘watery-ness’ and subjectively tastes better when converted into water. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Nov 9, 2025 |
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Nov 9, 2025 15:22
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Americans don't know what a 'kettle' (more specifically, an electric kettle, is) a product almost every home in China, the UK, Australia etc., has. They had to come up with an even stupider way of 'you put some hot water in a cup with a teabag'.
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Nov 9, 2025 15:27
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Yeah that's why there's maybe an episode per season set on Earth and half of those are time travel stories. It's called "Star Trek." If it all took place on earth it'd just be "Trek"
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Nov 9, 2025 15:30
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No, it'd be Wagon Train meets the Twilight Zone, which it already is.SuperMechagodzilla posted:the Federation is a theocracy: they believe that the human soul survives transporter obliteration, and so - according to that same logic - energy derived from water retains its original ‘watery-ness’ and subjectively tastes better when converted into water. That's true, Star Trek is a much better adaptation of Dianetics than that piece of poo poo Battlefield Earth. Cinema Discusso fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Nov 9, 2025 |
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Nov 9, 2025 15:32
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In the Trek universe Roko's Basilisk would be able to meaningfully torture a clone of Riker for all eternity, the only difference is that the other Rikers wouldn't care.
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Nov 9, 2025 15:42
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CAPTAIN’S LOG - MV FREEWINDS Day 217, Caribbean Sea Winds steadier than morale. Crewmen show signs of doubt: auditing sessions scheduled at dusk. Fuel reserves lower than the highs of our spirits. A junior officer was seen thinking critically about Command Intention. We wish her well on her next billion-year posting. Our long-term objective remains unchanged: total freedom, total control, total contribution. End log.
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Nov 9, 2025 15:45
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I always thought R2 mixing up a computer terminal and power outlet in ESB was silly. But now USB outlets are pretty common and I'd like to apologize to him.
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Nov 9, 2025 18:59
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The MSJ posted:What about He-Man where everyone have advanced technology but only the most powerful people have magic? Next to that, the sci-fi technology is almost beside the point. It's operating under the theory of uneven economic development, where a guy can live at a medieval level of technology but also own a hover-tank with laser cannons. Science is frequently indistinguishable from magic, in the Vancian sense where it doesn't particularly matter if a Horde trooper's laser rod is powered by batteries or incantations. RBA Starblade posted:Why don't the Ferengi simply buy the Federation Their whole civilization is based on maintaining trade networks among other unaligned planets that don't have the wherewithal to do it themselves. (That's why their Scripture references interstellar travel and is bluntly racist.) The Federation is wealthy and well-organized, so it only needs to deal with the Ferengi on the fringes, in times of crisis, etc. Ferenginar is a republic of entrepreneurs wherein each individual is encouraged to maximally exploit the wealth of the universe to the ultimate benefit of Ferenginar. But even with the whole universe before them, there's not enough opportunity to go around, which is why  are kept at home and the value of their domestic labour goes unacknowledged. This changes abruptly at the end of DS9, along with a host of social-democratic reforms, presumably because in the context of interstellar trade it's no longer desirable to keep half the species out of formal economic activity. (Zek's eyes light up about women as a market for consumer goods, like that's not the norm on a hundred other planets.)Interestingly, empowered Ferengi women don't dress like Ferengi men. They dress like humanoid women from other planets. Ferengi feminism is intensely liberal, focused on the right to participate in contracts and earn profit. 1.0.1.0.1.0.1 posted:Gene Roddenberry suggested Star Wars was basically just escapism compared to the 'deep philosophy' of his work. Being maximally sympathetic, Trek TOS had a small budget and severe technical and format limitations. It's staged more like a play than the lived-in kitchen-sink drama that's part of Star Wars. That's why its best episodes are ones like "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" and "The Squire of Gothos," which come across like Hammer House of Horrors with much less money.
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Nov 9, 2025 19:03
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I'll also put up "The Way of the Gun" for a TOS episode on the "stage production" side of things. It's a good morality play, and the sets are peak TOS design aesthetic.
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Nov 9, 2025 21:29
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It’s a thankless job defending Star Trek in the Star Wars thread and Star Wars in the Star Trek thread, but someone’s gotta do it.   
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Nov 9, 2025 22:41
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1.0.1.0.1.0.1 posted:The replicators are more "magic" than many Force powers in Star Wars. what is actually happening is that he's becoming aware that there's too much starch in his collar.
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Nov 9, 2025 23:02
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Halloween Jack posted:I think that to a postwar liberal humanist like Roddenberry, "deep philosophy" partly meant escaping grubby little questions of class and political economy to focus on those "concepts that talk." The result, whether you take the out-of-universe (Doylian) or in-universe (Watsonian) perspective, is absurdity. Star Trek's very second episode "Charlie X" shows that Force powers, presented more like magic than in Star Wars, do exist in the canon. Charlie (a proto-Anakin) has them as a result of his time among the Thasians, one of the most powerful species we ever see, who are never revisited. Explicitly, Thasians were once human-like but have "evolved" to become what they are. Yet, the very premise of Star Trek that 'progress' - technology, exploration, reason (Enlightenment values - 'boldly going where no man has before') are fundamentally good. DS9’s treatment of faith and politics begins to get at the idea that reason alone can’t capture the fullness of human experience. But rational engagement with belief still frames the debate. Discovery and Picard show institutions faltering, but they ultimately reaffirm Enlightenment virtues: moral courage, self-reflection, and reform through understanding. So they all end up agreeing with the Fukuyama/end of history or Pinker (everything gets better over time, advancement is better, thing). So, even when Star Trek seems to deconstruct utopianism, it’s performing a kind of dialectical self-correction: very much in the Enlightenment spirit of critique and reform. These assumptions suggest that humans evolving to the point of non-corporeal, all-powerful Thasians as the more advanced species is both desirable and natural: this is similar to Peter Thiel, a literal techno-fascist (look into what he and Alex Karp actually believe via Curtis Yarvin!) that humanity evolving beyond their current form is desirable. Star Trek conflates technological sophistication with moral and social advancement. At times Star Trek seems to recoil at 'transhumanism' as the logical next step of its Enlightenment worldview - recoiling at the Borg, etc., But if you look closely, it consistently fantasizes about forward-progress integration of the transhuman "into" humanity - e.g. a technology advanced being (like Data) itself 'improving' through absorbing emotion or human-like elements that it considers to its highest ideal - "integration" but still on progress's terms. All of this evokes materialist/positivist Enlightenment descendants like Comte (strictly positivist: reality is what can be empirically verified; social progress = growth of scientific knowledge), Tylor (cultural evolution - savagery; to barbarism; to civilization). Of course, this is Leftist Enlightenment thinking via Marx: "history has a rational direction, driven by material progress, culminating in a moral, scientific, classless (the ideal state, as you suggest, in Star Trek writer's thoughts getting in the way of utopian ethical application) society - the Federation." All of these worldviews, and Star Trek carries the Enlightenment faith that truth is what can be known, improved, and shared; Star Wars, Taoism, Buddhism, postcolonial, ecological, feminist/care ethics, existentialism, and mythic worldviews remind us that truth is also what must be lived, felt, and yielded to: the part of reality that refuses to be brute-force mastered.
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Nov 9, 2025 23:32
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Sad news for the thread's many poe fans. Disney don't succumb to fascism challenge (impossible) https://bsky.app/profile/discussingfilm.net/post/3m5bxuqhckc2l No Mods No Masters fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Nov 10, 2025 |
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Nov 10, 2025 18:33
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1.0.1.0.1.0.1 posted:The Law of Cultural Embargo/Leguin/Hainish Cycle does seem to address the systemic realities of this stuff more. But so does Star Wars in its ripple effects, consistently. What LeGuin does that I never see no movie do, nohow, except Interstellar, is add the realities of faster than lightspeed travel into the mix of politics and fantasy. Indigenous characters are horrified after travel because they took a nap and went into orbit and 12 years passed and people are dead. Everyone else just blasts instantaneously through space and they're on Naboo, enjoying Boba.
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Nov 10, 2025 20:05
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FunkyAl posted:What LeGuin does that I never see no movie do, nohow, except Interstellar, is add the realities of faster than lightspeed travel into the mix of politics and fantasy. Indigenous characters are horrified after travel because they took a nap and went into orbit and 12 years passed and people are dead. Everyone else just blasts instantaneously through space and they're on Naboo, enjoying Boba. I’ve always liked the idea that since FTL is already basically magic and thus we don’t actually know how relativity works in those impossible conditions, that there is an inverse effect between how much faster than light you are traveling vs the flow of time. So you’re basically going further backwards in time the faster you go so the math always evens out so that you always end up arriving at the same relative time for both the departure and arrival points.
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Nov 10, 2025 21:17
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galagazombie posted:I’ve always liked the idea that since FTL is already basically magic and thus we don’t actually know how relativity works in those impossible conditions, that there is an inverse effect between how much faster than light you are traveling vs the flow of time. So you’re basically going further backwards in time the faster you go so the math always evens out so that you always end up arriving at the same relative time for both the departure and arrival points. I am not qualified to debate the mechanics of faster than light travel, introducing the theoretical difficulties as an element the characters have to deal with just makes for more interesting stories than occluding it. Like, in Roccanon's World, they HAVE figured out how to transmit information more or less instantly, they have FTL but can't transport people with it, and those two wrinkles drive the entire story. Or City of Illusions, they WERE a Terran Colony but lost communication with the greater Ekumenical Network hundreds of years ago, so the story is much how they're adapting culturally and to the planet's environment. I feel like if you went further backwards in time the faster you went somewhere you might arrive before you left. Good story in there.
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Nov 11, 2025 18:45
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FunkyAl posted:I am not qualified to debate the mechanics of faster than light travel, introducing the theoretical difficulties as an element the characters have to deal with just makes for more interesting stories than occluding it. That's one of the paradoxes, yeah. Time and space are both, as we understand them, relative- however the speed of light is absolute. Mess with that and you mess with causality. Like, this is the Star Wars thread and technology in Star Wars works because it does. Every sci-fi thing has to decide what level of handwavy-ness they're going for- artificial gravity's another thing that is really way out there but gets used a lot, especially in movies/TV because low/microgravity is really technically challenging to fake.
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Nov 11, 2025 18:59
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I read through a solid fraction of early pulp scifi author Doc Smith's bibliography some time ago, and one of the wilder things about it was its complete disregard if not ignorance of light speed. Every space ship could simply accelerate to arbitrary speeds — except that it'd run out of fuel.
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Nov 12, 2025 04:39
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Schwarzwald posted:I read through a solid fraction of early pulp scifi author Doc Smith's bibliography some time ago, and one of the wilder things about it was its complete disregard if not ignorance of light speed. Every space ship could simply accelerate to arbitrary speeds — except that it'd run out of fuel. A lot of the very old stuff literally predates Einstein's theories, Lovecraft had the Mi-Go simply capable of flying between planets with their wings iirc. Kinda funny that one of the only settings I can think of that has multiple different forms of FTL travel, each with their own upsides and downsides, is Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. I think Sword of the Stars also does that more seriously, the space RTS where different factions use different FTL methods that affect gameplay significantly.
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Nov 12, 2025 05:06
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FunkyAl posted:What LeGuin does that I never see no movie do, nohow, except Interstellar, is add the realities of faster than lightspeed travel into the mix of politics and fantasy. Indigenous characters are horrified after travel because they took a nap and went into orbit and 12 years passed and people are dead. Everyone else just blasts instantaneously through space and they're on Naboo, enjoying Boba. Boba lives on Tattooine
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Nov 12, 2025 05:44
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Avatar does that (it takes years to get to Pandora) as does the Alien franchise iirc.
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Nov 12, 2025 05:49
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Everyone knows the Stargate is the superior method for interplanetary travel.
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Nov 12, 2025 14:18
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its common in "hard" sci fi to respect relativity
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Nov 12, 2025 16:10
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I will never respect math
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Nov 13, 2025 07:07
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FunkyAl posted:I am not qualified to debate the mechanics of faster than light travel, introducing the theoretical difficulties as an element the characters have to deal with just makes for more interesting stories than occluding it. That's kind of what happens with the invention of Churten (teleportation) in the later Hainish story, "Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea." The protagonist creates a stable teleportation field that returns him to his home planet just after he left it to begin work on teleportation technology.
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Nov 13, 2025 20:29
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You could say hard sci-fi physics are, relatively speaking, pretty solid.
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Nov 15, 2025 03:02
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