My only problem with this is that Geordi made it clear more than once that not only would he rather just be able to see, but that his VISOR caused him constant pain. I wouldn’t really call that accommodating for his blindness if that’s what was required to get into Starfleet later.
And, of course, that was what made it so impactful when he finally had eyes that worked.
And then there was Melora on DS9. Starfleet could have done so many things to fulfill her dream of traveling the stars without having her be stuck in the chair in near-1g environments or accept Bashir’s treatments. In fact, the only reason so few Elaysians ever left their homeworld was that everyone else was fine with 1g and no one gave a shit about their needs.
Geordi made it clear more than once that not only would he rather just be able to see, but that his VISOR caused him constant pain
it was also suggested that his visor was “superior to human eyes”. star trek is habitually inconsistent about its world and sometimes it is better not to think about it too much.
“curing at birth” != “Eugenics”
Still, the spirit of accommodation is spot on.
They’re not totally wrong either, just missing a step and leaving a gap.
Genetic engineering is strictly outlawed in the UFP which came about from the Eugenics wars.
Why wouldn’t you cure things at birth if you already know how to? Like, you know the kid is going to be blind, and you could just give the mom a shot to change that, but you’re gonna choose to let the kid be born blind? I dunno, that’s kinda messed up.
Which is one of the arguments against the Federations ban on genetic manipulation. There are plenty of others against it. There’s no one answer to this situation, unfortunately.
Because blindness isn’t a disability in the Federation. Geordi lives a full and happy life, and, as OP mentioned, is actually able to save the entire crew specifically because he’s blind.
“Fixing” his blindness in a compassionate, post-scarcity world that has the tools to allow someone to succeed no matter what physical characteristics they possess is like “fixing” a baby’s hair color. It doesn’t make the child’s life easier, so what’s the point other than eugenics?
save the entire crew specifically because he’s blind
so you take away a persons autonomy to have the potential to be able to see and live a life with natural sight as you see a use for it.
You did a 360 there on the ethics and wandered into utilitarian territory reducing people to things.
You might not define it as a disability but it’s still taking autonomy from someone. They could just as well invent a tool to help save the crew. There is more than one option for things such as that rather than reducing a persons entire definition to their difference and how useful it is to you.
Human condition is more than their differences or their use to you.
I think he was getting at that Geordi’s decision to remain blind and accommodated with his VISOR ended up having unforeseen positive consequences. In other words, pluralism leads to unforeseen positive side effects.
Your use of pluralism here: Romanticizing taking away someone’s choice to be without a disability (or pain given his repeated conversations with doctors) doesn’t make this more palatable. Geordie hadn’t chosen to be blind it was a birth defect. He only gained power to see as a story point in a few episodes. The one time Pulaski did offer it it was clear from Geordie’s response that it isn’t a common known procedure to restore eyesight. Let alone a light one as it was irreversible. Given those parameters: Geordie hesitated because of the “lesser of known evils”.
The Federation is inherently plural, and we see several different attitudes toward disability by different people throughout the series.
Geordi is blind from birth. No one holds it against the guy. He wears a prosthetic vision device called a VISOR which is kind of the vision equivalent of a modern cochlear implant, there’s an implant in his brain that an external sensor device hooks to. It’s not a perfect solution, it gives him headaches, but it allows him to see and function like a sighted person, he can even see outside of the visual spectrum. Several times throughout the series we see him working with his doctor to maintain and adjust his implant when it gives him problems. Several times we see glimpses of possible futures where he has swapped his VISOR for alternative treatment methods, and the canonical future seen in the films has him using implants in his eyes, or even seeing with natural eyes because of that one fountain of youth planet. Throughout the show, people mention other treatments he could be using, but for the run of TNG he prefers his VISOR, which his doctor provides continuous care for. We see him go to Dr. Crusher to have his VISOR worked on repeatedly throughout the show.
Worf was paralyzed in an accident once. A heavy thing fell on him and broke his spine. Klingon culture is extremely ablest and he struggles to stand being seen by his friends or family in this condition, he wants to kill himself rather than live like this. He begrudgingly allows the doctors to try a treatment but quickly deems it unacceptable, so they INVENT SPINAL CORD REPLACEMENT SURGERY for him so that he can continue living his life on his terms. “There’s nothing for it, we’re just gonna have to grow a new backbone and central nervous system for the man.”
Riva, the mediator/diplomat from the episode “Loud as a Whisper,” is deaf. In his words, “Born, and hope to die.” He has no intention of having his deafness cured or worked around, viewing it as a trait of his noble family and as a practical asset. He usually communicates through a trio of translators, but when they are killed, instead of attempting to cure his deafness via technology or medicine, Picard says “Okay it’s time for US to learn sign language so we can talk to this man.” and Data picks it up the fastest and takes on the role of interpreter. Riva’s mission is to bring two warring factions to the negotiating table, so he decides to use sign language as an exercise in learning to communicate with each other. Fun fact: The actor who played Riva is deaf in real life. He asked the producers of Star Trek to make an episode about deaf people and had a lot of creative input on the episode.
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If there is a through-line to how the Federation treats people with disabilities, it is to prioritize the patient’s decisions. Geordi receives continuous care for his prosthetic vision. They fly in civilization’s leading expert to do an experimental surgery on Worf. The conversation with Riva goes “We can-” “No thank you.” “Okay.”
As for this:
| Geordi…is actually able to save the entire crew specifically because he’s blind.
As Data points out in A Measure of a Man, though it would measurably improve a crewmember’s ability to function because he could see a wider range of the EM spectrum, the Federation does not force members of Starfleet to replace their natural eyes with cybernetic implants.
This is also set in a universe full of sentient aliens with all different kinds of physical abilities and senses. Several species are empathic or telepathic able to sense and/or transmit their own emotions and thoughts. No humans can do that. Again in Measure of a Man, Picard hand waves off a demonstration of Data bending an unbendable girder because “Several sentient alien species possess mega strength.” There’s one episode with aliens that have a kind of solar powered heat ray thing (the plot required the aliens to be able to take hostages and they needed a weapon that Lt. Yar couldn’t confiscate). In a society made up of multiple sentient species that evolved with vastly different physical abilities, I think your whole concept of “handicapped” or “disabled” needs to shift.
The core theme is that the Federation provides individuals with agency over their bodies. Sure, Geordi’s mother could have had his blindness cured before he would have known anything different, but it’s his body and ultimately his choice. Interestingly, we see the opposite with Dr. Bashir. His genetic enhancements don’t just offend the Federation because of historical trauma with the Eugenics Wars but because his parents didn’t even give him choice in the matter (at least, that’s how I’ve interpreted it).
You could make the same argument about down syndrome, autism, being transgender, darker skin tone. Eugenics is not a good thing, it seems appealing at first but it’s a slippery slope and gets ugly very fast. Also they have the technology to accommodate these kinds of disabilities, so why bother with all that when he could get ocular implants and live a relatively normal life.
You’re absolutely right about the examples you mentioned. I still would rather not live, or have lived, than being blind or being born without an arm or something not whole or complete. So I would definitely prevent certain things from being experienced by my children if I had the option.
Here is my take, assuming:
- We have the ability to remove all birth anomalies
- It is safe and effective, i.e. not an experimental technique
- It is not controversial, i.e. curing sickle cell is just the done thing\
- Scanning tech is much better than today
Situation 1:
Woman learns she is pregnant, say week 6. Gets a routine scan on the embryo. She discovers it has a genetic disorder. That will cause it to not be able to breathe well, running and playing will not be an option for your baby, they will survive; sweet no brainer there; splice in the fix doc. Correction is spliced in the next week, monitoring for rest of normal pregnancy.Situation 2:
Woman learns she is pregnant, say week 6. Gets a routine scan on the embryo. Doctor says, looks like there is a genetic defect, the audio nerve is not going to develop normally, your baby will hear badly at birth, and then over the next two years will go permanently deaf. Implants could fix this issue after birth, and living as a deaf person is not difficult. However we can ensure that the nerve develops normally and your baby will have perfectly normal hearing.In situation 1, the obvious answer is to fix the issue, having life long breathing difficulties that could easily be avoided would be cruel.
In situation 2, in my opinion it would also be cruel to impose on a kid; hey we could have fixed your hearing in a safe and effective way, but we decided for you before you were born that you would be “special”.I get where people are coming from, but they are looking at it with 2024 eyes, not 2424 eyes. Why would you impose on a kid, who has no say in the matter, a disability? Because that is the choice you are making, you are imposing a disability on a child that does not need to be there.
We currently give women folate, to protect against neural tube defects; along with a bunch of other interventions. We are already “interfering” with the “natural” progress of pregnancy and birth, we are only going to get better at it.
And also the conflating of eugenics and fixing birth defects is completely off base. These are only related by the fact that breeding is involved; they have nothing in common beyond that. In the same way that my kitchen knives would make great stabbing weapons, but cooking and stabbing only really have the tools in common.
And also the conflating of eugenics and fixing birth defects is completely off base
It’s not off base and what you’re describing is called liberal eugenics, or new eugenics.
[…] some critics, such as UC Berkeley sociologist Troy Duster, have argued that modern genetics is a “back door to eugenics”.
I’m sure the laws set in place after the eugenics wars would be strict enough to not leave such wiggle room.
It doesn’t really seem like in either situation I described that the treatment-enhancement gap has been breached.
There is no PGD, we are considering Star Trek levels of scanning technology. Both situations resulted from natural fertilisation, there was no group of potentials to select from.
The goal of eugenics, is unambiguously, to breed for some ideal. This resulted in some pretty dark times in the recent past.
Realistically, a lot of medical technology today is the antithesis of the eugenic ideal. Allowing those, who in the past, would have died from various causes to live. We at a species are the stronger for it.
Fetus is developing normally, except it has no ocular nerves. There is no cure for this. Baby is born and neural interfaces are implanted, along with a device for feeding EM sensory data directly into the brain.
Ok but for scenario 2 have you asked the deaf? Many of us say to do just that. In fact we disproportionately fight the hearing by saying that infants cannot consent to cochlear implants
That is an interesting point, as you say infants cannot consent to implants. Which does raise ethical questions.
But you are, I think, still looking from a 2024 perspective, where none of the technologies are even remotely available.
If you can consider it from the 2424 perspective, the treatment is non-invasive, permanent, safe and effective. It has been the standard for 100 years. Star Trek medical tech is magical to us because it is simply a story, but consider if it were real, what argument could you make to withhold the treatment?
I would see this as similar to the anti-vax arguments; withholding vaccines from a child who then goes on to catch a life altering disease, is a form of abuse. The kid cannot make its own judgements or medical decisions, but it sure can catch polio.
Would deliberately withholding “cures” be considered child abuse?
That is a difficult question. I would err on the side of yes. With some caveats.
Not treating some serious genetic conditions when safe, effective and proven treatments are available. Could easily be construed as abuse.
When considering the Star Trek universe medical care is free and easily accessed. Treating these conditions would be the default.
Turning this the other way around, and looking at it from the point of view, that the technology is the standard. What argument could you make in favour of leaving the condition in place?
The deaf see it similar to how the intersex do, that it should be the individual’s choice when they’re old enough to decide.
The point about accomodation is the key here.
If being born without functioning legs isn’t actually an impediment or challenge because society makes allowances for people without legs, then it’s no longer a handicap!
If a blind person has options beyond merely having their sight “restored” to that of the baseline “normal”, then they have options that might open up paths that regularly sighted people don’t have, in which case their unique trait of being blind becomes an asset.
There’s the secret to the utopia Star Trek positsv not that we try to “cute” everyone born different, but that we instead create opportunities for them to thrive as they are. In the future of Star Trek, the word “disability” is probably alien to them. Rather, they would describe someone in our time with such challenges as “disenfranchised” because we don’t offer them opportunities.
https://youtu.be/bqm_Iq8rFeg?t=16
“Surely by the 24th century, they would have found a cure for male pattern baldness.” Gene Roddenberry had the perfect response.
“No, by the 24th century, no one will care.”
Let it be known, however, that Gene did say this after aggressively petitioning against Patrick Stewart as Captain. His baldness was specifically mentioned. According to Patrick anyway
well, he didn’t mention that in the bloody video. I blame Patrick Stewart for making me look like a fool.
Patrick has been telling this story for a while at the panels, Frakes and others will tell it too. Sometimes it comes with that caveat and sometimes not. I’ll see if I can find the clip where he talks about that.
Meanwhile Shatner was stealing half a dozen of Kirk’s toupées every season…
Why the hell would it be eugenics to cure disabilities. If you could turn me from a trans chick into a cisbabe, I’d be down. I mean on one hand periods will suck, but on the other, maybe my fucking hair will grow out!
I’m in the same position, but if I could choose between the best hearing aids the 24th century can offer or repairing my ears, then I’m going full Geordi. Much in the same way I know some trans women wouldn’t make the choice we would.
And that’s the thing, routinely Star Trek shows disabled characters having choices in how to approach their situation and making the choices they feel are right for them. Some people will take a 5% chance of negative consequences to get their legs back, and others will take a futuristic mobility aid instead.
We actually already see this in cochlear implants. They’re difficult; unpleasant, and would give you hearing you don’t otherwise have
Removed by mod
I never saw LaForge as a “disabled person” at all. In my view he had superpowers. What puzzled me was why other characters didn’t wear similar visors. I mean why would blindness be a prerequisite for getting the ability to see in infrared, ultraviolet, etc? Seems like everybody would want that. Especially if it could be ocular implants like he eventually had.
Someone with functioning eyesight wearing the VISOR would just get a mishmash of nonsensical information. Their real senses clash with what the VISOR is sending them. Coincedentally it’s also the exact same reason for another side effect. Pain. Despite Geordi not being able to see, his eyes still sort of fought the VISOR and caused him constant pain. It also had the ability to be hacked which isn’t a great option.
Easy technobabble fix - the visor suppresses the optical neurons, or it simply acts as a blindfold so the real eyes see only darkness. LaForge’s pain was because the tech wasn’t fully developed. I forget if he still had the pain with the prosthetic eyes. Hackability is another problem we probably won’t have in the real future because of quantum encryption or whatever, but it’s still a good plot device present-day people can relate to - no matter how unrealistically it’s portrayed - click-click-click… “okay, I’m in!” LOL.
Easy technobabble fix
Brother, the technobabble is what got us in this situation in the first place. They used the technobabble to create a flaw because perfection in a narrative is boring.
Quantum encryption won’t ever be a “thing.”
All cryptography requires a pool of random numbers as inputs, and while different cryptographic methods are more secure than others, all of them are only as secure as their random number pool. The most secure cipher possible is known as a one-time pad which can be proven to be as secure as a cryptographic algorithm could possibly be, and so the only thing that could possibly lead to it being hacked is a poor random number pool. Since quantum mechanics can be used to generate truly random numbers, you could have a perfect random number pool, combined with a perfect cipher, gives you perfect encryption.
That sounds awesome right? Well… no. Because it is trivially easy these days to get regular old classical computers to spit out basically an indefinite number of pseudorandom numbers that are indistinguishable from truly random numbers. Why do you think modern operating systems allow you to encrypt your whole drive? You can have a file tens of gigabytes bit and you click it and it opens instantly, despite your whole drive being encrypted, because your CPU can generate tens of gigabytes of random numbers good enough for cryptography faster than you can even blink.
Random number generation is already largely a solved problem for classical computers. I own a quantum random number generator. I can compare it in various test suites such as the one released by NIST to test the quality of a random number generator, and it can’t tell the different between that and my CPU’s internal random number generator. Yes, the CPU. Most modern CPUs both have the ability to collect entropy data from thermal noise to seed a pseudorandom number generator, as well as having a hardware-level pseudorandom number, such as x86’s RDSEED and RDRAND instructions, so they can generate random numbers good enough for cryptography at blazing speeds.
The point is that in practice you will never actually notice, even if you were a whole team of PhD statisticians and mathematicians, the difference between a message encrypted by a quantum computer and a message encrypted by a classical computer using an industry-approved library. Yet, it is not just that they’re equal, quantum encryption would be far worse. We don’t use one-time pads in practice despite their security because they require keys as long as the message itself, and thus if we adopted them, it would cut the whole internet bandwidth in half overnight. Pseudorandom number generators are superior to use as the basis for cryptography because the key can be very small and then it can spit out the rest of what is needed to encrypt/decrypt the message from it, and deterministic encryption/decryption algorithms like AES and ChaCha20 are not crackable even by a quantum computer.
This is a rather reductive view of quantum cryptography. The two most common applications of it I hear about is the development of encryption algorithms resistant to being broken on quantum computers (the way, say, Shur’s algorithm is known to break RSA) and techniques like quantum key distribution. Both of these are real problems that don’t become meaningless just because one-time pads exist - you need to somehow securely distribute the keys for one-time-pad encryption. That’s why one-time pads aren’t used everywhere (“it would cut the whole internet bandwidth in half overnight” would not have been a sufficient reason - that’d be a tiny price to pay for unbreakable encryption, if it actually worked).
This is a rather reductive view of quantum cryptography.
Correct = reductive?
The two most common applications of it I hear about is the development of encryption algorithms resistant to being broken on quantum computers
First, I was talking about quantum encryption, not quantum cryptography, which is a bit more broad. Second, we already have cryptographic algorithms that run on classical computers that are not crackable by quantum computers, known as lattice-based cryptography which are way more practical than anything quantum cryptography could offer.
the way, say, Shur’s algorithm is known to break RSA
Shor’s algorithm. Yes, it breaks asymmetrical ciphers like RSA, but we have developed alternatives already it cannot break, like Kyber.
and techniques like quantum key distribution
Classical key exchange algorithms prevent someone from reading your key if they intercept the data packets between you. QKD is entirely impractical because it does not achieve this. Rather than preventing someone from reading your key if they intercept the data packets, it merely allows you to detect if someone is intercepting the data packets. You see, in regular cryptography, you want people to be able to intercept your data. It’s necessary for something like the internet to work, because packets of data have to be passed around the whole world, and it would suck if your packets got lost simply because someone read them in transit, which is why QKD is awful. If a single person reads the data packet in transit then they would effectively deny service to the recipient.
Both of these are real problems that don’t become meaningless just because one-time pads exist - you need to somehow securely distribute the keys for one-time-pad encryption.
One-time pad encryption is awful as I already explained, it would cut the entire internet bandwidth in half because if you wanted to transmit 10 gigabytes of data you would also need to transmit 10 gigabyte key. QKD is also awful for the fact that it would be unscalable to an “internet” because of how easy it is to deny service. It also doesn’t even guarantee you can detect someone snooping your packets because it is susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack. Sure, the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange is also susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack, but we solve this using public key infrastructure. You cannot have public key infrastructure for quantum cryptography.
The only proposed quantum digital signature algorithms are unscalable because they rely on Holevo’s theorem, which basically says there is a limited amount of information about the quantum state of a qubit you can gather from a single measurement, thus creating a sort of one-way function that can be used for digital signatures. The issue with this is that Holevo’s theorem also says you can acquire more information if you have more copies of the same qubit, i.e. it means every time you distribute a copy of the public key, you increase the probability someone could guess it. Public keys would have to be consumable which would entirely prevent you from scaling it to any significantly large network.
That’s why one-time pads aren’t used everywhere, (“it would cut the whole internet bandwidth in half overnight” would not have been a sufficient reason - that’d be a tiny price to pay for unbreakable encryption, if it actually worked).
You are living in fairy tale lala land. Come back down to reality. If you offer someone an algorithm that is impossible to break in a trillion, trillion years, and another algorithm that is in principle impossible to break, but the former algorithm is twice as efficient, then every company on the entirety of planet earth will choose the former. No enterprise on earth is going to double their expenses for something entirely imaginary that could never be observed in practice. You are really stuck in delulu town if you unironically think the reason one-time pads aren’t used practically is due to lack of secure key distribution.
Even prior to the discovery of Shor’s algorithm, we were issuing DHKE which, at the time, was believed to be pretty much an unbreakable way to share keys. Yet, even in this time before people knew DHKE could be potentially broken by quantum computers, nobody used DHKE to exchange keys for one-time pads. DHKE is always used to exchange keys for symmetrical ciphers like AES. AES256 is not breakable by quantum computers in practice as even a quantum computer would require trillions of years to break it. There is zero reason to use a one-time pad when something like AES exists. It’s the industry standard for a reason and I bet you my entire life savings we are not going to abandon it for one-time pads ever.
If you offer someone an algorithm that is impossible to break in a trillion, trillion years, and another algorithm that is in principle impossible to break, but the former algorithm is twice as efficient, then every company on the entirety of planet earth will choose the former. Some companies who pay a lot of money for bandwidth, maybe. “Any company”? Not a chance. Internet is cheap and companies routinely waste money in much more frivolous ways. And for stuff which sells on its security, e.g. messengers like Signal, the advertising value of “our encryption is mathematically unbreakable” would be well worth it. And plenty of individual nerds would opt into it just out of principle, being fully willing to cut their bandwidth in half for fuzzy feelings. Not even to mention military applications. You don’t see such things in reality, because this is, unless I misunderstand something truly massive, impossible. You can’t do unbreakable encryption over the network because you can’t securely share the pad key. Yet, even in this time before people knew DHKE could be potentially broken by quantum computers, nobody used DHKE to exchange keys for one-time pads. Well yes, because that’d be incorrect - by sharing one-time-pad keys with DHKE you’re reducing the security to that of DHKE, so you might as well drop the one-time-pad part and use an ordinary encryption algorithm instead.
Didn’t they address that in an episode? Or the movie with Cochrine?
I see names being mentioned and It’s problematic when someone assumes disabilities by armchair diagnosing characters with a disability and then defend it as if it were true.
“I assume normies would find this character annoying as they have some quirky, slight misunderstandings of personal boundaries so I’m going to attribute them with ‘being on the spectrum’”
That isn’t happening though.
Geordi is blind, Julian was genetically engineered to remove a learning disability and Tilly is stated as having special needs while being aggressively autistically coded.
The only one that doesn’t have something directly pointing towards it is Barclay but that man is the textbook definition of Aspergers Syndrome and people have been saying it for decades. It’s not like his issues are minor either. They’re a significant core component of the character.
Just FYI, “Asperger’s Syndrome” is no longer used as a medical term and some ND people do not care for it being used at all because it divides people on the autism spectrum unnecessarily, especially since there’s no real separation in terms of symptoms. Everything falls under “autism spectrum disorder” (ASD) now.
(I realize you didn’t mean to offend, just letting you know.)
They could solve racism by ensuring everyone has the same colour at birth! /s
The only thing I can think of whenever I hear that is, hilariously, an episode of Fairly Odd Parents.
Timmy wished for everyone to be a grey blob so racism couldn’t exist. People still kept saying they were grey-er or blobbier.
People just gonna hate.
Honestly that show was and is so far ahead it needs a cameo ship in trek. It would be like other federation ships, with nacelles that look like wings and a little crown floating nearby.
Problem is it’s showrunner Butch Hartman is a POS. His self insert character was Doctor Rip Studwell if that isn’t telling enough.
Or they could just bang each other. In fact I’m kind of alarmed at how decidedly unmixed people still are in whatever year it is supposed to be
Why is Barclay disabled. Unless being a perv is a disability.
Holodeck addiction is a disability I guess
Also what disabilities do Julian and Tilly have?
Tilly is obviously ginger
Lt. Barclay has an anxiety disorder which greatly interferes with his ability to live his life as he wants to.
He appears to be on the spectrum
Very few characters are ever seen wearing glasses.
Is over thinking tv shows a disability? Asking for a friend, obviously.
If me writing a 20 page essay about my favorite TV show and being a major contributor to the wiki counts as a disability, then I want a parking permit.
Granted on the premise that leaving the house should be rewarded.
STRICTLY PROHIBITED (unless you’re a good boy doctor)
His parents paid the price.
The iron price, or gold (pressed latinum)?
