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From: milne@uci-icse
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: "Where no man has gone before"
Message-ID: <2663@topaz.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 11-Jul-85 01:24:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.2663
Posted: Thu Jul 11 01:24:18 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 13-Jul-85 07:33:33 EDT
Sender: daemon@topaz.ARPA
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 60

From: Alastair Milne 


> >How likely is it that anyone would send so expensive a ship off
> >into nowhere for 5 years?

> Very.  As a general rule, exploration ships fall into two classes:
> unarmed and armed.  
> ....
> Besides,
> human ships are always armed.  Haven't you read any space opera?

     What on earth has this response got to do with the question?  Unless you
     equate weaponry with expense, it seems irrelevant.

     The point of the question was that Enterprise was one of the 12 or 13
     most advanced ships in the fleet, and as such served a number of duties,
     of which exploration and experimentation (not necessarily synonymous)
     were only two.  The Federation simply couldn't afford to send so powerful
     and useful a ship off on its own, out of all contact, for so long a
     period.  A year perhaps, maybe two, and even then you'd see it seriously
     debated in Starfleet's upper offices.

     Enterprise is certainly far more than a scout ship, and the question
     involves much more than whether she should be armed  --  which she is, of
     course, heavily.

>  As for naming, I believe most of the visible stars have been named.

     Do you indeed?  (I assume you're talking about individual, non-systematic
     names like Rigel, rather than Beta Orionis).
     Assuming that by "visible" you mean what the unaided eye can see (from
     Earth) on a night with good seeing and no extraneous light to obstruct
     vision, then there are many more stars than have been named.  Add a
     telescope, and you can just about forget the idea of individual,
     non-systematic names for every star (how many? 100,000?  1,000,000?
     10,000,000? more?).  Now widen your scope to every star in the galaxy, 
     not just the restricted set we can see.  Is the degree of horror becoming
     clearer?

>  Man, as a race, is arrogant.  
   
     Not nearly as much as so many apologists would have us think.  Besides,
     what relevance has this to naming the stars?


>  As long as StarFleet sticks
>  to names of the form Starname-Planet_#, they're on well established
>  ground.

     Naturally.  This is the purpose of doing things by convention,
     systematically.  Can you imagine the chaos (and the suicides by
     librarians) that would ensue if the individual names given by a thousand
     civilisations to over 10,000,000,000 stars were *all* in common use!!??
     Besides, every time you discovered a new one, you'd have to invent a new,
     *distinct* name for it.  Far better to have a system that has a slot
     already allocated for it.  Spare the librarians.

  
  Alastair Milne