Let’s say a wormhole drops standard issue technobabble Trek device capable of resequencing your DNA; in other words, it can change a person of one species to another. It was damaged during the interdimensional transit, so it’s stuck on the Terran-to-Vulcan setting, and the broken part is made of unobtainium, so it’s not going to be fixed. Would you be willing to transform yourself into a Vulcan?
To be clear, I’m talking about a REAL Vulcan, like Mr. Spock. (Take that, T’pol!) If transformed, you get superhuman strength (let’s say you become 5 times stronger than you are now), eidetic memory, lightning calculator abilities, enhanced hearing, and so forth. No change in skin tone, but the eyebrows and ears definitely get wonky. And, your sex drive gets…um…strange.
Lots of pros to that idea, those mentioned above plus of course longer lifespan and the ability to haunt someone. (In a manner of speaking anyway) The whole ‘Only gets randy once every 7 years’ bit would take some thinking over though.
This would mean trading off my insatiable sex drive and strange magnetic attraction for alien chicks, as well as my improbably effective fighting style.
Um, if you were transformed into Mr. Spock, you’d still be half human. You’d be conflicted by the emotionally embracing Terran half of your psyche and the emotionally suppressing nature of the Vulcan half. So for the sake of discussion, since you can’t go back to your original state, does the device turn you into a half-human/half Vulcan hybrid, or a full Vulcan, like Spock’s father, Sarek, for example?
Yeah, I know. Leave it to me to discover a diptera in the viscuous topically applied preparation.
Pon farr is a culturally imposed restriction, not a biological one. For that matter, the emotional control is culturally imposed as well. If all the machine is doing is making your DNA into Vulcan DNA you’d be more like a Romulan in the end, since you weren’t raised as a Vulcan.
As has been pointedf out, the Valcun emption-suppression thing is cultural, not biological.
From my admittedly limited understanding of the Vulcan backstory, Vulcans are actually naturally inclined to extreme emotional states, especially anger; they’re prone to outburts of tremendous fury and violence. The cultural opposition to emotional behaviour was an effort to save them from themselves.
Exactly that. They’ve sublimated all of their emotions in regular interaction, but I think they found that mating can’t be done sublimated…the emotions are too strong. So as part of the Vulcan culture, they sublimate all mating urges. They can only do this for seven years before it finally builds up to be too strong and they MUST mate or die.
Like I said, the pon farr is cultural, not biological. It results from the emotional suppression. If there were no emotional suppression, they’d mate pretty much like Romulans, who have no such restrictions, IIRC.