I think so long as you maintain consciousness that issue is fairly null in this particular circumstance. There’s lots of tolerance for changes in thought while maintaining the same self, see many brain damage victims. So long as there is minimal change in personality, there are lots of other circumstances that have a stronger case for killing one person and having a new person replace them due to change of consciousness, imo, I don’t think most people would consider a brain damaged person killed and replaced by a new consciousness, or a drug addiction with radically altered brain chemistry, etc.

I don’t see an issue with that. A prolonged brain surgery that meticulously replaces each part with a mechanical equivalent in sequence. Could probably remain conscious the whole time.

There’s a lot of interesting ethical concerns about the Borg Collevtive. It’s easy to think of it as some big, alien, external force that erases minds and uses the bodies as flesh puppets. But that isn’t how they’re described at all. The people are all still there, that big scary intelligence is made up from merging all their minds together. Obviously, the consent issue is problematic, and we know people generally find it horrific when they are freed. But the fact is, the majority of the Hivemind apparently don’t mind, the hive mind is made up from the gestalt of the individuals, and that is the only thing keeping individuals from leaving.

What level of abstraction is enough? Training doesn’t store or reference the work at all. It derives a set of weights from it automatically. But what if you had a legion of interns manually deriving the weights and entering them in instead? Besides the impracticality of it, if I look at a picture, write down a long list of small adjustments, -2.343, -.02, +5.327, etc etc etc, and adjust the parameters of the algorithm without ever scanning it in, is that legal? If that is, does that mean the automation of that process is the illegal part?

Sentience is the little hump that we can at least sort of see some evidence of, judging by how similar regions of brains activate in certain circumstances. Sapience is the real tricky one.

I don’t think it works like that. It’s Stargate logic. You get scanned, then deconstructed into energy, then stored in the energy banks. At that point you are gone, there is just a surplus of power in the system, and a blueprint of how to make you. It then transmits the energy elsewhere, then reknits it back into matter. But it’s not like it just takes the “you,” energy, and of course there’s no way to make the energy that was your hand back into your hand. Everybody is a transport clone, the originals all died ages ago.

There are civilizations that were around for ages before we made fire in Star Trek, and lots of primitiveraces too. Hell, in Voyager they found a race of Terran dinosaurs that escaped Earth before the asteroid hit. They’re one of the stronger races in their region of space, but are far from top dog in the Quandrant, implying several societies are possibly millions of years old. Not every race will follow a similar tech advancement, but a couple probably do, anyway.

Humanity are the mad scientists of the setting. Sad I couldn’t find the thread alone, this half assed article will have to do.

The thing about blaster bolts in the OT is that they usually are on screen for roughly the same number of frames, no matter the shot. So in close in fights, they can be pretty slow, for long shots, especially the chase of the Tantive IV, they are incredibly fast.

Size comparisons aren’t particularly useful when the tech gap is so large. A single relatively small Culture ship would annihilate the Empire and have a grand old time doing it. Going by supplemental technical books from both franchises, Star Wars is insanely, hilariously, beyond the Federation in the ability to project energy. The printed values for Star Wars are frankly absurd and make very little sense, but if we took them at face value the Falcon would be a nigh unstoppable menace. Like throwing some AA guns on a tugboat and harassing some previously uncontacted tribes in the Pacific.

Using estimates from what we see on screen lessens the gap considerably, but still puts Star Wars in general on a higher rung of the Kardeshev scale. I don’t know if it still exists, but stardestroyer.net used to have some great calculations of blaster energy levels based entirely from OT footage, with full breakdowns of their math and estimations. As for the “lasers,” that’s just old nomenclature from long since outdated weapons, blaster tech drives the vast majority of Star Wars weaponry. In new canon, they’re plasma weapons. In old canon, there were several flavors, including plasma, but most were particle weapons that used some very exotic fictional particles that didn’t interact much with normal matter except thermally, like how dark matter doesn’t react much except gravitationally.

And really. It just makes sense. Star Wars technologically plateaued ages ago. The invention of FTL tech is prehistory. Star Trek is only a couple centuries ahead of us.

Janeway takes Torres under her wing a bit too, and talk shop often. I think the rise is almost exclusively due to the Captain being a woman and having at least a single head of staff be another woman means any episode the captain has to consult that character means it will pass. The 7 bit is just gravy filling in episodes that isn’t the case.

I tried to go back and watch it as part of a kind of personal nerd pilgrimage. I just couldn’t get through it to save my life. Then I hit the beginning of TNG and was shocked, that was not what I remembered at all from all the reruns I saw growing up. I’m honestly still kind of shocked it lasted long enough to grow the beard.

I mean, she wasn’t jiggling. Carrie had often complained about how tightly bound she was, he specifically didn’t want that look either. Nothing at all in that outfit would have honestly made a huge difference in how the whole thing felt I think, at least in hindsight it would really cheapen it.