this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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Star Trek
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/c/StarTrek: Your safe harbored Spacedock in these Stellar Seas!
Fire up the inertial dampeners, retract all moorings and clear space dock. It's time to boldy go where no one has gone before!
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You have come up with some plausible ideas, but I still don't think it works. The Voyager probes would not be a message only transferred to one single person and their memories. Even if there were a hundred probes, that's only a potential of 100 people who will remember their civilization to the degree they appear it wanted to be remembered, and only until they die. And that's only if all 100 probes are encountered by other spacefaring civilizations by chance. Maybe one or two of them have some way to transfer one person's memories to some sort of archive, but that's a hell of a chance to take. But I especially think the golden records is a bad example because, even if it were intended to show what we were like in a desperate attempt to save our culture when we know it's doomed, one record could potentially be studied by countless aliens since it is a tangible thing.
As much as I love the episode dramatically, especially because Patrick Stewart really sells it, it just doesn't really work rationally as a concept.
Which is fine, a lot of good Star Trek doesn't really work rationally, especially all the times they just randomly encounter something like that probe in deep space where it's just hoped it will be stumbled across at some point.
Perhaps the probes were meant to work against large crowds, and that the remaining functioning systems/power only had enough for one person. Perhaps the biology of those on the Enterprise weren't compatible in the large group format or the distance from the probe to the ship to great. Since we're making this all up, there's no end to it.
I'll posit an even more extreme set of in-universe events. The entire store of Kataan is in-universe fake. No one lived. No one died. The probe is a old culture's version of Netflix and the Enterprise accidentally activated it. The flute in the probe is simply a mass market cheaply constructed souvenir for the customer consuming the experience. Silly humans thought it was real attributing meaning and experiencing loss for purely fictional characters in what is essentially a slightly different holosuite entertainment program.
That honestly works better for me than saying this is how they memorialize their civilization.
I mean at least in Voyager's Memorial, the memorial was supposed to be something anyone visiting the planet would get affected by in perpetuity (until Tuvok turned it off, but that was obviously not a scenario they envisioned).
The probe in The Inner Light stops working after sending the dream (or whatever you want to call it) to Picard. It's one-time use. So a DRM-protected 'movie' rental sure works better for me.