I think the best coffee company in the world is appropriately named Starbucks. They have the best coffee shops in the world, hands down.
Star Trek: The Original Series and The Next Generation
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I think the best coffee company in the world is appropriately named Starbucks. They have the best coffee shops in the world, hands down.
I can't find this TOS reference to acetylcholine, but if it's in there, they made the mistake of using a real neurotransmitter with known properties. A quick look at Wikipedia says it doesn't work that way, although one of the effects of nicotine is to selectively mimic the effect at particular receptors.
This isn't the TNG clip I was looking for, but it does feature Wesley Crusher having never heard of addictive drugs and failing to understand the concept. There's another clip I think from the same episode that features some senior staff being similarly unaware?
From the perspective of the 24th Century, all of these things can be (and are) synthesized, and their physiological effects seem to be thoroughly understood, so the difference between "natural" drugs like caffeine and fully synthetic compounds is moot (and that acetylcholine that wouldn't work is naturally biologically produced anyway.) If Picard's tea has caffeine in it, which (given it's coming from a replicator) isn't actually clear, then the distinction between that and a shot from the doctor is kind of a moot point too so long as its use is left to personal discretion. It's a false distinction. What's inconsistent is that caffeine is addictive and the 24th Century seems nonetheless unaware of the existence of addiction. For TNG by itself, one would take the impression that Picard's tea probably doesn't contain any caffeine at all.
This is of course inconsistent with Deep Space Nine and Voyager, where the coffee is explicitly caffeinated. But for all that people rail about nuTrek not following the TNG ethos, TNG is really the odd one out, and it's not just about caffeine. TNG elevates and distances the society that the Federation represents in ways that are unique to TNG. Janeway needs her coffee because it makes her relatable, nothing more complicated than that. Considering all the weird 80s-90s hangups the TNG crew do have, often in relation to gender roles, all the effort to make them feel like a real future society can feel a little baffling to me watching it now.
And of course, every series makes an exception for alcohol.
The trouble is that abject horror at the concept of street drugs in contemporary culture has largely been a tool of people in power to brand disadvantaged groups as less-than, which is why we've so long banned cannabis while permitting the more dangerous tobacco. And whether people addicted to drugs are blamed or pitied (TNG has some of both) they tend to be poor, disenfranchised, or politically malcontent sections of the population. There's a feeling of superiority there that reeks of class distinction, like the culture of the 24th Century is the culture of our 1%. Wine is fine, whiskey is frisky, beer ain't here.
From a purely speculative point of view, the biotechnology of Star Trek is such that any positive effect people associate with any contemporary drug (in the broad sense including caffeine etc.) could easily be synthesized with no side effects whatsoever. Or, drugs could be freely indulged and the ill effects reversed. Star Trek has always chosen not to include tobacco in the culture of the 23rd-24th C., specifically because it's been on the right side of history with respect to the effects and cultural perception of that drug. But take something that Trek chooses to make easy, like a simple injection that can save a person from fatal radiation poisoning, and you could fix lung cancer or other disease by much the same means. The absence of tobacco isn't about the speculative future, it's always been about the present.
In reality, quite a lot of problems people still have in the 24th Century could be instantly solved with technology, and often the reason they still have them anyway is so that the show can have a story. Or even for staging concerns - Dr. Bashir doesn't send Sisko an e-mail with a bunch of attachments, he walks into his office with an armload of PADDs representing each individual report document. People in Star Trek don't spend their days sitting and staring at computer monitors, and in the rare unavoidable case that they do sit down at one, nuTrek makes it transparent so the cameras don't have to shoot around it.
Any bit of contemporary human culture that Trek chooses to include in the 23rd, 24th, or 25th Century is at least as much a choice about what that thing represents to viewers in the present audience as it is about any speculative aspect of the show, and what you choose to include or exclude and what you overlook in either direction says more about the present than it does about any hypothetical future.
Coffee and tea are just one of the easy ways available to the writers to ground the characters in something that the viewers have some experience with.
This isn't the TNG clip I was looking for, but it does feature Wesley Crusher having never heard of addictive drugs and failing to understand the concept. There's another clip I think from the same episode that features some senior staff being similarly unaware?
From the perspective of the 24th Century, all of these things can be (and are) synthesized, and their physiological effects seem to be thoroughly understood, so the difference between "natural" drugs like caffeine and fully synthetic compounds is moot (and that acetylcholine that wouldn't work is naturally biologically produced anyway.) If Picard's tea has caffeine in it, which (given it's coming from a replicator) isn't actually clear, then the distinction between that and a shot from the doctor is kind of a moot point too so long as its use is left to personal discretion. It's a false distinction. What's inconsistent is that caffeine is addictive and the 24th Century seems nonetheless unaware of the existence of addiction. For TNG by itself, one would take the impression that Picard's tea probably doesn't contain any caffeine at all.
This is of course inconsistent with Deep Space Nine and Voyager, where the coffee is explicitly caffeinated. But for all that people rail about nuTrek not following the TNG ethos, TNG is really the odd one out, and it's not just about caffeine. TNG elevates and distances the society that the Federation represents in ways that are unique to TNG. Janeway needs her coffee because it makes her relatable, nothing more complicated than that. Considering all the weird 80s-90s hangups the TNG crew do have, often in relation to gender roles, all the effort to make them feel like a real future society can feel a little baffling to me watching it now.
And of course, every series makes an exception for alcohol.
The trouble is that abject horror at the concept of street drugs in contemporary culture has largely been a tool of people in power to brand disadvantaged groups as less-than, which is why we've so long banned cannabis while permitting the more dangerous tobacco. And whether people addicted to drugs are blamed or pitied (TNG has some of both) they tend to be poor, disenfranchised, or politically malcontent sections of the population. There's a feeling of superiority there that reeks of class distinction, like the culture of the 24th Century is the culture of our 1%. Wine is fine, whiskey is frisky, beer ain't here.
From a purely speculative point of view, the biotechnology of Star Trek is such that any positive effect people associate with any contemporary drug (in the broad sense including caffeine etc.) could easily be synthesized with no side effects whatsoever. Or, drugs could be freely indulged and the ill effects reversed. Star Trek has always chosen not to include tobacco in the culture of the 23rd-24th C., specifically because it's been on the right side of history with respect to the effects and cultural perception of that drug. But take something that Trek chooses to make easy, like a simple injection that can save a person from fatal radiation poisoning, and you could fix lung cancer or other disease by much the same means. The absence of tobacco isn't about the speculative future, it's always been about the present.
In reality, quite a lot of problems people still have in the 24th Century could be instantly solved with technology, and often the reason they still have them anyway is so that the show can have a story. Or even for staging concerns - Dr. Bashir doesn't send Sisko an e-mail with a bunch of attachments, he walks into his office with an armload of PADDs representing each individual report document. People in Star Trek don't spend their days sitting and staring at computer monitors, and in the rare unavoidable case that they do sit down at one, nuTrek makes it transparent so the cameras don't have to shoot around it.
Any bit of contemporary human culture that Trek chooses to include in the 23rd, 24th, or 25th Century is at least as much a choice about what that thing represents to viewers in the present audience as it is about any speculative aspect of the show, and what you choose to include or exclude and what you overlook in either direction says more about the present than it does about any hypothetical future.
Coffee and tea are just one of the easy ways available to the writers to ground the characters in something that the viewers have some experience with.
Yeah, Trek is consistent across the generations at least on that front.
Okay who am I (and Memory Alpha) missing here. Rios is a human main character, singular, in a current Trek show and who smokes like it's nothing. As far as I can recall he's the only one.
Raffi vaped on some kind of psychoactive alien plant in a vaporizer, but that wasn't a human custom to begin with (WOG says it's Orion, and the cannabis equivalents on present day Earth look different. And neither of those things is tobacco, or in fact smoking.) There's no particular connection to anything humans used to do. Vadic smokes as part of her persona but isn't human or Federation, and while she has lungs, she almost certainly doesn't have the physiology to benefit from nicotine. She's in the same category as Carl the Guardian of Forever, or Counsellor Troi, smoking a holographic cigar as a character prop. (TNG is shockingly inconsistent about how alien or familiar the twentieth century is to the present-day crew. Similarly, in Star Trek VI, Kirk smokes a joint when it's offered to him with no difficulty as if it's not his first time.)
It's worth noting, whether or not I'm missing someone obvious, none of that means the scene in "Little Green Men" was "wrong". I don't know to what extent the writers were taking care to consider it themselves, but Nog's only experience of humans is through Starfleet. He's never visited Matalas Prime, played a bunch of Earth period holonovels, or been to the admiral's barbeque. He knew smoking as a centuries-past human custom, but he might have described eyeglasses the same way.
Raffi vaped on some kind of psychoactive alien plant in a vaporizer, but that wasn't a human custom to begin with (WOG says it's Orion, and the cannabis equivalents on present day Earth look different. And neither of those things is tobacco, or in fact smoking.) There's no particular connection to anything humans used to do. Vadic smokes as part of her persona but isn't human or Federation, and while she has lungs, she almost certainly doesn't have the physiology to benefit from nicotine. She's in the same category as Carl the Guardian of Forever, or Counsellor Troi, smoking a holographic cigar as a character prop. (TNG is shockingly inconsistent about how alien or familiar the twentieth century is to the present-day crew. Similarly, in Star Trek VI, Kirk smokes a joint when it's offered to him with no difficulty as if it's not his first time.)
It's worth noting, whether or not I'm missing someone obvious, none of that means the scene in "Little Green Men" was "wrong". I don't know to what extent the writers were taking care to consider it themselves, but Nog's only experience of humans is through Starfleet. He's never visited Matalas Prime, played a bunch of Earth period holonovels, or been to the admiral's barbeque. He knew smoking as a centuries-past human custom, but he might have described eyeglasses the same way.
It was mostly very early on in TNG's run that scenes that like (kinda cheesy) Wesley clip occurred... when Gene had more influence over the writing, and had the characters represent his idealized future humanity... for more insight into that, read "James T. Kirk's" (I suspect written by Gene himself) introduction to the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
As his influence over the series waned, the characters became a little more "contemporized" and relatable while still retaining the general enlightened mindset typical to Federation citizens.
As his influence over the series waned, the characters became a little more "contemporized" and relatable while still retaining the general enlightened mindset typical to Federation citizens.
Gene Roddenberry was more futuristic, and he created all the Original Series and Next Generation characters. He also hired real, hard-core sci-fi writers like Gene L. Coon. Finally, Roddenberry was a genius on the same level as Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov.
You know, the first thing you're going to hear about Roddenberry in any carefully researched documentary of him and his role in Trek history is that one of his biggest successes was the mythology he created around himself.
(There's no doubting his influence on science fiction equals someone like Asimov. I don't really see the point of comparing either, favorably or unfavorably, to the scientist who invented science communication and also wrote one decent sci-fi novel.)
(There's no doubting his influence on science fiction equals someone like Asimov. I don't really see the point of comparing either, favorably or unfavorably, to the scientist who invented science communication and also wrote one decent sci-fi novel.)
And like George Lucas, another highly influential figure on modern sci-fi, Roddenberry's ideas tend to turn out that much better when there are people under him with the stones to say "no, you may've gone too far", or to moderate some of his more extreme ideas.
When those people are absent, we get (in Lucas' case) abominations like the prequel trilogy, or in Gene's case Star Trek: The Motion Picture (as much as I enjoy it, the Director's Cut even moreso, it isn't a film that speaks to general audiences) and the aforementioned early-season cheesiness of TNG.
Gene Roddenberry was at the helm of the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Original Series where it thrived. When Roddenberry walked away at the beginning of the 3rd season, the quality of the episodes dropped down such that the series ended after the third season. I have no doubt if Gene Roddenberry stayed on as producer the sky would be the limit on how many more seasons of Star Trek: The Original Series we would have gotten.
I genuinely don't know what would lead you to think that. Unlike the additional seasons of TOS that exist in your imagination, the early seasons of TNG that TM2-Megatron referred to actually exist. And you're not even engaging with his point, that Roddenberry's presence isn't a binary on or off switch, there's also the question of how complete the control he had was, which was highest in early TNG.
Never mind the fact that Roddenberry, the entire idea of what Star Trek was, and the relationship between those things unquestionably changed over the intervening 20 years, so this isn't some controlled experiment where Roddenberry is a known variable you can add and remove.
Never mind the fact that Roddenberry, the entire idea of what Star Trek was, and the relationship between those things unquestionably changed over the intervening 20 years, so this isn't some controlled experiment where Roddenberry is a known variable you can add and remove.
Remove Gene Roddenberry and there is no Star Trek. Add Gene Roddenberry and there is Star Trek.
Remove George Lucas and there is no Star Wars. Add George Lucas and there is Star Wars.
There you have your controlled experiment with Roddenberry as a known variable you can add and remove.
Remove George Lucas and there is no Star Wars. Add George Lucas and there is Star Wars.
There you have your controlled experiment with Roddenberry as a known variable you can add and remove.
I'm not sure if you're following what TM2-Megatron and I are saying, but you're not showing any sign of it. Just knock off the hero worship, nothing is ever as simple as you're trying to make it. A lot of people contributed to what Star Trek was, from the very start.
Saw a whole bunch of DS9 eps.
Nog's arc of being a Starfleet officer is awesome and I love that, in an alternate future (where his best friend is miserable), he actually becomes a captain. The potential is there! He just doesn't get any taller, which is weird.
I know why Bareil is killed. They needed Kira free cuz of whole Odo is in love with her plotline. Uuuuugh.
Julian Bashir is 30? That's kinda young. I'm super annoyed and sad at the ep where he could have cured the Jem Hadar but O'Brien was a jerk. He should have taken the immunity guy prisoner.
Ugh, naked Quark mom culture.
Sisko transitioned from John Stewart Justice League head hair to Justice League Unlimited version with bald and bearded. And his new girlfriend Cassidy looks like the doctor in Orville.
The Adversary ep season 3 finale with the changeling in the station was a great action ep. It didn't feel like a regular episode. It was tense.
Worf is a permanent cast member now?!?!
Anyhow, I'm past the middle of the whole show, whee
Nog's arc of being a Starfleet officer is awesome and I love that, in an alternate future (where his best friend is miserable), he actually becomes a captain. The potential is there! He just doesn't get any taller, which is weird.
I know why Bareil is killed. They needed Kira free cuz of whole Odo is in love with her plotline. Uuuuugh.
Julian Bashir is 30? That's kinda young. I'm super annoyed and sad at the ep where he could have cured the Jem Hadar but O'Brien was a jerk. He should have taken the immunity guy prisoner.
Ugh, naked Quark mom culture.
Sisko transitioned from John Stewart Justice League head hair to Justice League Unlimited version with bald and bearded. And his new girlfriend Cassidy looks like the doctor in Orville.
The Adversary ep season 3 finale with the changeling in the station was a great action ep. It didn't feel like a regular episode. It was tense.
Worf is a permanent cast member now?!?!
Anyhow, I'm past the middle of the whole show, whee
A small spoiler, it doesn't end up being that direct because they still have to draw it out, but uuuugh indeed.
...maybe they also, I dunno, like the taste of it? I mean, that's like saying "who would even want to eat pizza in 25th century, when they should have tastless protein bars for every meal by then?"
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