My pet theory is that going past Warp 10 makes you have powerful, contagious psychic hallucinations, and that the crew of the Voyager actually just found Paris and Janeway rolling around naked in the mud making salamander noises in an inebriated stupor.
This is now canon. At least for me it is.
What does a salamander sound like?
Horny Kate Mulgrew
What does horny Kate Mulgrew sound like?
@Salamander, duh.
🤯
Imagine a Jamaican steroid abuser shouting “Vulkan Lives!”
Because the whole episode was them hallucinating after being exposed to alien spores. They were cured of being high as a kite not of being hyperevolved salamanders. The sex though was probably real so they understandably never talk about it again.
The final form is always a crab. Writers were high or something.
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So how much higher are the odds of alien life being crabs than resembling something close to humans?
No clue. I’ve just read the articles talking about how crabs have evolved separately I think three times. Nature keeps making crabs. But that is using earth environments. Perhaps very alien environments would have selection bias toward other forms.
We need a spinoff series about what happened to the kids
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They had a salamander-person among the patients who went to “The Farm” in that episode where Tendi made a dog and Boimler got stuck mid-transport, so they haven’t forgotten.
I wasn’t aware that the 4th season of Lower Decks is about to start. thanks for telling me!
Imagine going back and being like “Yeah, let’s talk about exactly why these are the final stage of human evolution.”
And then it turns out that being a salamander is actually awesome, and they can shoot laser beams from their eyeballs and fly in space without a warp drive or something.
I mean, if they’re just salamanders at the height of their evolution, then Q must be stifling a laugh at all times.
Well, the thing about evolution is it doesn’t always lead to “better”, only “more able to survive and reproduce in the environment”. Which means any kind of hyper-accelerated “evolution” would be entirely random.
Evolution also isn’t something that can happen to an individual, and I’ve yet to see a sci-fi story about this actually explain why it’s happening outside of natural selective pressures.
TNG would have made the salamander thing an entire episode. Voyager just yaddas the good stuff
But you yadda’d over the best part…
I said the salad was good.
I mentioned the bisque
A Warp 10 science probe would be amazing AND no salamanders.
I never thought of that, good idea. Obviously they didn’t make it because it would make the show obsolete to have the ability for an information gathering device to be literally everywhere at the same time, allowing real time data collection of everything imaginable.
But the question stands, why wouldn’t starfleet build them after the discovery on voyager? Possibly the most enormous tactical development in the history of the setting, starfleet could literally observe what happens in the romulan government from their headquarters, or monitor the Borg up close without any risk.
We learn from TNG that some parts of the galaxy are being damaged by warp travel and have speed limits to lessen further degredation. A warp 10 probe would likely cause massive damage to these protected zones as well as some damage to normal zones.
Turning into salamanders wouldn’t have kept them from going home since they both made a full recovery. Warp 10 back to Earth and leave a note saying “Yes we turned into salamanders. This is how you fix that”
