Credits, navy beans, whatever. It's still currency, even if you also eat it.
Posted on 08/19/2012 3:56:19 PM PDT by EveningStar
Sorry to all you Star Trek fans out there. I may be the only science fiction fan in the universe that really hates his guts. He stands in the annals of history with Karl Marx as one of the most vile perpetrators of socialism and communism this planet has ever known. I call him the used philosophy salesman…. and he was good at that job, one of the best.
Today is the anniversary of his birth and I have been constantly reminded of this all morning. Tributes everywhere I look to the man who turned the brains of a generation of science fiction fans to utter mush. If only he had passed on ten years earlier. We would never have had to put up with the inane techno-babble ramblings and neo-communist preaching of the Next Generation.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefreehold.us ...
And Roddenberry's cosmos was largely a military realm, where of necessity business enterprises took a back seat to military requirements. We don't know what earth or its neighbors looked like in Roddenberry's 23rd century. So far as I know, we only see the lightly settled frontier planets and the ships that police them. So it's only natural that private firms and individual enterprise don't play a major role there.
Much of the ideology behind Star Trek (or The Twilight Zone) was tepid Sixties liberalism -- civil rights, civil liberties, international organizations, collective security. If there was some deeper hostility to private property involved, it's hard to separate out the real political edge from the demands of creating a fantasy world -- one that was very different from Earth ca.1966 AD, one that resembled the conceptions people had of outer space at the time, and one that had enough space for adventure and the astounding.
Plato or St. Thomas More or Tommaso Campanella wasn't necessarily advocating putting socialism in practice, when they wrote their utopias. There was a certain amount of fantasy, of whimsy, of allegory involved. Roddenberry was -- well, first of all he wasn't any Plato or More -- but he was more political than they were. Still, there was enough of the fantastic and other worldly in his shows that I don't think you can say that he was sketching an attainable blueprint for a socialist future. Sometimes, utopian fiction is a compensation for the unattainability of dreams, rather than an incitement to realize them.
RIP William Windom.
Trek studiously avoided the bad implications of replicators and holodecks.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned matter transmitters (yet anyway-I haven't read the whole thread yet). One thing I'd like to mention about the replicators and matter transmitters is that they were added to the Star Trek universe for one simple reason. It saved a lot of money in production costs. You don't have to spend time in the series mucking about with landing craft except when the craft has something to do with the story itself. Replicators were essentially introduced for the same reason. No mucking about with menus, waiters, or much of anything else to do with food. It's a time and money saver as far as production costs are concerned.
Warp drive is essentially the same when you get right down to it, and you see it all over the place in science fiction for a very simple reason. Space is big. It's bigger than most people think. Much, much, much bigger than most people think. Download a copy of Celestia if you'd like to personally experience exactly how freaking big space is. Try travelling around the solar system from planet to planet, limited to merely the speed of light, and you get a very small taste of how big the solar system is. Just as an example, here's how long it takes to run through the solar system as it stands at this moment (21:45 CST 08/20/12)
| Planet | Time to Planet |
Cumlative Time> |
|---|---|---|
| Mercury | Begin | -------- |
| Venus | 00:04:13 | 00:04:13 |
| Earth | 00:06:15 | 00:10:38 |
| Mars | 00:14:31 | 00:25:09 |
| Jupiter | 00:54:23 | 01:09:32 |
| Saturn | 01:58:41 | 03:08:11 |
| Uranus | 00:4:03:10 | 07:11:20 |
| Neptune | 02:26:14 | 09:37:34 |
| Pluto | 03:53:45 | 13:19:59 |
I really hope I got the math right with that. Adding time is a PITA, as it uses 3 different bases. Again, all of the above is at the speed of light, and it is actually nowhere near a worst case scenerio for travel distances within the solar system. The planets aren't badly lined up at the moment. The first few planets aren't all that bad, but the last few get really tedious. If, after your little trek, you wanted to make a final stop at Voyager 1, and swipe the LP hanging on the side, that would take you an additional 12:20:09 from Pluto. From Earth straight to Voyager 1 is 15:30:30, which puts that particular spacecraft into the 'really far out' range.
Now, so far I've just been puttering around the solar system. Yeah it's fun, but only really gives you a feel for what the local neighborhood is like. I have some time on my hands though, so lets take a trip to the nearest star. It's 4.242 light years away. so the calculation at the speed of light is pretty obvious. (4.242 years for those of you in Rio Linda) So let's bump things up a bit. Let us propose to have a spacecraft that is able to travel the distance between the earth and the sun (known as an Astronomical Unit) in one second. That's pretty freaking far. It takes light 8:34.9 to get from the Sun to the Earth. We'll round that off to 505 seconds. So, you're travelling 505 times faster than the speed of light. That's pretty honking fast. How long does it take you to get to Proxima Centauri travelling at 1 AU per second? Well, there are 31,536,000 seconds in a year. Multiply that by 4.242 and that gives you 133,775,712. Divide that by 505 gives you 264,902, which, when converted back into time is equal to about 3 days. So, in order to make space travel something that doesn't take years to decades to go anywhere, (Betelgeuse is almost 500 LY away) you have to have a starship that can travel much faster than the speed of light. If you want to leave the galaxy, you're talking a need to travel light years per second.
BTW, Celestia is one of the coolest programs I've ever seen. It is essentially a real-time universe simulator. It is awesome fun for the whole family!
That’s really hypnotic. Damn you!
I was thinking the same thing. It sucked me in for a while.
Marx’ theory is only about how history develops and ‘progresses’. The details of what the ‘End of History’ would look like in practice were left suitably vague by Marx and filled in by others (Lenin, Mao).
I used the word DAMPEN, as in the shock absorber will DAMPEN the oscillation of the spring or restrict the motion of the spring. Definitions: 1. to make damp (you are right here)
2. to deaden, restrain, or restrict
3. to soundproof
Small point- if you dampen the motion you, do not prolong the motion. When you dampen the motion you reduce or restrict the oscillations
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.