/r/startrek

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A casual, constructive, and most importantly, welcoming place on the internet to talk about Star Trek

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Star Trek: Discovery (2024)

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/r/startrek

741,093 Subscribers

7

I mean, I, I am the guy who writes down things to remember to say when there's a party. And then, when he finally gets there, he winds up alone, in the corner, trying to look comfortable examining a potted plant. - Reg Barclay

For anyone with social anxiety, this is such a realisable quote

2 Comments
2024/03/01
17:12 UTC

38

What is the worst Star Trek episode ever?

By today there have been 13 movies and 12/13 shows.There have been over 500 different episodes.Some of them are good,some bad and some just suck.

So by your opinion, what is the worst episode of star trek ever? For me I'd say the ending of Star Trek Enterprise.Makes 0 sense all of the episode set in holodeck on Enterprise-D.

213 Comments
2024/03/01
15:45 UTC

10

How does replicator-style cooking work?

Janeway has programmed dishes her grandmother made, and also ruined a pot roast. Does this imply that "following a recipe" is a matter of entering the correct ingredients in the correct proportions, and just hoping that what comes out tastes similar to what it would be like when cooked by hand? When she burns the pot roast, can we assume she overestimated the cooking time or temperature and it's not the replicator's fault unless it was malfunctioning?

Paris claims that the replicator can't get "plain tomato soup" right. Since the recipe calls for tomatoes, is there a "tomato file" accessed by all Starfleet replicators that was based on one specific tomato, or do they synthesize a variety of tomatoes into one universal flavour?

17 Comments
2024/03/01
14:25 UTC

5

Favorite character by series day 1: TOS (+TAS)

Who is your "favorite" (whatever that means to you) character who appeared in the original series and/or the animated series? Not limited to "main" characters - if they appeared, they're a nominee.

I will do a post each day for the different series.

22 Comments
2024/03/01
14:18 UTC

41

Which Star Trek Alien Would You Say Is The Biggest "Eldritch Abomination" Or Lovecraftian In Nature?

a definition for eldritch abomination for the uninitiated: The Eldritch Abomination is a type of creature defined by its disregard for the natural laws of the universe as we understand them. They are grotesque mockeries of reality beyond comprehension whose disturbing otherness cannot be encompassed in any mortal tongue

star trek has more than a few aliens that could be considered lovecraftian, but one that jumps out to me would be the Crystalline entity...maybe Nagilum too

123 Comments
2024/03/01
13:48 UTC

183

My dog died last night and the exchange between David and Kirk keeps running through my head.

When David tells Kirk he had never really dealt with death before. Though I am no Kirk, I am in the same boat.

I have never dealt with it. Sure, there have been people in my life that have passed, but I, I don't know how to articulate it, I just kind of shrugged it off.

This death though, even though it was my dog, has floored me. I cannot stop crying when I think about her. I have had pets pass before. But, she was the best dog I have ever met. She loved me unconditionally and wholly. The world is a darker place without her in it.

45 Comments
2024/03/01
11:48 UTC

1 Comment
2024/03/01
11:33 UTC

0

Star Trek Science - Cygnokemia

This post contains SPOILERS for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 1

M’benga’s Daughter is Sick. But What Exactly Does She Have?

Feb 29^(th) is Rare Disease Day, so it seems like a good time to talk about a disease so rare that it only exists in Star Trek.

We learn early in season one of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds that Dr. M’benga’s daughter Rukia has cygnokemia, a fictional disease. The show tells us a few important things about it — it affects kids, it’s life threatening and it’s rare, but not totally unknown. It wouldn’t be fair to the show to expect the biology of the illness to be any more detailed than the story’s needs, but the show does give us some details we can use to make up our own explanation of the illness.

We know a few things about cygnokemia from exposition in M’benga’s dialogue. For one thing it’s very rare. It’s so rare in fact that almost no one on a ship full of scientists from the future has even heard of it. We only know of one patient who has it, an 11 year-old-girl.

We also know that cygnokemia is incurable even with Star Trek medicine, and maybe not even totally understood by Star Trek science. It’s implied that there may be a quantum component to the condition, an aspect of disease not known to 21st century medicine and not even really suspected by current science.

Another clue comes in the form of some Star Trek technobabble about re-aligning peptide bonds which, while the line might make some biochemists cringe, does provide the most detailed information about how the disease might work.

As I said at the start, this isn’t enough to really conclude anything, but in my head canon, this combination of evidence puts cygnokemia in a particular category of medical conditions from our world:

Rare heritable diseases

Cygnokemia certainly fits the rare part. A disease is considered rare in the US if fewer than 200,000 people in the country have it. In the EU the definition is a little different. There, a disease is considered rare if it affects fewer than 1 in 2000 people. Those are just the cutoffs, diseases can be much rarer than that. Some diseases really are so rare that it would be believable for a whole ship packed with scientists and doctors not to have heard of them.

But what about the heritable part? We don’t have evidence of disease in Rukia’s family tree. Her mother is no longer living, but if the cause of death were related to cygnokemia the characters would be surely talking about it. So what makes this seem heritable?

It turns out that the term rare heritable disease, while accurate, actually means something more specific in a biological context. Rare heritable diseases are all different and have different causes, but they almost always involve damage to some very important gene.

To understand why damage to a gene can cause disease, it’s useful to think about each gene as a blueprint for a tiny molecular machine. Many individual machines can be made using one blueprint. There are machines that break up food molecules and turn them into energy. Other machines act like pumps that move fluids to where they need to be.

The machines are called proteins. It’s a different meaning of the word than we use when talking about food, but only slightly. Muscle cells are full of machines that use energy to push and pull. When you eat a hamburger most of what you’re eating is those machines. You’ll break them down into pieces to make proteins of your own.

Proteins float around our cells doing their jobs until they eventually break down, fall apart and get recycled. New ones are always being made using the gene as a blueprint. If the blueprint is damaged, the proteins won’t be made correctly.

Some genes are critical to life, others we can do without. Many genes have jobs that are so subtle that scientists don’t even know what they do yet, so we don’t always notice when they break. When critical genes break, we sometimes have backups.

In most cases we have two copies of every gene, one from each parent. Usually if one copy is damaged the other one can compensate, but not always. There are also groups of related genes with partially redundant functions that can fill in for each other — like an extra Klingon liver.

If an import gene is broken in a brand new embryo, a few things can happen. If the damage is serious enough, the embryo might not even result in a viable pregnancy. Pregnancies brought to term often result in kids with rare heritable diseases. Many of these kids will not reach adulthood, but a slim majority do. In adults, rare heritable diseases often interfere with the ability to start genetic families in one way or another.

For all of these reasons, bad copies of genes have a hard time making it into new generations of people. That’s why the diseases are all so rare, the broken genes that cause them are constantly disappearing.

So how does this fit with Rukia’s illness?

Cygnokemia is rare and it’s rare in a way that feels genetic. The show heavily implies that it’s not an acquired disease — no one talks about how she got it or whether it’s communicable. We know that she developed symptoms spontaneously and without warning, an unfortunate pattern shared by many rare heritable diseases.

Like a lot of rare heritable diseases in our world, cygnokemia is lethal in childhood. The lack of treatment options makes sense too. Kids with heritable diseases are, almost by definition, missing a very important molecular machine. This is a fundamental challenge to any treatment. In our world, we often don’t have drugs that can fully make up for missing genes.

Although it’s not possible for most rare diseases today, gene therapy is a promising technology on Earth in the 21st century. This type of treatment might actually let us replace a broken gene with a working one. It would make sense that the technology isn’t perfected yet in the world of Star Trek. Research into it has been largely sequestered by The Federation due to misuse.

If we want to get really speculative, we could focus on the hint that there’s something quantum about the disease. In the world of The Federation, we might expect heritable disease to be mostly managed by family planning. It’s a useful strategy even today and in the future our understanding of genetics will be even better. Maybe this doesn’t work for cygnokemia because it’s inherited through some quantum mechanism that even Star Trek geneticists don’t understand yet.

Finally, we need to talk about re-aligning those peptide bonds. Peptide bonds are the things that hold proteins together. There’s a whole category of real illnesses that result when damage to a gene pushes these into the wrong configuration. They’re called misfolding diseases. Sickle cell anemia is an example. It seems like M’benga is proposing a treatment based on pushing misfolded peptide bonds back into place.

This idea doesn’t quite make biological sense because proteins don’t last that long. A protein is just a short lived machine, the gene is the long term blueprint. Even if individual proteins could be fixed by peptide re-alignment, the gene itself would still be broken and new proteins would still have the damage. It would be like fixing a problem at the sneaker factory by individually repairing each shoe after it shipped.

All of this together suggests to me that cygnokemia is a rare heritable disease. It’s just head canon for now, and probably for good. The show’s exploration of cygnokemia seems to have ended with a time honored Star Trek tradition: plot resolved by magical nebula.

medium

2 Comments
2024/02/29
19:09 UTC

1

Which Star Trek character are you most like?

For me I’d have to go with Picard. Someone who is respected by everybody. A formidable intellect. Classically handsome. A master diplomat, tactician and connoisseur of the arts. Perhaps the greatest ever Captain in Starfle…

Actually on reflection forget that I’m Morn,

2 Comments
2024/03/01
09:44 UTC

53

Michael Barrier who played Lt. DeSalle in TOS "The Squire of Gothos", "This Side of Paradise" and "Catspaw" has died aged 90.

Hi Everyone.

Sad news that Mike Barrier who played Lt DeSalle has died. His character was originally intended to be long term recurring, but the character never really fit and in the end only appeared in a few episodes. After he moved on from his acting career he became a lawyer.

While I never managed to get in contact with him, I know he was alway very receptive to fanmail and autograph requests from Trekkies - although he himself claimed he never watched reruns, had only seen two of the movies, and couldn't remember which of ones he had seen.

https://obituaries.neptunesociety.com/obituaries/plantation-fl/michael-barrier-11688232

12 Comments
2024/03/01
08:15 UTC

5

Artificial organs (TNG and DS9 era)

Picard has an artificial heart, in DS9 Bashir talks about replacing several organs when vedek bareil is having medical issues, Nog has an artificial leg that’s seemingly identical to his other… what can’t the replace?? If you can replace a heart and pretty much every other organ how does anyone actually die? Why not just keep replacing things (aside from ethics)? It seems like the only thing that can’t be replaced is the brain and that’s a maybe from what Bashir has said. In a universe where body parts seem so replaceable it seems like no one should die.

Edit: an unrelated side note: I’m no longer watching DS9 in whatever out of order haphazard repetitive way they’ve been showing up on Pluto tv. My boyfriend is a gem and bought the whole show on vudu (check out the bundle deals, they’re great) so now I’m watching them in order 🥳🥳

31 Comments
2024/03/01
05:20 UTC

129

What episode of Star Trek was ahead of the time?

There are countless episodes which have been ahead of its times whether by showing a concept or technology that is yet to exist or perhaps addressing some social issue that other shows or movies hadn’t. What is an example of this done well or not?

299 Comments
2024/03/01
04:56 UTC

0

Why is DS9 Capitalist?

The rest of the universe seems to be more socialist. They don't mention money atall in most of the federation. Yet DS9 has shops and gambling and finances etc.

I assume that on a ship everything is provided for the crew, but why was this not extended to Starfleet crew on DS9?

I'm interested in both in world explanations, and the writers reasoning.

46 Comments
2024/03/01
03:41 UTC

5

We found a unit with a bunch of Star Trek scripts and signed photographs

Are there any Star Trek fanatics? That would be willing to authenticate some items that we recently acquired. Or just tell us the true value of.

11 Comments
2024/03/01
01:22 UTC

148

AIs are more accurate at math if you ask them to respond as if they are a Star Trek character

39 Comments
2024/03/01
00:17 UTC

43

Are Star Trek books canon?

The books have a lot of information and background that's not covered in any of the shows, which makes me curious.

87 Comments
2024/02/29
23:38 UTC

6

What starship is this?

I was hoping to upload a video, but this community doesn't allow.. I'm rewatching DS9, and at about 11:35 into S5:E17 a ship is seen passing by in an exterior shot which has a saucer section that looks just like an intrepid class, but either with a different nacelle configuration or it is tractoring something. Just thought it was interesting as it seems a bit early relative to when Voyager came out, and compared to all listed apperances of the class, although the EMH was on DS9 in the previous episode...

6 Comments
2024/02/29
23:05 UTC

0

What if tos Kirk and tos enterprise encountered krall?

Ever since I saw star trek beyond with Kirk losing the enterprise and they almost got defeated by krall got me wondering what if the tos enterprise and Kirk encounter krall?

Let me set up the scenario It's 2267 Kirk and enterprise are ferrying supplies to the new starbase Yorktown on their patrol schedule. It's not a snow globe in space and closer to the mushroom space dock we see on earth. Starbase Yorktown is close to a unexplored nebula.

Enterprise arrives, crew gets some r&r. Kirk has meeting with commodore Paris going over ship repair schedules and have some small talk. An alien ship emerges from that nebula and approaches the starbase. The alien begs for help and her crew are on a planet in the nebula needing rescue. Paris orders Kirk and the enterprise to investigate. Kirk obliges Enterprise departs Yorktown to go into the nebula. After some turbulence they exit the nebula. They see a class m planet They take standard orbit approach. They scan the planet and there are signs of technology down there. But there's some weird energy field limiting the sensor.

Then all of a sudden a unknown ship show up on their sensors. Spock says it's not in the database. They try to hail it but no reply. Kirk doesn't have a good feeling about this. Then the ship suddenly scattered into a swarm headed straight towards the enterprise.

This is where I'll leave it to you. Base on what you know of tos how do you think Kirk crew and tos enterprise would do against krall and his drones? Do you sees things playing out similarly or different.

What do you think?

7 Comments
2024/02/29
22:32 UTC

0

I’m selling my collection of first edition rare Star Trek cards. Would anybody here be interested?

Figured I’d check, before I post them somewhere else. 😊

12 Comments
2024/02/29
22:23 UTC

113

Pakleds are stupid

Obviously. But what I mean by that is that the whole existence of the race in the universe is just stupid. It Is possible that I don't remember correctly why they are warp capable (through trade I think) but they would not survive in universe filled with Klingons, Ferengi, etc. Are they supposed to be some satire of humans or Are they just "haha funny" race?

135 Comments
2024/02/29
21:36 UTC

6

In the SNW x Lower Decks episode, my head canon for Spock

is that he intentionally tried out casual smiling Spock on Boimler to fuck with Boimler specifically. He just saw this weedy little future ensign, and his human-ness decided "I'm gonna mess with this guy so much right now". That's not textual, but I thought it fun head canon. Enjoy or disregard.

Edit: deleted an extra 'specifically'

12 Comments
2024/02/29
21:01 UTC

0

Request for space anomalies

I don’t know if this allowed here but hear me out! I would love and appreciate if ya’ll would share with me still images of your favorite Star Trek space anomalies. Including the show and episode from which it came. I am working on an art project. Please and thank you! Live long and prosper, my friends 🖖

8 Comments
2024/02/29
19:09 UTC

3

What to watch next?

Hey people!

So far I watched TNG (great), DS9 (even better!), VOY (meh) and PIC (acceptable)

What should I watch next? I really liked DS9 for the huge continuity in the later seasons. I liked how everything flowed into a bigger picture. I am thinking about watching the one with the huge time jump into the future next, but am unsure.

Based on this, what would you recommend?

12 Comments
2024/02/29
19:06 UTC

30

How long would it take the federation to rebuild after the burn? (Discovery)

In discovery they said the peak of the federation had 350 member worlds. In first contact which took place in 2373 Picard mentioned 150 member worlds. In 3188 (season 3) the Indian relay station nco mentioned they have only 38 member worlds left after the burn. Then in 3190 (season 4) burnham says there back up to 60. So 2 years they went back up 22 worlds. So how long do you think it would take the federation to go back to 350 worlds? Also do you think the federation by the 32nd century would span the whole galaxy? Like what do you think happen to the dominion in the gamma quadrant and the delta quadrant?

40 Comments
2024/02/29
18:55 UTC

1

Enterprise Rewatch

I bailed on rewatching Enterprise half way through the Cogenerator episode.

For all the other series I could watch multiple times. Enterprise I only made it all the way through once.

I have seen multiple comments on the reason the show was not a success attributed to too many shows on at the same time.

If I recall correctly all the shows fell under the production team. It is evident as many of the episodes feel like minor tweaks to DS9 or TNG episodes. How many shuffle craft crashes episodes can you make without them feeling repetitive?

I’m kinda bummed because I think there was a lot of potential material they could have explored.

They looked at pre-Federation earth but they could have also had episodes dealing with pre-TOS Valcans. The Andorian/Vulcan conflict were some of the more interesting episodes so far. Also there are indications that the Vulcans had been monitoring Earth from at least the 1950’s. How did this shape their dealings ENT era earth?

The Klingon story lines. Why the Empire, not feuding houses? In later series even the fully formed Empire is fragile.

Where are all those cargo ships going?

What were the early colonies like?

Why did they need a Borg episode?

12 Comments
2024/02/29
17:55 UTC

15

Does anyone know how many times the Enterprise-D blew up on screen?

I know it happened quite a few times in Cause and Effect, Parallels, All Good Things and in Star Trek: Generations, but does anyone know the official count off the top of their head? Are there any episodes I’m missing?

33 Comments
2024/02/29
17:41 UTC

220

In the Kelvin timeline, which actor do you feel did the best homage to the original character?

Mine is definitely Karl Urban as Bones.

217 Comments
2024/02/29
17:23 UTC

78

Your best Star Trek fan theories - GO!

Blow my mind! What theories that make you go, "Wait, that actually makes sense..."

A few of mine:

  • Q is secretly guiding humanity's evolution, not just annoying Picard.
  • The Borg Queen isn't a ruler, she's a prisoner.
  • Every time a transporter is used, the original person and their consciousness dies.
237 Comments
2024/02/29
17:05 UTC

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