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The cure for rapid aging (or late youth) is the transporter (1, 2, 3), psychic magic (4, 5), or nothing (6).

I think I've found all or almost all the episodes that deal with *rapid* age changes. The Bashir episode is questionable, as the aging only occurred in his mind. I can't think of any relevant Voyager or Enterprise episodes. Q's kid ages rapidly for Janeway, but that's sort of to be expected.... There are several episodes that take place partly in the future (the end of Enterprise; the DS9 episode with old Jake Sisko; the end of TNG; the end of Voyager; the icy planet crash landing episode of Voyager; Time's Arrow, kind of--Data's head at least ages 500 years in the course of the episode...), but those don't constitute rapid aging. Picard's hand ages rapidly in Timescape, but that's just one part of his body and doesn't require a "cure" like the other episodes I listed.

If I've missed any (even questionable ones), let me know :).

The cure for rapid aging (or late youth) is the transporter (1, 2, 3), psychic magic (4, 5), or nothing (6).

I think I've found all or almost all the episodes that deal with *rapid* age changes. The Bashir episode is questionable, as the aging only occurred in his mind. I can't think of any relevant Voyager or Enterprise episodes. Q's kid ages rapidly for Janeway, but that's sort of to be expected.... There are several episodes that take place partly in the future (the end of Enterprise; the DS9 episode with old Jake Sisko; the end of TNG; the end of Voyager; the icy planet crash landing episode of Voyager; Time's Arrow, kind of--Data's head at least ages 500 years in the course of the episode...), but those don't constitute rapid aging. Picard's hand ages rapidly in Timescape, but that's just one part of his body and doesn't require a "cure" like the other episodes I listed.

If I've missed any (even questionable ones), let me know :).

The cure for rapid aging (or late youth) is the transporter (1, 2, 3), psychic magic (4, 5), or nothing (6).

I think I've found all or almost all the episodes that deal with *rapid* age changes. The Bashir episode is questionable, as the aging only occurred in his mind. I can't think of any relevant Voyager or Enterprise episodes. Q's kid ages rapidly for Janeway, but that's sort of to be expected.... There are several episodes that take place partly in the future (the end of Enterprise; the DS9 episode with old Jake Sisko; the end of TNG; the end of Voyager; the icy planet crash landing episode of Voyager; Time's Arrow, kind of--Data's head at least ages 500 years in the course of the episode...), but those don't constitute rapid aging. Picard's hand ages rapidly in Timescape, but that's just one part of his body and doesn't require a "cure" like the other episodes I listed.

If I've missed any (even questionable ones), let me know :).

The cure for rapid aging (or late youth) is the transporter (1, 2, 3), psychic magic (4, 5), or nothing (6).

I think I've found all or almost all the episodes that deal with *rapid* age changes. The Bashir episode is questionable, as the aging only occurred in his mind. I can't think of any relevant Voyager or Enterprise episodes. Q's kid ages rapidly for Janeway, but that's sort of to be expected.... There are several episodes that take place partly in the future (the end of Enterprise; the DS9 episode with old Jake Sisko; the end of TNG; the end of Voyager; the icy planet crash landing episode of Voyager; Time's Arrow, kind of--Data's head at least ages 500 years in the course of the episode...), but those don't constitute rapid aging. Picard's hand ages rapidly in Timescape, but that's just one part of his body and doesn't require a "cure" like the other episodes I listed.

If I've missed any (even questionable ones), let me know :).

The cure for rapid aging (or late youth) is the transporter (1, 2, 3), psychic magic (4, 5), or nothing (6).

I think I've found all or almost all the episodes that deal with *rapid* age changes. The Bashir episode is questionable, as the aging only occurred in his mind. I can't think of any relevant Voyager or Enterprise episodes. Q's kid ages rapidly for Janeway, but that's sort of to be expected.... There are several episodes that take place partly in the future (the end of Enterprise; the DS9 episode with old Jake Sisko; the end of TNG; the end of Voyager; the icy planet crash landing episode of Voyager; Time's Arrow, kind of--Data's head at least ages 500 years in the course of the episode...), but those don't constitute rapid aging. Picard's hand ages rapidly in Timescape, but that's just one part of his body and doesn't require a "cure" like the other episodes I listed.

If I've missed any (even questionable ones), let me know :).

I'll trust Starfleet medical on this one.

-when the United Federation of Planets finally installs that Weather Modification Network over Earth and we can put all this behind us. Well, at least until Q shows up..

I wonder why Samsung stopped at that movie. ST:TOS had them well before the 2001 A Space Odyssey came out. How the **** did this patent get approved and why isn't the judge laughing them out of the courtroom with punitive damages for wasting the court's time?

Two great concepts were introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Episode 5x06 The Game. Suckdisk, and medical virtualization of the human brain. Now one of these is one step closer to reality!

I still anticipate the actualization of Suckdisk.

Abiogenesis is a complex enough topic that we still don't know if that's true or not. It certainly seems that, yes, once life got started it was pretty darn good at surviving, but we still don't have answers to basic questions like "how common are small rocky planets with fast-spinning iron cores and nitrogen-based atmospheres?" Further, Earth has undergone a lot of potentially unlikely events: like this, this (which, if true, gave us our iron core), and this. We can't even detect Earth-like exoplanets yet to compare; many of the known exoplanets are so-called "hot jupiters." (Which sounds to me like a euphemism for "failed companion star," but I digress.) We may never fill in enough of the Drake equation to determine how many times life has arisen, if it's arisen at all.

One thing's for sure, though: it hasn't developed far enough to obliterate the observable universe yet. This is a little unfair, as it means we're expecting civilizations further away from us to have developed quicker (so that we can see them with our historical view of distant space) and we're pretty sure that life can't develop until the stars have gone through one or two metal-enriching supernovae (the earliest universe was almost nothing but hydrogen; living organisms require a huge range of transition metal ions to do redox reactions)... so really the safest assumption would be to go off our own figures, and say that anything further than about 4 billion LY away probably hasn't gotten through abiogenesis yet, and we shouldn't even bother with it.

That being said... there are some things about the nature of the periodic table that seem almost too perfect. Most of the non-metals, especially in period 2 (the second row) all have very flexible and useful properties, and carbon, utterly essential to stable life, forms naturally when a star dies. There's also some iffy evidence that biomolecules as complex as glycine and the nucleobases have been found in space. So it's easy to start suspecting that the universe was tuned (either deliberately or by luck over many permutations) to develop Earth-style life—but a better way to look at it, and one that's particularly good at dismissing radical alternative biochemistry hypotheses, is simply that life arose out of that which was most abundantly available, and that is because, regardless of vanishingly tiny probability, it had the most chances to roll the dice.

And that is why bringing up this crap is pretty much the "In Soviet Russia" of biology.

Are they referring to the road-type of cars, or something more similar to ski-lifts? The orbital tether from Star Trek Voyager comes to mind.

Are they referring to the road-type of cars, or something more similar to ski-lifts? The orbital tether from Star Trek Voyager comes to mind.

Looks pretty similar to me. Just extend the screen a little and thicken the border some.

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/File:DS9_arboretum_plan.jpg

Granted, it's from DS9 rather than TNG, but that's still 1994.

That is fairly brilliant, actually. Hotel Utopia Planitia. The whole hotel could host one or more murder-mystery-scale adventures at once, sort of like a gigantic magic motion ride. Only some elevators need to be special though, and the bridge.

Wrong Trek. That's Captain Picard's uniform. ;)

This is the dro^H^H shirt you're looking for...
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Redshirt

General Cartwright has NFI what he is asking for.

Cartwright's an Admiral. They don't have Generals in Starfleet.

Oh wait...

Did you mean Ceti Alpha V?

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Ceti_Alpha_V

Are there no Star Trek fans online today? I thought for sure there would be references to bio-neural gel packs by now.

Apple as species 8472 would be appropriate in this regard- but I think very few people would get the reference. The borg are an iconic part of star trek and few enough people get that. (if you don't know who species 8472 is, here's the memory alpha link. They're a Chuck Norris-like race that started destroying entire borg planets after the borg attempted to assimilate them.)

[citation needed]

PADD stands for Personal Access Display Device.

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/PADD

Consisting of a large touchscreen display and minimalistic manual interface or control panel (generally only one or two buttons), the typical PADD is used for a variety of functions including logging manifests, compiling duty rosters or diagnostic reports, entering personal data, and/or accessing library computer systems.

You can do similar things with an iPad.

LCARS

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/LCARS

In the 24th century, graphical controls housed underneath touch-sensitive clear panels allowed LCARS panels to be quickly reconfigured by users to suit the task at hand, including a tactile interface for visually-impaired officers. (VOY: "Year of Hell") This enabled even complicated tasks to be executed with just a few button presses. LCARS also controlled the retrieval and storage of files in the data banks housed within the ship's computer cores.

Sounds a lot like the iPad to me.

[citation needed]

PADD stands for Personal Access Display Device.

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/PADD

Consisting of a large touchscreen display and minimalistic manual interface or control panel (generally only one or two buttons), the typical PADD is used for a variety of functions including logging manifests, compiling duty rosters or diagnostic reports, entering personal data, and/or accessing library computer systems.

You can do similar things with an iPad.

LCARS

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/LCARS

In the 24th century, graphical controls housed underneath touch-sensitive clear panels allowed LCARS panels to be quickly reconfigured by users to suit the task at hand, including a tactile interface for visually-impaired officers. (VOY: "Year of Hell") This enabled even complicated tasks to be executed with just a few button presses. LCARS also controlled the retrieval and storage of files in the data banks housed within the ship's computer cores.

Sounds a lot like the iPad to me.

Not directly but... http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition Rule 98 Every man has his price.

PADDs have been used on-screen to open doors, take inventory, sign contracts, read text, watch video with audio, display diagrams, activate site-to-site transports, compose a novel, and download information wirelessly from other computers. It's not clear to me that they could run arbitrary code, though it certainly fits. Mostly they're used for data entry and retrieval, and they also make a convenient place to put buttons that do plot-related things. See the Memory Alpha article for more.

Wesley with tractor beam was The Naked Now (which was a dreadful episode and firmly established hatred for Wesley). I can't think of any episodes where the whole ship was controlled via a PADD. My knowledge of TNG episodes is pretty encyclopedic, so there probably isn't one. There is an episode where Picard pilots a shuttle which in turn pilots the Enterprise, but he uses the usual shuttle controls, and at one point his commands are relayed by voice and entered into one of the consoles on the bridge.

CLEMENS: Oh? I'm not so impressed with this future... huge starships... weapons that can no doubt destroy entire cities... military conquest as a way of life.

She looks sidelong at him.

TROI: Is that what you see here?

CLEMENS: Oh, I know what you say... this is a vessel of exploration... your mission is to, discover new worlds...

The Turbolift arrives. A strange alien EXITS. Clemens reacts, stares after him. They ENTER the Turbolift.

TROI: Deck thirty-six.

CLEMENS: That's what the Spanish said... and the Dutch, and the Portuguese. It's what all conquerors say... (beat) I'm sure it's what you told that blue skinned fellow I just saw... before you brought him here to serve you.

TROI: He's one of thousands of species we've encountered. We live in a peaceful Federation with many of them... the people you see are here by choice.

Clemens ponders this for a moment.

CLEMENS: So there are a privileged few... who serve on these ships, living in luxury, wanting for nothing. But what about everyone else? What about the poor? You ignore them...

TROI: Poverty was eliminated a long time ago. And a lot of things disappeared with it: hopelessness... despair... cruelty... war...

He regards her solemnly. He's beginning to realize that his dark view is misplaced.

CLEMENS: I come from a time when men achieve wealth and power by standing on the backs of the poor... when prejudice and intolerance are commonplace... when power is an end unto itself... (beat) And you're telling me... that isn't how it is anymore?

TROI: That's right.

CLEMENS: (with a sigh) Maybe it is worth giving up cigars for, after all...

Troi smiles... the Turbolift door opens and they EXIT.

There's an episode of Voyager, Author, Author that does explore issues of the oppressed living in the Federation, but the oppressed are holograms and are obviously a stand-in for an arbitrary oppressed minority. They had to use holograms because it would have been unbelievable if they had used people whose rights were clearly established. This is also a very brief plot line that (as far as I recall) appeared only in that one episode. By contrast, Troi's view of the Federation/humanity in the future is the same one as in each of the series. Really, you have no idea what you're talking about.

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/PADD

Wow. You should have thought twice before posting.

Comparing a statistic that describes the dynamics and personal decisions of hundreds if not thousands of people to the presence of a token character is not even slightly equatable. I assume you haven't taken a second-year statistics course.

Further, the targets are different and not necessarily causally linked. The fraction of women with the potential to enjoy engineering is not the same question as the fraction of women interested in gaming, which TFS argues is about the same as the number of men; even if the sheer numbers are approximately comparable, that doesn't even support the idea that they're identical sets.

Further still, you're comparing fractions of representation to fractions of audience, which is a little like tying your own shoelaces together and then tripping over them. Universities have been improving the sex ratio in STEM programs primarily through enhanced representation of women in promotional materials and cultural portrayals of their disciplines. Because the cultural image the institutions put forth is woman-friendly, we're not turned off at the front door, and because the staff and faculty within are conscious of their organizations' intended office culture (typically canonized in policy), they themselves make an effort to be more egalitarian.

No mandate or attitude for such reform exists in the commercial world, where products live and die based on sales, even though they carry with them potentially powerful cultural impact. As a result, the games industry has a long-standing habit of staying within the boundaries it's comfortable with, lest they alienate what they perceive to be their core audience—as it often occurs in these sorts of cases, one dollar sign is making a judgment about another dollar sign's value system, and screwing over a third.

Going back to picking on Valve: only one in five special infected in the original L4D was female, and you couldn't even play her in Versus. The amount of effort that would have been required to make the Hunter, Smoker and Boomer be gender-neutral would have been trivial compared to the rest of the game.

Relatedly, and continuing to pick on Valve, players have been working for years now to create workable female models for TF2—and there's still been precious little interest from Mann Co. Even though the gender bias is part of the game's atmosphere, a significant portion of the fanbase feels slighted by it. This seems to be a stumbling block outside of extreme fantasy and science fiction; sometimes authenticity needs to be sacrificed in favour of modern moral values. Just ask Benjamin Sisko.

Well, there ARE conflicting reports on that subject.

But I do believe that the man often referred to by his euphemism-for-a-bodily-function designation/nickname SHOULD be somewhat of an expert regarding the issue.

That was an alien lifeform.
Although... The creature WAS rather partial to creating apples out of thin air.

From http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/VISOR The VISOR, acronym for Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement, was a medical device used in the Federation to aid patients who have suffered loss of eyesight or who were born blind. The VISOR detected electromagnetic signals across the entire EM spectrum between 1 Hz and 100,000 THz and transmitted those signals to the brain through neural implants in the temples of the individual via delta-compressed wavelengths. We may not be at brain-interface yet, but looks like we are heading in the right direction.

Fractal interconnects? It sounds like Star Trek techno-babble.
  http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Fractal_encryption_code

The warp bubble would rip the objects.

Things like planets and stars? I highly doubt it.

If they're using a deflector beam to get microscopic particles out of the way, they're sure as hell not ripping through planets and stars.

I'm pretty sure if they did something like that, they'd pretty much be destroyed -- in rather a spectacular way I should think. You think a car driving into a wall creates carnage? A starship crashing into a star at warp speed is going to make one hell of a boom.

It's going to be exploded using a trilithium weapon and the ensuing level-12 shockwave will obliterate the rest of the solar system - turning off everything else and also getting rid of the problem.

Interesting article...... I wonder if they will branch off into alcoholic beverages manufacturing soon?

That sounds like a great idea!

I get that all the time. Compare this SGU episode with this DS9 episode.

To be fair, though, TOS was in the business of ripping off things already. Consider Balance of Terror, which proudly combines a classic WW2 U-boat terror movie with the Roman Empire... IN SPACE!

I get that all the time. Compare this SGU episode with this DS9 episode.

To be fair, though, TOS was in the business of ripping off things already. Consider Balance of Terror, which proudly combines a classic WW2 U-boat terror movie with the Roman Empire... IN SPACE!

Looks like someone forgot to post anonymously. Given your low UID, is it possible that you are the Methusalah of trolls? Traveling from one era to the next, trusty bag of tired memes in one hand, bucket of spam in the other?

You know, I don't get many opportunities on this site to do this, but.... NERD!!

Looks like someone forgot to post anonymously. Given your low UID, is it possible that you are the Methusalah of trolls? Traveling from one era to the next, trusty bag of tired memes in one hand, bucket of spam in the other?

I'm sure damaged blackboxes happen all the time—for those who don't feel like RTFAing, it looks pretty beaten up in the photo, and they've got submersibles scouring a rather large region for more pieces still. (The summary's habit of using the word "part" is kind of adorable, in a Simple English Wikipedia sort of way. What is a memory part, anyway? Is this specialized manufacturing jargon (i.e. part numbers) or just weird writing?)

According to "The Return" by William Shatner, yes...

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/V'Ger#Background_information

Makes more sense anyways than when they tried to explain why Klingons looked different in the train-wreck that was ST:Enterprise...

I bet this guy sold it to Steve.

Apparently these people never saw ST:TNG. Other than the selection of black for the border of the display, what's the non-obvious design difference again?

Here's what the predecessor of the iPad looked like, it was called the PADD:
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/File:PADD_2370s.jpg

Rectangular with rounded corners.

Scotty was 'resurrected' in a way that was totally plausible for the character. It worked, and technically he never died. Spock's resurrection was much less plausible

According to Memory-Alpha, "Scotty ... attempts to save Uhura from the probe, but is killed by it, only to be revived by it shortly thereafter."

That's funny, I thought it was Quark, Rom, and Nog.

I go to Memory Alpha and watch episodes in release order, which is roughly the same.

Pure speculation. We know Riker got Troi, but Picard...well, all we know was he was an old, unmarried, childless Frenchie. You may presume that he got more alien tang, but such is never brought to light.

Au contraire, mon frère!

Picard got Vash FTW.

(There was also Nella Daren, but I always thought she was fairly ordinary.)

Pure speculation. We know Riker got Troi, but Picard...well, all we know was he was an old, unmarried, childless Frenchie. You may presume that he got more alien tang, but such is never brought to light.

Au contraire, mon frère!

Picard got Vash FTW.

(There was also Nella Daren, but I always thought she was fairly ordinary.)

This sounds like a good way to get somewhere fast, but what about slowing down? The Daedalus probe was to shoot past Barnards star and send out probes to examine the planet, but the actual craft would just keep on going into deep space maybe forever. But if we want to ever see the planets orbiting distant stars then we need to move away from chemical rockets and into more exotic forms of propulsion. Sure we may not have Star Trek Warp Drive, but we can at least send the V,Ger probe into space and make our mark on the universe. Maybe we could catch up with the Voyager probe and bring it back to Earth.

I read somewhere, around the 1980s, probably by Amory Lovins, that if we spent a year or so of the cost of maintaining the US Persian Gulf deployment force on insulating US homes and other energy efficiency improvements, that we would not need any imported oil. Related:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
    http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en

All this robotic warfare is just ironic, as are, ultimately, all arms races that lead to the destruction of all parties (except maybe the robots). See also:
    http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Minosian
"The Minosians were a thriving, technologically-advanced humanoid civilization from the planet Minos. The Minosians gained notoriety as arms merchants during the Erselrope Wars, providing advanced weaponry such as the Echo Papa 607 which were sold under the banner "Peace through superior firepower." It was discovered in 2364 that the Minosians were subsequently eradicated by their own weapon system when it went out of control. One of the few Minosian artifacts surviving, the Echo Papa 607 system was responsible for the destruction of the USS Drake and attempted to destroy the USS Enterprise-D. (TNG: "The Arsenal of Freedom") "

Thus:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html