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Friday, October 18, 2024

Star Trek: The Original Series

I had forgotten The Devil in the Dark.  The worst episodes were badly thought out commentsries on social problems of tge 1960s such as This Side of Paradise.  Some of the best science fiction such as The Devil in thr Dark did not survive advancing science.  The Horta was a silicon-based life form living deep with a planet with human miners.  While it easy to sympathize with the Horta's cries for its unborn children, the notion of life where silicon took the place of carbon did not long survive Linus Pauling's work on chemical bonding.  

Carbon's unique bonding capabilities are dependent on the availability of both p and s electron shells in a way that silicon cannot.  This is why there are very long alkane chain molecules (methane, methane, propane, butane) but not much past silane (SiH4).

I am slightly surprised to see a Wikipedia article about "carbon chauvinism."  It does acknowledge the chemistry problem of p-s bonding, but I see some postcolonial discussions.

Islam, Monirul (2016). "Posthumansm: Through the Postcolonial Lens". In Banerji, Debashish; Paranjape, Makarand R. (eds.). Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures (1st ed.). New Delhi: Springer India : Imprint: Springer. p. 117. ISBN 978-81-322-3637-5.

This crap goes everywhere

2 comments:

  1. Silicon is highly unlikely as a building block.

    But that wasn't the point of the episode. It was on learning to cooperate ...play to everyone's strengths. And ignorance and arrogance of humans sometimes.

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    Replies
    1. Agreed. And respect for life even if it looks weird.

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