My solution to the Kobali problem doesn't stray into the "final" one that some in this thread seem to opt for. I believe the way forward is to set up a donor scheme whereby Federation citizens offer their DNA for cloning upon death and allow Kobali scientists to use inanimate clones as a template/framework to grow new Kobali. Using this method allows families the right to grieve a body without fear of desecration and you could sell it to individuals with the Kobali's justification as a positive promotional point.
I think some people are being a bit "overly Darwinian" in their analysis. Even the harsh application of the founding ideology behind the Prime Directive seen in Enterprise's "Dear Doctor" doesn't suggest that biology is the only legitimate driving force in determining a species existence - if the Valakians had been able to develop warp drive themselves and negotiate or discover a technology to prevent their mutation driven disease, then it wouldn't be an issue. Technology is not a cheat - for those who are strict adherents to natural selection being the only force at work, it is a hypocrisy to claim that it is (what if humans had not discovered irrigation or refrigeration or antibiotics etc - would we have survived in sufficient number to become dominant in the face of other predatory species and natural disasters?)
Therefore, surely the Kobali solution while pretty much in bad taste as far as human other species sensibilities go... does satisfy the requirements of natural selection (merely that something was preventing or challenging their survival and they found a way to circumvent it).
If the Kobali were completely unprincipled, they could find a world inhabited by a primitive species and interfere in its cultural development - grooming the race they encountered to accept/incorporate the technological recycling of its dead into its belief system... and if the Federation made first contact at that point, there'd be nothing they could do.
What they was doing was to to survive and keep living. Just like most do. Only issue I had was they was doing it without respect of the one's dead. The end result of them contacting the family and making a list to the ones to do it. Was the best solution to them.
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
Spoiler Alert: I could be wrong, but isn't the result of that battlezone story line a Kobali agreement to no longer use the hibernating vaadwaur corpses?
And Dust to Dust goes even further - they will now ask for persmission from anyone.
With the Delta Alliance they are probably in contact with so many species that it's actually practical for them. There will be enough willing to give them corpses.
A second chance at life should also include the second chance or the first to tell someone you love them. To continue where you left off, to be with friends, true family, is the greatest gift of rebirth.
They take that away, they steal and corrupt your very soul, twist it into their rightful view, warp your mind to make you believe you had no family, no life, no hope, future, stop you point blank from seeing and loving your true family and friends, all with out asking anyone, you..............that is what is sicking.
There is no clear indication that souls exist in Star Trek, nor that the Kobali would affect them.
What we know is that the Kobali rebirthing process does alter the body considerably, which normally leads to a complete memory loss. It's not that they force it, it's that it a byproduct. I suspect if they could retain the memories, they would have gone for that. Apparently at least the human hosts however manage to retain their memories partially.
It kinda makes sense to me, too, from a biological perspective:
For one, the corpse decays, and that means the brain would no longer be intact - not a good chance to still retrieve anything. And then the process rewires the brain (leading to the Kobali special talents), so it's unlikely that any remaining information somewhere inside those half-decayed neurons could be restored. Maybe human brain cells decay more slowly or the brain structure is closer to the Kobali so that some memories remain.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
There is no clear indication that souls exist in Star Trek, nor that the Kobali would affect them.
Search for Spock. The Forge trilogy. I think it's confirmed Vulcans specifically have something resembling a soul. I think the Bajorans may also, I seem to remember an episode about that, but they bore me so I may not be remembering correctly.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
There is no clear indication that souls exist in Star Trek, nor that the Kobali would affect them.
Search for Spock. The Forge trilogy. I think it's confirmed Vulcans specifically have something resembling a soul. I think the Bajorans may also, I seem to remember an episode about that, but they bore me so I may not be remembering correctly.
Good point.
But I believe in general, this is the whole Star Trek thing with "disembodied conciousness" and "conciousness" transfers - is that really the same as a soul? It is probably as close as we can get to something like a "soul" in Star Trek. The Vulcans call it katra, I believe. Of course that might just be literally the same thnig as soul, just their name for it. But can it be that only some species have that? Or is it actually something that's ultimately physical, like a special matter/energy configuration that can retain stability under certain conditions?
To me the fundamental metaphysical purpose of a soul is to be something that exists for eternity to explain what happens to you when your body dies. If it has some physical reality and can be altered, manipulated or destroyed, it seems it really fails its original purpose and lets me ask the same question: If we invent the soul to explain what happens to us after we die, what do we need to invent to expain what happens to us when our soul is destroyed/consumed?
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
The Kobali have a major problem: Their concept makes absolutely no sense. Sci-fi demands suspension of disbelief, but the Kobali are "Threshold" level of suspension of disbelief that's really hard to pull off if you even have the most basic understanding of population dynamics, genetics or biology
All of that put aside and just pretend we have a race of undead that need to raise corpses to reproduce (using fnatasy terms here makes it a little easier). Do these raised beings that live a life on their own after being raised and have a free will the right to exist? In my opinion of course, every form of life has a "right" to exist. The Vaadwaur do not simply protest what is going on, they want to erradicate the Kobali who reached out and asked for help. Interveining in ongoing genocide is in line with what Starfleet does. Letting Vaadwaur in tubes die on purpose to have more Kobali is a crime and one you stop during the mission arc (t's very simplistic, but that's what the story tells us).
What makes this case complicated and essentially a good piece for the "strange new worlds" piece of Star Trek is that the raised aren't simply new beings, they are the same people that died. And those reanimated naturally want to return to their old live which they had and which they remember and if they try to they are forcefully reintegrated into Kobali society. That's the ethical debate. If they were to offer them the choice and accept that they would leave the Kobali to reunite with their old lives there wouldn't be such a big problem.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
There is no clear indication that souls exist in Star Trek, nor that the Kobali would affect them.
Search for Spock. The Forge trilogy. I think it's confirmed Vulcans specifically have something resembling a soul. I think the Bajorans may also, I seem to remember an episode about that, but they bore me so I may not be remembering correctly.
Good point.
But I believe in general, this is the whole Star Trek thing with "disembodied conciousness" and "conciousness" transfers - is that really the same as a soul? It is probably as close as we can get to something like a "soul" in Star Trek. The Vulcans call it katra, I believe. Of course that might just be literally the same thnig as soul, just their name for it. But can it be that only some species have that? Or is it actually something that's ultimately physical, like a special matter/energy configuration that can retain stability under certain conditions?
To me the fundamental metaphysical purpose of a soul is to be something that exists for eternity to explain what happens to you when your body dies. If it has some physical reality and can be altered, manipulated or destroyed, it seems it really fails its original purpose and lets me ask the same question: If we invent the soul to explain what happens to us after we die, what do we need to invent to expain what happens to us when our soul is destroyed/consumed?
Well there's no set definition for a soul anyway. The concept varies heavily from mythology to mythology. So if in its most general form it means the persons personality and memories that is separable from their body then a Katra is a soul.
However souls in mythology are usually separate from the physical laws of personhood which are simply neurons firing and chemical storage and so on.
It seems to me that Katra are mostly physical, whereby the neural patterns that make up a Vulcans 'self' are simply 'copied' and 'downloaded' into another persons head through a mind meld or stored in someway in a Katric ark.
So if the work 'soul' is being used to represent a purely supernatural 'inner self' from before we discovered how 'selfhood' is actually held in a body then I don't think a Katra is one. However if we're using 'soul' to refer to the conscience part of a self aware organism, then I think Katra is a soul.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
It's not just strange for a Starfleet officer. I can imagine that a Klingon would not want to help a liar either. Especially when they're lying to hide the fact that they themselves are responsible for the conflict in the first place, and when they realise they can't win the conflict, they go and run to someone stronger to do the fighting for them.
It's the kind of behaviour you see between siblings when they're young and little children in general. Except we're dealing with a war here and they expect you to take the risk for something they caused - something they don't even have the guts to admit. If I were a Klingon, I would not support those with such dishonourable behaviour in any way.
And besides the continued lying and lack of transparency, there's also lies about other things. Note how the General keeps saying 'we can't stop fighting until the Vaadwaur leave our world' or something like that. That's actively trying to rewrite history. Or propaganda.
It's not even their world. It used to be a Vaadwaur colony, hence why there's so many bodies in stasis on that specific planet. The Kobali only settled there recently, somewhere between Voyager's visits so less than 40 years ago.
And I just realised, there's some darker meaning to those words... waiting 'until the Vaadwaur leave our world' could be interpreted in a gruesome way, knowing that they are basically waiting until the pods fail.
Yeah, by the end of the arc they've stopped just letting people in failing tubes die. Before they only repaired the tubes after the occupant died so they could use them for storage.
That's where I protested vehemently. They were essentially murdering those in stasis by not at least repairing their failing tubes until they could repair them no longer to keep them alive.
Now a LTS and loving it.
Just because you spend money on this game, it does not entitle you to be a jerk if things don't go your way.
I have come to the conclusion that I have a memory like Etch-A-Sketch. I shake my head and forget everything.
But not before many lives were lost and only because we found out eventually. If we hadn't intervened, which we shouldn't have, then they likely would have kept doing what they were doing.
Note, for example, how they keep defending their 'temple' *, as the city wasn't even the main battlefront as Kim explained. They kept defending their practices until the bitter end, and they were willing to sacrifice their allies and even their own city's defences to keep doing it.
* The use of the word 'temple' can be somewhat misleading here too btw, just like the General's comments. They're not even a religious species, not that we (or Kim) know of. But instead of attacking military installations that have a very strategic value for the dying species that the Vaadwaur are, the Vaadwaur are now suddenly even attacking the poor Kobali's civil and holy buildings!
If the Kobali had the technology to engineer this virus that: 1. brings the dead back to life 2. rewrites the reanimated corpse's DNA into Kobali DNA 3. removes the memories of the corpse's past life ... then why couldn't they simply engineer a virus that rewrote the part of their own DNA that makes them sterile? Seems that would have been the less impossible road to follow.
"Logic is a little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow. Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell BAD." - Spock
If the Kobali had the technology to engineer this virus that:
1. brings the dead back to life
2. rewrites the reanimated corpse's DNA into Kobali DNA
3. removes the memories of the corpse's past life
... then why couldn't they simply engineer a virus that rewrote the part of their own DNA that makes them sterile? Seems that would have been the less impossible road to follow.
As I said earlier, the Kobali make absolutely no sense from a real life point of view AND from a in-universe point of view where rewriting DNA is something seemingly casually done all the time.
Not finding a way to circumvent/cure their infertility even artificially but finding a way to reanimate the dead and transform completely alien people into their own that then get sterile in the process makes absolutely no sense.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
I would definitely have my body cremated in the ST universe. More utility in that than expecting a galaxy full of strangers to care about my self-important sense of moral indignation.
But not before many lives were lost and only because we found out eventually. If we hadn't intervened, which we shouldn't have, then they likely would have kept doing what they were doing.
Not intervening would have lead to the worst possible outcome. An entire species going extinct, and the Vaadwaur having even more military capacity. (Including access to Kobali technology. Who is to say how they'd abuse the whole Kobalization process - imagine them using it to biological weapons. After all, they used biological weapons against the Kobali, as well. And the Kobali tech - as unbelievable as it is - is advanced enough to be applied to any humanoid corpse - so they might have just the right tools to also create biological weapons that can target any species.)
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
In a certain way, they're a lot like the Borg...except they assimilate you after you're dead and bring you back as one of them.
No, they bring you back as yourself and then slowly mutate and brainwash you into one of them. We see this happen to Harry Kim's clone in one of the missions. And are not allowed to save him.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a conflict between two peoples that has nothing to do with me so I feel no need to get involved. Even if I were to get involved, I'd limit myself to diplomacy, the Vaadwaur have a valid point and a vaccine against Kobali-fication is a perfectly legitimate thing for the Vaadwaur to create and use on their own people, they also have every right to offer the concept to others who's cultures disapprove of the Kobali's practices.
Actively conducting genocide is not fine, but neither is resurrecting people from cultures that don't approve of tampering with the dead, especially without permission. Protecting oneself from such a practice in my eyes is a perfectly sensible and perfectly valid course of action and I would support anyone who wanted to do that.
Yes, let's let our own personal feelings about dead bodies decide whether an entire race lives or dies. As someone else said, the Klingons couldn't care less about what happens to dead bodies, and as far as the mission(s) in question, after reading all the messages on various consoles it actually appears as though the Vaads don't really care about the dead bodies either. They only want the still "living" ones, and only want to stop the Kobali from using the dead bodies just..... because....
Even in human history there have been many cultures that cared nothing for the bodies of the dead, other than moving the body away from the actual living area.
Besides, is there truly any difference between the Kobali, who happen to use the entire body to save their entire race from extinction, and us current humans, who harvest and use numerous parts/organs from dead bodies in order to save an extremely small percentage of our race ?
The only true difference is that in most present day Earth cultures we only harvest body parts from people who have volunteered them, whereas the Kobali were not given permission first, and in fact hadn't even asked. Then again, in even somewhat recent Human history, people have resorted to eating dead bodies to avoid dying of starvation themselves, and I am quite sure they didn't get permission from anyone first.
It is actually a quite (to me), well written story arc. The Kobali are only doing what they must to survive, and are being extremely secretive about it in fear of what the reactions of others would be if they knew. Sure enough, the secret does come out and just as they feared, some people just can't handle it and would gladly see their entire race die.
Thankfully, for the Kobali, others are willing to move past their repugnance (or feel that a dead body is really nothing special, except to someone who must have it or die themselves) at exactly how the Kobali manage to survive and their race will not die out.
In the STO universe, now that the secret is out, there are plenty of species/individuals out there who don't care about what happens to the bodies of the dead who will likely be happy to give them to the Kobali, just as there are plenty of people currently alive today who don't care what happens to their bodies after they die, happy to donate their bodies/organs to help someone else to live.
Yes, let's let our own personal feelings about dead bodies decide whether an entire race lives or dies. As someone else said, the Klingons couldn't care less about what happens to dead bodies, and as far as the mission(s) in question, after reading all the messages on various consoles it actually appears as though the Vaads don't really care about the dead bodies either. They only want the still "living" ones, and only want to stop the Kobali from using the dead bodies just..... because....
Except it's not "dead bodies," because there is resurrection technology involved. They are living people, who are then forcibly transformed and brainwashed into Kobali.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a conflict between two peoples that has nothing to do with me so I feel no need to get involved. Even if I were to get involved, I'd limit myself to diplomacy, the Vaadwaur have a valid point and a vaccine against Kobali-fication is a perfectly legitimate thing for the Vaadwaur to create and use on their own people, they also have every right to offer the concept to others who's cultures disapprove of the Kobali's practices.
Actively conducting genocide is not fine, but neither is resurrecting people from cultures that don't approve of tampering with the dead, especially without permission. Protecting oneself from such a practice in my eyes is a perfectly sensible and perfectly valid course of action and I would support anyone who wanted to do that.
But not before many lives were lost and only because we found out eventually. If we hadn't intervened, which we shouldn't have, then they likely would have kept doing what they were doing.
Not intervening would have lead to the worst possible outcome. An entire species going extinct, and the Vaadwaur having even more military capacity. (Including access to Kobali technology. Who is to say how they'd abuse the whole Kobalization process - imagine them using it to biological weapons. After all, they used biological weapons against the Kobali, as well. And the Kobali tech - as unbelievable as it is - is advanced enough to be applied to any humanoid corpse - so they might have just the right tools to also create biological weapons that can target any species.)
Well one could argue that the Kobali were destined to die. Sounds cruel, I know, but it's something they would have caused themselves.
As for the Vaadwaur threat: never took that serious. It didn't make sense. Just by giving a species a few hundred years behind everyone some tech, doesn't mean they know how to use it or that they have the numbers to use it effectively.
In some cases it was just too clear that they were only added because a new bad guy was needed. The threat never seemed believable, like when they destroyed an entire Voth fleet, yet we destroy their ships without effort. Or when one ship (the player's) could save the Turei homeworld. From the same species that caused the fall of the B'omar and technologically advanced Krenim? Two entire empires fell yet the player manages to save half the quadrant when dealing with them.
Also, the the Kobali only took Vaadwaur that were already dead (from the battlefield, or from already failed stasis pods). The only thing I can count against them is that they didn't try to keep the stasis pods from failing, which they said they would start doing.
Support 90 degree arc limitation on BFaW! Save our ships from looking like flying disco balls of dumb!
Comments
I think some people are being a bit "overly Darwinian" in their analysis. Even the harsh application of the founding ideology behind the Prime Directive seen in Enterprise's "Dear Doctor" doesn't suggest that biology is the only legitimate driving force in determining a species existence - if the Valakians had been able to develop warp drive themselves and negotiate or discover a technology to prevent their mutation driven disease, then it wouldn't be an issue. Technology is not a cheat - for those who are strict adherents to natural selection being the only force at work, it is a hypocrisy to claim that it is (what if humans had not discovered irrigation or refrigeration or antibiotics etc - would we have survived in sufficient number to become dominant in the face of other predatory species and natural disasters?)
Therefore, surely the Kobali solution while pretty much in bad taste as far as human other species sensibilities go... does satisfy the requirements of natural selection (merely that something was preventing or challenging their survival and they found a way to circumvent it).
If the Kobali were completely unprincipled, they could find a world inhabited by a primitive species and interfere in its cultural development - grooming the race they encountered to accept/incorporate the technological recycling of its dead into its belief system... and if the Federation made first contact at that point, there'd be nothing they could do.
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
With the Delta Alliance they are probably in contact with so many species that it's actually practical for them. There will be enough willing to give them corpses.
There is no clear indication that souls exist in Star Trek, nor that the Kobali would affect them.
What we know is that the Kobali rebirthing process does alter the body considerably, which normally leads to a complete memory loss. It's not that they force it, it's that it a byproduct. I suspect if they could retain the memories, they would have gone for that. Apparently at least the human hosts however manage to retain their memories partially.
It kinda makes sense to me, too, from a biological perspective:
For one, the corpse decays, and that means the brain would no longer be intact - not a good chance to still retrieve anything. And then the process rewires the brain (leading to the Kobali special talents), so it's unlikely that any remaining information somewhere inside those half-decayed neurons could be restored. Maybe human brain cells decay more slowly or the brain structure is closer to the Kobali so that some memories remain.
Search for Spock. The Forge trilogy. I think it's confirmed Vulcans specifically have something resembling a soul. I think the Bajorans may also, I seem to remember an episode about that, but they bore me so I may not be remembering correctly.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
But I believe in general, this is the whole Star Trek thing with "disembodied conciousness" and "conciousness" transfers - is that really the same as a soul? It is probably as close as we can get to something like a "soul" in Star Trek. The Vulcans call it katra, I believe. Of course that might just be literally the same thnig as soul, just their name for it. But can it be that only some species have that? Or is it actually something that's ultimately physical, like a special matter/energy configuration that can retain stability under certain conditions?
To me the fundamental metaphysical purpose of a soul is to be something that exists for eternity to explain what happens to you when your body dies. If it has some physical reality and can be altered, manipulated or destroyed, it seems it really fails its original purpose and lets me ask the same question: If we invent the soul to explain what happens to us after we die, what do we need to invent to expain what happens to us when our soul is destroyed/consumed?
All of that put aside and just pretend we have a race of undead that need to raise corpses to reproduce (using fnatasy terms here makes it a little easier). Do these raised beings that live a life on their own after being raised and have a free will the right to exist? In my opinion of course, every form of life has a "right" to exist. The Vaadwaur do not simply protest what is going on, they want to erradicate the Kobali who reached out and asked for help. Interveining in ongoing genocide is in line with what Starfleet does. Letting Vaadwaur in tubes die on purpose to have more Kobali is a crime and one you stop during the mission arc (t's very simplistic, but that's what the story tells us).
What makes this case complicated and essentially a good piece for the "strange new worlds" piece of Star Trek is that the raised aren't simply new beings, they are the same people that died. And those reanimated naturally want to return to their old live which they had and which they remember and if they try to they are forcefully reintegrated into Kobali society. That's the ethical debate. If they were to offer them the choice and accept that they would leave the Kobali to reunite with their old lives there wouldn't be such a big problem.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Well there's no set definition for a soul anyway. The concept varies heavily from mythology to mythology. So if in its most general form it means the persons personality and memories that is separable from their body then a Katra is a soul.
However souls in mythology are usually separate from the physical laws of personhood which are simply neurons firing and chemical storage and so on.
It seems to me that Katra are mostly physical, whereby the neural patterns that make up a Vulcans 'self' are simply 'copied' and 'downloaded' into another persons head through a mind meld or stored in someway in a Katric ark.
So if the work 'soul' is being used to represent a purely supernatural 'inner self' from before we discovered how 'selfhood' is actually held in a body then I don't think a Katra is one. However if we're using 'soul' to refer to the conscience part of a self aware organism, then I think Katra is a soul.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
It's the kind of behaviour you see between siblings when they're young and little children in general. Except we're dealing with a war here and they expect you to take the risk for something they caused - something they don't even have the guts to admit. If I were a Klingon, I would not support those with such dishonourable behaviour in any way.
It's not even their world. It used to be a Vaadwaur colony, hence why there's so many bodies in stasis on that specific planet. The Kobali only settled there recently, somewhere between Voyager's visits so less than 40 years ago.
And I just realised, there's some darker meaning to those words... waiting 'until the Vaadwaur leave our world' could be interpreted in a gruesome way, knowing that they are basically waiting until the pods fail.
That's where I protested vehemently. They were essentially murdering those in stasis by not at least repairing their failing tubes until they could repair them no longer to keep them alive.
But not before many lives were lost and only because we found out eventually. If we hadn't intervened, which we shouldn't have, then they likely would have kept doing what they were doing.
Note, for example, how they keep defending their 'temple' *, as the city wasn't even the main battlefront as Kim explained. They kept defending their practices until the bitter end, and they were willing to sacrifice their allies and even their own city's defences to keep doing it.
* The use of the word 'temple' can be somewhat misleading here too btw, just like the General's comments. They're not even a religious species, not that we (or Kim) know of. But instead of attacking military installations that have a very strategic value for the dying species that the Vaadwaur are, the Vaadwaur are now suddenly even attacking the poor Kobali's civil and holy buildings!
If the Kobali had the technology to engineer this virus that:
1. brings the dead back to life
2. rewrites the reanimated corpse's DNA into Kobali DNA
3. removes the memories of the corpse's past life
... then why couldn't they simply engineer a virus that rewrote the part of their own DNA that makes them sterile? Seems that would have been the less impossible road to follow.
As I said earlier, the Kobali make absolutely no sense from a real life point of view AND from a in-universe point of view where rewriting DNA is something seemingly casually done all the time.
Not finding a way to circumvent/cure their infertility even artificially but finding a way to reanimate the dead and transform completely alien people into their own that then get sterile in the process makes absolutely no sense.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Actively conducting genocide is not fine, but neither is resurrecting people from cultures that don't approve of tampering with the dead, especially without permission. Protecting oneself from such a practice in my eyes is a perfectly sensible and perfectly valid course of action and I would support anyone who wanted to do that.
Even in human history there have been many cultures that cared nothing for the bodies of the dead, other than moving the body away from the actual living area.
Besides, is there truly any difference between the Kobali, who happen to use the entire body to save their entire race from extinction, and us current humans, who harvest and use numerous parts/organs from dead bodies in order to save an extremely small percentage of our race ?
The only true difference is that in most present day Earth cultures we only harvest body parts from people who have volunteered them, whereas the Kobali were not given permission first, and in fact hadn't even asked. Then again, in even somewhat recent Human history, people have resorted to eating dead bodies to avoid dying of starvation themselves, and I am quite sure they didn't get permission from anyone first.
It is actually a quite (to me), well written story arc. The Kobali are only doing what they must to survive, and are being extremely secretive about it in fear of what the reactions of others would be if they knew. Sure enough, the secret does come out and just as they feared, some people just can't handle it and would gladly see their entire race die.
Thankfully, for the Kobali, others are willing to move past their repugnance (or feel that a dead body is really nothing special, except to someone who must have it or die themselves) at exactly how the Kobali manage to survive and their race will not die out.
In the STO universe, now that the secret is out, there are plenty of species/individuals out there who don't care about what happens to the bodies of the dead who will likely be happy to give them to the Kobali, just as there are plenty of people currently alive today who don't care what happens to their bodies after they die, happy to donate their bodies/organs to help someone else to live.
Except it's not "dead bodies," because there is resurrection technology involved. They are living people, who are then forcibly transformed and brainwashed into Kobali.
Well said. Completely agree.
Well one could argue that the Kobali were destined to die. Sounds cruel, I know, but it's something they would have caused themselves.
As for the Vaadwaur threat: never took that serious. It didn't make sense. Just by giving a species a few hundred years behind everyone some tech, doesn't mean they know how to use it or that they have the numbers to use it effectively.
In some cases it was just too clear that they were only added because a new bad guy was needed. The threat never seemed believable, like when they destroyed an entire Voth fleet, yet we destroy their ships without effort. Or when one ship (the player's) could save the Turei homeworld. From the same species that caused the fall of the B'omar and technologically advanced Krenim? Two entire empires fell yet the player manages to save half the quadrant when dealing with them.
This. ^^^^^
Also, the the Kobali only took Vaadwaur that were already dead (from the battlefield, or from already failed stasis pods). The only thing I can count against them is that they didn't try to keep the stasis pods from failing, which they said they would start doing.
Support 90 degree arc limitation on BFaW! Save our ships from looking like flying disco balls of dumb!