>> ^Yogi:

Well fuck it I might as well admit. I am a practicing member of CoS and I'll have the last laugh when I leave on my spaceship muhahahahaha.
Oh that's my way of saying we're done here.


Bon voyage, brave traveller.

I always get this mixxed up with Fantastic Voyage movie.

Alistar McGrath is so full of crap.

"Why are [the laws of physics] so reassuringly fine-tuned to values that lead to the existence of life.."

You've got to be fucking kidding me. The universe, for all intends and purposes, is almost 100% HOSTILE to all life. even if we assume theres a billion planets out there like earth, thriving with life, that still leaves the vast majority of mass in states completely hostile to any life, either way to cold planets and gas-giants, or way too warm, or simply on fire like the stars. And thats only the insignificant part of the universe that actually is something at all. The universe is still almost 100% empty, cold space. Conditions in witch any sign of life would instantly freeze to death in utter darkness, so far from anything that you wouldnt even be able to make out any light at all, if you were there, which we never will be, because its too fucking far to imagine.

The thin film surrounding this tiny rock that we're standing on is the only known place that we, or anything else can live, and in a few hundred million years, the sun will swell to a red giant and turn the entire thing into a lump of coal that it will later swallow, and with the possible exception of the Voyager-1, there will be no signs that life ever existed in this part of the galaxy.

Fine-tuned my ass.

I have been thinking and it would be cool to have it on a significant date related to space. July 20th is the anniversary of the moon landing but maybe its a bit close, I havent been able to dig up any great space videos to kick the thing off with, and Im not sure how many are interested "Build it and they will come" indeed but I can't find the proper building material

Here are some important dates:

July 20, 1969 First Manned Moon Landing
August 20, 1977 Launh of Voyager 2 (yes! it was launched before Voyager 1)
September 5, 1977 Launch of Voyager 1
September 12, 1959 First Spacecraft to Impact on the Moon
September 15, 1968 First Moon Orbit
October 1, 1958 NASA is Born
October 4, 1957 First Artificial Satellite
October 4, 1959 First View of Moon's Far Side

Anyone have some great ideas on how to attract some attention to a space day? Build up some excitement?

@Arkaium lol, actually, it's a question that gets often hotly debated around my work. We used to ask it as an interview question of new hires to see if they could answer with a logical reason or get flustered.

Also, Neither: Janeway and voyager would blow the enterprise out of the sky

>> ^NicoleBee:

I get a "connection error" in the player trying to get this to go.. Anyone else?


Try again? http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/147 maybe?

It isn't sarcasm (a form of irony) because there isn't any contempt. Definitions really help here.

Irony (from the Ancient Greek εἰρωνεία eirōneía, meaning hypocrisy, deception, or feigned ignorance) is a situation, literary technique, or rhetorical device, in which there is an incongruity or discordance that goes strikingly beyond the most simple and evident meaning of words or actions. Verbal and situational irony is often intentionally used as emphasis in an assertion of a truth. The ironic form of simile, or the irony of sarcasm or litotes may involve the emphasis of one's meaning by deliberate use of language that states the direct opposite of the truth, or drastically and obviously understates a factual connection.

>> ^flechette:

I thought things like saying 'Isn't this nice' while a plane crashes and saying 'What nice weather we're having' while a hurricane rips off the roof is called being sarcastic, and has nothing at all to do with irony.
The 'unsinkable' Titanic sinking on her maiden voyage is ironic. Four U.S. Intelligence services bungling an investigation to the point where they're arresting/shooting each other because they're too hard-headed to share information with each other isn't ironic, it's just dumb. A terrorist suicide bomber getting the wrong address and blowing up a terrorist safe house would be ironic, because not only is it terrible terrorism, it'd still be terroristic.

I thought things like saying 'Isn't this nice' while a plane crashes and saying 'What nice weather we're having' while a hurricane rips off the roof is called being sarcastic, and has nothing at all to do with irony.
The 'unsinkable' Titanic sinking on her maiden voyage is ironic. Four U.S. Intelligence services bungling an investigation to the point where they're arresting/shooting each other because they're too hard-headed to share information with each other isn't ironic, it's just dumb. A terrorist suicide bomber getting the wrong address and blowing up a terrorist safe house would be ironic, because not only is it terrible terrorism, it'd still be terroristic.

Title fixed.
>> ^RadHazG:
Correction Arvana - It's 4 themes total. I don't believe the last 15sec or so is an actual theme just a tie up of the overall feel of each.
Star Trek : Original Series, Star Trek : Deep Space 9, Star Trek : Voyager, last one is Star Trek : The Next Generation

Correction Arvana - It's 4 themes total. I don't believe the last 15sec or so is an actual theme just a tie up of the overall feel of each.
Star Trek : Original Series, Star Trek : Deep Space 9, Star Trek : Voyager, last one is Star Trek : The Next Generation

I was somewhat embarrassed to realize I recognized each of them within 2sec of the opening notes. But then ST:OS is all over the place, ST:DS9 is probably my favorite theme (if not show) and ST:Voy was probably almost my favorite series just barely under ST:TNG.

These gentlemen do a massive credit to the themes, played just beautifully. Also, I'm about 80% convinced that a large part of the reason ST:Enterprise failed so miserably (besides the show itself) is that it was the first series to step away from the grand brass orchestral opening and instead went with that piss ant contemporary music crap. How can you feel as if your actually in ST or about to set off on a grand adventure with THAT crap as the start? Go listen to the ST:Enterprise theme after this and see if you aren't immediately turned off to the series just based on the opening theme alone.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'creative, happy' to 'creative, happy, leftward bound, voyage, adventure, alex bettigole, zach parker' - edited by SlipperyPete

>> ^budzos:
Yeah once you get accustomed to the voice there is actually some fun content here. I for one LOVE First Contact despite the many flaws in the story. The borg queen was a really stupid idea, if you ask me. The faceless, personality free borg as force of nature is much more awe-inspiring.



I've always thought that too. The way I think of it there were two distinct versions of the borg, the grey borg (the original), and the green borg (this movie plus all the crap that happened in voyager).

What made the borg scary in the first place was not just that they were powerful mechano-corpse people, but that they were inscrutable. There is something unsettling about an emotionless and relentless enemy that cannot be reasoned with or manipulated. And you couldn't easily define them as evil, since they weren't vengeful or malicious, just devoted to their own form of logic. With this movie they got rid of everything that was distinctive or interesting about the borg. And just turned them into cyber-zombies at the command of some slimey lich queen.

BSG is a clusterfuck of gratuitous violence, unrealistically evil characters, and woo-woo nonsense. Interesting, yes. But it is utterly incoherent. Brother Cavil is an even less realistic character than Lord Voldemort. Most of the characters in BSG are fucking insane.

If I had to rank the Star Trek series:
1. DS9 seasons 1-6 and TNG seasons 2-7
2. DS9 season 7
3. Voyager
4. TNG season 1
5. TOS and Enterprise

Prequels are almost always bad because knowing the future in too much detail kills creativity.

DS9 is #1. Love it.
Enterprise has Jolene Blalock...so it can't be worse than Voyager.
BTW, Jolene was in House last week, but just a bit part

That said, one of the big victories of TNG was the SF plots w/o the tawdry sex. The five seasons of Andromeda managed a few episodes of that too.

I would start by saying that all Star Trek is rubbish.

It's got this built-in level of crapness that you have to tolerate if you end up as a fan. I actually view Voyager as a great guilty pleasure and the others can go hang apart from the TOS which at least was good old campy fun.

TNG was utter drivel for it's first three seasons and that's a long time these days. Even after that it was dull and only intermittently exciting. No way a show would last that long now. I just thank the folks who made BSG and proving that intelligent, entertaining SF can be made and broadcast.

Enterprise was the lowest of the low - it couldn't maintain it's low-tech premise (weren't they resorting to transporters even in the first episode!?) and it looked like they had no idea what they wanted to do with it apart from recycle the standard Trek premise. And the characters were uniformly forgettable. Even pineapple head in Voyager trumped them.