Screenshot of Lemmy via Voyager of a meme and one of the comments replying to it.
The meme is a picture of an invertebrate and reads:
“This is Suzy. Suzy is a basal amniote.
She enjoys sitting in the sun, catching bugs, and laying eggs with extraembryonic membranes.
312 million years ago Suzy had two kids. One evolved into you and the other into a T-Rex. If Suzy isn’t metal as fuck I don’t know who is.”
The reply to this meme reads:
“Yeah, it seemed weird that Janeway and Tom Paris turned into this, but I get it now.”
So we evolved from salamanders and we’ll evolve back into salamanders?
I thought we were going to evolve into crabs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
Even H.G. Wells thought so.
https://non-aliencreatures.fandom.com/wiki/Crab_Creature
Crabs being a common endpoint doesn’t mean it’s the optimal lifeform. It could be a local minimum that many organisms get stuck in.
I mean I don’t think salamanders are the optimal life form either. Star Trek does.
Star Trek also thinks a worm is an apex predator:
I could be wrong but wasn’t that a manufactured device? I’m a big Star Trek fan but mostly films and TNG+ onward, I admittedly have not watched or am familiar with TOS in its entirety.
Memory Alpha says it was originally envisioned as a weapon. You are right. I always heard it referred to as a “monster” so I always thought it was alive.