Yeah I only like the OG trilogy for movies plus some of the OG games such as KOTOR and the Jedi Knight series, as well as the N64 (Rogue Squadron) and SNES titles (Super Star Wars trilogy).

I’ve also heard great things about the X Wing and Tie Fighter games for PC but I’ve never played them. Very old school DOS games!

I’m confused. Here was your original comment:

When you could stop working and just coast off of what you’ve got till you die. At that point, making more is a luxury.

That, to me, includes grandmas who live off their pension cheque as “coasting off what you’ve got.” Did you not intend for that interpretation?

There’s an enormous gap between grandma living month to month on her pension cheque and Jeff Bezos money. Grandma doesn’t work though so you could say she’s “coasting” even if she relies on the senior discount at the grocery store to get by.

There’s also a lot of people who have a lot of wealth (in the form of land, buildings, equipment) yet can’t afford to stop working, such as farmers. The UK government is going after these folks aggressively and they’re very unhappy. We could be seeing a strike by farmers in the new year where they simply stop delivering food to market.

So you don’t think people should ever be able to retire?

And very derpy! I can just hear him in his posh RP accent “Don’t look at me! This is completely undignified!”

I thought I was looking at some kind of weird snail!

It’s called Simpson’s Paradox. When you split people into groups each group can have a favourable rating towards a politician but when you combine all the groups you can have the opposite trend where all politicians are viewed negatively.

I’d forgotten that long ago. I was just enjoying this back and forth with you!

She wasn’t just one person. She was a representative of her entire species. They make it clear at the end when everyone reverts to their youthful appearance. The life Picard lived as Kamin was in some sense a staging for Picard’s benefit, not a real life. Kamin may have been a real person who was married to Helene but Picard wouldn’t have mirrored exactly what he did with his life.

At any rate, I think you’re missing the point of Star Trek. The show has never been “hard sci fi”. It’s always been a show that uses a science fiction setting to tell human stories. Trying to criticize it from a scientific perspective is just silly. There’s a bit of science in the show but any time science gets in the way of the story they wave it away with some technobabble.

I think it’s fair to say that they didn’t value books, at least not at the time they built the probe. Their planet was dying and they had accepted that fact for many years. Kamin’s wife Helene even admonishes him for spending too much time with his books instead of living life with their family.

It’s completely and utterly realistic from an emotional perspective. It’s everything you’d expect from a people who knew they were dying. Their way of life, their traditions, their music, their celebrations: those are what mattered to them and they couldn’t be preserved authentically in books or pictures. That’s why they created the probe.

Being able to decipher a language doesn’t mean the language is alive. It has to be spoken everyday by people who were taught by their parents, passed down as part of a whole culture.

Languages die when people stop speaking them. They cannot be revived from written records. People still study Latin today but it will forever be a dead language because the chain of speakers was broken. The same goes for culture, for which language is a part. You cannot preserve a culture after all of its native practitioners are gone.

What the Resikans did was to preserve their own culture by giving Picard a life on their planet. Through his experiences he became the last living member of their culture. The profound grief he shows and his reluctance to talk about it is exactly what we would expect from the last survivor of a dying culture.

Unfortunately, Picard has no way to preserve their culture because he cannot recreate their entire way of life. No amount of writings or other artifacts can do that.

This is what we see all over the world with indigenous cultures that are dying off. They cannot be saved by scientists studying them and writing everything down and cataloguing all the art they’ve made. Just as you can’t save a species from extinction using dissection and taxidermy.

Did you watch the video I linked about nutmeg? We actually have real life examples of cultures going extinct in real time. The Bandanese people are witnessing the death of their own language as it happens. What upsets them the most is that their own children don’t speak their language. They could not care less about memorials to their language in some institute of language in the capital city.

That’s the whole genius of The Inner Light. They reached out across the vastness of space and time and taught Picard what it really meant to be a person living on their planet, in their culture. No stupid memorial plaque or other token could achieve that.

It’s not the piece of pottery that matters! It’s the people making it. Their lives and their experiences.

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

No thing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”, 1819 edition

They wanted one person to remember them. All the other extinct cultures had none!

Anyway, suppose they had made the probe infinitely reusable as long as you hooked it up to a power source. Then it would’ve turned into a Disney ride, totally cheapening the experience. Do you see what I’m getting at?

All the difference. We’re talking about the values of a people who knew they were dying. You called them idiots for wanting to be remembered by a person who actually cared about them. I think if you ask most people they’d rather be remembered by their loved ones than have their life recorded as a bunch of artifacts in a museum.

According to their values, their probe succeeded wildly in a way that nearly all other extinct cultures failed. The only other ones to come close were those aliens that hid their own humanoid DNA in the genetics of all the major civilizations. Even then, those aliens didn’t succeed at getting anyone to care about them the way Picard cared about the Resikans.

TLDR: no one cares about a bunch of crap people leave behind when they die. Go to an estate sale and see.

Edit: if you have a few hours to kill, watch this video. Then come back and continue the discussion.

How many long-extinct human cultures do you care about like they’re your own family?

One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

This quote summarizes the Resikans’ entire rationale and their rebuttal to your argument. First of all, I believe the probe was intelligent and it targeted Picard because he was a leader among his people (being captain of a starship). Secondly:

This is how they wanted to be remembered!

Not as some pile of artifacts and writings collecting dust in the back room of some museum — one dead civilization among countless others — but as living, breathing people. That’s what’s so profound about it! They reached across time and space and managed to get a single person to care and care very deeply about them.

Look at all the other artifacts Picard collected as an archaeologist. They’re important to him but for the wrong reason: they’re trophies of his intellectual curiosity. The Resikan flute is so far above that. It’s his most treasured possession because it stirs in him the memories of a people he truly loved.

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It was not a booby trap! He was entering his apartment, he wasn’t approaching the scooter. It was just there!

Flat out wrong. Your entire point rests on your equation of using a civilian vehicle (a scooter) to hide a bomb with “the feigning of civilian, non-combatant status” which is categorically false. Feigning civilian, non-combatant status is very specific. It means dressing your soldiers up as civilians and approaching the enemy in order to use your false civilian status to get them to let their guard down, then attacking:

Citing Article 37 of Additional Protocol I as support, it defines perfidy (and thus treachery) as “acts that invite the confidence of enemy persons to lead them to believe that they are entitled to, or are obliged to accord, protection under the law of war, with intent to betray that confidence.”

In no way did a scooter parked on the street invite Kirilov’s confidence to believe he was protecting the scooter under the law of war.

That is what perfidy means: using the protection of civilians specifically and treacherously to launch an attack while disguised as civilians. This requires that the enemy see you dressed as a civilian and let his guard down.

This did not happen since Kirilov never saw his attackers.

2. Ruses of war are not prohibited. Such ruses are acts which are intended to mislead an adversary or to induce him to act recklessly but which infringe no rule of international law applicable in armed conflict and which are not perfidious because they do not invite the confidence of an adversary with respect to protection under that law. The following are examples of such ruses: the use of camouflage, decoys, mock operations and misinformation.