Chris Parr wrote:On the other hand, who can say what those kooky mad scientists of the Federation and the Klingon Empire and the Romulans and so on are up to? I mean, we only ever see a tiny sliver of what is going on in the Federation's Galaxy, right?
Oh, and before anyone goes jumping down my throat for giving the Federation an unfair advantage here...
The point is that we should not
assume that there are huge piles of strange, unknown, and mysterious things being developed all over the place just outside the "camera frame" of what we can see. There "might" be.
But then again, there might be someone standing right behind you, silently watching you. Right now. Oh, you turned around? Ha! He dodged around behind you again! There he is! He MIGHT be there! You can't rule it out! He might be a ninja!
See how silly and immature that sounds? How annoying would it be to have someone who's constantly going on about how there MIGHT be invisible ninjas hiding just outside your field of view all the time? How out of touch with reality would a person like that sound?
Because the reality is, the reason we don't see those ninjas isn't that they're super-stealthy. It's that
they aren't there. There is no invisible ninja standing behind you right now. Sure, in some imaginable alternate universe there MIGHT be, but it's pointless to talk about things that are purely hypothetical when there's no evidence for their existence.
There's a concept in philosophy known as Occam's Razor, which can be simply stated as "if you have two possible explanations for a situation, AND they both fit the facts equally well, the simpler one is more likely to be correct."
In this case, Occam's Razor is telling us that the reason there aren't lots of supermen running around the Star Trek galaxy is that
unlike in a comic book, there aren't lots of supermen randomly being created IN the Star Trek galaxy. If there were, then Star Trek would have
weird things, things
like this, going on
ALL THE TIME instead of only happening in a crossover comic.
But if, based on Occam's Razor, we say that it is highly unlikely that superbeings are being spammed all over the Star Trek universe on a regular basis... then it is similarly highly unlikely that they would
conveniently just happen to be spammed in time to present problems for a bunch of new alien invaders.
I'd just like to point out that the Empire also has the ability to tweak genetics. They can't make a super duper Jedi on command, but they can create some super powerful creatures.
And yet this is seldom if ever done, rather than being a commonplace... when people in Star Wars need fighting power on their side, they get human guards or battledroids, but do not invest in genetically engineered terrors with comic book level superpowers.