Little things that get to you in terms of beleivability

[Shroom Man 777]

You need specialized facilities to clone limbs and shit. It's not like a modern day warship is going to have a medbay that doubles as an operating room theater with enough material and staff equipped to perform brain surgery, or even an appendectomy.

Though, yeah, it is kind of dumb that in the 25th century medical technology in general won't be able to cure someone who fell off his horse and broke his spine.

[Junghalli]

You need specialized facilities to clone limbs and shit. It's not like a modern day warship is going to have a medbay that doubles as an operating room theater with enough material and staff equipped to perform brain surgery, or even an appendectomy.

I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about stuff like that Star Trek episode where Worf breaks his back and ZOMG without some risky experimental procedure he'll be crippled for life. Or when I was watching the trailer for Avatar I was thinking "they can give people telepresence waldo robots and presumably build starships but they can't fix whatever's wrong with that guy's legs, what's up with that?"*

* Although I haven't watched the movie yet and have been determinedly avoiding spoilers, so for all I know that could be something that makes sense or fulfills some vital profound plot point or character development, although it'd have to be something really funky going on with him for me not to think "dude, why can't people who can build starships fix that?".

[neoolong]

Or when I was watching the trailer for Avatar I was thinking "they can give people telepresence waldo robots and presumably build starships but they can't fix whatever's wrong with that guy's legs, what's up with that?"*

Spoiler

They can. It's just expensive.

[Shroom Man 777]

Maybe instead of getting universal space healthcare, the alternate science-fiction universe instead has space insurance becoming very unaffordable and the space people being unable to buy space medicine or get space coverage or space premiums and the space republicans have murdered space medicaid and space medicare in their space sleep? That could also explain why old space people don't go to space nursing homes where space geriatric care is designed to make them live forever (in space), and such stuff is only affordable to the few who can afford it and the rest of the unwashed huns get to die when their space hips break and they can't afford space hip replacement space surgeries. In space.

Because, like, they didn't get to elect Space Obama. No They Can't.

[Styphon]

You know, for all its general horribleness, Enterprise was actually pretty decent about a few things on this list. IIRC, there were several episodes where various officers (particularly the captain) had to be called to the bridge when they were off-duty... and also at least one instance of gravity failure.

Then again, the doctor was using space leeches, so it fails miserably at the medical thing.

[Shroom Man 777]

Why? Some people debride gangrenous or otherwise rotting tissues in large wounds through the use of sterile clean maggots, fly larva, to eat the decomposing tissue. The maggots leave living flesh alone and after the wound has been 'cleaned', the doctor schoops out the maggots. I saw it in a documentary, done by actual-factual doctors.

[Simon_Jester]

Also, psychic spacemen. The idea that humanity will inevitably "evolve towards greater things", one of which is always psychic powers and/or energy beings.

That's an unfortunate legacy of older days when the idea of psychic powers wasn't as thoroughly proven-stupid as it is today. Sort of like having humanoid robots in settings that still need human gunners sitting at controls.

This sort of thing is nothing more than new-age bullshitism. Psychic powers do not make sense in the evolutionary timeline, we do not see it in any other animals, there is no evolutionary need for them. Primitive natives easily dominate their environment without such tools. Humans are easily the most powerful and terrifying creatures on Earth, they don't need such bullshit to wank them further. Raw intelligence and attitude can do more than such copout wank.

For this to make any sense (which is, admittedly, a stretch), you have to interpret "evolve" in a more general sense, as a synonym for "develop" (which most writers back in the day weren't smart enough to do).

If psychic powers were possible at all as some sort of generalization of the mental abilities we already possess, or as refinement of otherwise useless low-level abilities that get written off as "intuition," then you might honestly see development over time. Like any other technology, people would get better at the techniques of unlocking mental power, much as people figure out better ways to train athletes who keep setting higher and higher records. For that matter, they might specifically manipulate their descendants to create psychic supermen.

So the idea that a species "more advanced" than us would have worked out the methods of using mental powers on a scale we can't tell from magic would actually make some sense. If there were such powers, and the bizarre half-assed stuff that today's "psychics" claim to be able to do is the tip of a much larger iceberg rather than being a fake, then we could expect the capability to be far more thoroughly developed after the scientists get a grip on it.

...The problem is that in a world where people had these things everybody should be able to do it. Writers usually seem to treat psychic powers as something you can get from a single gene or mutation, which is utter bullshit. Any mechanism that lets you read minds or start fires with your mind or whatever is going to be complex...

And since this requires huge amounts of time and all the intermediate stages are going to have to be useful (or else they wouldn't be selected for) they should be disseminated over the entire human race...

Then there's the writers who suggest that everybody has latent psychic powers and some people just have it "activated", which is just as bad. Apparently we're to believe that people developed complex physical mechanisms that let you do all this awesome shit with your mind while it was TOTALLY USELESS in almost all the population.

The only quasi-sane explanation I can think of is that it isn't something you need a complex physical structure for. From the point of view of someone dissecting a psychic's brain or sequencing their genome, they are little or no different from everyone else; the trick is that they're using some kind of learned technique to train their brain to do something unusual.

For instance, we evolved the physical structures of hand-eye coordination. We evolved to estimate distances and do ballistics in our heads. But we did NOT evolve to shoot rifles, and we don't get the hang of it by instinct. The fact that some people can shoot is a sign that they took faculties which everyone has and deliberately used them for a purpose that evolution had not identified. This also explains why animals can't shoot on their own, even given the tools to do so; they aren't smart enough to think of the specific use of their existing abilities that would make it possible.

If something similar applied to psychic powers, the reason you can't read minds isn't that you lack the structure, it's that you lack the technique, and that it isn't hardcoded into your mind the way walking is. You have to learn to walk, but you instinctively try to learn as a baby, so by the time you grow up you already know... but psychic abilities are something far less developed in us, to the point where the genetic potential is almost there but the instincts are not.

And then you go into space and encounter someone who's been doing genetic engineering on themselves for ten thousand years; if psychic powers were possible at all you'd expect them to have them in spades.

Evolution in general is treated horribly in fiction. The evolution of psychic powers is just one offshoot of this horrible characterization. The worst is shit like that Trek episode where evolution was "killing off the species to make room for an upcoming dominant species".

Groan. Now THAT kills me.

[Raxmei]

Evolution is all too commonly treated as intelligent design. Evolution is not just divine intervention by another name.

[adam_grif]

For some reason this reminds me of something else that got to me a little bit when watching Babylon 5. Pretty much every person and every alien is totally into mysticism and religion. Maybe I'm just being naive, but I'd like to think that irreligion was correlated with education and technological sophistication

We had what, Garibaldi being Agnostic? Maybe the Centauri, but in more of a "they're so evil they don't believe in their own emperor gods" way.

[Elessar]

For some reason this reminds me of something else that got to me a little bit when watching Babylon 5. Pretty much every person and every alien is totally into mysticism and religion.

Remember? The Vorlons messed around with pretty much every younger race to make them see the Vorlons as messianic figures. Hell, we watched the creation of one of the major religious figures of the Minbari. B5's religions aren't exactly blind faith.

[adam_grif]

All the more reason for them to be extremely disillusioned when they suddenly start getting their planets cracked open like eggs by them. Iirc the vorlon tampering was not exactly a widespread secret. Things should have been getting more than a little fishy after every single diplomat claims to have seen their own version of the angel.

And even so, Vorlon tampering is supposed to have happened in the RL timeline, but of course irreligion is still higher amongst educated first world people and so on. It's not like Angels were showing up on a frequent basis in public, the Kosh incident was most assuredly the exception, not the rule.

[Elessar]

All the more reason for them to be extremely disillusioned when they suddenly start getting their planets cracked open like eggs by them. Iirc the vorlon tampering was not exactly a widespread secret. Things should have been getting more than a little fishy after every single diplomat claims to have seen their own version of the angel.

And even so, Vorlon tampering is supposed to have happened in the RL timeline, but of course irreligion is still higher amongst educated first world people and so on. It's not like Angels were showing up on a frequent basis in public, the Kosh incident was most assuredly the exception, not the rule.

The point wasn't that the Vorlons revealed themselves. The point is that they tampered in B5 species development to be universally more religious.

An additional point is that 'religion' in B5 is more of an acknowledgement of tampering on the part of the First Ones. It's not the blind faith that you're complaining about that is correlated with education etc.

[adam_grif]

It's "blind faith" for about 99.999999999% of the galaxy. The people who have actually literally witnessed such smoke and mirrors on their parts pass on secondary accounts, and so on.

Tampered to be more religious? That's now how I was reading into it. They had been tampered with to see angels when they saw Vorlons, not necessarily tampered with to praise God and dance around worshiping the Old Ones. Did they ever actually state that at some point?

[Zixinus]

I don't mind religion as much, even though I can get fed up with it too. What I hate, is that it can become an overwhelming aspect not for just one character, but the entire species. It's one thing to have one person or even group obsessed with being a warrior or with a religion, but an entire race? Remember the Klingons everyone?

Now, I don't watch much Star Trek, but when I saw bits about them I frequently think: how the bloody hell did these make agriculture, never mind spaceships.

It's just a bit of author creativity (again, this is where I must give kudos to Farscape: there, Dargo was obsessed with being a warrior and it was shown that it was actually bit of a thing for him, rather than a typical thing for his species).

I mean, come on: we, humans, have small population that is devoted to learning and mastering warfare: soldiers. They learn to be aggressive, to be paranoid, to be careful, to be armed, etc. Hell, one can find warrior-obsessed people in their own home in form of survivalists or historical-reanactors or sportsman (remember: some sports are exclusively sourced in mastering tools of death, think fencing or archery or javelin-throwing).
But we also have other kinds of people: we have a population of people devoted to nothing but our religions: think of the thousands of Christian priests, the RCC, the Tibetian monks, voodoo priests, rabbis, etc.

We have populations that are artists, that are craftworkers, that are hunters, that are scientists, etc. We too have criminals, we have foragers, we have scavengers, we have torturers and rapists, we have bankers, we have health-insurgence companies with music- and film-industry corporate heads, etc.

Yet, in some scifi, it is handled that humans are unique in their non-uniformity. Some species are one-hit-notes, with not even the slightest implication that this would be different for others. What utter bullshit and lack of imagination.

Are you telling me that an entire species, billions of atheist-metaphorical souls, are either dreaming nothing about but being a warrior or about being a priests? Both genders? Every nation, every school, every country, every street, every town and village, every bed?

[adam_grif]

Yep. You're not the only one who's noticed.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHats

[Coyote]

You know, for all its general horribleness, Enterprise was actually pretty decent about a few things on this list...

Ahhh, yes.... Star Trek: Enterprise. It may have had some moments of bright, shining goodness, but in the end run, no matter how you try to spin it, the Enterprise N-X still goes down in history as the only starship in science fiction history that got fudge-packed by fucking piston-engine Stukas.

I mean, come on: we, humans, have small population that is devoted to learning and mastering warfare: soldiers. They learn to be aggressive, to be paranoid, to be careful, to be armed, etc.

Paranoid, huh? Who told you to say that?




Along the same lines as suspending believability, is the mono-thematic planet. I suppose I can forgive extreme climate types-- we have evidence of desert worlds (Mars), ice worlds (Europa) and water worlds (that funky new extrasolar planet), but when you have an entire planet covered with complex plant life ("the FOREST moon") and no tropical zones? Or "Jungle" planets? Or all-weather planets: the RAIN planet, for example.

[Broomstick]

At least Avatar, which on first glance seems to be "The Glowing Jungle Planet", makes a nod to plains and oceans/shores. It's a really short, brief mention-in-passing but at least it's there, a nodding concession that the moon isn't entirely uniform.

[Junghalli]

The only quasi-sane explanation I can think of is that it isn't something you need a complex physical structure for. From the point of view of someone dissecting a psychic's brain or sequencing their genome, they are little or no different from everyone else; the trick is that they're using some kind of learned technique to train their brain to do something unusual.

For instance, we evolved the physical structures of hand-eye coordination. We evolved to estimate distances and do ballistics in our heads. But we did NOT evolve to shoot rifles, and we don't get the hang of it by instinct. The fact that some people can shoot is a sign that they took faculties which everyone has and deliberately used them for a purpose that evolution had not identified. This also explains why animals can't shoot on their own, even given the tools to do so; they aren't smart enough to think of the specific use of their existing abilities that would make it possible.

Except that analogy doesn't work very well because the mechanisms you use to fire a rifle have many other physical uses. What does the organ that lets the pyrokinetic set things on fire with his mind do in a normal human who can't heat things up with his mind?

The only way I can think of for the "everyone has latent psychic powers but for some reason almost nobody actually manifests them" thing to make sense is if humans had developed psychic powers in the deep past and then something happened to create a selection pressure against having them. Then you might get everybody walking around with all the genes for psychic powers except some critical developmental gene or genes that need to be turned on for them to start developing, and are broken in almost everybody because at some point people with the broken genes were doing a lot better than people with the functional versions for some reason.

Personally I'm rather partial to the idea that at some point in prehistory Earth was invaded by some kind of psychic predators (sort of like the Enslaver plague in 40K). The psychic predators would home in on psychic powers, and eventually killed off basically all the normal (psychic) humans. The only way to have a measure of safety from them was to have reduced psychic abilities, the less the better. If you had a genetic disorder that made you psychically weaker than average you were safer. If you had one that rendered you completely non-psychic you were completely safe from them. The right kind of brain injury would probably do the job too, but of course your children wouldn't get to benefit from that. Eventually the only people who survived were those that had either a genetic disorder that rendered them complete non-psychics or a combination of genetic disorders that cumulatively did the same thing. This would nicely explain the way psychic powers typically manifest in SF/fantasy; the knockout genes are ubiquitous in the human population so it takes a very rare combo of genes for a psychic to be born, and most of them have some knockout genes but not all so you'll get people with different "powers" and "power levels" depending on which ones and how many they lack, with the more powerful ones being rarer because they have fewer knockout genes hence the required combination of genes gets exponentially less likely with increasing "power level". Of course if the psychic predators are still around the price for being one of these people is you're no longer safe from them, and the more powerful you are the less safe you are. On the plus side most of them may have starved to death since the Pliestocene with their prey so badly depleted ... but this just means that there are far fewer predators for the far fewer prey.

This would be a cool idea to explore in some modern/urban fantasy universe. I have the mental picture of a lot of low-level psychics being considered mentally ill in such a universe, because they live in fear of monsters that are coming to get them that nobody else can see. Have the monsters kill you in ways that looks relatively innocuous from the outside (maybe they drive you crazy, or make you commit suicide, or you die of an apparent stroke or heart attack), and have the typical weak psychic have abilities weak enough that aren't easy to unambiguously prove, so most people simply dismiss their claims of having powers as more ravings of an obvious lunatic. Meanwhile the ones that have powers strong enough to be actually useful are secretly recruited by various governments or some sort of secret order or something and spend most of their lives in giant Faraday cages or pumped full of special drugs or something to keep the psychic predators away. I'm getting the picture of some awesomely horrible story about some poor low-level psychic getting cornered by one of these psychic predators on a crowded bus or something, and the thing's about to start mind-raping the shit out of him and he's screaming in terror, and of course everyone else just sees some crazy nutcase having a freak-out and looks on as the thing horribly mind-fucks him.

Along the same lines as suspending believability, is the mono-thematic planet. I suppose I can forgive extreme climate types-- we have evidence of desert worlds (Mars), ice worlds (Europa) and water worlds (that funky new extrasolar planet), but when you have an entire planet covered with complex plant life ("the FOREST moon") and no tropical zones? Or "Jungle" planets? Or all-weather planets: the RAIN planet, for example.

You could get planets with much more uniform land conditions that Earth realistically. For instance, if you have a planet that's really hot, and you make the continents really small or skinny so you have no major rain shadows, you can more-or-less have your "jungle planet". Take the same planet, make it colder, and move the small/skinny continents into the temperate zones and you have your "forest planet". The unbelievable thing is when this sort of state of affairs appears to be the rule rather than the exception. Of course, a "forest planet" or "jungle planet" with no oceans would be really stupid. Where exactly is all that rain supposed to be coming from?

[Sam Or I]

The Dues Ex Machina saving the day, even when foreshadowed.

The little kid genius. I want to scratch my eyes out. Little kids in general are bad, but if writen correctly they can be made acceptable. (Newt from Aliens)

Random stuff pulled out of a magic satchel to help out move along the plot. Like batmans utility belt from the 60's. This includes expanded functions of items to fill plot of the week. (Tricorders anyone) Other examples, the T850's exploding battery, Mal's moved nerve cluster, Qui Gon's breathing device, ect... ect...

[adam_grif]

Along the same lines as suspending believability, is the mono-thematic planet. I suppose I can forgive extreme climate types-- we have evidence of desert worlds (Mars), ice worlds (Europa) and water worlds (that funky new extrasolar planet), but when you have an entire planet covered with complex plant life ("the FOREST moon") and no tropical zones? Or "Jungle" planets? Or all-weather planets: the RAIN planet, for example.

[Junghalli]

Was it ever explicitly stated in the movies that Dagobah was a "swamp planet"? I can't remember it, and we only ever saw the immediate area of Yoda's dwelling. Concluding it's all swamp from that would be like concluding Earth is all swamp if all you saw of it was the home of some hermit who lived in the Everglades. Although if it wasn't representative of most of the planet's land area you do have to wonder why Yoda would choose such an unpleasant dwelling-place, unless he likes those conditions.

Not that I'm saying Star Wars doesn't have a problem with the single biome planet brainbug, and I bet Dagobah = swamp planet was author's intent if they thought about the issue at all, I'm just wondering.

[Stofsk]

I don't know if Dagobah was conceived of as solely a swamp world, but I think it was intended to be a world teeming with life - juxtaposed with Hoth (a world hostile to life, frozen tundra with wandering monsters) where Luke was 'frozen' in achieving his destiny. To underscore Yoda's point about how life feeds the Force, he has his training on a world that is full of life forms.

[adam_grif]

Was it ever explicitly stated in the movies that Dagobah was a "swamp planet"? I can't remember it, and we only ever saw the immediate area of Yoda's dwelling. Concluding it's all swamp from that would be like concluding Earth is all swamp if all you saw of it was the home of some hermit who lived in the Everglades. Although if it wasn't representative of most of the planet's land area you do have to wonder why Yoda would choose such an unpleasant dwelling-place, unless he likes those conditions.

Not that I'm saying Star Wars doesn't have a problem with the single biome planet brainbug, and I bet Dagobah = swamp planet was author's intent if they thought about the issue at all, I'm just wondering.

Just from memory, the entire surface of the planet looks completely homogeneous from orbit. Not that you can necessarily conclude that it's all swamp, but it certainly looks as though it is.

Checking wookiepedia, it says that it's mostly marshland with some forests.

[Batman]

Although if it wasn't representative of most of the planet's land area you do have to wonder why Yoda would choose such an unpleasant dwelling-place, unless he likes those conditions.

*Cough* TTT. The proximity of the Dark Side cave masked his presence from the Emperor?

[Sarevok]

Anyone got a screencap of Dagobahh seen from space ? From memory it looked like another blue-white planet like Earth.