posted
I see the stance of the Starways Congress in Xenocide that the Piggies not be helped or interfered with to be a criticism of the Star Trek 'Prime Directive' which 'Q' and others have hinted at being nothing more then moral cowardice.
It is clear that the one is an influence on the other because who has not watched Star Trek? Should we interfere? More pointedly should higher cultures interfere with us? Have they?
I have often thought that long parts of the Old Testement read like a breeding experiment with human stock with radio contact to a project coordinator. So perhaps our God is nothing more or less then this influence.
Would we have the right to take a species with the will and wit to be our partners and make some portion of them civilized in a single generation and then charge that portion to fill the world and join our cause?
It comes down to an accedent of timing, and I feel that in a world like ours where periodic catastrophy looms, how could allowing a race to reach a point of saving itself be immoral?
Posts: 1249 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
Your ending question does not match the rest of your thesis. Your stance was is it worng to lift anther race up, but the last paragraph said raising up to save themselves.
I do not think that it would be right to interfer with another culture, mainly because we would be imposing apon them our moral judgements, and effectivly making them human. Esp. if the goal was to save, because with our help, there would be "agreements" that must be met.
However I could see where we could have been tampered with. To the bible, in the story of noah. Some aliens could have monitored our weather and warned noah. But that is a long shot.
If we were interfered with, that has certainly stoped. When/if we were tampered with, it was long ago, before we were as we are now. In that case it was not to save, but for purposes unknown. I do not think it would be that bad of a thing so lonk as you took an active role in the devlopment. Not just give them compacity, and leave them to fill it.
However you could take the problem farther and ask, did they tamper so much as to creat us to begin with? You raise the point of breeding. Could we be a breeding expirement? Some aliens come and tamper with the genetics to see if they could make sentience(sp?) from monkeys. then we raise a whole new set of moral problems.
And going back to noah, that could be like in our fly breeding in biology when we set loose the adult flies, and concentrated on the babies. The "aliens" were, in effect clearing the viles.
posted
The end of my post is not clear but the implication I meant to make was that the failure to tamper was risking accidental catastrophic extinction.
However I never implied I thought tampering was a bad thing. I wondered what others thought.
The section of the Bible I am refering to is the creation and direction of the Jewish people.
Start with a chosen man, selected for certain traits.
He produces a son through intervention with an infertile woman. (new traits added)
Encourge the son to certain healthy practices and look for the emergence of inserted traits.
When famine threatens move breeding group to new location.
When numbers are sufficiant send breeding group into fertile region after first culling group in hardship conditions.
Order breeding group to kill all natives in region and prohibit interbreeding to prevent loss of genetic drift.
Maintain advisory contact with group to encourage successful domination and expansion of new traits.
Look for individuals who display the largest percentage of special abilities due to manifestation of genetic alterations, and use them as intermediaries.
Find individual female with strong inherited traits and artifically impregnate her with "Ideal" offspring with full abilities and knowlege built in. (John and Jesus were close relatives after all)
Posts: 1249 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
Yes, but tampering is bad. What right do the others have to express traits in us? Nature should take care of bring the important traits without any trouble or help. That is why it is wrong. And as I said, don't give the ability for a cutlure to distroy itself, if you cannot police it to ensure that does not happen. (unless that is your goal, in which case, you are either really evil, or me.)
posted
Well to say that tampering is bad is silly I think. Do we let the intellegent people of Pompei die because they do not yet understand Vulcanology? What do dead people learn? Nature is not always going to allow a species time to evolve without intervention. How do we know that the kick our species recieved in the past is not the only thing that made us a tecnologically advanced civilization between two ice ages, or two super-valcanoe erruptions or between two asteroid impacts? (or any combination of ELE) Can we say that it was bad to have made the climb? Would it be bad to allow another species to do the same? I think not.
Posts: 1249 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
saving a species is all well and good. But how would save the people of pompei? Move them. How would move them? Some sort of advanced transportation. How will the natives percieve it? We (whoever) are Gods. Why is that bad? Because it is bad enough that they believe in multiple gods, without making them believe in another. Or they will attribute it to teir one God, and that too would be false. You would tamper with the social and spiritual beliefs of a people. That is why it is wrong.
posted
I think anyone who's interested in this question should read The Uplift Wars by David Brin. He does a fairly good job of addressing the different sides of this issue.
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posted
Or go watch Babylon 5. No Prime Directive in that series. And humans were portrayed as having been actively tampered with by beings who look a lot like angels. . . .
Posts: 1323 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
Well, I lied. I don't have every episode on my computer. My [word deleted in light of other user sensitivity] of a mom deleted them. But I did have them at one time. Man I love that show.
-W-
[ December 11, 2003, 04:51 PM: Message edited by: Julian Delphiki Jr. ]
Posts: 93 | Registered: Nov 2003
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posted
that's are really rude thing to say about your mom. But I guess it does make you a son of one. I'd appreciate it if you'd edit that.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
You should've changed it to "beeotch". That's more sensitive, right?
Personally, I think "bitch" was used to convey the emotion you were feeling, and needed no editing. I really don't understand people's problem with reading bad words.
If we're going to start blowing the whistle over minor profanity, we might as well go delete half the threads on the other side because of their non-"G" rating.
I did, however, say it with scathing sarcasm. So, factor that in with any "amens" you have to my post.
Posts: 7600 | Registered: Jan 2001
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quote: You should've changed it to "beeotch". That's more sensitive, right?
Personally, I think "bitch" was used to convey the emotion you were feeling, and needed no editing. I really don't understand people's problem with reading bad words.
If we're going to start blowing the whistle over minor profanity, we might as well go delete half the threads on the other side because of their non-"G" rating.
*annoyed*
While I agree with this, I do reserve the right to think anyone who calls his mother a bitch is a big goober.
Posts: 7600 | Registered: Jan 2001
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posted
Dude, maybe she'd stop deleting your stuff if you stopped downloading copyrighted material off the internet. Just a thought.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
Man do I feel the love. No, it is not beause it is copyrighted. she partakes in file sharing herself. As far as the "angst ridden teen" goes, that is not true. I am not full of hatered or lothing fo all thosein my family. My mom does one thing that makes me mad. Sorry that i let you all know about that. And as far as the cencoring thing goes, I did that because i was out of line. No, my mom is not a bitch, she occasionally makes me mad. Sorry I brought the subject up.
And while I am being everyone's whore, I am really sorry, Bean Counter, for degrading this serious topic, that could have been debated seriously, into this pissing contest. Please forgive me.
posted
It is all serious for one reason or another. I do not understand how a reader of the Ender Books, the virtual flagship series for nerddom, the "How it feels to be smarter then the rest" book of the century can cry Nerd Alert about Star Trek.
Honestly I feel as if I have been crowned. Great Nerd at the Nerd convention.
Still the thread exists even if the topic eluded some. Should intervention with an intellegent species take place, nor is this a jump into idle speculation.
Third world and tribal cultures are adapted to a place and pace of life that we do not share, we mercilessly integrate these cultures into our own sprawling over culture changing the world in our own image.
Many Cultural Anthropologist have noted that the knowlege of our exisitence sends a shock into these cultures that makes them start acting like us as much as they can. Contact kills them.
Yet it also extends their lives, improves their standard of living (sometimes) and offers them greater possibilities.
Same issue really, do we have the right to withhold and sit in judgement, or the duty to do our best to share what we have?
posted
If we ever actually met an alien species, they would be so vastly different from us that I can hardly believe that contamination would cause them to lose their cultural identity. Of course, this is not true in the Star Trek universe, where aliens look just like us and speak English.
Posts: 17 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
Yes, tampering does happen. And I am one of those people that believe what happens is supposed to happen: fate. So, the integration of cultures was supposed to happen, and it did. That is the natural devlopment of things. However, I am still against it.
Mainly because, if you give them the ability, you also have to teach. If you don't teach, the living improvment might not last that long, before they are thrown mack into 3rd-worlddom.
The devolped conutries were able to cope (yeah right) with the new techknowledgy, and not destroy ourselves, because we were here for the progression. Had someone juse gave us the means to build an atomic bomb, we would have destroyed ourselves. Like in the 3rd-world, they were given the ability to have weapons, and the only ones that could get the weapons were the rich. So they use the weapons to oppress. 3
That is what could very well happen if we were to interfer with other alien cultures, like the alien cultures here on earth. So i will be forever against it.
quote: do not understand how a reader of the Ender Books, the virtual flagship series for nerddom, the "How it feels to be smarter then the rest" book of the century can cry Nerd Alert about Star Trek.
*snicker* It's funny because it's true. Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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quote:I do not understand how a reader of the Ender Books, the virtual flagship series for nerddom, the "How it feels to be smarter then the rest" book of the century can cry Nerd Alert about Star Trek.
Because the only person to dress up in a ridiculous costume at Endercon was OSC's son, Geoff.
Posts: 6213 | Registered: May 2001
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posted
You can bet money that if I had gone to Endercon, I would've worn my Star Trek uniform. Of course, it fit me back when I was fifteen, which was about six inches ago. So maybe I wouldn't have worn it after all.
Posts: 276 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
I think that the Deep Space 9 series was by far the best created. I never really liked the original series. It was too mellow dramatic, with the "da da dum!!" before every comercial.
posted
C'mon, Bean Counter. The whole purpose in being a geek is feeling superior to other people, especially people with normal social lives. It ends up spilling over into geek subcultures, and rival geekdom ensues. This is pretty basic geek knowledge, and if some of us geeks want to feel cool because we perceive that someone else is not exhibiting their geekdom correctly, than you have to give that to us. I mean, where would geekdom be without a heirarchy to establish some organization?
posted
I don't think I'm worthy of that title. I didn't/don't watch Babylon 5, never went to a sci fi convention, don't have pointy ears, and have never worn a Star Trek uniform. *ponders* But, I did go to the Oregon Hatrack Get Together...*brightens* does that make me a geek?
Posts: 1423 | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
Wow, this has degraded nicle in to a depiction of the subculture of hatrack. Or at least this side. This is quite interseting if I do say so myself.
In the immortal worts of Strong Mad: "KEEP IT GOIN'"
posted
Ralphie is so holding court in this thread. She should she go to the narcissism thread and post so much that she takes it over. That would truly show the extent of her dominion.
Posts: 1423 | Registered: Sep 2003
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