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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
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Simon_Jester said:
And there's a very narrow gap between saying this and saying "let's go out of our way to declare it the Year Zero and annihilate the pre-existing culture!" Even if you stand on the 'nice' side of the gap, the one where you aren't casually destroying people's customs deliberately, the catch is that it's very easy for slight changes of wording and emphasis to make it look as though you're on the nasty side.

Which is, in my opinion, exactly as it should be. Because it is very, very easy for people caught up in proclaiming how natural it is for a culture to evaporate and fall by the wayside to start welcoming this development.

Likewise, there's a very narrow gap between "this is natural" and "why are you worrying? This is natural!" And "this is a positive good, getting all those primitive languages that don't even have words for the color blue out of the way!"
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You can't get angry at people discussing bad things because "talking about the bad thing is kind of like supporting the bad thing", that's nonsense. You can't pre-emptively get mad at people who haven't done anything wrong, and aren't planning to.

Nervos Belli said:
So what you're saying is we need an incorruptible, benevolent, immortal dictator to preside over our utopian society. All hail our new overlord, Mipek.
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That's the theoretical ideal, though in reality you could never be sure enough that dictator was all of those things to go through with it.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
Perhaps unintentionally, you've loaded down your answer with enough qualifiers to march an army of No True Scotsmen through.

How much planning constitutes 'well planned?' How many ways are there to plan the 'uplift' and end up with all those extra plans becoming counterproductive? Falling apart, because they lead to people trying to carry out the plan past the point where it ceases to work.

What constitutes "competent," and "trained?" An uplift project takes decades or centuries, and each one is unique. It's not something where you can vet people on the basis of their track record of performance in dozens of similar scenarios.

What constitutes "sufficient funding?" This one is fairly obvious.

Who the heck qualifies as professional revolutionaries if real revolutionaries don't?

And how can you assume that 'real, competent, trained' people will somehow materialize to do something so monstrously complicated that every time people volunteer to do it, they screw it up?

Heh.

On a more serious note, however the Federation made its transition to post-scarcity paradise, it didn't do so by following the philosophy of Marx.
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You don't assume anything.

You make a plan based on lots of information on every single aspect of the task at hand, with contingencies for every scenario, taking a couple years (or centuries, if that's what it takes) to study the target, and everything else around that might influence the mission.

You pick your best and brightest, then you spend a couple of years (or however many years it'll take) to teach them every skill they need.

You get a positively ludicrous amount of money, to carry out what is a mega project to the scale of an interstellar polity. The costs are lower for a lower population, so moving in early can have substantial benefits.

When everyone, even the people against uplift can honestly say you are ready as you can possibly be, you make your move.

Why yes, this is ludicrously expensive, in resources, personnel and time. You probably shouldn't go trying to fix other people's problems unless all of yours are already solved though, and this reflects it. The Federation will want to leave uplifts for the future, maybe until a time when everybody around us has stopped being warmongers and the Borg and Dominion are in firm retreat.
 
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Deathbybunnies said:
You can't get angry at people discussing bad things because "talking about the bad thing is kind of like supporting tbe bad thing", that's nonsense. You can't pre-emptively get mad at people who haven't done anything wrong, and aren't planning to.
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Okay, I didn't explain well enough.

The problem is that there's an extremely narrow line between saying "it is the way of the universe" and "it is good."

It is legitimately hard to tell, sometimes, which side of that line a person you're talking to stands on. I'm sorry if I overestimated your position, but I came by that mis-estimation honestly.

Reading Briefvoice's post, I honestly came away with the impression that this is how he thinks things are supposed to be. "Forget our language, it's stupid and doesn't have words for things like 'blue.' Don't teach it to the children, it'll only confuse them."

There is so much racist crap that's come about as a result of this kind of thinking that it's a bit like saying "well, naturally they'll sterilize their defectives." Even if you don't mean some kind of evil by saying it, that's the way it sounds.

065tdsa said:
You don't assume anything.

You make a plan based on lots of information on every single aspect of the task at hand, with contingencies for every scenario, taking a couple years (or centuries, if that's what it takes) to study the target, and everything else around that might influence the mission.

You pick your best and brightest, then you spend a couple of years (or however many years it'll take) to teach them every skill they need.

You get a positively ludicrous amount of money, to carry out what is a mega project to the scale of an interstellar polity. The costs are lower for a lower population, so moving in early can have substantial benefits.

When everyone, even the people against uplift can honestly say you are ready as you can possibly be, you make your move.

Why yes, this is ludicrously expensive, in resources, personnel and time. You probably shouldn't go trying to fix other people's problems unless all of yours are already solved though, and this reflects it. The Federation will want to leave uplifts for the future, maybe until a time when everybody around us has stopped being warmongers and the Borg and Dominion are in firm retreat.
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So basically... any plausible attempt to do it that might actually occur can be classed as "you didn't try hard enough." That's kind of convenient for someone whose argument is "it only works if you try hard enough," and who is dealing with a constant stream of discouraging failures.
 
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Iron Wolf said:
Personal Log, USS Sarek - Lieutenant Solla Payat

Only problem I've had so far is the ground is really slippery. It's actually quite interesting, it's because a comet impact spreaAOOOOOOOOOO
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I bet that in Starfleet there's an informal list of 'most embarrassing things to be inadvertently recorded in a personal log'. This is definitely going on that list.
 
Simon_Jester said:
So basically... any plausible attempt to do it that might actually occur can be classed as "you didn't try hard enough." That's kind of convenient for someone whose argument is "it only works if you try hard enough," and who is dealing with a constant stream of discouraging failures.
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Err, no. You just have to invest a lot. It's expensive. Why wouldn't it be. If they really did invest a lot, and also importantly did their research (I do believe the Shanpurr failed this, since they likely failed to comprehend how the species they are dealing with are different than they are) and got good personnel, who all both capable and in it for the cause rather than themselves, and still fail, then clearly the idea was flawed.

Unless they did mess up, and say, chose a species that was simply too different to properly understand. Or got interrupted by an unfortunate circumstance that could not be predicted.

This is such a complex endeavor, you can't quite tell one way or the other some times. In some cases, trying for uplift will be a bad idea, simply because the conditions aren't there. If that's the case, then simply to try is to commit a mistake. But if the conditions are right, then you can try. If you messed up the assessment of conditions, then that's a failure of your assessment methods or personnel.

Some would argue it's not worth taking a risk on. I say natural development is just as potentially random if not more, it just happens to be free, and feel guilt free. This makes it the preferable pick, but not the moral one.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
The problem is that there's an extremely narrow line between saying "it is the way of the universe" and "it is good."
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I don't think there is - disease and meaningless suffering are both obvious counterexamples - but I really only jumped in to defend people who seemed fairly obviously on the "right side" there.

As for @Briefvoice 's example, you're quoting parts that were hypothetical quotes of the hypothetical cavemen in question. We obviously place a much higher value on those cave paintings than the cavemen probably would with TV available.
 
The thing is, if you look at closely analogous situations in real life (Stone Age villagers who cultivate their land but don't have cities, these are NOT Paleolithic cavemen we're dealing with in-setting)...

Sure, they drop a lot of their old habits and behaviors. But New Guinea highlanders didn't automatically transmute into Englishmen or Australians. They adopted some but not all cultural elements. A synthesis was produced.

I'm not sure how much of that is happening here, given the Shanpurr's "smothering" behavior.
 
I don't feel like I have to "win" this discussion really, or convince people of anything. I put a a few posts for how I'm thinking about these issues, but I'm not motivated to keep arguing even if people are being wrong on the internet.

You want to unleash true passion, have a vote at stake. Or preferably don't; that might be too much heat for this thread.

EDIT: Though one thing I wonder is that people keep bringing in our real life experience with different cultures interacting on our one world with our one species. Surely the Shanpurr had their own periods of history where they had multiple cultures interacting with each other.

How did that work out? What happened when the Shanpurr new worlders met the Shanpurr Europeans? Are their expectations built around that, rather than how it worked in human history?
 
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Yup.

Iron Wolf said:

At the very least, their ships have stood down. No one is calling for Lieutenant Payat to be turned over for people's justice. Indeed, among a few radical groups, she has emerged as the 'Torchbearer of Progress', an ostentatious title I will remind her of constantly.
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Apparently that amused someone.
 
Iron Wolf said:
Something I forgot to comment on:

I dunno about the storage capability of the Hood, but I know outer space by definition has a large cargo carrying capacity. :V
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"Look mum, falling stars, and so many!"

Edit: And, following the PD debate, it's quite interesting how different reader perception can be.
 
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