It is not so much hard to imagine as impossible. If Pike can flash one flash or two a binary message, then he can build up any message from that binary given enough time (the crudest way is to consider a game of 20 questions, you can often get a lot of information out of 20 yes or no questions). This is the magic of the binary system at the heart of the way computers store information etc. You can have interfaces like menus that options auto scroll through and when you get to the option you want then you select that one (Pike can do that since he can say yes to a question), I think that is the way Hawkings screen work. A simple example is have a menu showing the 26 letters of the alphabet plus some punctuation and control characters, the user can now select each letter and so type out any word in the English language, add some predictive text etc. and it gets more efficient. Although Hawking would take some time to compose his speech and so was not composing stuff on the fly at like 100 words a minute or anything.Percysowner wrote: ↑Thu Sep 24, 2020 11:24 pm I think a huge part of the issue of Pike in TOS is that no one was able to foresee how far technology would come to help mitigate disability restrictions. In our own lifetime Steven Hawking was able to communicate even as his body failed him. He communicated using face movement. It is hard to believe that 300 years from now, technology wouldn't have found work arounds for Pike's limitations, if they didn't have a way to heal his injuries.
I think a reasonable inference is that Pike in the chair is either in a very weakened state or racked by pain such that answering yes or no questions is more the limit of what he can do given the amount of energy he has to spare for anything rather than some limit of the tech interface the federation can come up with. I mean even so he should be able to do more than depicted in the show, but this would mitigate the gap a little (and yes it basically comes down to a failure of imagination on the part of the writers at the time). The Talosians can presumably either anesthetize his pain with their mind powers or amplify is vitality to allow him something like a normal level of attention.
I mean I think the Menagerie has some problems in that I'm pretty sure they leave in the Cage dialogue where the characters say death would be preferable to the world of illusions offered by the Talosians (although I guess you could say it was the forced part of it that was offensive to human dignity). Wait but Pike is disabled, well yeah then that face worse than death would be better than what he is currently living through.CharlesPhipps wrote: ↑Fri Sep 25, 2020 10:46 am I dunno, even in the episode, Pike DOES end up living an entirely helpful life with the Talosians.
It's just that the Federation's technology is not sufficient at that time.
Although I think this is even more the case for Vina. As far as we can tell by the depiction in the Cage/the Menagerie her problems are mostly cosmetic (she seems like she probably has something of a limp and so on also). However in the Cage story and the Menagerie epilog this sense I get can be (somewhat unfairly) characterized as "Yeah you are ugo fantasyland is probably the best you can hope for." We might charitably interpret that Vina is not just ugly and a bit creaky in her movements but actually has more wrong with her including possible chronic pain etc. that the Talosians are mitigating but that mere Federation science can do nothing for (really did not seem that way to me).
I never got the sense that Pike was doing much useful stuff on Talos just that he was able to play around in a pleasant fantasyland with near normal mobility etc. (in that fantasy land). Although I guess Discovery reinterprets the Talosians as no longer just a sterile society trapped stagnant in its fantasies but as also one who uses their amazing mind powers to heal the occasional random psychiatric case that appears and do other stuff for the wider universe. So maybe Pike is getting something useful done between romps through fantasyland with Vina?
I appreciated it.
Just picking up on what you said and some earlier discussion.
It seems to me that Star Trek has been about imaging a better future (as opposed say to the worse future of say a post apocalyptic nightmare scenario).
Some of this tension boils down to the old George Bernard Shaw quote "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." When we imagine a better future on any issue how much is imaging away present problems and how much is imagining us adapting to those problems in ways we so far have stubbornly refused to, I think it is usually a mix of both.
So in the future the Earth will not have war, different nations (or what were different nations), cultures and people will get along without fighting. Part of that will be about the technology of war itself (phasers, shields, medical technology etc.) change how wars could be fought, some of that will be about the sort of predisposing technological background (no one has to fight for resources because technology has provided abundance for all etc.) and finally because attitudes changed (acceptance of different people and cultures etc.). All three combined occurred together in Star Trek and the future being bettered wrt war depended on achieving all of them.
So likewise with disability if we want to imagine a better future along the same lines it is going to combine things like the fundamental medical technology around disability (treatments and so on that prevent or heavily mitigate the onset of a disability or allow the transformation of bodies etc.), the develops of technology that make creating infrastructure of accommodation (things that allow disabled people to do more stuff) and attitude towards disability.
As Freeverse suggests it is easy to see how poor attitude can make things worse and indeed bothering to accommodate or treat disabled people requires thinking they are worthwhile in some sense. As mentioned accepting disability can often be a pathway to better adapting to limitations and so allowing people to do more.
My sense of disabled activists is that many of those who are concerned about abelist attitudes (who often are people with disabilities in my experience) are usually at least if not more concerned about the provision of proper accommodation and also things like responsive medical care to disabled people. Those other two things are about the disabled people being able to do more not about them accepting doing less.
So to reconstruct an argument I heard a long time ago by one disabled guy who worked in a lab and was born without legs, his labs safety regs required him to have prosthetic legs on site, but he actually found his wheelchair safer and offered better mobility than the prosthetic legs. So he concluded the regs were designed not to actually give him more ability/safety but to conform to the expectations that the thing that more resembled what abled people did. So there are complicated interactions.
I think accusations of abelism and demands that we accept disability can and sometimes do shade into arguments for settling with a bad situation in some cases (usually just the opposite). However equally demands for a cures and the transformative elimination of disability shade into the arguments that disabled people are less useful or valuable etc. and not bothering to do what we can now to make life better for them.
