They didn’t talk about it because crazy shit happened to that fucking ship every day. I could just imagine some ensign going home to his wife like ‘The ship gave birth today’ and she just rolls her eyes and goes back to her book.
The funny part about that is, even though he was the one who got the shit over it, the fucking ship came on to him. He just wanted to talk about the goddamn warp drive.
i had a thought about this… ive been watching lower decks
the emergence of new life forms seems almost trivial to everyone… its something that happens all the time.
for some perspective, humans are pulled out of other humans at hypothetical, but totally realistic rate of something like 1000 babies/hour… the ‘miracle of life’ at volume.
for each one of these humans, its clearly a momentous occasion. in aggregate, not so much.
edit: duuude its actually closer to 16,000/hour. damn
I feel like there’s a difference between a worker robot deciding it doesn’t want to live or die at the command of its humanoid creators, or a collections of nanites establishing an emergent intelligence, and a Federation Starship locking out its crew of 1,014 people and seeking out a white dwarf star like a salmon swimming upstream so it could give birth to an entirely new lifeform.
Even setting aside the ethical implications of using a ship capable of such a thing as transport, and putting into dangerous combat situations, is Starfleet prepared for similar events to happen on all their ships? What happened to the emergent lifeform after it left the Enterprise? Is it still out there? Why did it look like a screen saver from 1992?
But the crew of the Enterprise are fundamentally uncurious about the wider implications of the event.
“Amazing, isn’t it captain? An entirely new lifeform brought into being by the very ship we sail through the stars.”
“Quite so, Number One. Tell me, what’s our next stop?”
“We’re going to rendezvous with the USS Hood to pick up lieutenant Ro; she just finished her advanced tactical training.”
“Excellent! We’ll have to throw her a ‘Welcome Back’ party in Ten Forward.”
Sometimes I love Wikipedia.
They never mention the nanites or the exocomps again either.
Lol the entire enterprise crew needs some deep therapy after all the traumatic shit they deal with on the daily. The most unrealistic part of that show was how none of them became became grizzled after 10 years of life altering experiences and losses though they often showed others who did. I want to assume they had access to more than troi and just didn’t show it because an entire crew probably couldn’t be supported by one therapist similarly to how whichever physical health doctor on board had lots of help and even other doctors.