What's the deal with Klingon painstiks?

Wait-a-minute Wednesday: To draw attention towards a situation or decision which bares further scrutiny.

For example: the crew of the Defiant not stopping Captain Sisko from committing acts of terrorism in order to prevent other atrocities being carried out by the Maquis.

So let's dig up the decidedly bone-head commands made by any characters throughout the Continuum, aside from the tried and true Tuvixian methodology. Or do, just provided there's a fresh/skewed take to be had.

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You're getting at the fact that the whole thing is a stupid plot device for a poignant episode and it makes no sense. "All the other extinct cultures had none" especially makes no sense considering the probe used itself on a guy who's hobby was learning about what extinct cultures left behind.
I'm sorry, nothing you have said makes the probe a better idea to memorialize a civilization than the carved plaque we put on the Pioneer probe. Because everyone can see the plaque and learn about us that way. And even if we had the same technology as the probe, we, and they, could do both.
I don't think you are getting the idea that a memorial space probe for an entire species that went extinct right after making the probe without a single piece of text on it is nonsense.
- Did you watch the video I linked about nutmeg? We actually have real life examples of cultures going extinct in real time. The Bandanese people are witnessing the death of their own language as it happens. What upsets them the most is that their own children don’t speak their language. They could not care less about memorials to their language in some institute of language in the capital city.
  That’s the whole genius of The Inner Light. They reached out across the vastness of space and time and taught Picard what it really meant to be a person living on their planet, in their culture. No stupid memorial plaque or other token could achieve that.
  It’s not the piece of pottery that matters! It’s the people making it. Their lives and their experiences.
  I met a traveller from an antique land
  Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
  Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
  Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
  The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
  And on the pedestal these words appear:
  "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
  No thing beside remains. Round the decay
  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
  The lone and level sands stretch far away.
  — Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias", 1819 edition
  
  Nothing that you have said at any point justifies the lack of text and images. Languages die out because of a lack of text. Are you trying to say they didn’t invent writing but invented psychic space probes?
  
  Languages die when people stop speaking them. They cannot be revived from written records. People still study Latin today but it will forever be a dead language because the chain of speakers was broken. The same goes for culture, for which language is a part. You cannot preserve a culture after all of its native practitioners are gone.
  What the Resikans did was to preserve their own culture by giving Picard a life on their planet. Through his experiences he became the last living member of their culture. The profound grief he shows and his reluctance to talk about it is exactly what we would expect from the last survivor of a dying culture.
  Unfortunately, Picard has no way to preserve their culture because he cannot recreate their entire way of life. No amount of writings or other artifacts can do that.
  This is what we see all over the world with indigenous cultures that are dying off. They cannot be saved by scientists studying them and writing everything down and cataloguing all the art they’ve made. Just as you can’t save a species from extinction using dissection and taxidermy.
  
  Languages die when people stop speaking them. They cannot be revived from written records.
  Uh...
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipherment#Notable_decipherers
  But sure, we have no idea what cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs or Akkadian (and other cuneiform-script long-dead languages) or Linear B say. No idea at all. All those people who deciphered them after they were long dead, big liars.
  
  Being able to decipher a language doesn’t mean the language is alive. It has to be spoken everyday by people who were taught by their parents, passed down as part of a whole culture.
  
  Okay? This still doesn't justify a total lack of writing and pictures on their probe.
  We put writing on probes not even intending them to be used in any sort of archaeological context. Just to help us put them together. Open up any piece of electronics- writing everywhere. Do they really not need any sort of instructions upon assembly?
  
  I think it’s fair to say that they didn’t value books, at least not at the time they built the probe. Their planet was dying and they had accepted that fact for many years. Kamin’s wife Helene even admonishes him for spending too much time with his books instead of living life with their family.
  It’s completely and utterly realistic from an emotional perspective. It’s everything you’d expect from a people who knew they were dying. Their way of life, their traditions, their music, their celebrations: those are what mattered to them and they couldn’t be preserved authentically in books or pictures. That’s why they created the probe.
  
  Why is it fair to say that? You have no idea how they felt about books just because one person didn’t like one other person spending too much time with their books. That’s a criticism real live humans have given to each other.
  To accept all of your explanations, I have to accept a whole lot of things that are pure assumptions on your part and not actually demonstrated in the episode.
  I think we all know that you can come up with extremely convoluted explanations for why stupid things in sci-fi aren’t actually stupid. They all involve adding all sorts of details. If those details were relevant, you shouldn’t have to make them up.
  
  She wasn’t just one person. She was a representative of her entire species. They make it clear at the end when everyone reverts to their youthful appearance. The life Picard lived as Kamin was in some sense a staging for Picard’s benefit, not a real life. Kamin may have been a real person who was married to Helene but Picard wouldn’t have mirrored exactly what he did with his life.
  At any rate, I think you’re missing the point of Star Trek. The show has never been “hard sci fi”. It’s always been a show that uses a science fiction setting to tell human stories. Trying to criticize it from a scientific perspective is just silly. There’s a bit of science in the show but any time science gets in the way of the story they wave it away with some technobabble.
  
  Again, you're making up things that aren't in the show and assuming things that aren't said.
  At any rate, I think you’re missing the point of Star Trek. The show has never been “hard sci fi”. It’s always been a show that uses a science fiction setting to tell human stories. Trying to criticize it from a scientific perspective is just silly. There’s a bit of science in the show but any time science gets in the way of the story they wave it away with some technobabble.
  I think you're missing the point that this was a "Wait-a-minute Wednesday" thread in a meme community and maybe you need to take this about a billion times less seriously than you're taking it.

44 comments