It's not an unreasonable study per se; the problem is that it was done in fruitflies, which you may remember are rather small. Humans are significantly less transparent to photons in the visible spectrum, so think of this more as an extended corollary of UV light being bad for your skin—the truth is probably something like "all high-energy photons are bad for all biological processes," which isn't exactly headline-grabbing.

Three words: "Choose life, friend."

timeOday's replies are not exactly the full story—NeRF does use machine learning, and in fact it trains a small neural network based on the images you feed it. With 128 of Google's fancy proprietary TPUv2 cores, the JAXNeRF implementation asks for 2.5 hours of training and is then run with a camera position as the neural network inputs to generate an actual output image in about 350 ms for an 800x800 result. So it has many of the most obnoxious characteristics of leading machine learning algorithms but not the regurgitory aspects; although these figures may be a couple of years out of date, it's still like $20 of cloud computing time per scene.

Sorry, you wanted to input zig-zig-zag, but the device only recognized zig-zag. Now the 5 TB of hot grits memes you were trying to delete have been sent to everyone in your Teams chat. Computers are so wacky and imprecise!

None of that really amounts to a downside for fusion; unless you're trying to say "solar is cheaper and has failed to be the end to all energy problems, so a more expensive solution doesn't stand a chance," you haven't really dismissed fusion. I'm sure there were coal execs making the same sorts of claims about fission seventy years ago.

As I understand it, solar power does pose some problems of its own. Panel manufacture requires a lot of very... rapacious mineral extraction that isn't doing the environment or geopolitical order any favours. Expensive though it may be, I haven't heard fusion power be accused of the same.

Wait—why wouldn't a functional fusion system be the end to all energy problems? Scalability? Meddlesome oil execs? Overly-broad definition of "functional" that includes extremely low-yield systems? Last I checked, getting a (harvestable) net positive output was the hard part.

Clearly there's a conversion ratio. 2 months = 1 round-trip flight. Not unreasonable for someone who can drop $2000 on a bleeding-edge gadget—and then blame the gadget for what should have been an obviously foolishly risky purchase in the first place.

Admittedly I avoid Discovery, so I can't really reflect on the Short Trek clip. The horrifying TNG episode you mentioned, Code of Honor , has been described by Frakes as "a racist piece of shit;" he also said that "even Gene would have been embarrassed by" it. There's some interesting trivia to be seen there—Frakes says "would have been" as though Gene was already dead (he wasn't) or was absent from production (maybe he was busy or sick?). The script was also mainly credited to a woman, Katharyn Powers, who would go on to write a similar story for the first season of Stargate SG-1, with similar blowback.

As the Memory Alpha article attests, not everyone involved thinks the episode was inherently racist; Wil Wheaton more or less describes it as the product of an 'unfortunate' choice of setting. (Yet as you noted, this was baked in from the start.) Going back to the archetype of the Nietzschean libertine that I described before, we see in many pulp stories a desire to "tell it like it is" with regards to African cultures, which functionally means to regurgitate the tales of 19th century colonial explorers who first contacted these people. As we see in the iconic White Man's Burden by Rudyard Kipling, they were mired in Social Darwinist and capital-R Racist philosophy; they did not see themselves as hateful or in opposition to the dignity of indigenous peoples, and sometimes wrote in admiration of (what they believed to be) tribal customs and values, often because they coveted the autonomy of their leaders. The pre-WW2 generation grew up reading authors like Burroughs (John Carter of Mars) and Howard (Conan the Barbarian), and their stories frequently indulge in this kind of power fantasy.

If we ask Katharyn Powers what the fuck she was thinking when she wrote that episode, she probably would have said it was meant to present the people of Styris IV in an honourable light, as the title suggests. (More cynically we might accuse her of smuggling a weird self-insert fantasy into the writers' room, considering that women had been writing pornographic Star Trek fan fiction for something like fifteen years at this point, but that's another conversation altogether.) Code of Honor is where the fantasy of the libertine's enlightenment crashes into the reality of their utter isolation from the inequality of the real world, and collapses in a mess of antique clichés that seem like little more than weird heirlooms. It doesn't help that these same depictions of the Noble Savage trope were often inextricably intertwined with anxious paranoia and feelings of inferiority, also on display in stories by Lovecraft and Howard, which were powerful instruments that kept southern whites on their toes between lynchings.

Even prior to the revival, artificial sentience is a subject that is essentially so mangled in Star Trek that it cannot really be sorted out. The end of the Doctor's personal growth arc, Author, Author , concludes with the revelation that EMHs across the Federation were retasked as menial labourers in a mine, performing work that could have been done by a mindless automaton in a surplus Exocomp shell. Limiting ourselves to the most restrictive model of ethical philosophy, and accepting only what Kantian and Utilitarian ethics might agree upon, the decision to use EMH miners is essentially immoral: it creates needless suffering in something that appears to be capable of experiencing it, in the same way that it is more ethical to use a machine to test for the presence of an insect poison than simply sacrificing insects. Really, the entirety of how holograms are treated in Star Trek, right from the first Dixon Hill encounter in TNG, is absolutely incomprehensible unless we assume ethics in the Star Trek universe have actually gone back a century rather than forward, which would conveniently place them at the time of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Picard's approach to robots is, of course, a self-contained mess, since it's a stolen plot ineptly shoehorned into the Star Trek setting. It is indeed tempting to say that the plastic people of Mars (what a sobriquet!) are inferior to Soong-type machines in a meaningful way. The paradox lies in the attack on Mars itself: the Zhat Vash most certainly knew all about Data, Lore, and the sophistication of Federation holograms, but only the proliferation of low-quality androids provoked a response from them. Thus, either the Plastic People of Mars were sufficiently advanced to rebel, and were actually just subject to behaviour-blocking code (this is the story of the Kaylon of Orville, according to From Unknown Graves ), or the writers were so ignorant of their own setting that they included their own EMH without recognizing that holograms would be a much greater threat in the eyes of the Zhat Vash. (I'm honestly divided on this issue.)

It's important not to typify historical figures according to political labels from a different era. Often we find that, in addition to the unique, individual views that comprise a person, they subscribed to movements of thought that have since evolved or evaporated, which can tell us a lot about them. Understanding Roddenberry poses a challenge for almost everyone who grew up watching television, because his generation was full of social planners who deliberately replaced their own viewpoints with what they thought was best for society. In retrospect, fights like the civil rights movement may look like they involve two fundamental, axiomatic perspectives that are essentially timeless, but actually they were the crystallization of a great deal of discourse.

The best way to describe Roddenberry's views on social issues is as a libertine: he valued his freedom and independence above all else, and proceeded from that position, having discarded those institutions and ideas that he felt were in conflict with it. He believed in God, or at least acted like he was expected to, but you can be sure he arrived at the conclusion that the Golden Rule (treat others as you wish to be treated) was valid after much introspection and discussion, probably with the help of a reefer joint, a martini, the afterglow of sex, or all three. It goes without saying that he thought of racism as repugnant; to him, any sort of discrimination was an imposition on the liberty of the victim.

Crucially, this has very mixed results when it comes to women. We can't say for certain that Majel Barrett would have been cast as the first officer in The Cage if he wasn't in love with her. Likewise, Star Trek was very womanizing—Kirk doesn't actually sleep with all that many alien women, but he and Spock share meaningful glances whenever they see something they like. This lingers in TNG's first two seasons because they still had Phase Two scripts to use; The Child (2x01, Troi gets pregnant with an energy being and gives birth the next day) is perhaps the single weirdest episode in the whole franchise because of this, and gets mentioned in a few feminist essays about what it means to be a woman in science fiction. The easiest contemporary we can point at is Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy, who once branded himself as a herald of progressive thought. Neither man wanted to be tied down by one lover, nor limited to white women—Roddenberry also slept with Nichelle Nichols, which basically tells you everything you need to know about his motivations for supporting racial integration and for putting women in positions of prominence on Star Trek. His politics and his show were both very useful when he wanted to impress chicks. (He seems to have known Grace Lee Whitney from a previous show, so one can imagine the female recurring cast was basically his little harem, a very Heff-like thing to have indeed.)

This was not unique, of course; it was simple Nietzschean philosophy, and it was essentially ubiquitous among the generations that lived before and during World War 2. To some extent, the war was even fought about it, and its scarcity in the modern world—aside from the occasional US president—is the result of deliberate erasure by the very people who engaged in it. Many of these men were unafraid to be proven wrong, and while some of them, like Shatner, could never truly evolve with the times, they willingly ceded the world to second-wave feminists and other progressive groups who had a more sober understanding of the Golden Rule. Even Donald Trump was a Democrat in the nineties; at the time he probably saw his own womanizing as a relic of the past rather than a natural consequence of manhood.

Roddenberry grew more zealous of his views later in life. The man more or less died while shouting at his lawyer to make Paramount remove something like half the running time of Star Trek VI because he thought it was too "militaristic," which is not at all something we would expect from his younger self. TNG is not a perfect witness of his views at this point, either: he rejected scripts for shows in the vein of DS9's Homefront (where the Starfleet Admiralty on Earth nearly burns the figurative Reichstag in pursuit of Changeling spies) and cultivated a writers' room that often ran up against Rick Berman, Paramount's man-on-the-inside who reliably shut down almost any representation of homosexuality, gender identity, or AIDS for more than a decade. Understanding Berman is important to understanding why Star Trek seemed less poignant in the 90s than it did in the 60s.

Being a studio executive, Berman believed he was keeping Star Trek marketable and watchable to a less-liberal audience. He has also confessed explicitly that he does not believe in Roddenberry's utopian idealism. (Perhaps if he did, his incredible skill at driving women off the show—Denise Crosby, Terry Farrell, and Jennifer Lien all claim he harassed them—might have stayed in check.) It is because of Berman that the closest we ever get to a canon gay male couple from this period is flirting between Mirror-Universe Garak and Mirror-Universe Worf; whereas we have two lesbian Trill kisses (from previously-heterosexual couples), Mirror-Ezri and Mirror-Kira, and Frakes kissing a genderless being who wants to be female. Frakes himself wanted the actor of said genderless being to be male, but Berman refused it, somewhat robbing that episode of its meaning, but pushing back the clock substantially on when the writers would next try to do a gender-centric episode. Berman has a few writing credits of his own from Enterprise that really double down on his deep and abiding trashiness, like the gratuitous lotion-rubbing in the opening two-parter, and the tonedeaf Unexpected (ENT 1x05), where Tucker gets pregnant and suddenly becomes annoyingly hormonal. We can also thank Berman for the Xindi arc, the MACOs, These Are The Voyages..., and many of Voyager's flaws.

There are a lot of other things from the 24th century that Gene wouldn't have stomached, either. His biggest bugbear by far was the corruption of Terran institutions; really, the entirety of DS9, especially the Maquis, was complete anathema to him, and we can imagine he would have shot down the Pegasus, Section 31, and screamed in horror at In The Pale Moonlight. With this in mind, it's pretty obvious what he would have thought about the casual mistreatment of people, slavery of sentient machines, and whatever this was supposed to be. All three of these abuses are portrayed in a sympathetic light, and thereby suggest that the culture of the Federation is fundamentally broken, having either lost or never possessed the utopian spirit that Roddenberry put forward; they're anti-establishment, which is probably what many conservatives mistakenly identify as 'progressive' because progressivism is an outsider movement in the US today.

For all their failings, Prodigy and Lower Decks are consistent in portraying Federation values, even if they each needed a few episodes to work through their respective season one blues. The Hageman Brothers, who run Prodigy, took a cautious approach; they brought onboard a DS9 script veteran and novelist (David Alan Mack), and have sufficiently nuanced opinions about the canon that they felt comfortable putting the Dauntless at the end of episode 10, an obscure fake Starfleet ship from a fairly easily-forgotten episode of Voyager. Their alien misfits aspire to be worthy of Starfleet, so the show literally fetishizes the pursuit of Roddenberry's vision as a core theme. Mike McMahan is, as you've probably noticed, so personally invested in TNG that he would probably be an annoying tourist if actually transported into the setting, and his list of topics to avoid discussing boils down to The Chase , Force of Nature , and the Temporal Cold War; accordingly, his show has had multiple episodes insinuating that Kurtzman's approach to making television is fundamentally flawed.

I can't really speak to Strange New Worlds, as I haven't seen any of it yet, but my understanding about Discovery, Picard, and SNW is that they all have the same pool of writers, with the same pool of foibles, and even if fan feedback has chastised them repeatedly for failing to capture the essence of the show, they will keep making the same mistakes, bound by the Dunning-Kruger effect more than anything else.

What makes you say you're thinking this Blake wouldn't pass a Turing test?

You can have your polemic invective back once you actually stand up to fascism. Until then, it's a problem, and pretending otherwise is nothing more than a proud declaration of complicity.

Surely you mean

It isn't—but it makes things wet. That's the definition of "wet."

This story is about a murder committed by a veteran. There are no good guys.

The modern consensus is indeed that hexapods (including insects) evolved from crustaceans. The competing theory was that hexapods were more closely related to myriapods (centipedes and millipedes); the debate was more or less settled around 2010 through molecular evidence (in greybeard terms, using diff on the genomes and reconstructing a revision tree.)