Or start cheering for nationspanning American football games with other santient probes.

17776 Football was the best thing I've experienced in years. I'm not even into sports. Tingles just thinking about it.

https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

That... that was really something. That was and is incredibly engaging for me, though it's quite different and I'd understand if someone didn't find it to their taste. What a totally beautiful artifact of the internet.

I discovered this thanks to you. I'm still reading it, but I just wanted to thank you. This is brilliant stuff.

What....what is this?

New plan for the evening...

This is cool. Thanks.

I can see a Gravity Gate happening when Andromeda Patriots tweak the Earth gravity simulator of their home stadium to gain an advantage.

That's actually a great movie plot, not sure if it has been done before.

Not with Voyager, but for example:

The year is 2243; a spacecraft that humans sent out of the solar system on a one way trip launched in 2045, has once again come into contact unexpectedly and is re-entering our solar system. The system seems to have been updated and is sending information that would have not existed when it was launched and is potentially foreign tech in 2243.

This ship was never supposed to come back...

Edit: Ok, I have admittedly not seen the first Star Trek movie.. I probably should =p

Here's another one for you:

Rather belatedly the human race realizes - after decoding some interstellar video - that the Voyager's trajectory will bring it sooner or later into contact with a race whose sole mission is to eradicate all other intelligent life.

The Voyager's creators helpfully adding a map indicating its origins prompt the recall of the century: launch a mission to overtake both Voyagers and to capture them and bring them back before they are discovered.

Working title: Recall

Upvoted purely because I love the fact that there's someone here who hasn't seen ST:TMP.

(And you needn't bother, honestly. It's the franchise's answer to 2001, put together by people who didn't really get what made 2001 great. If, like me, you can't get enough absurdly prolonged sequences of old-school practical model effects in effectively static poses, then you'll love it to pieces, but otherwise...)

That is basically the exact plot of the very first Star Trek movie

Spoilers below:

You just described the plot of the first Star Trek film. Even better, it was a Voyager probe (a fictional Voyager 6) that was augmented by alien machine intelligence and returned to Earth.

More spoilers below:

> alien machine intelligence

The Borg.

That's fanon. Yeah, I sort of like the idea too, and yeah, Goldsmith to some extent may have styled the First Contact Borg leitmotif after V'ger's from TMP, and yeah, maybe he did that deliberately, and yeah, somebody's friend of a friend said that Gene Roddenberry once coughed in a way that could be interpreted as suggesting he'd had in mind the Borg creating V'ger all along - but it's fanon all the same.

(Me, I like Ron Jones's theme from The Best of Both Worlds a lot better, anyway...)

The connection to the Borg isn't cannonical. Though Star Trek's cannon has gotten extremely messy in recent years.

Great!

Lucky then that the second Voyager gets blown up by a wildly overacting humanoid alien with mad hair

More like Singer flings a Dual-Vector Foil at us...

That's actually the plot of the first Star Trek movie (without the seduction part).

[Spoiler below, hopefully not a huge deal for an almost forty year old movie)

Voyager returns under the name v-ger.

> without the seduction part

I have a vague recollection of the humanoid that V'ger hijacked to serve as a voice being romantically involved with the original captain that Kirk replaced, and that relationship being exploited and becoming a plot element later. So I think there was some going on...

I think that was the joke that GP was alluding to :)

Back in the early 90's I wondered why so many Unix boxes had 'vger' in their name. Not until this year, when I watched the original Star Trek with my youngest, did I realize what it was all about.

Sad thing is I saw the movie in the theater when it was first released...just didn't put the two together.

The first two Linux machines I ever had to admin back in the 90's where called Picard and Kirk (Picard was the primary, Kirk the secondary (no guessing which series I preferred)).

The NT machine was called Locutus.

The "Locutus" is so perfect!

The art of educating people is to helpfully answer questions as they arise, not to interrupt the good mood with a display of your knowledge.

Pretty sure that's the joke.

whoosh