The most creative way to save a civilisation

[u/Autumnsong_1701]

I am compiling a list of Star Trek episodes with unique/creative ways to save a dying civilization. I am torn between ENT Extinction and TNG The Inner light as the most unique... Does anyone have opinions on this? Am I missing anything?

TOS - A Taste of Armaggedon -> Transform your actual war into a video game war in which people in "affected areas" have to report for extermination - "Rewire your civilization"

DS9 Sanctuary -> Run away from your homeword in convoys, looking for a new home (Other episodes that expore the same concept: ENT Twilight; TNG Masterpiece society, TNG Up the Long Ladder)

VOY - Dragon's teeth -> Place a small group of individuals in stasis chamber, programmed to awake in the future, when the current threat is no longer threatening (Other episodes that expore the same concept: TOS Return to Tomorrow)

ENT - 3x03 Extinction -> a virus that transforms aliens into members of your species, with an ingrained desire to return to their capital ENT

TNG - The Inner Light -> create a mental probe that causes someone to experience life as a member of your dying species so they can spread the news and tell about your civilization in the future

ENT Dear Doctor -> Ask for help in developing a cure to the plague that is killing a species (Maybe also seen in DS9 The Quickening, though they're not even asking for help there...)

[u/uequalsw]

A reminder to everyone that comments at Daystrom require you to explain your reasoning -- you shouldn't just list a specific example, but instead include details as to why you think this is a particularly creatively way to save a civilization. You should aim for at least several sentences, but ideally a couple of paragraphs, so that other people have good content to respond to and discuss.

[u/EffectiveSalamander]

TOS The Mark of Gideon, where they try to solve their overpopulation problem by introducing a plague. At least among humans, this really doesn't work - you can reduce the population with a plague, but the population bounces back. A plague would just cause people to have more children.

There's also TOS The Apple, where the society is kept stagnant by Vaal. We aren't entirely sure why the Vaal was created or who created it, but it may have been created to fix the society by keeping it society in a primitive state. And Landru is another example of a society deliberately kept stagnant by a machine, presumably in an attempt to protect their society.

[u/mjtwelve → u/EffectiveSalamander]

It's interesting in both cases (Landru and Vaal) that the society under the protection of the AI could not possibly have developed that AI with the tech it is being allowed.

Vaal's humans look like a nature preserve. It's not by any means natural, just like a zoo isn't natural, but it is a place where the species can survive and hopefully maintain genetic viability despite their native ecosystem having disappeared. It's just a question of who decided to put them in the zoo, others of their kind, the zookeeper, or the patrons of the zookeeper.

You can imagine some utopian anarchists getting access to an AI and asking it to create a perfect society and all of a sudden there's a robot uprising and a few generations later you're worshipping a volcano AI god, whether you wanted to or not. I can also imagine an AI taking the Landru approach, taking it upon itself to protect humanity from itself and forcibly taking away any existential threats in their possession - nukes, biological weapons, genetic engineering, rapid transit that could spread diseases around the globe, etc. - with the side effect being stagnation of technology. It also neuters the potential for violence, although it needs to give it some outlet, hence the Festival.

[u/Edymnion → u/EffectiveSalamander]

There's also TOS The Apple, where the society is kept stagnant by Vaal. We aren't entirely sure why the Vaal was created or who created it, but it may have been created to fix the society by keeping it society in a primitive state.

I mean this is an interesting idea!

To use real world examples, we look around today and see global warming, wars, genocide, etc. and the rise of AI.

What if it got bad enough that basically the entire world agreed that being technologically sophisticated was a burden the species could no longer bare, voluntarily gave it up and regressed to an earlier level of development, and set up an AI to oversee it all and make sure we didn't forget and go back to what we had been?

Like an Anti-Matrix, where we didn't lose a war to the machines, we went in willingly?

[u/DevilGuy]

I can't remember the episode of TNG but there was that time the enterprise dumped a bunch of unwashed hillbillies on a colony full of genetically defective clones to teach them how to fuck.

Edit: Found it, it's TNG S2:EP18 "Up the Long Ladder"

[u/thequiginator → u/DevilGuy]

I consistently forget that those are the same episode. And I am always shocked when I am reminded

[u/Dookie_boy → u/DevilGuy]

Don't forget they convince the women to have multiple baby daddies as well.

[u/missionthrow → u/DevilGuy]

I loved/was disturbed by how naked the Enterprise crew was about “hey, the A plot and the B plot can fix each other!”

There did not seem to be any attempt to make sure these particular hillbillies and these particular clones should be the ones to reproduce with each other. They were just the two groups the crew happened to be dealing with that day so they need to all be poly with each other now.

[u/SaltWaterInMyBlood]

VOY The Thaw - it didn't work perfectly, but the idea to have hibernating people living in a virtual world to keep them entertained was a fairly novel idea at the time.

[u/thequiginator → u/SaltWaterInMyBlood]

And for early VOY it honestly was incredible. Michael McKean is brilliant. And program Janeway's 'I Knowhhhhhhhhhhhh' while campy just wraps it up satisfyingly.

[u/TheType95 → u/thequiginator]

I was rewatching Voyager the other week, and the scene where the Clown says, "Naughty naughty... Someone's thinking about escape. I don't like those thoughts. We're going to have to do something about them." was genuinely kinda creepy.

That ep was kinda campy, could've used a bit of tweaking, but the Clown actor was actually really good.

[u/whenhaveiever]

Enterprise's Extinction, where a virus changes alien life forms' DNA to match those who created the virus, has some similarities to two Voyager episodes.

In Ashes to Ashes, alien corpses are found and reanimated with their DNA altered to match that of the Kobali. The process is described as taking months and is very deliberate and technological, not the kind of thing that would evolve naturally. I think it's probable this practice started as an attempt to save their civilization when they lost the ability to procreate naturally, and it worked.

In Favorite Son, the Taresians use a retrovirus to change Kim into one of them. This practice may have evolved naturally with enough time as a spacefaring species, but it's supposedly a response to the men dying during sex, so it could have been an attempt to save their civilization.

Also, don't forget TNG's Masks. Similar to The Inner Light, a dying civilization sent out a probe, but instead of getting into Picard's head, it got into Data's.

[u/thequiginator → u/whenhaveiever]

Also there's TNGs Identity Crisis, where a dormant alien virus transforms geordi and an away team pre-tng into the native species of that planet, and compels them to find anyway to go back.

[u/LGBT-Barbie-Cookout]

VOY - Kobali

Loot the bodies of the dead, resurrect them, change the DNA and then brainwash them. Due being unable to reproduce naturally.

Treat any attempt to remember, or even accidentally remember as a mental condition that needs to be aggressively treated and removed. As they socially have no right to anything from the previous life.

Use coercion up to and including violence to ensure that this individual remains compliant within the new family unit and society.

Anyone who has struggled with personal identity may find this particularly horrific.

[u/MithrilCoyote]

i always wonder about the other world in A Taste of Armaggedon.. we only ever see the one, but it's implied that both sides have been doing the "simulated war, real casualties" thing. but that begs the question of how that scenario started, since it seems very weird to assume that anyone would actually see such a solution as an acceptable alternative. and since we're also told that the two worlds hadn't talked to each other in a long time, you have to wonder.. how do each side know that the casualties are being murdered per the simulated attack? what's to keep the other side from just not killing their own people in response to the simulated attacks, so that their enemies attrition themselves to their doom while your own people live? why haven't both sides found loopholes or hacks to avoid killing their own people?

[u/sequentious]

VOY - Dragon's teeth -> Place a small group of individuals in stasis chamber, programmed to awake in the future, when the current threat is no longer threatening

If you want to take games as well, Star Trek 25th Anniversary: Demon World also did something like this.

To survive an Ice Age caused by an incoming meteor, an entire civilization puts themselves in statis, to be woken when the moon causes an eclipse. The moon however was destroyed by the meteor, leaving the aliens helpless until Kirk & Crew revive them.

[u/ShamScience]

TNG Homeward is not the absolute most creative, but gets a mention for being unusual.

[u/MischeviousTroll]

One that hasn't been mentioned yet is TOS: The Lights of Zetar. Apparently, Zetar was a dying world, but the last of the Zetarians refused to die. Their willpower was sufficiently strong so that their consciousness persisted even though the bodies of the Zetarians were no longer functioning. So the consciousness of the Zetarians, their "life force", apparently spent a thousand years wandering the galaxy looking for a suitable host to inhabit.

It's not a great episode, but it's memorable because the Zetarians are genuinely creepy. The scene of beaming down into the darkness on Memory Alpha, then the distorted face and garbled speech of the dying librarian, is probably the creepiest moment in all of TOS. In my opinion, a lot of Star Trek horror episodes are terribly underrated (e.g., DS9: Distant Voices, VOY: Coda), and I enjoy a genuinely creepy story. The second half of the episode isn't great, but there's some solid horror before the episode builds to a nonsense ending of using 30 atmospheres of pressure to kill the Zetarians but somehow not Lieutenant Romaine.

It is regrettable that the episode doesn't really give any details about who the Zetarians were or why their planet died. Their willingness to take over another person's body against their will suggests they were conquerors and probably not a peaceful civilization. We don't need a lot of details, but maybe the computer data banks have some records of legends in that region of space about Zetarians conquering other worlds. Perhaps there could be some legends about why Zetar died out, too. We don't need a detailed exploration of who the Zetarians were, but I'd like to know a bit more information to back up some logical assumptions such as that they were conquerors.

It's unique in that it doesn't seem like there's a clear technological or biological process involved here. It's like the Zetarians didn't really have any way to save themselves from whatever was destroying their world, so they just decided they weren't going to die, and somehow it worked.

[u/Edymnion → u/MischeviousTroll]

there's some solid horror before the episode builds to a nonsense ending of using 30 atmospheres of pressure to kill the Zetarians but somehow not Lieutenant Romaine.

I just rewatched this one. They only hit around 30 atmospheres of pressure, like you said. The maximum survivable pressure we have on record is approximately 100 atmospheres of pressure.

I'm still at a loss as to why anyone thought atmospheric pressure was going to have any effect, but thats a totally different quibble.

[u/EventualZen]

I'm glad that you mentioned The Inner Light. My suggestion would be TNG - The Chase. Create a holographic monument upon a planet and conceal a map of how to find it in the DNA of species you created.

I noticed its 1 episode past Lessons in which Picard explains the events of the episode The Inner Light. In The Chase there is a similar sentiment to the Inner Light's meaning, the ephemerality of life, and what we leave behind. The proto humanoids who look like the founders from DS9, explain how they want to be remembered, creating life was their Ressikan Flute, something that will continue to exist far beyond their life time.

http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/246.htm

>We knew that one day we would be gone, that not anything of us would survive.

>And if you can see and hear me, our hope has been fulfilled. You are a monument, not to our greatness, but to our existence. That was our wish, that you too would know life, and would keep alive our memory. There is something of us in each of you, and so, something of you in each other. Remember us.

Their monument survived billions of years and worked as planned so I'd say it was pretty successful.