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Comment by mariodiana | Hacker News Reader

Just yesterday I was rewatching an old Star Trek episode, "The Menagerie," where the story centers around this poor victim of an accident ("delta rays") who is confined to a wheelchair, in a near-vegetable state, with only the ability to trigger a light: once for YES, twice for NO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menagerie_(Star_Trek:_The_...

Okay, still no flying cars—but we really ought to take stock in the many ways our present has already exceeded expectations from our recent past of even our distant future.

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If you liked that episode, you might want to see the show "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds", which tells the story of the crew before Kirk, and how the Captain of that crew (Pike) got into that position

The episode always struck me as very strange - all that advanced technology - but all they can do is give this guy a single light.

Yeh if you can trigger a light you can send morse code, to say the least (I don't remember the episode so I don't recall the mechanism of triggering the light, maybe morse wouldn't work)...

Most of the Star Trek writers really didn’t care about technology. The space environment was just a backdrop for human and human vs. alien drama.

Evidence of that is how they used to add something along the lines of “insert technobabble here” in the scripts, for someone to fill in later. But that didn’t allow for any technical input on the nature of the scripts.

The exceptions might be some of the scripts written by sci-fi writers, like the one written by Harlan Ellison - but he hated that episode. When he won the Hugo Award for it, he dedicated the award to “the memory of the script they butchered, and in respect to those parts of it that had the vitality to shine through the evisceration.”

It is strange. I chalked it up to the idea that perhaps his injuries were so severe that even with advanced technology that single light was all they could manage for him; that if he were injured in the same way today that he'd be brain dead at least for sure.

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