Chaos on the Bridge

Has anyone else seen Shatner's new documentary about the creation of Star Trek: The Next Generation?

I've only seen bits and pieces, but it doesn't seem overly complimentary towards Gene Roddenberry.

Even the most flattering or innocuous accounts of that time are NOT good to Roddenberry.

The trailer is better than the doc.

is it available any place without, ya know, actually paying for it?

I haven't looked yet (although I know it's not on Netflix) but I'm fairly certain you'd be able to obtain a copy through the usual dark places on the web. (Rhymes with "abhorrent".)

The trailer is better than the doc. Some interesting new stories, but overall nothing special.

Anyone seen this, it's on Netflix? It's really good.

Yeah. Already knew some of that, like the bit about the lawyer. Didn't know GR would have just retired if the studio hadn't insisted on going ahead with the series with or without him. Somewhat amused by the fact Paramount was already throwing the idea around for launching the show on a new network they'd own for TNG, but then I remembered they had planned on doing that way back in the '70s with Phase II as well.

Knew most of it. It was interesting nonetheless.

I knew bits and pieces, but not the whole story. What I really found interesting, and I knew this already, but it makes me wonder, is the Berman and Braga kept faithful to GR's vision. I knew that, OK, Everyone knows that. Everyone also knows tha RDM. Didn't so much. The point I'm getting to is that, based off of those interviews, Berman and Braga come off as genuine guys who cared about the franchise and so does RDM. How is it that they managed to fuck it up so bad? Did they just simply run out of ideas or what? No so much RDM, but the other two.

My next question is, can those two ever be redeemed? We know that a new series is coming out and Orci is in charge. A lot of people are happy about it, but, some are cautious. Myself included. I almost wonder if maybe Bermen and Braga should be in charge instead. Yes they fucked up Star Trek, but they also made TNG wonderful, so can they truly be redeemed or is it truly over? Perhaps that should even be a seperate thread? The other alternative would be RDM in charge and in that case, you'd have to mandate him to not go too dark. I'd be fine with that if the circumstances were right.

*bump*

http://www.wordforge.net/index.php?threads/chaos-on-the-bridge.107598/

I melded the two threads.

not Orci, Kurtzman. The latter might actually make something good. He was responsible for Fringe after all.

No, no, a quadrillion times, no. Both have displayed a distinct lack of ability of being in charge.

Have them on board by all means, have them write, but in charge? Hell no.

TV has moved on a great deal since TNG, something neither VOY nor ENT really grasped, and I have zero confidence they wouldn't zip back to the glory days of TNG when any new series needs to be informed by modern TV, and preferably actually take the lead and have a crack at defining how a show should be done.

There is no reason a new Trek series couldn't 'do a GoT', but there are endless reasons why it won't. No need to add another two.

In my opinion it was the late Michael Piller who has escaped much of the blame for sending Star Trek over the cliff thanks to his early death.

It was Piller who became fanatical about the whole idea of Star Trek being about a "family" of characters.

It was Piller who revived the Ferengi as regular foils for the TNG cast during the Third Season.

It was Piller who was most fanatical about Star Trek adhering to the so called Gene Roddenberry "vision" about the future being perfect. Way of example? Piller once killed a TNG story that involved a luxury passenger liner because in his own words "in the future everyone is rich".

Well, that's just part of how Rodenberry's vision was in large part moronic. Why isn't everyone rich enough to have their own Galaxy class starship? One of the functions of money is to allocate resources, and they apparently don't have a rational way to do that. Why can't everyone have a starship? Who decides how many to build, and why do so many people contribute their time and labor to the task?

I enjoyed it. It confirmed a great deal of what I already knew about Roddenberry and the people surrounding him, but it was also nice to get some more stories.

They're a post-scarcity society, hence why they have to bullshit-up things like latinum in order to do kindergarten level tales of capitalism. Material resource isn't an issue 99% of the time, and they're only going to be limited by time, energy and manpower.

You want a starship? Sure, develop the skills to architect, design and engineer the systems, and spend a long time with replicators and the future version of welding equipment and go build yourself one.

Of course you may find it difficult to source antimatter, or microsingularities, to power the thing, so those pretty warp drives you've whipped up won't actually work. And even if you did, you'd need some further engineering-fu to make sure it all worked properly and you weren't killed in a wormhole accident.

In theory, you could replicate antimatter, but that would likely require some mean hacking of it and a vastly reduced lifespan as the replicated antimatter came into contact with your replicator made of matter.

It's never been made explicit, but the only way such a society would function would be by people having a default amount of energy use, supplemented by some form of service to gain extra energy usage. So yeah, everyone is materially wealthy in comparison to our society, but there are still things out of reach of the individual due to limitations of being human or restricted technologies.

No, the design would be easily downloaded to a 3-D printer. There are tens of thousands of different ships in Star Trek. Everybody would have the designs of hundreds.

A default amount of energy to use and extra energy for service sounds like something out of the Third Reich. "Work will let you have light!" The whole Rodenberry universe falls apart because it doesn't make any sense. How often did the Enterprise go to mining colonies where people died while "bettering themselves" because they just love the fuck out of mining on hostile planets for no reward - except twitching death?

You invent scarcities to explain why ordinary people can't have nice things. One high level Cuban government official once explained to Cubans why they couldn't just hop on a plane and leave by saying the amount of air traffic would cause massive aerial collisions, so that leaving just wasn't possible. And people believed his bullshit.

Er, did you actually read anything I wrote? A replicator is a fancy 3D printer for starters, and exactly how big a 3D printer are you envisioning people actually have?

Or would you, as I wrote, create individual parts and put it together?

Uh, no. It's more like a reverse income tax system, or UBI. Alaska, well known bastion of all thing Hitlerish and where everyone dies every day, has a small version.

As for mining, you'd really expect machines to do that, Trek had a lot of ideas for the future, not all of them made sense (passing PADDs about. Why not everyone have one each and transfer the data?). Mining was one of them.

Not inventing scarcities, making reasoned assumption. Unless you know how to 3D print antimatter or singularities? Or have a mile-long 3D printer in your back yard? Go on, wow us.

I remember a guy analyzing Star Trek once pointed out the guy sweeping the floor at Sisko's fathers restaurant. Was that guy "maximizing his human potential".?

Actually if you consider the original series to be the last word on everything Star Trek unlike TNG when Roddenberry was barely able to stay lucid, then Roddenberry's "vision" barely exists at all. TOS was full of references to the crew getting paid or "earning their pay" or using currency (Federation credits).

Nor did it stand to reason logically. Why were there so many colonies from Earth? Historically colonies are established by people unhappy with the status quo or their freedoms and opportunities at "home". If Earth was a paradise then no one would have any reason to leave to go anywhere.

Sisko said "It's easy to be an angel in paradise". He could've also have said accurately "No one leaves paradise for the frontier either".

With the colonies bit, well as Trek referenced Milton on more than one occasion, and to repeat Khan, "better to reign in hell than serve in heaven" would be one reason, as not everyone would agree with the version of paradise they lived in, another would simply be to decrease population density, yet another would be the sheer sense of exploration.

One of Treks strengths is also it's weakness - the fact it is set in the future, but a reflection of the present in order to tell stories. That means you have something of a clash. @Diacanu has highlighted some of the issues with the technology level in the past, but we rarely look into the social clashes, and it's where the holes are.

Money-wise, I think it was TVH that first expressly mentions that there is no money, and that was taken on board with the series' too. You could easily argue the references to earning pay was nothing more than a turn of phrase, and Federation credit was for dealing with cultures that still had financial systems - there would still be trade between Federation and non-Federation cultures, and for that you need something to represent value rather than barter.

It's why I've always been in favour of a full reboot, an actual guidebook could be written then to address a lot of the issues without acting as a noose for storytelling.

I watched the whole thing last week and, while it wasn't an outright attack, the overall message of the documentary was that Gene Roddenberry turned wackadoodle.

FASA's take on Star Trek and economics when they put out the role playing game was probably the best. Which is to say it was much like today with better technology.

Roddenberry was a wackadoodle from way back. Considering he gets so drunk the night before his son is born that he can't even drive Majel to the hospital the next morning speaks volumes about his total lack of character.

It's just not possible to have a plausible post-scarcity economy without money to keep track of things, or limit what people consume.

A guy goes into a pizza shop (no idea why there would be a pizza shop or why anyone would work there, but let's ignore that).

"I would like 50,000 meat lovers pizzas please."
"50,000?! What kind of event are you staging? I should have heard about it by now."
"No event. I'm building a fence."
"That's nice, but why do you want pizzas?"
"To build the fence."
"How many people does it take to build a fence?"
"Not very many."
"Then why do you need 50,000 pizzas."
"Well, each pizza is about a half inch tall and a foot-and-a half wide, and the fence is going to be 6 feet tall and about 350 feet long."
"Your building a fence out of pizzas?"
"Yeah. It'll be a pizza fence."
"You can't do that."
"Sure I can. Pizza is free and I want a pizza fence."
"You're an idiot."
"Oh, are we going to have conflict now? Conflict is not allowed. 50,000 pizzas or I'll send you to a mining colony."

In a post-scarcity society, what you're going to pay for (one way or the other) is effort, intellect/talent/creatvitiy, and the not-easily-reproducible. Guys may still be sweeping floors because it's easier/cheaper than building/programming a sentient robot to do it. Engineers and inventors won't be forced to give away their designs for free...people will pay for downloads of schematics that their replicators can use. Latinum has value because it's not possible to replicate it, correct?

The guy building a pizza fence will essentially be reducing the trash pile in {insert your preferred corner of the formerly-impoverished world}. But he won't be going to a Pizzeria to do it, he'll just use his own replicator, or a public one. If he wants the Pizzeria guy to do it...well, that Pizzeria guy is getting paid for his effort, because he wouldn't be in business for shits & grins. Even if Pizzeria Guy only does is because he loves making pizza, I'm pretty sure he'll pass on making those because no one is that dedicated. So his likely response is going to be: a) You're an idiot, and b) Do it yourself.

I don't see how even with Star Trek technology you can advance the "replicators can make anything". To make anything requires energy. And energy is never unlimited and thus free. Even matter/antimatter generators do not produce power in unlimited quantities.

That's horribly, horribly wrong. Firstly, money is a carrier of value - it's not meant to have intrinsic value (it does in material), but represents a token of barter, it isn't actually a limiter of consumption in and of itself (potential consumption varies, from infinite where cost = 0, to none where cost > volume of money.) Now we know there are plenty of variables in assigning value, however we know scarcity and labour are primary causes (see supply/demand and the paradox of value.) Remove both of these and value of anything drops towards zero.

At this point money is no longer a viable token of value, as everything has effectively deflated towards (but not reached) zero. Your monetary system is dead, it is no longer a rational measure of value because both scarcity and labour have been taken out of the equation.

And here we have what are the new forms of value, time and energy.

Let's say it takes one replicator one minute to create a pizza, that's almost 35 days if he's got one replicator. Guess what? Pizza guy will tell you to fuck off and user your own replicator, they're not spending 5 weeks playing Candy Crush whilst the replicator does the work.

But if you do want to make a fence out of pizza, go for it. Post-scarcity says you can. May take you a whole lot longer than whizzing up some wood though.