So I was watching some Star Trek: The Next Generation on BBC this weekend, and one was the ep “Home Soil” (s.01:ep.18), the one with the Microbrain…
(which was a bit weird b/c I was just talking about that ep earlier last week)
… and something occurred to me: the crew should not have been as surprised to find it as they had been, or had as much questioning about it.
There was all this hooplah about whether or not the silicon-based crystals found were alive, whether or not they could be life. Not if they were intelligent (which they later proved they were), but simply whether or not they were a life form, as if silicon-based life was some hypothetical thing no one had ever encountered.
But just five episodes earlier – s.01:ep.13, “Datalore” – they encountered the Crystalline Entity, but they never questioned if it was alive or not. (Why did they not even mention it in this ep?)
And the original Enterprise, under Captain Kirk, encountered at least two silicon-based life forms: the Horta, seen in “The Devil in the Dark” (ST:tOS s.01:ep.26), and Yarnek the Excalbian, seen in “The Savage Curtain” (s.03:ep.22). Three, if you count the Tholians, first seen in “The Tholian Web” [s.03:ep.09]; they have a crystalline exoskeleton, and thrive in high temps, but I don’t believe it’s been stated that they’re silicon-based. (And some of the crew of Captain Archer’s Enterprise NX-01 fought off a silicon-based viral infection in “Observer Effect” [ST:ENT s.04:ep.11], though that was written decades later.) So the Enterprise-D crew should know that not only is silicon-based life possible, there are several examples out there.
(via star-trek-machine)
