New Star Trek book series featuring the Borg!
(except it isn’t)
Just a wee bit of plagiarism.
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Is it an AI written set?
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I like a lot of Feral Historian’s videos. And that is wonderful take that I haven’t heard elsewhere.
The idea that industrialization was the turning point and since then all the current ideologies are just variations on it because the means of production, and most of the effects, are the same is pretty profound. I’ve seen lots of videos about ‘money in star trek’ and such, but never one that hits that point.
That he points out that it skips the ‘how’ and gets right to ‘never mind how, what would it be like?’ is also interesting. It’s a big gap. But that kind of thinking can be useful. If that’s where we want to go, then we think about “how do we get from here to there?”. Instead of just thinking “what’s the next thing we could do with what we’ve got?” which at this point mostly translates to “how can we be more profitable next quarter?”
Well, I guess we need replicators. 3-D printers certainly aren’t Star Trek replicators, but they’re a tiny step towards that direction. Energy for them is another thing, of course. And whatever raw materials feed them.
I like the idea of thinking big. Moon shots. Not just for some billionaire’s ego, but because we have some larger long-term goal, and can envision a different world that’s not just “today, but with more profits”.
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Did a DS9 writer write that joke…
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Now I’m questioning my assumption that Borg designations were based on order of assimilation into a sub-unit…
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That’s correct, tho… at least I think so…
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So 7 of 9 is just a 7 of 9?
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James P. Hogan theorised that mostly what was needed was an unlimited power source (and a culture free from bias and prejudice)
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I feel like with our current culture, where people literally compete to use as much energy as possible hoarding digital markers for how much energy they’ve used, an unlimited power source would just cook the world with waste heat. 
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Well there’s a solution for that too, in Larry Niven’s “Pierson’s Puppeteers”:
“I had explained,” said Nessus, “that our civilization was dying in its own waste heat. Total conversion of energy had rid us of all waste products of civilization, save that one. We had no choice but to move our world outward from its primary.”
[…]
“In short, we found that a sun was a liability rather than an asset. We moved our world to a tenth of a light year’s distance, keeping the primary only as an anchor. We needed the farming worlds and it would have been dangerous to let our world wander randomly through space. Otherwise we would not have needed a sun at all.”
Eventually, their sun converted from a yellow dwarf to a red giant, so the Puppeteers moved the “Fleet of Worlds”, the five planets, to their system’s Oort cloud.
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I guess it’s clean power, and the other key element is the culture itself, which is non-capitalistic and non-hierarchical, so people don’t use more power than they need. Idealistic and utopian? I think it was more a thought experiment than anything.
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That’s very fair and I’m not faulting Hogan. I just…feel like in the real world it’s important to remember thermodynamics exists, because there are people who genuinely want to ignore it. In his “techno-optimist manifesto” Andreessen talked about how everyone should someday use a thousand times the energy they do now – and yet even if it were completely clean with no greenhouse emissions or anything, that would still kill us all, simply because used energy is heat and that’s too much of it. Infinite growth on this planet simply isn’t possible no matter what we invent.
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Steve Shives is one of those Luxana haters…
His shirt…
LOL!
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Admittedly, the character’s initial presentation didn’t have a lot of depth… kind of an overbearing “Pepe Le Peu in space,” as the actor said… but her later appearances had so much more warmth and spirit, it’s hard not to like her, IMHO.
…and it’s funny this is coming up now, because I spotted some posts on Bluesky about a potential spin-off:
…and in repsonse to another post (“Best Star Trek crew, wrong answers only” suggesting the Golden Girls):
transport the lanai to Betazed, rename the show “Daughters of the Fifth House,” and you would not have to change a single other thing to seamlessly insert Lwaxana Troi into this ensemble as if she had always been there
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