In memory of Leonard Nimoy, most famous for playing the (straw) rationalist Spock, what are your top 3 ST:TOS episodes with him?

shamelessly I once tried to steelman Spock in 'City', and the result was a fic 'Thinking like demented you' on ff.net (hides under the table)

In Galileo Seven Spock also says something like, "I, for one, do not believe in angels," indicating his skepticism about an afterlife. Does that make Spock the first (implicitly) atheistic character on a network TV series?

Hence "(straw)" in the title. See e.g. this summary of a talk by Julia Galef about the difference between being a Straw Vulcan (memetic hazard warning: TVTropes) and being an actual practitioner of rationality.

[EDITED to link to the LW article that has a transcript of the original talk an a link to the YouTube video.]

What kind of answer is that?

One that, presumably, would make Uhura cry.

The original Star Trek is a Western, it's about people trying to do the right thing out on the lawless frontier. Why are people still watching Westerns?

I think it's a bit of a leap to go from NASA being under-funded and unambitious in recent years to "people 50 years from now, in a permanently Earth-bound reality".

I agree with you that humans in their current form will forever be earth-bound. But it's not because of a lack of funding or initiative. It's because it would be absolute insanity to consider exporting humans off the planet. The example I like is, suppose elephants were sentient, and coexisted on the planet with humans. Equal intelligence. Would it make sense to develop rockets to lift elephants into space, when humans are so much lighter? Of course not, go with the humans. So then, why lift humans into space when robots are so much lighter?

Intelligent, conscious entities, children of humans, will almost certainly spread out into space. But the human form is so ridiculously wasteful compared to a human consciousness operating in a robotic machine that it will never make sense to expend the effort required to spread humans around.

Freeman Dyson brings up this very issue, his approach was the Astrochicken. But I don't think even he really got how it will all play out.

Arthur C Clarke did, I think. The human form is just a stepping stone. The story doesn't end there.

but Star Trek made a certain kind of sense in the late 1960's (nearly 50 years ago!) when the U.S. and the Soviet Union had real space programs which tried to do new things, one after another.

I haven really watched more than a few episodes of ToS, but IIUC it never even bothered to be a realistic depiction of how space exploration would look like. It was more e metaphor of the Cold War, in Space!

would people 50 years from now, in a permanently Earth-bound reality, bother to watch these ancient shows and obsess over the characters?

They will probably idolize some dude who played a vampire. Or zombie. Or BDSM vampire zombie...

Actually, they mention every so often that the Cold War turned hot in the Star Trek 'verse and society collapsed. They're descended from the civilization that rebuilt.

So much for the immense successes we have had with unmanned missions. It make a lot of sense to send a few pounds of electronics into space rather than a person. What's wrong with cost effectiveness all if a sudden?

which shows why male nerds have always identified with the Spock character: He gets an opportunity for sex only once every seven years - at best.

We get the point. You earlier:

These injunctions from the Abrahamic religions assume that young men have opportunities for "fornication" in the first place. What if the young women in your life do all of the rejecting to keep this from happening?

I can see why atheists would want to deny unicorns: They don't want unicorns to hold them accountable for their adult virginity. : ) and before that a nearly identical comment.

We understand that you think that certain demographics are not having sex and that this is a really important thing. Almost no one else here assigns this a high priority. Moreover, the fundamental claims in question are simply false. For example, Atheists and religious people have about the same amount of sex.

You used to spend your time on LW being an advocate for cryonics and related issues, something you've been involved with for a very long time and you clearly know a lot about. Why don't you post more on that subject anymore?

I always liked that episode. Before I thought being emotionless was effortless for Spock. When I saw that episode I realized he had to work at it.

I'm upvoting this because I don't think that it should really be below the visible threshold. I expect that people are voting based not only on this comment but also on your other recent comments as cited by JoshuaZ. In and of itself, this comment is not as bad as all that, and it led to a worthwhile reply by is4junk. Nevertheless, I do basically agree with JoshuaZ.