Baggy52
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Post by Baggy52 on Jan 9, 2008 20:55:09 GMT -6
Either that or they exist in another area of the universe, wormholes are known to open and close around areas of mass energy, is it possible that this one fell through a wormhole, was it possibly caught in an alien warp feild for a wild ride, was this an explorer from another galaxy that became stranded and could not return? We may never know...
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Atoz 77
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Post by Atoz 77 on Jan 11, 2008 9:08:12 GMT -6
Good point, except that she said, "my life emanates from this place", suggesting that she was native to that asteroid. Remember, it was a field of asteroids. In James Blish's adaptation, it was suggested that a much larger planet had once existed there, and broken up.
Of course, in "Obsession" we have a similar creature -- the murderous, blood-sucking cloud that pursued the Enterprise (and which Kirk remembered had pursued the Farragut many years before). But I think it's obvious that they are completely different species. For one thing, it appeared completely immune to phaser beams.
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Baggy52
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Post by Baggy52 on Jan 11, 2008 15:57:51 GMT -6
And thats whay you're the Prof.
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Luke
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Post by Luke on Jan 19, 2008 10:36:56 GMT -6
I know I may be waying in a little late, but I think you are too quick to rule out telepathy in regard to the salt vampire.
1. It knew things about Dr. McCoy, like the fact that Nancys pet name for him was Plum. 2. When it appeared to Uhura, it was able to speak Swahili. 3. In the herboriam, Sulus plant apparently was able to detect its presence psionicly.
How can you explain these wihtout it being able to read minds?
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Atoz 77
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Post by Atoz 77 on Jan 22, 2008 8:31:40 GMT -6
You bring up some very good points. I'll take them in reverse order.
As an exobiologist, I'm familiar with many plants which are animate to some degree or another. But I've never come across a plant like Gertrude/Beauregard (without eyes and essentially unable to move from place to place) which also possessed a nervous system complex enough to receive telepathic signals, let alone see through them. Plants can and do send and receive chemical messages between themselves. On Earth, the acacia tree, when its leaves are attacked by a goat, releases a chemical which warns other acacia trees. They respond by increasing production of tannin, which makes their leaves poisonous. So it is reasonable to conclude that Sulu's plant was responding to the enzyme which I've already postulated.
Uhura's young man actually confirms my theory. You've got to wonder how difficult it would be to poke around in someone's mind and piece together a coherent sentence in another language that you don't even know. As I've already said, the salt vampire didn't show any signs of being that intelligent. It would have been much simpler if it stimulated Uhura's "familiarity center" so that she only thought the man was speaking Swahili. Plus, it was clear from the way Uhura behaved that she didn't recognize the man. Clearly, he wasn't an image the vampire had plucked out of her memory -- he was just a generic black man of the type Uhura might be expected to be attracted to.
Which brings us to "Plum". This seems to be pretty conclusive evidence, unless we can think of another way the vampire might have found out about this pet name. And we can -- it read Nancy Crater's diary! Remember it had been impersonating her for two years, probably trying to act as much like her as possible to please Professor Crater (otherwise, as he himself admitted, he would have killed it). Why wouldn't it read her journals, her old love letters?
I don't claim this is the only theory that could possibly explain everything. But it does seem to work.
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Luke
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Post by Luke on Jan 23, 2008 11:25:30 GMT -6
You are right. It does seem to cover everything. Its just hard to picture a sort of controlled hallucination being responsibel for all that.
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Atoz 77
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Post by Atoz 77 on Jan 25, 2008 8:47:37 GMT -6
Granted, but it's more parsimonious than jumping to the conclusion that the answer is paranormal. I mean, granted that as Starfleet officers, we've seen things that would be considered paranormal by the standards of the early 21st century (Vulcan mind melds, for example), that doesn't mean that everything we see is necessarily paranormal. Appearances can be decieving, but we'll never know unless we exercise a little skepticism.
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Baggy52
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Post by Baggy52 on Jan 25, 2008 20:13:34 GMT -6
Logic explains all, Its power, Its weakness.
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Luke
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Post by Luke on Jan 26, 2008 10:34:20 GMT -6
I don't think logic explains everything, but it comes pretty close. The irony is in the real world, Im skeptical of the paranormal too. I just don't apply that to Star Trek. I guess it's like Atoz said, we get used to this stuff happening and we suspend disbelief too soon.
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Atoz 77
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Post by Atoz 77 on Jan 28, 2008 8:32:55 GMT -6
It's good to be skeptical, even if you know things like that can happen. In "Devil's Due", there was an alien masquerading as a supernatural being. Picard knows that powerful beings can exist (he's met Q for goodness sakes), but he was still skeptical, even when she apparently obliterated the Enterprise right in front of him. And he turned out to be right.
It's like the Ghost Hunters. They go out expecting to see evidence of ghosts, so that's what they find. They don't really try to look for other explanations (okay, they make a token effort, but it's not really convincing.) They need one true skeptic along with them.
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Luke
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Post by Luke on Jan 29, 2008 13:14:35 GMT -6
Okay, moving along to the Menagerie then. Doesn't it seem like the fantasy environments you find in holodecks would be just as addictive as the Talosians mental powers? And yet Starfleet has holodecks on its ships. Does that make sense? Any speculation on how they got those mental powers anyway?
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Atoz 77
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Post by Atoz 77 on Feb 1, 2008 8:54:55 GMT -6
We've touched on this topic before, I think in the thread called "What Technology would you want?" My theory is that virtual reality technology must have existed in the 23rd century (the time of the Original Series), but that it was restricted in Starfleet for the very reason you suggest -- they were afraid it would be too addictive. By the 24th century (the time of the Next Generation), virtual reality was so commonplace that people had become disciplined enough to only use it sparingly. After all, when was the last time you saw people lined up outside the holodeck, waiting for the chance to use it?
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Atoz 77
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Post by Atoz 77 on Feb 1, 2008 8:59:18 GMT -6
Physiologically speaking, the Talosians obviously had larger brains than ours, and presumably they were better developed. They could easily have had some specialized structure which made them capable of sending and receiving thoughts (telepathy, in other words). If Vina was right and they spend "thousands of centuries" living underground, I would imagine that they started off developing their ability to daydream to the point they could actually create imaginary environments in their heads. Then they would develope the ability to share these imaginary environments with one another, ultimately reaching the point where they could impose them on people who didn't even have the specialized structures for telepathy.
What bothers me is that the Talosians were apparently concerned that humans would learn their "power of illusion". How is that possible, if it took the Talosians centuries to evolve that ability?
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Luke
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Post by Luke on Feb 2, 2008 10:42:16 GMT -6
It might be partly technology. The cells they put Captain Pike in might have been set up like holodecks. There could have been holo-emitters hidden in the rocks at the landing site.
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Atoz 77
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Post by Atoz 77 on Feb 4, 2008 8:25:59 GMT -6
We didn't see much evidence of technology, but of course that doesn't mean anything. Their culture could have made them hide such things. If the planet's surface was as devastated as all that, they pretty much had to have some kind of technology -- life support if nothing else. Some of those fantasy environments were pretty big -- the Rigelian castle for example -- but Pike never bumped against the walls of his cell. That argues that they must have had some means of at least partly paralyzing him so that he didn't walk in his sleep. But when they first captured him, they had to use a rod which shot out sleep gas! Why didn't they just put a mind lock on him? You could argue both ways, I guess.
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