Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
Read more about how to comment at Daystrom.
Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
3. Be diplomatic.
Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
4. Assume good faith.
Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”
5. Tag spoilers.
Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.
6. Stay on-topic.
Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.
Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
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I’m still trying to figure out how an arrogant scientist whose creation killed over 450 Starfleet crew members on two starships and then went insane himself got a prominent technological institute named after him.
Yeah, well, other than that he was great!
Considering that despite his failures Starfleet has muscled on with fleet automation ever since, no matter how many times it destroys the fleet, I suppose they consider his failure aspirational.
I would make the case that in the Star Trek future, people have learned to be able to see beyond an individual’s mistakes (even egregious ones). The M-5 was certainly a dangerous mistake, but Daystrom had good intentions and was working on a project of great interest to Starfleet Command. The results were completely unintentional on Daystrom’s part, and he clearly was not emotionally stable by the time “The Ultimate Computer” occurs, so I think that in light of the many tremendous impacts Daystrom had in computing that society was able to understand and forgive.
Well, his big successes were early, right? Maybe the institute was too.
Visionary.