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"Up the Long Ladder" is an episode from the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Plot

The USS Enterprise-D receives an automated distress call from satellites orbiting a human colony on the planet Bringloid V, which is in danger from solar flares from its star.

The colony turns out to have been founded by the crew of the SS Mariposa, a DY-500 class cargo freighter launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, USSR, Earth on November 27, 2123 under the command of Walter Granger, and destined for the Ficus Sector.

The colony, now led by an Irishman named Danilo O'Dell, are followers of an early 22nd century philosopher who advocated returning to a pre-industrial rural lifestyle. When taken aboard the Enterprise-D, the colonists are at first amazed by the 24th century technology on the ship, but they quickly adapt to it.

When the colony has been rescued, O'Dell informs Captain Jean-Luc Picard of another colony, also descended from the Mariposa. Flying to a star located half a light year away, the Enterprise-D also visits this colony, which has taken to calling itself Mariposa. A "descendant" of the original Walter Granger, Prime Minister Wilson Granger, is happy to see the Enterprise and welcomes them to visit.

The Mariposa colony is strikingly different from the Bringloidi colony. The Mariposa colonists have kept their advanced technology, but when the colony was founded, there were too few survivors from the ship crash to establish a stable gene pool. This caused the Mariposans to turn to cloning instead, strongly rejecting biological reproduction, and as a consequence, any sign of intimacy. For almost three centuries, every Mariposan has been a clone derived from one of the five original colonists, and now the colony is in danger of dying out because of replicative fading: genetic errors will soon cumulate into a terminally fatal stage, making all subsequent clones nonviable.

The Mariposans ask the Enterprise-D crew for a sample of their DNA, so they could create new clones. The crew refuses, so the Mariposans kidnap Commander William Riker and Doctor Katherine Pulaski to steal their DNA. When Riker and Pulaski find out, they visit the colony's cloning labs and destroy the new clones.

An alarmed Wilson Granger once again turns to Picard and his crew. Doctor Pulaski tells them they must cease cloning and need a new breeding stock for a viable gene pool. The Bringloidi colonists would serve as a perfect source for this gene pool.

Under urging from Picard, Pulaski and Riker, the members of both colonists agree to integrate the Bringloidi and Mariposa colonies. However, monogamous marriage will be temporarily suspended, to ensure fast development of a healthy, sustainable new generation. Because of the limited gene stock in the second colony, Dr. Pulaski suggests that each woman will have to have three husbands of different genetic makeup, and each man will have three wives.

External links

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 ==Plot==
-Let him learn to shave backwards.
-Thoughts on 12/8 Readings: In reading the intro (which overall was a lovely overview of the conservative movement from its genesis in the early ‘60s to the end of the Bush administration), I was disappointed that Jacobs and Zelizer didn’t devote more time to the Clinton administration, where it’s situated in the conservative movement, and how it dealt with a climate that—while maybe not as right-wing as Republicans like to claim—was certainly more conservative than what most modern Democrats faced. Clinton, of course, was not a conservative, and in his first two years, he pushed for universal health care, signed an assault weapons ban, and passed a tax hike. But after the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 that saw conservatives controlling the House, he tacked to the middle, and tackled issues of a centrist nature that many on the right were (previously) supportive of, such as welfare reform and balancing the budget. Not only did he move to the center though, but in some instances, he actually affirmed conservative principles and continued conservative policies; his 1996 State of the Union pronouncement that “The era of big government is over!” comes to mind for the former, and his signing of the repeal of Glass-Steagall as well as the deregulation of the telecommunications industry both exemplify the latter. It seems that it’s only been in the last year or so of the Obama administration that conservatives have begun realizing that Clinton more or less affirmed the “Reagan Revolution” (even if it wasn’t quite a “revoultion”); The Daily Show recently ran a montage of clips showing Republicans from John Boehner to Rudy Giuliani chastising Obama for lacking Clinton’s bipartisanship, and hoping that the mid-term elections would lead to Obama engaging them as Clinton did post-’94 (leading host Jon Stewart to quip, “Yes, the ‘90s, they were a modern-day era of good feelings! For those who weren’t around, let me show you what it was like!” leading him to sing “Let the Sun Shine”). Of course, these recent Republican remarks are politically rooted, crafted with the hope of stoking Republican angers by suggesting that Obama is worse than Clinton and the hope of making Democrats think that perhaps Obama is not as effective a leader as their last elected president. But it does hit on the fundamental truth that while the Clinton administration was not “conservative,” it had to deal with a climate that was opposed to “big government” where many still regarded Reagan fondly (this builds upon the comment you had for my last set of journals, about how presidents interact with the times they’re in and the circumstances they’re dealt). Certainly, I’m no historian who’s spent hours poring over primary documents, and even those who are will (rightfully) say that it’s probably too soon to properly judge or contextualize the Clinton administration in any sort of lasting, authoritative way. But if I were to hazard a guess, I would say that Clinton is to the Democrats (and the broader era of conservatism that characterized 1980 until at least 2008) what Dwight Eisenhower was to the Republicans (and the broader era of the New Deal coalition that characterized 1932 until at least 1968, perhaps 1980). Like Ike, Clinton was elected with great hopes from the base of his party that he may roll back the accomplishments of the preceding two presidents. Instead, while he was privately sympathetic to the cause, he publicly pursued a path of moderation (more so post-1994) and in a few instances, actually sured up/continued their policies. While he was a successful president (like Ike), he did not succeed in any sort of broad realignment of voters or major ideological shift in policy from Reagan years (also like Ike, with Franklin D. Roosevelt).
-A young Illinois senator summed it up well (albeit maybe too simply) in an interview with a Nevada reporter in February 2008: “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.”
 The [[USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D)|USS ''Enterprise''-D]] receives an automated distress call from satellites orbiting a human colony on the planet Bringloid V, which is in danger from solar flares from its star.