US economic policy is destroying American advantages in global trade at an unbelievable pace, while simultaneously undermining the domestic economy.

Even if Ford managed to build an 'affordable' EV, I suspect the percentage of the population able to afford it will be vastly reduced by the time it gets to market.

I would watch that show. Seriously.

I'm not sure how straight you'd play it, it'd need some degree of comedy, but an investigative procedural where there's no human conspiracy, just some jaded and worn out alien gumshoe... there's potential there.

That was a fascinating read, thank you for posting the link - especially the ideas for motion and transmission of data to space.

I'm not sure how they'd process and analyze samples and transmit results, but things temperature, pressure, and wind speed seem like relatively easy wins once you have the radar reflector idea in play.

The actually unidentified flying object investigator that you want to figure out if something was an odd atmospheric phenomenon, something civilian, a foreign spy craft, or one of your own that wasn't supposed to be seen... or the kind who thinks he's Fox Mulder and wants to prove little green (or grey) men have nothing better to do than fly across light years of space to buzz rural closeted homosexuals and give them dreams of being sodomized by sex toys?

They can be processor, they can be storage, they can be combined to create more efficient transistors, they can handle more than binary states. They're essentially a hardware-implemented neural net node and I am still waiting to see someone manage to use them for that.

I suppose a Venus-tolerant surface probe would be pretty impressive too. Or a home computer that didn't fry itself if the cooling fan seized.

I like dogs, so I'm reaching for a use case that justifies the little robopuppy. I reluctantly concede that the virtual cane is likely far more practical.

>I'm hugely open to the idea that other life forms might not share our morphology. So why do they all look like humans with big fucked-up heads?

Two reasons: the more 'alien' your aliens, the more difficult it is for an audience to interpret them, and production costs.

The goal is to tell a story within a budget, so as Pat Tallman once said, "they sit you down in a chair and put a vagina on your face".

The dog is good for carrying the power required for extended run time (though you give some of that back to the motors making it move) and for providing physical cues through the harness.

My change would be to route the voice system through a Bluetooth headset. There's no need for the dog to talk to the entire environment, and it would be harder to hear in urban settings.

I'd argue TOS wasn't bad. By today's standards, sure, and there were some episodes where the writing failed to overcome the budget limitations, but it was adult science fiction taken seriously and often based on very good stories in days when that was uncommon.

It wasn't Lost in Space.

There's a difference between being inclusive and pandering. TOS didn't pander. Well... maybe a bit. Roddenberry wasn't above it.

Still, there did seem to be a more genuine (though occasionally ham-fisted) attempt at inclusiveness. I doubt a focus group of the times would have given us the Star Trek we got.

The new stuff is often hollow. It's checking boxes. It's pandering. That works better in pop music than in science fiction.

Picard shit the bed from the beginning. From watching an old man survive a massive explosion, throwing in a trailer-dwelling drug addict and a Romulan ninja, through to wasting Seven and ending on a big Reset Button.

Oh, and "Main character is dying"? That's inconvenient... let's replace him with an android running a simulation of his brain and keep on going. Jesus, but that was dumb. I'd have called the show "Star Trek: Legacy" and moved on from Picard in season two... maybe passing the baton to Seven. You don't start out with a big premise and end with, "just kidding", that's high school level writing.

Strange New Worlds managed to give us a musical episode as well as one about an energy being that likes mucking about with people using its magic reality altering powers... and make those episodes not suck.

I liked the Nurse Chapel updates. I even liked the Spock stuff, though like any over-analytical fan I have notes. :)

I hope the writers of that show go on to other successes, because they executed exactly what the premise required while adapting it to a modern production.

That's a silly right-wing red-piller idea.

There's nothing wrong with, you know, not marginalizing groups of people.

Now, throwing bones to the perceived 'woke' crowd based on a checklist... that's going to fail. You can have LGBTQ+ characters so long as that's not why they're on the show (unless your show is specifically about members of those groups). When the character description starts and stops with "non-binary gendered", that is a reliable indicator that the show will be garbage.

Easy enough. "Star Trek fans"

Plenty of them clamored online for "Starfleet Academy" as a series concept for years to get away from the "Ship goes to the planet of the week".

Star Trek went Disney long ago - churn out ill-considered concepts and scripts plastered with nostalgia designed to appeal to the fan base and zeitgeist and certified by a panel ensuring all the right boxes were checked off.

Strange New Worlds was a nice partial deviation from this - they still made sure to pander to all the current 'sensitivities', but if the writers of the show didn't love the original series and its fundamental qualities, I don't know who does.

The rest of it has been pablum. Academy sounded great until you read the synopsis. "Let's subvert tropes" followed by "Yeah, the academy is actually just another starship, and we'll give the kids superpowers". Their attempts to drop little Easter eggs for classic fans were just insulting - like having aliens show up with the writers obviously having zero idea that in the original series the whole point of their appearance was to watch them die in an unnecessary final act of self-imposed genocide.

Throwing Star Fleet uniforms and phasers into a setting doesn't make it good. Let it rest until they figure that out.