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V_V comments on In memory of Leonard Nimoy, most famous for playing the (straw) rationalist Spock, what are your top 3 ST:TOS episodes with him? - Less Wrong
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Comments (40)
I hate to spoil the mood for nerd grieving and geek hermeneutics, but Star Trek made a certain kind of sense in the late 1960's (nearly 50 years ago!) when the U.S. and the Soviet Union had real space programs which tried to do new things, one after another. But because astronautics has regressed since then, despite all accelerationist propaganda you hear from transhumanists, this genre of mythological framework for thinking about "the future" makes less and less sense. Given the failure of the "space age," would people 50 years from now, in a permanently Earth-bound reality, bother to watch these ancient shows and obsess over the characters?
I haven really watched more than a few episodes of ToS, but IIUC it never even bothered to be a realistic depiction of how space exploration would look like. It was more e metaphor of the Cold War, in Space!
They will probably idolize some dude who played a vampire. Or zombie. Or BDSM vampire zombie...
Won't they realize that humanity's dreams of obtaining vampirehood and zombiedom have utterly failed? They would never look up to such an obvious fantasy!
The original series was rarely about the political or military tension between the Federation and an opposing major power (i.e. the Klingons or Romulans). It was much more often about dropping in on some planet and solving some local problem; or some psychic effect or setup by superhuman powers causing the crew to reenact a moral or metaphorical drama. Superhuman godlike entities appear more often than the Federation's rivals.
(Klingons only appear in seven TOS episodes, and Romulans in three — out of 79 episodes produced. Alternate Earths, such as those of "Miri" and "Bread and Circuses", and explicit reenactments of Earth social systems, such as the Nazis of "Patterns of Force" or the gangsters of "A Piece of the Action", are about as common.)
If they had BDSM vampire zombies in space I would totally watch that. Once.