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‘Star Trek’ Failed to Reckon with Our Greatest Threat: Climate Change

blacksqr 6y ago
World War III brought industrial activity down to almost nothing, handily ending the threat of global warming.
- qubex 6y ago
  That kind of misses the whole “tipping point” aspect of climate change, wherein crossing a certain threshold is an (essentially) irreversible act. One could argue that any realistic scenario for WWIII would (unfortunately) involve a broad thermonuclear exchange, and therefore a probable “nuclear winter” scenario, but that global chilling is temporary and the climatic system would revert to its warming trend shortly thereafter (after at most half a decade or so).
  - blacksqr 6y ago
    Shortly after WWIII humanity made contact with an alien race, and initiated technology-sharing agreements that one can confidently assume included non-carbon-based energy generation, as well as environmental remediation techniques.
qubex 6y ago
This is a stunningly bad piece of writing, wherein the author ‘criticises’ pieces of work for not foreseeing what came later. Star Trek was written by writers in the 1960s and addresses issues that were prevalent in the 1960s; Star Trek: The Next Generation is similarly focussed on the late 1980s and early 1990s. We’ve already caught up with some of the events that formed the supposed historical backdrop of both series (the supposed Eugenics Wars of the 1990s) and they didn’t happen. There’s occasional mentions of Leningrad which strongly suggest that history was expected to play out somewhat differently in other ways, too (either no fall of the USSR or at the very least no renaming of cities). So what? They’re products of the era that they were written in. Relax. P.S. Discovery isn’t really Star Trek anymore — perhaps the Pike spin-off series will revert to the original. The inherent stupidity of running a starship on mushrooms and darting around the galaxy following pathways of a giant fungal network that somehow evolved to violate the laws of physics is just... demented. Stop trying to impose any logic upon it.

World War III brought industrial activity down to almost nothing, handily ending the threat of global warming.

qubex 6y ago
That kind of misses the whole “tipping point” aspect of climate change, wherein crossing a certain threshold is an (essentially) irreversible act. One could argue that any realistic scenario for WWIII would (unfortunately) involve a broad thermonuclear exchange, and therefore a probable “nuclear winter” scenario, but that global chilling is temporary and the climatic system would revert to its warming trend shortly thereafter (after at most half a decade or so).
- blacksqr 6y ago
  Shortly after WWIII humanity made contact with an alien race, and initiated technology-sharing agreements that one can confidently assume included non-carbon-based energy generation, as well as environmental remediation techniques.

This is a stunningly bad piece of writing, wherein the author ‘criticises’ pieces of work for not foreseeing what came later. Star Trek was written by writers in the 1960s and addresses issues that were prevalent in the 1960s; Star Trek: The Next Generation is similarly focussed on the late 1980s and early 1990s. We’ve already caught up with some of the events that formed the supposed historical backdrop of both series (the supposed Eugenics Wars of the 1990s) and they didn’t happen. There’s occasional mentions of Leningrad which strongly suggest that history was expected to play out somewhat differently in other ways, too (either no fall of the USSR or at the very least no renaming of cities). So what? They’re products of the era that they were written in. Relax. P.S. Discovery isn’t really Star Trek anymore — perhaps the Pike spin-off series will revert to the original. The inherent stupidity of running a starship on mushrooms and darting around the galaxy following pathways of a giant fungal network that somehow evolved to violate the laws of physics is just... demented. Stop trying to impose any logic upon it.