That was cool…and what the heck was up with the purple lipstick in his later appearances?
Uh, maybe not. From here.
Marc Kamionkowski is the Robinson Professor of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics at Caltech, BTW.
But I seriously doubt that you could transport the Voyager there.
I’ll need to read more from a source other than MSNBC, as my official position is that everyone there is a nitwit. 'Cept Rachel Maddow. I love Rachel. If I ever go into a murderous rage and attack MSNBC with a fleet of helicopter gunships, Rachel will be allowed to leave before we open fire, and no one will be permitted to rush her as she is Rachel Maddow.
What was I talking about?
Oh, right. Before the big bang. I’ll need to read more from a more, ahem, rigorous source, but as I read that, Kamionkowski is talking about seeing what happened before inflation, which I take to mean the zillionth of a second that went by before the creation of time/matter/space and the beginning of the expansion we are currently in. As time and space were created during the BB, I still say “before” the big bang is meaningless.
But I could easily be wrong. I’m wrong quite often. I used to think Al Gore would be president one day, and I thought McCain was going to win last year till about 2 days before.
Riker was gay?
I was always suspicious of that excessive lurch/swagger he had. And I have also figured he is a descendant of the Oxy Clean guy…
I called DeLancie “Q-gene” for a while before learning his actual name.
Arlene Sorkin was hot, yo.
My vote is for a tester. A rational being using impossible power to test humanity.
My favorite Q moment?
Q: “You HIT me! Picard never HIT me!”
Sisko: “I’m not Picard.”
I saw an outtake from DS9 once that cracks me up to this day.
Q: Or what? You’ll ravish me?
SISKO: looking him up and down I might.
It’s around the 2:00 minute mark on that video.
Tuvok’s not bad in that either!
I think his problem was that he was so detached from human-level creatures that he didn’t see them as real. And he was so powerful that he could do plenty of harm on a casual impulse.
Persoanlly, I’d consider the Q to be an example of a race quite a bit innately morally superior to humans, subjected to who-knows-how-long corruption by absolute power. They aren’t nearly as nasty as I’d expect omnipotent humans with untold millenia of absolute power behind them to be.
It’s not necessarily meaningless; according to some theories there could have been a previous universe ( or many of them ). Some theories outright require it, in fact. The Big Bang is just when OUR universe started, not necessarily time and space.
That sums up the sociopathic mindset very well.
It’s not sociopathic to see things as inferior if they are inferior, though. I’m not a serial killer if I put down ant poison.
You are from the ant’s POV. Everything is relative.
It’s when you think you have a right to kill humans the way humans kill ants that you have a problem.
When I think that, sure, I’d be a sociopath, because I’m a human being. But what about when an omnipotent being who’s further advanced over humans than human beings are over ants thinks that?
Show a little solidarity with your fellow ants, would ya? 
You nailed it, my good man.
Captain Amazing said:
The analogy is flawed, because ants don’t have consciousness and aren’t moral beings. They don’t have the level of sentience. To suppose there is a being with some greater amount of knowledge and power is one thing, but that does not negate that humans are sentient and have a moral sense.
A truly great moral being who has all the capabilities of a superQ (or god or whatever term you want to use) is going to be limited in what he will do to humans, not because humans are stupid and powerless, but precisely because they are stupid and powerless but also sentient. Right and wrong applies to the greater moral being more so than the lesser moral being, because the greater moral being has a greater ability to understand it.
For Q to dismiss humans as insignificant may be an accurate summation of our place in the universe, but it is not the position of an advanced moral being. Our lives have meaning to us.
I loved it when Picard complained about the loss of 18 crewmen during the ship’s first encounter with the Borg, and Q basically told him to stop being such a big baby about it. Knocking down Picard after he has gotten on his moral high horse is NO easy feat.
“Like flies to naughty boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”
You’re making the assumption that your standard of morality is going to be the same as our fictional superbeing, and that a being like that is going to consider “sentience and a moral sense” to be the traits that something has to have to respect its life. That’s not even something that all human cultures believe.