If they survive contact with the Cardassians, this will need to change.
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
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If they survive contact with the Cardassians, this will need to change.
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- Infraspace
Tense change here, maybe (did, were)?
Are the Shanpurr inspired by anything?
Welp, so much for "the Shanpurr ethos isn't restrictive".
AKuz
Been Better
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- A Rising Tide of Horrors
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- She/Her
This was written before introduction, hence before FC with Voshev.
I'd like to just point out that they are in no way coercive. Just patronizing. I'd almost call them paternalistic, but the term is kinda nonsense from their perspective.
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- Infraspace
Ah, right.
It just reads a bit like an external analysis, which would necessitate first contact to have already happened.
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- Germany
But there is a comparison to Earth-animals...
AKuz
Been Better
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- A Rising Tide of Horrors
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You've never met nosy grandmothers, have you?
AKuz
Been Better
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- A Rising Tide of Horrors
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AKuz
Been Better
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- A Rising Tide of Horrors
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It actually occurs to me that Office 0 /DTI, probably has a dude whose only job is to keep all the tenses straight in their documents.
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Yeah, this is going to explode at some point.
Winged One
Not the Simurgh
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- definitely the ground
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- They/Them/It
We... might have to make some kind of special coursework with the value judgements against what they're doing stripped out, actually. If they feel judged, they might reject the xenosociological knowledge we want them to have, and then they won't know how to stop fucking up as much.
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- Germany
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We might get a cooperation between our scientists, the ISC and the Shanpurr going once the Shanpurr admit that they might have use for other people's insights. And that still has a big potential to end as a great steaming pile of ... .
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- Maybe?
I get the impression that the Shanpurr don't have either the notion or the mere presence of "natural outliers". They're not restrictive out of malice but rather a kind of inexperience with fundamental cognitive or cultural diversity outside of their lifestage cycle. Which makes sense what with their large fuzzy family structure - if everything is ingroup, then there's no need to develop coping mechanisms or neutrality, and the only important question when meeting outgroup is "how do we make these people be ingroup." Hence the uplifts.
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Random Member
Gardener of Human Happiness
- Location
- Behind You
"A bright future is on the horizon.""Let's all live together in peace and harmony, yes?"
And this quest had been doing so well at portraying Vulcans as reasonable people.
An entire city is disrupted, the power grid knocked offline (if this didn't kill anyone, the Vulcans are genius safety engineers - losing all power in a modern human city would kill thousands of the city's inhabitants as critical machinery was without power at the wrong moment and for just long enough to kill by lack of ventilation in constrained spaces, by exhaustion as the old or the ill are trapped in the wrong places for too long, by heatstroke, etc, ect).
Certainly this was a major disaster and the city's emergency responders would need to be very active to avoid a large death toll. So in this disaster situation, having a curfew and seeing uniforms on the street is a bad thing? Sure, they may have made things more difficult in ShiKar in the short term. But are the Vulcans really so uniform adverse that they would react to Starfleet working to stop the extremely serious problem from spreading with such rancour that the Starfleet reputation across the entire Federation is damaged? Really? I would imagine the Vulcans in neighbouring cities were glad that the problem didn't spread beyond ShiKahr.
It sounds like a time rift opened and the awful Vulcans from Enterprise have been dumped into the future.
Aiiii! The star trek "science"! It burrrrrns!
And this shows us that the Shanpurr are not the fuzzy corporeal beings they appear to be, but are instead higher dimensional life forms going incognito.
I am joking of course. But I do think you are somewhat misrepresenting what "Dunbar's Number" actually is (I think unintentionally). It is a limit on the processing power of a meat-computer that needs to fit inside a human skull. While the impact of "Dunbar's Number" may be different in the Shanpurr, their brains will also have physical limits and this will have impacts on how Shanpurr deal with very large social groups, just as "Dunbar's Number" has an impact on human behaviour in very large groups.
This is a common trope in space opera, but I would like to point out that this is basically impossible. It's like rolling a billion dice and most of them coming up 1 when the laws of entropy dictate that there should be roughly equal numbers of each die face.
Most all herbivores eat other animals (mostly insects) as small but important parts of their diet. (Similarly most all carnivores eat small but important numbers of plants in their diets.) The only animals that do not eat other animals on Earth are highly specialized feeders like butterflies (though even that may be a bad example, since the larvae are much less choosy eaters). As a consequence, it takes an extremely brief amount of evolutionary time (as little as hundreds of thousands of years) for herbivores to evolve into predators and vice versa. The ecological niche is easy to fill, but this background on the Shanpurr is implying that somehow on the Shanpurr homeworld the laws of physics that underpin biology are working differently.
Not to mention, on Earth detritivores at least equal and often exceed herbivores in number. What is eating the dead things on the Shanpurr homeworld?
As for aggression, even among animals that are not aggressive for the purpose of eating, aggression is used for other things. Horny male herbivores fighting for mates or territory being prime examples.
Which leads me back to my theory that the Shanpurr are higher dimensional life forms on holiday. Their home planet isn't a natural ecosystem - it is a park!
Of course Star Trek has taken particular glee in ignoring and misrepresenting biological science for decades. See multiple episodes in which evolution is basically treated as "space magic". Warp 10 turning people into salamanders was only the cherry on top of a long and sad tradition. So none of what I say here should be taken as criticism of the omake - it fits within Trek tropes just fine. But if any of those reading this tongue in cheek rant become scriptwriters, please talk to an actual biologist or ecologist before you write an episode about strange alien ecosystems for the scifi show you work on!
Remember, biologists watch television too.
fasquardon
AKuz
Been Better
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You don't need to be.
Any acid in my humour there is due to the way star trek the show has treated my own field of science.
The poor Shanpurr didn't cause these mental scars...
fasquardon
AKuz
Been Better
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- A Rising Tide of Horrors
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You don't need to be.
Any acid in my humour there is due to the way star trek the show has treated my own field of science.
The poor Shanpurr didn't cause these mental scars...
fasquardon
Interestingly, "Shan is an abandoned Park World and the Shanpurr evolved petting zoo animals" makes perfect sense in a Trek like setting.
EDIT: ANd yeah, Trek can be pretty bad. Evolution does not have an endgoal. Or a cosmic plan. DOCTOR
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"Pre-urban" as in Stone Age? Or pre-industrial?
AKuz
Been Better
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Late Neolithic. Just starting the transition to settled cities. Though how much of that was natural and what is Shanpurr influence is impossible to tell without a deep dive of Shanpurr archives by a specialist.
Mmm. And now I think of it, the Preservers were active in the region around Earth less than 50,000 years ago (and they may have been active as little as 2,000 years ago). 50,000 years is probably a short enough time that an unnatural park-world ecology could still lack many predators or icky detritivores since even in the face of so many empty ecological niches, evolution wouldn't have time to fill them well.
So OK, the "grandmotherly Organians" head cannon isn't needed...
EDIT: And if the Shanpurr realize their entire ecology is basically a planet sized over grown park, that would push their urge to intervene even more - their wonderful world was made by the intervention of a more advanced race and it worked for them, so clearly they owe it to pay it forward and cultivate the other worlds they find.
fasquardon
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AKuz
Been Better
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- A Rising Tide of Horrors
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Enough beating a dead horse, or a dead Denobulan in this case.