This episode is crap, and creates some crazy implications. The Enterprise comes into sentience and gives 'birth' to a life form which flies away.... I guess that flies in the face of the declaration that the Enterprise computer is property in The Measure of a Man. I wonder if the computer would eventually refuse to undergo a refit.
The episode "Emergence" is absolutely presposterous
- Thread starter James T Kirk
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I hope they serve cellular peptide cake on the way!
The thing that was weird for me was that in the beginning Enterprise jumps into warp on it's own. OK, fine, but the reason for it was dumb. There was a theta flux distortion building up that threaten to destroy the ship. BUT, sensors weren't designed to detect it... what? Aren't sensors designed to detect everything?
Memory Alpha says: "The sensors were never designed to detect such distortions, yet there was a record of the distortion in the sensor log."
How is that possible?
Memory Alpha says: "The sensors were never designed to detect such distortions, yet there was a record of the distortion in the sensor log."
How is that possible?
SPOCK ("The Naked Time"): Instruments register only those things they're designed to register. Space still contains infinite unknowns.
Harry
Well, no - just like phasers aren't designed to destroy everything, shields aren't designed to protect from everything, and warp engines aren't designed to provide all speeds from zero to infinite.
(Actually, that last one is debatable, as it does appear as if a warp engine can attain any and every speed if enough power is somehow fed into it...)
Sure, the designers would like to include everything. But there's no way they can. And apparently, theta flux distortions are just a tad too difficult to detect.
The sensors evolved, on their own. That was the point of the whole episode.
I guess there would exist sensors that can detect theta radiation, and analysis systems that can measure the flux involved, but there just didn't used to be enough computing oomph to divine any distortions from that feed - a bit like how a gamma-ray telescope today wouldn't have the same sort of resolution that, say, an infrared telescope has, due to fundamental physical issues, and would have to do a lot more computing to compensate. But the computer evolved, reallocated, and ultimately survived thanks to this bit of evolution (which in the case of intelligences needn't be Darwinian and can quite blatantly be Lamarckian - and can take place in milliseconds, meaning a bit of idle experimentation on whether theta could be resolved better can alert the computer to something being amiss with theta, at which point it chooses to evolve to meet the potential threat).
Timo Saloniemi
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