I was always a little surprised that such an advanced civilization would be completely unfamiliar with carbon scoring.
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It just sucks that Earth has “what they used to call a black hole” so close to it. It also apparently threw the Pioneer probe half-way across the quadrant into Klingon space.
Also, apparently “they call black holes something else now” went into the same Star Trek canon garbage bin as “no one swears in the 23rd century.”
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“Colorful Metaphors” is one of my favorite exchanges in any film.
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And ‘women can’t be captains’.
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‘Women maybe don’t belong on the bridge at all’ if you go by The Cage.
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Well, astronomers still haven’t completely ruled out the possibility of the so-called “Planet 9”, or that if it does exist that it isn’t a primordial black hole or some kind of conglomeration of dark matter.
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Well whatever it is, apparently it’s not a black hole in the TOS movie era, because they don’t call it that then. They called it that before the TOS movie era and after the TOS movie era, but there was a short time there where there was a “stop calling them black holes” directive from Starfleet Command.
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Fun story: Gene Roddenberry gave a lecture in the town where I was then living and he finished off by showing The Cage (not readily available then, and in B&W because the color version had been temporarily lost). When Pike made his ‘I can’t get used to women on the bridge’ remark, the audience started oinking. Even more at ‘Not you Number One - you’re different.’
Fun how times change, right? Now Pike is surrounded by women and no one bats an eye.
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Number One is still different though… it’s just that this time she’s different because she’s genetically altered, and apparently that’s the worst possible thing in Star Fleet. Far worse than breaking the Prime Directive since that gets broken every other week. Really, the Prime Directive should be the Secondary Directive and the real prime directive should be about arresting people who try to end Down Syndrome forever.
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If I remember ST: Enterprise correctly, the Federation was founded a bit over a hundred years after “official” first contact between humans and Vulcans, which in turn was just a decade or so after the end of World War III / the Eugenics Wars. A century during which the survivors pulled the planet back from the brink of ecological collapse with Vulcan’s help. It should be no surprise that laws were enacted on Earth during this time firmly banning the practice of genetic alteration for eugenic purposes, i.e., “improving humanity,” or that such feelings still held true centuries later. Not to put too fine a point on it, but look at feelings about the Confederate States of America today — over 150 years after the end of the American Civil War. Insurrection Clause, anyone?
Julian Bashir was eventually set up to be an example of how slippery the slope to crossing the line between curing a genetic disease and human augmentation could be, and that was a century after SNW. It would thus be inconsistent to make Number One a genetic augment and then hand wave the prejudice away.
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If you like, you can interpret it as meaning “there are black holes, and then there are other things that used to be confused with black holes but turned out to be something different, and this particular so-called black hole was one of the latter”. (I should hope so, if it were that close to Earth.)
The clunky thing about that line is “what was then called a black hole”. Why not call it by what it is called now?
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“Ice giant” doesn’t have the same continuum-distorting connotations “black hole” does, and the ship had already escaped from an accidental wormhole earlier in the movie.
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And then there’s the whole Graviton Particle thing…
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I give gravitons a pass for the simple reason that despite no one having a workable (peer reviewed, testable) theory of quantum gravity that doesn’t break the Standard Model, the non-quantum gravity theories are in worse shape. Experiments are underway to begin looking for evidence of axions. And tachyons keep popping up periodically as a Finagle factor only to vanish again as theory adapts to observations. But chronitons? Puh-lease!
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I thought they killed off tachyons fifty years ago.
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Eh, they keep popping occasionally up as a way to explain some new twist in theoretical physics, but a way to solve the math without them is usually found.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2012.0340
But there’s always the exception that just may prove the rule, like the cosmological constant. That’s why I called them a Finagle factor; because they just won’t go away and stay there.
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I hope Fingal doesn’t flub the finagle factor!
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But if gravity isn’t actually a force and is instead a warping of space time, do we even need a particle?
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There are numbers in this story that I have no concept of when applied to certain units of measurement.
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Do they measure it in bananas? Because it’s the only worthwhile measurement system.
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