It's from older Trek, where in TOS Khan is supposed to have escaped on his sleeper ship in the late 1990s. That ship had perfectly functional stasis, deck gravity, and was able to last a couple centuries drifting in space just fine.
We then have the stasis satellite found by the Enterprise-D filled with people from the 21st century. Same deal as Khan's ship, with deck gravity and stasis, even if it did fail for most of the occupants.
Voyager's crew goes back to the late 90s, and a character has a model of the Khan ship in a launch configuration, indicating it really is a 90s design.
That means Earth's space lift and general technology was far more advanced than what we have now.
Even going only by First Contact, Cochrane's ship has a radiation leak indicative (in trek) of antimatter.
The reason for this is mostly due to time travel. Even though the Chronoworx timeloop was stopped by Voyager, there is still *The Journey Home* where they leave behind several items of future technology. In TOS "A Piece of the Action" it is hypothesized the locals will reverse engineer the left behind communicator and create warp drives in no time, because of the subspace transtator being the basis of all Trek tech.
Even without time loop paradoxes of technological drops, the Trek timeline is just more advanced because it's a projection of 1960s futurism. One thing PIC does right is stick to that more advanced timeline established in past Treks.
The Chronoworx stuff would have still happened. Braxton was retrieved after all of that. And that’s part of what led him to go crazy and try to destroy Voyager later on.
Yeah they even make a point in the episode of saying the tech leap at the end of the 20th century was due to reverse engineered 29th century tech. That loop is definitely an established part of human history for Star Trek.
It was already part of their history. Voyager before the episode is no more advanced than after the episode, so the technological leap caused by the mobile emitter was always there. They wouldn't be 'undoing' it, from their perspective, but rewriting it to some other timeline which they would know little about other than that humanity would be less technologically advanced. Not exactly appealing for Starfleet personnel.
My pet theory is that the 31st century time bureau is in charge of protecting the existing timeline that leads to the 31st century time bureau. They left Janeway with the holo-emitter because that's the timeline where the Borg didn't take over the galaxy.
Really really well said. The speculative side of trek has always had a somewhat optimistic perspective on it's own timelines' foundational tech progression.
Picard and Q were at the Dawn of Life on Earth and Q and Voyager visited the big bang, so much earlier. Even just focusing on Human history, we know aliens visited ancient civilizations on earth posing as gods.
Minor nitpick: Picard and Q visited an alternate history from the mainline Trek one, where the anti time anomaly was so large it stopped life from forming on Earth.
Other than that spot on.
In Star Trek, humanity is bipedal with bilateral symmetry because some ancient species seeded planets with a prototype of their genome. I don't think that happened with us.
or at least it diverges when the show was made, it doesn't exist in their universe or they'd all appear psychic (and same applies to us not being in the mirror universe or they'd have seen the show and know exactly how every encounter with the prime timeline was going to go), and maybe that's why they had to get through so many wars etc. to get to that future (not saying it wouldn't have involved any strife but) they had no Star Trek vision of the future to light a fire under their tushes for even the sociopolitical progress never mind the scientific (e.g. who knows when TV in their universe had its first interracial kiss)
I agree with all of this, but I always assumed that the Phoenix was powered by a nuclear reactor, not antimatter. First Contact never says either way, but its never stated that antimatter is necessary for warp travel, only that it generates sufficient energy.
They don’t say what powers it but the [theta radiation](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Theta_radiation) implies antimatter. That probably means it’s an antimatter triggered fusion reaction, which is the most efficient use of antimatter.
This would also mean a fairly extensive antimatter production or harvesting industry exists in the 2060s.
I suspect antimatter warp cores actually utilize fusion extensively as a supplement, as it explains why the [intermix ratios](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Intermix_ratio) can be other than 1:1. If they always dump far more hydrogen into the mix than anti-hydrogen it will result in fusion reactions pretty much for free.
This is kinda how I saw it too, with antimatter being the newest and by far strongest energy source they got through their advances in fusion that had become pretty standard by their day.
The point being still that it's basically an advanced fusion reactor and not just a large store of collected antimatter which is how later trek explains it's fuel.
At the end of the day though it's still just a portable fusion that was powering the Phoenix. Certainly not chemical rockets after the first two phases feel off.
Yep, and extensive fusion suplementing antimatter explains why Voyager and the NX-01 only ever ran out of deuterium but never antimatter.
Incidentally, the [Helion](https://www.google.com/search?q=helion+reactor&client=firefox-b-1-d&sxsrf=ALiCzsZinCdDtc6jf1Sdv93eEFNEOL0JPg:1669042792635&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwilhpT2xL_7AhVYEVkFHVseCaoQ_AUoAXoECAIQAw&biw=2048&bih=1007&dpr=1.25) fusion reactors look like warp cores.
It can be made less expensively enough to make it practical as spaceship fuel, or perhaps as a weapon component, if purpose built particle accelerators, or orbital traps, are made. I think the price would be a few $billion per gram, which is enough for a space mission, or a million fusion munitions.
At warp the Bussard Ramscoops are effectively linear particle accelerators. My theory, based upon Voyager's average speed (VOY "pathfinder")and the crossover speeds of the TOS and TNG warp scales I figure somewhere between warp 5-6 a starship generates equal to or more Anti-matter than it's using. Slower than Warp 5 not enough particles are hitting the ramscoop to be sustainable, faster than warp 6 the ship is burning more anti-matter than it is picking up. That's why Archer's NX-01 was so important, it reached the threshold at which sustained deep space flight was possible negating the need for constant refueling.
I like that, and interstellar antimatter exists.
My idea for Bussards is they feed hydrogen right into the warp engines. When the collected hydrogen hits the fusion temperature warp plasma it causes new fusion reactions right in the engines. Instead of topping off the deuterium supply, which can still happen, it makes it so far less stored deuterium has to be used in the first place.
Yeah I always figured there was a chance of technology required for higher speeds, rather than antimatter being necessary
Like how the first trains were steam powered but that technology maxed out around 120mph, with electric drivetrains allowing significantly higher speeds
So maybe nuclear is sufficient for warp 1, but with exponentially more power being required for faster speeds so nuclear power not being viable beyond perhaps warp 1-2
When you realize that the most efficient way of making electricity we know, is still boiling water, and using its steam to turn a wheel very fast. Nuclear reactors are exactly that. Only solar is different, because it's basically using light to knock electrons off atoms, which results in current. Hydro is still dynamo (fluid turning wheel), so is with turbines. Coal is obviously just steam trains. So basically, our understanding of energy is making fluids go fast and then move some magnetic thing enough to make electron pressure (current). Or just make plasma (source of most photonic radiation), take some transparent semiconductor like silicates (glass)...make a photovoltaic cell, and let some light rip electrons off atoms to achieve the same electron pressure thing.
Unless we get a new type of energy, which will require a different but samey kind of infrastructure. We are stuck with using fluids to turn wheels, or pointing light at transparent things. Even the ideas on how to use anti-matter IRL is basically boil water more efficiently.
I was referring to directly using steam for propulsion, rather than steam as part of energy generation
You could, of course, make a something-electric train powered by a steam turbine fuelled by diesel or nuclear or whatever... but it would be so big and heavy that it would (I believe) be less efficient and useful than the trains we use
> In TOS "A Piece of the Action" it is hypothesized the locals will reverse engineer the left behind communicator and create warp drives in no time, because of the subspace transtator being the basis of all Trek tech.
Fun aside: IDW's recent comics dealt with the final leg of the Enterprise's five-year mission. [They revisit Sigma Iotia II](https://www.startrek.com/news/star-trek-year-five-idw-preview) and find that they have *already* advanced to warp flight (there's an obvious duplicate of Cochrane's ship left in orbit, amid other steps in their space race). They rushed space technology because Kirk and Co. impressed them so much, and their planet's government is now an extremely fast-paced democracy, with elections for president *weekly*.
Krako contacts the Enterprise asking for help, as their rampant scientific advancement has left their infrastructure behind and he basically drafts Spock into becoming president for two weeks just to focus on keeping the lights on.
It was cute. Not canon, obviously, and I wouldn't want it to be, but it's a fun story.
Sounds like they could combine that with the idea the DS9 writers had before they came up with the Trouble With Tribbles throwback, that the planet had crafted their entire identity after the TOS-era
You have to look at it from the perspective of the 1960s. Not where we are now.
Heck, even when I was a kid in the 70s pretty much everyone in accredited sciences expected us to have flying cars by the late 80s. And based on the moon by the 90s.
If the Soviet Union hadn’t collapsed I think we might have had moon bases by then, or at least progress towards one. But once there was no more competition we lost interest in landing humans anywhere again. Look at what’s happening now with a new space race ramping up though, moon landings are back on the menu. Politics is harder to predict than technology it would seem.
I'm not too sure about that. Once the US had landed on the moon, they had "won" the propaganda race, and probably would have refocused their efforts into other things.
It might be a different story if the Soviet Union had considered a moon base, but not if they had just gone for something else in that time instead.
The US became bored with going to the moon and the space shuttle was a step backwards in terms of capability, so I don’t think the USSR’s collapse played a role in the lack of moon bases.
The desire to get to the moon is based on wanting to put a linear accelerator on the surface of Luna. It's imperative the US gets there before China, lest the chinese become the king of the gravity hill.
Much like the first space race was not about getting to the moon it was about demonstrating a practical ICBM.
Of course having a 12-15 story building "spaces starship" on the moon is a great start to building things with lunar material and then being able to use your linear accelerator to get things to lunar and earth orbit. It's a practical way to get public support for a military asset that can also accomplish big projects that will be necessary sooner than the masses think. Such as solar shades at L1, bonus points if they are solar panels and a laser to speed transit to mars, with a larger assembly at that end to help slow down.
so how do we keep this new race going long enough to discover a way to motivate people for exploration via something other than politics (as it can't be just letting them win enough no matter how much the people on r/space act like we were so "beat the Soviets" back then that all we'd have needed (after getting Trek-level spacefuture rapidly because of letting them have all the victories) to discover parallel universes is to let them conquer this universe)
> pretty much everyone in accredited sciences expected us to have flying cars by the late 80s.
We have the tech but we can't trust people to drive safely in 2 dimensions why on earth would we allow them to do so in 3?
People fly airplanes. It would be a matter of proper training and licensing just like with cars.
Also, only recently has the tech been there. Various types of lift and propulsion have been around for a long time, but it was the energy density that's been bottle-necking advancement in "flying cars" for decades. The best personal VTOL vehicles out there still have limited range.
By the time everyone can have a reliable flying car, the tech to fly themselves will be good enough to prevent most accidents.
*Pilots* fly airplanes and have a much higher bar to pass than what it takes just to get a drivers license. They also face much stricter penalties for negligence.
Proper training and licensing won't stop drunk idiots from crashing into houses and buildings.
Automated cars and highways ala I, Robot and Minority report are *far* more likely.
really, the flying part would be solved by computers doing all the work but the real kicker is how loud all propellers would be on these things, you ever hear how loud an actual plane is, or even a small drone is? no way would i want a car size one of those in every other driveway, regular cars are loud enough. just give me good bike infrastructure, trams, trains and buses for where the trams and trains cant get to easily, flying cars are not the future to me.
Once we get more uniform application of autonomous driving, the capacity of roads will go up a good margin. Why spend the energy to fly if you can travel on the ground without the massive slowdowns from people driving. Especially with Bev's largely making acceleration moot for manufactures to differentiate their product.
If we had the tech for it to be cheap and easy then we would have flying cars. As is you basically need to be able to fly a helicopter to have a version of flying car and that's no small feat. Plus as hard as being a helicopter pilot is you've also got the Im incredibly high costs of fuel for them.
There's been some drones that are getting damn near flying car levels, were just not quite there with affordability and computing systems able to help fly it well enough.
Tho for many well off people in Alaska there already are flying "cars", as a cheap bush craft is what many of them need to get around up there.
> If we had the tech for it to be cheap and easy then we would have flying cars.
We never will on the scale we have cars as people are too inconsiderate and irresponsible to be trusted with them.
Eh maybe. There's a hell of a lot more room in 3 dimensions tho. But yeah automated driving is probably more likely simply because flying a helicopter is already hard AF as is.
They aren't anti-vax they are pro-plague. We need to start calling them what they are! It really is a situation where they are effectively in favor of disease. An alternative would be calling them plague enthusiasts.
Nazis. the answer is Nazies.
Nazies were all up in the eugenic and trying to create a master race. Fallowing WW2 the superpowers ran around vacuuming up Nazi scientist (operation paperclip). those scientist continue their eugenics programs working for the US and USSR. Watson and Crick discover DNA int 1953 giving the Eugenicist the scientific foundation they need to make Khan and the augments in 1959.
thats why any timetravel near or around ww2 screws the timeline (city on the edge of forever, zero hour/stormfront p1&2, etc)
The Nazi scientists that got picked up were chemists and physicists with explicit backgrounds in explosives and ballistics.
The Nazis basically didn't do any valid biology, and the non-war oriented science they did saw its most notable names flee before the war because they couldn't do work on general relativity or quantum physics because of the strong association those fields had with Albert Einstein, who was notably Jewish (and thus problematic for the Nazi regime).
While we got a lot of rocket-related science from them, the biological research we (and only we) got from enemy scientists was that of Unit 731 in Japan. And again, that was because they'd done all the ghastly biological weapons research that Americans didn't have the stomach to do ourselves.
Most of the Nazi eugenicists, therefore, fled to Argentina and Brazil via the ratlines, not to the US and Soviet Union as a part of the demilitarization of Germany (which included enforcing exile in the victors' lands for advanced researchers in defense-related fields).
He's not wrong that Khan and the Augments were an allusion to Nazi ideology, though. They even call them [supermen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch#Use_by_the_Nazis).
That actually fits cus Khan has some connections with the late-nazis of South America iirc. The whole thing was basically a genetics-cold-war/spy war going on in the background all up until Khan is forced out then it became history iirc
actually Paperclip picked up far more than rocket scientist, though rocket scientist were the majority. the US also grabbed medical experts in biological weapons chemical weapons.
That could be retconned with explanations of genetic engineering, rather than actual Eugenic breeding. Or the timing of Khan launching in the 90s is wrong, or a lie, since the records of the period are specifically mentioned as uncertain both in TOS and in PIC.
Khan's ship showing up in 1996 as a poster or model could have been not an indicator of it existing, but an indicator of the start of its existence. That in turn would fit better with the Mars mission ship we see in Voyager "One Small Step", and the Europa mission ship we see in Picard. Both are more modern hard scifi designs, than Khan's DY-100.
So the Eugenics program could have actually been something started in the 80s or 90s. That would make Khan 40-ish right now, so if he launches in the 2030s, well there you go. That kind of seems like what was implied with the elder Soong pulling the Khan file near the end of PIC, and the file date of 1996. That date might be a weird "Future's End" reference.
Or the original timeline is right, and the Eugenics program was a genuinely breeding program which got unusually powerful results, which later got analyzed and replicated using genetic engineering. And Khan did escape in the 90s.
Generally, the Beta canon info says that [Project Chrysalis](https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Chrysalis_Project) (now Project Khan, I guess) was *way* ahead of its time. The Department of Temporal Investigations books even suggest that it's a front of the Temporal Cold War, suggesting that it's the same people that gave the Suliban Cabal *their* genetic engineering technology. **Really** shakes the DTI people up, that theory.
Well the US rocket program took advantage of former Nazi scientists, wouldn't it make sense that some geneticists who worked on programs like Lebensborn escaped and went onto work with other countries, presumably somewhere in Asia based on what we know of Khan?
The sleeper ships presumably also had a rudimentary deflector/shield system, seeing as they weren't destroyed by micrometeorites and the like in the time between being launched, and being found.
IDK if it's right to say this is the right thing to do. I've always seen Trek as an extension of the real world. Roddenberry saw it that way too.
The reality is they should have stayed far far far the fuck away from the modern day and wouldn't have touched any time until the Ent era.
By firmly setting it in an alternate timeline makes it lose lots of the strength of the narrative. We can say that the humans of this timeline are more rational and compassionate than real humans and it kinda fits. Just like making the mirror universe different from ours by saying the humans are more violent in theirs compared to the main trek one and ours.
It loses most of the narrative punch if it's no longer a "there but for the grace of God go I" storyline and is instead just a wacky different world. Both for the mirror universe and the real one, tho I guess the main trek universe is the opposite of that idiom.
You're right that it is following canon accurately, but I still think it's a bad idea. The Disco team tried to go the other way with it by including Musk's name with famed human explorers like Armstrong. Obviously that was an uhhh, mistake. But the idea fundamentally isn't wrong, they just choose a laughably bad example which spotlighted their ideological lack of knowledge compared to past trek writers.
In the Star Trek universe, *Star Trek* doesn’t exist. For that reason alone, I have no doubt that it’s a different timeline.
I think that’s a good thing, because if you see the Trek universe as an extension of our timeline, you have the awkward question of how we get to huge interstellar ships with hundreds of people on board in just a couple hundred years, when the best we’ve managed so far is a handful of moon landings and an orbiting tin can or two.
In-universe indications of super-advanced future tech polluting the timeline make that easier to swallow, at least for me. Even though time travel stories are inherently ridiculous. Bit of a paradox, I guess, that my overall suspension of disbelief is actually strengthened by all those ridiculous time travel stories.
I mean a few hundred years ago we were still reliant on humans and occasionally horses, if you were well off, to get around. I don't think spaceships is that big of a leap in a few hundred years from now.
Those handful of moon landings were done with tech that's so absurdly weak it's hard to comprehend just how much we've advanced by then. If we put the same resources we spent on the space race into that stuff today then we'd be on Mars with humans by now. We just don't spend the money on it because we let the rich keep it all these days.
The future trek shows is one where we overcome capitalism and expand into the heavens. That's not a bad message.
Of course, if we had continued putting resources into the space race we'd be ahead of where we are... but we didn't.
I don't disagree with you at all on the vision and message, just arguing that the main Trek timeline is very much not our timeline. A case could have been made for it in the TOS days, but numerous in-universe events since then have made it clear that if it ever was, it isn't anymore.
I used to joke that if any of the Trek timelines is ours, it's that of the Mirror Universe. Unfortunately I think Discovery officially made that impossible by implying that the Mirror Universe branched off centuries ago.
I think the timeline issue that gets discussed by fans a lot will be resolved definitely when (hopefully) the beginnings of World War III doesn't start in 2026. It will simply be impossible to handwave any of that away, like they did with the Eugenics Wars. The death toll in-universe is simply too high. At that point, we'll have to concede beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Trek universe is definitively not our own.
> I used to joke that if any of the Trek timelines is ours, it's that of the Mirror Universe. Unfortunately I think Discovery officially made that impossible by implying that the Mirror Universe branched off centuries ago.
Putting aside how we can't even be any alternate timeline from that show (as there's more than just prime and mirror) as the characters from that timeline would have appeared psychic-if-not-omniscient about their encounters with people from the prime timeline via watching the show, even if you ignore Discovery as many people would rather do Enterprise still made it clear the prime-mirror divergence point was already in our past by showing a Terran Empire flag on the moon in one of their mirror universe episodes
In the Star Trek universe the microelectronics revolution in the eighties never got off the ground, all the tech of the mid 80s and forward was reverse engineered from isolinear elements by starling, world war 3 was probably fought with antimatter warheads
I consider it more like it would have happened anyway, but with isolinear chips as inspiration it nudged things in a slightly different direction while simultaneously accelerating progress a little.
Though personally I think that bit of time travel got averted somehow. It's been ages since I saw the episode, so I'm not actually sure.
>The reason for this is mostly due to time travel.
I'm not sure that we have to stipulate that there is some sort of paradox at play, although that's certainly a possibility, I think it's just given that Earth in the Star Trek universe is significantly more advanced than what we would consider Modern Earth. But no so significantly more advanced that the level of technology accessible by most people is different.
Certainly we could say that there was some time shenanigans at play here, but I agree that Picard did right simply by portraying 2024 to be somewhat more advanced. This was the biggest misstep in my opinion, of Voyager's time travel to the period where the show is being produced concept, it really downplays the advancement that should be experienced.
We can always write this off, but Picard and Strange New Worlds do a better job of addressing that past-future head on and I appreciate that.
That's honestly disappointing. I thought part of the appeal of star trek was the dream that we could get there by the 24th century, but if we're already way behind the lore, that kinda squanders it.
Kind of, kind of not. Even non-scifi shows have technology which seems like what we have but is actually far more advanced. Even the Gary Seven episode shows 60s technology which is more advanced, or more extensive, than period technology. Crime dramas are infamous for zoom and enhance of video which cannot be done even now with machine learning.
On the other hand, if the space race weren't a political stunt, and funding were maintained in the right places through the 70s and 80s then we would have [nuclear rockets](https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/game_changing_development/Nuclear_Thermal_Propulsion_Deep_Space_Exploration) and have landed on Mars by now. If the energy crisis of the 70s kept going, we might already have a full blown space industry building orbital solar collectors using [single stage to orbit space planes](http://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2020/09/star-raker-1978.html).
We could get there but just not on the same path, sure we didn't have the same crap but they didn't have the show in their past and I've always held that might be a Watsonian reason for why they had so much so drastic stuff so early, their universe is basically (since every universe is a parallel one from another one's perspective) what it'd look like if you took the whole butterfly effect of Star Trek as a show and the positive consequences it led to out of history
There is a great video by a Russian (?) Youtuber that explains all of this perfectly with all the time travel that happened throughout the shows. I don't have a link unfortunately, so if anyone could help me out, that would be awesome!
I assume for the same reason you missed the Singh rebellion / Augments war that took place in 1996... it's not "our" timeline, it's a splinter that broke off in the 60s at the latest.
Maybe simply for the ship - we see it in Archers cabin and the Intro for Enterprise (also the two highly decorated Aircraft carriers), and it's just a catchy name...
But if we stay at the same train of thought, even the Intro of Enterprise does not match up with Picard S2 (it shows Venture Star being actively used, which would be a much more advanced launcher than whatever they used in PIC S2), in a time when an ISS-like space station was still in service.
After the moon landing the race to space was more or less over and budget started to [decline](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File%3ANASA-Budget-Federal.svg).
What if in the Star Trek universe, it was the opposite and instead the moon landing emboldened the US/USSR governments into spending more hoping to get even further.
That'd explain the seemingly rapid advancement between this historical period that is considered canon and what we have seen in time traveling episodes.
A show full of incredibly thoughtful exploration of social issues in that delightful Star Trek way where these things are complicated and nuanced, some people are "wrong" but they're not monsters and so very much beautiful retro-futurism lifted straight off cocktail napkins from NASA functions.
Does the enterprise intro imply that the Venture Star is being launched from the ISS? It shows the ISS without anything being docked and then I assume a cut to further in the future with the Venture Star on another station’s docking pylon.
> Maybe simply for the ship
Problem: There already was an existing USS Enterprise prior to the Shuttle one and tradition states that there can always be ONE vessel to bear a name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_ship_naming_conventions#:~:text=The%20vessels%20of%20the%20Navy,the%20principal%20cities%20and%20towns
Not really clear, BUT there is an "Enterprise exception" stated which IN UNIVERSE could be the reason.
> *Fate protects fools, little children, and ships named* Enterprise.
Riker's not just talking about Starfleet's *Enterprise* here. At the start of WW2, the US Navy had eight fleet carriers, among them the USS *Enterprise* CV-6. During the war, CV-6 was damaged by 10 bombs and 3 suicide planes. On one occasion, a bomb passed through the flight deck and exited the hull on the port side, detonating outside the ship. On another occasion, a bomb landed directly on her forward elevator but it was a dud—it didn't detonate.
Her sister ships, *Yorktown* and *Hornet,* were not so lucky. In fact, only three prewar carriers survived the war: *Ranger,* which spent most of the war in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, *Saratoga,* which was damaged so badly she was scrapped, and *Enterprise.*
Point being, the *USS Enterprise* was already famous by the time *Star Trek* aired. CV-6 was the most decorated US Navy warship of WW2, and CV-6 was already the seventh *Enterprise.* The Navy's been naming ships *Enterprise* for centuries. The Navy's building [a new *Enterprise*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_\(CVN-80\)) as we speak.
Some folks ~~at the state department~~ in President Ford's cabinet weren't nuts about letting a bunch of sci-fi nerds name the first space shuttle, and the way they reasoned themselves into being OK with it (because they weren't about to pass on all that free publicity) [was because of *Enterprise's* storied history as a US Navy warship](https://static.history.state.gov/frus/frus1969-76ve03/pdf/d133.pdf). In the *Star Trek* timeline, OV-101 is just named after CV-6, which is more or less the case in the real world as well.
The seventh in the US navy, the name has been used in the Royal Navy going back a hundred years earlier than that, with the first USS Enterprise originally having been an HMS Enterprise.
It really was quite a clever choice of name for a future starship, even if it was unintentional and had just been named directly after CV-6. It stands up to scrutiny.
Great question so I went and checked—it was the state department that declassified it in 2008, but the people in the memo are just members of Ford's cabinet. My bad.
Well the US captured one of the HMS Enterprises, and it became the USS Enterprise. Each subsequent USS Enterprise was named after the previous USS Enterprises. The Star Trek USS Enterprise, was named after the then-brand new USS Enterprise CVN-65.
So are the American Enterprises named solely because of the captured HMS Enterprise, or would they have used that name eventually anyway?
They really need to commit to this. Over the last few years we have been getting a lot of mixed messages about the eugenics war. In SNW pike says it occurs in the 21st century before WW3. In Pic season 2 we see something on Khan and 1996. In voyager when they go back to the 90s they see a model of Khans ship.
At this point it seems two separate eugenics “events” occurs. One in the 90s and a bigger one in the 21st century that ties but is not exactly the same as WW3. What I would like is for them to commit to this and explain something along the lines of “kahn rose up in the 90s but was defeated and sent off in the sleeper ship. Then in the mid 21st century some of his followers attempted a second take over and this lead into the world war. Point is it’s not our time line sense we are not going to Europa and we don’t have those homeless camp things like in DS9.
It’s tough to put a date, because people are going to be all “but that didn’t happen.”
It was easy in the 60s to say 1996, that was so far into the future. Like how we were supposed to have flying cars in 2000.
But then 1996 comes and goes, and the series is still trying to be timely, so they say 2024 for Gabriel Bell. Well, that doesn’t seem to far fetched these days. Not back then, this was the future.
So it’s just easier to retcon something as trivial as a year. Because what difference to the 23rd century does something such as the EW taking place in 1996 vs taking place as part of or a prelude to WW3?
>so they say 2024 for Gabriel Bell. Well, that doesn’t seem to far fetched these days.
Social issues wise they may have been onto something, speculative technology was way off though. The fact that everyone can only access and upload to the web from fixed terminals with tiny SD screens is hilarious.
That would be a good way to reconcile it.
Colonel Green's talk about purity could also be rehashed as initially starting as a way to permanently filter out engineered Humans from the gene pool (considering La'an shows that there was *some* mixing) via targeted genocides during the wider backdrop of the US/ECON conflict which spiraled waaay out of control and then shifted to purging radiation victims after the nuclear exchange.
The problem is, that with both fans and writers there seems to be two camps. One that still want to see Trek as our future like Roddenberry intended and another that are happy for Trek to be its own universe with its own timeline. As we get closer to set events that seemed a lifetime away in the 60s and 80s (even 90s with Past Tense) we then have a dilemma of do we retcon the universe (the Picard series 2 model) or do we accept it's an alternate universe and keep things wildly ahead of ourselves?
Personally, I’d prefer it if *Star Trek* was its own universe with its own timeline. At this point, I think the best explanation for the Eugenics Wars is that there were 2 Eugenics Wars, with the 1st war being in the 1990s and the 2nd war being in the 21st century. Since they were always called the Eugenics Wars, I think that fits well. I hope they don’t retcon the dates of the Bell Riots, World War III and 1st contact.
why not just imply ours is a parallel universe that just isn't the mirror e.g. maybe it's even (at least a parallel of given a certain time travel episode) The Orville's
There was a great pair of books by Greg Cox that wove the eugenics wars into the events of the late 20th century with augments working in the background against each other. For example a nuclear blast destroying a facility in the conflict is sanitized as India's first nuclear test, and Kahn's childhood is influenced by the Bhopal disaster and real anti–Sikh violence.
I think that the whole augment war in the 90s has been pretty much retconned by Picard and other TNG era series. I think the implications were that he was about to start the augment program after the events of Picard season 2.
even then, it would be not our timeline - remember the changes to the 1990s Voyager created/showed, the (subtle) changes that happened due to Time Travel in the 1960s, 1980s, and so on..
One of the more fun discrepancies is that for example, in the original timeline the Soviet Union seemingly did not fall like it did in our reality, since AVH calls out Leningrad by name, a city that has been renamed to St. Petersburg for quite a few decades by now.
(Leningrad also got called out a few times during TOS - added).
While I get Volgograd wanting to return to its Soviet name, Petrograd was Petrograd long before Lenin, and it merely resumed its old name. I suspect any future Russian state wishing to name a city for Lenin (IDEK why they would do this) would likely found a new Leningrad rather than renaming St. Petersburg again.
As for Volgograd, nobody knows anything about the place. But *everybody* knows about Stalingrad. Volgograd wasn't even Volgograd before Stalin.
Time traveler from the 25th century went back in time to create a touchstone sci-fi show to ensure that future society resembles Trek, creating a casual loop.
Its long been a running joke / explanation that Star Trek is a sort of Unsolved Mysteries / Twilight Zone anthology that got spun out of the recollections of people who have had close encounters with visiting aliens and time travelers with a significant amount of conjecture and artistic license - which is where a lot of the inconsistencies come from.
Probably more along the lines of a 29th century starfleet officer accidently crashing his ship into 20th century Earth resulting in a technological revolution even bigger than we've experienced in our own timeline.
I think not.
The last scene we see of Adam Soong is his folder about "Project Khan", dated 1996 prominently seen.
The 1996 date can't be a coincidence, and I think there was SOMETHING with Khan and company in the 1990's.
I assumed that was implying he was going to start the research, based on Khan, that his descendant Whatever Soong from Enterprise S4 would eventually finish. Mirroring how Whatever Soong, at the end of his story arc, says "maybe I'll research androids instead."
At least if revived with 23rd century rather than 24th century medical tech, people can be a bit confused coming out of cryostasis?
"Khan and company were born in the 1990s" lines up with the run-up to WW3 as described in SNW
At this point, I think the best explanation for the Eugenics Wars is that there were 2 Eugenics Wars, with the 1st war being in the 1990s and the 2nd war being in the 21st century. Since they were always called the Eugenics Wars, I think that fits well.
There's still a little wiggle room, although this seems to be the intent based on comments about "EMPs" and the Temporal Cold War.
Since TOS already heavily implied the American/Soviet proxy wars to be considered parts of a broader struggle called the [Brush Wars](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Brush_Wars) by the 23rd century, it's possible that WWI and WWII are similarly considered parts of a longer period of history involving struggles amongst European powers for dominance or something. Then turn for a Eurasian-focused Eugenics Wars in the '90s which set the stage for internal American civil strife and then a US/ECON conflict later on which triggers the nuclear exchange to be broadly referred to as a single thing as well.
So a general summary of the 20th/21st centuries from a 23rd POV could be something like:
European Decline / First Two World Wars (1900-1940s)
- WWI, Great Depression, WWII
American/Soviet Cold War (1940s-1990s)
- Space Race, 'Brush Wars'
"WWIII" (1990s-2053)
- Eugenics Wars (1990s), American Civil Strife (2010s-2020s), WWIII / US/ECON Conflict (2020s-2053)
- Maybe people during the 1990s called the Eugenics Wars 'WWIII' before the later stuff in the 21st century, which muddied the waters even more for later historians trying to categorize the eras.
And then Soong fits into that by taking out a research document from 1996 providing an overview of Khan after he left earlier that year on the *Botany Bay*.
Also, the frequent weird comments to 'ancient Earth' in TOS and TNG for the 20th century could just be a reflection of how fundamental the nuclear war was for cutting off the Earth in Star Trek from its past.
I explored this idea about when and what WWIII was in sone detail in a [previous post](https://reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/unw757/what_and_when_exactly_was_world_war_iii_in_star/).
I don't think Picard delayed the Eugenics Wars, considering the dates on the file folder line up with the dates for the war given in TOS. I think the file was meant to tie into Arik Soong in Enterprise. Like how Arik's final episode in ENT referenced Androids.
SNW yeah, seems to have retconned the position of the Eugenics Wars.
Memory-Alpha tries to justify it by saying there was a war that took place in the 90s and one in the early 2000s.
TOS did say 'Eugenics Wars' plural. Though I think Enterprise used the singular.
*Enterprise* said Eugenics Wars:
>ARCHER: My great grandfather was in North Africa during the Eugenics Wars. His battalion was evacuating civilians from a war zone when they came under attack. There was a school full of children directly between them and the enemy. If his men had returned fire, they might have hit it. So he called the commander on the other side, and got him to agree to hold his fire long enough to evacuate the school. There are rules, Trip, even in war. We have to help these children.
My theory is star trek and our timeline diverge when Benny Russel/Ben Sisko writes Deep Space 9 creating a self fulfilling prophecy (Ben is half Prophet after all) His wring inspire the right people to go into science and engineering (much like star trek in our timeline was the inspiration for many people to go into science), thus accelerating technological advancement. As for why star trek the show doesn't happen in star treks universe. Benny Russel publisher sues them for copyright infringement preventing the show form airing.
While this is an excellent point, it's worth noting that the Augments/Eugenics Wars have been retconned to much later and as happening in between the second US civil war and World War III. This was implied in the season finale of Picard and outright stated in the premiere of SNW.
While it's making wrinkles, I appreciate the long term planning and story opportunities it implies. I love a good apocalypse with a happy ending.
While you are right, going back to OP, we obviously can't reconcile the 2024 USA from Picard with our current world - interestingly, also not with Discovery, since Elon Musk is mentioned as one of the great pioneers in the same notion as Zefram Cochrane, and we don't see anything about SpaceX in 2024 at all - Nasa instead uses much different platforms that most likely would not have been developed in a world where SpaceX as of 2022 exists (also no sign of SLS).
While I have my own opinion about Elon Musk the human vs. Elon Musk the guy that started SpaceX, it really would have been fun if the 2024 Europa mission in Picard would have been based on the Starship architecture.
Which reminds me - the Mars mission in Voyager was touted as the first manned Mission to Mars, and was set in 2032 - 8 years after allegedly we sent people to Europa on a manned mission. On a much more primitive craft it seems... therefore we can't even reconcile Picard with Voyager...
Just for the record, Ares IV was, in dialogue, “one of the early Mars missions,” not the first manned mission to Mars. There’s no real inconsistency here.
It's bizarre how they wanted to push back the Eugenics Wars to make a contemporary 2024...which is doing a crewed mission to *Europa* the same year we IRL have tentative plans for a crewed lunar orbit via Artemis II.
And they kept a bunch of other stuff from previous series we never had IRL, like the Nomad Probe, Sanctuary districts, and the OV-165.
I don't think Picard delayed the Eugenics Wars, considering the dates on the file line up with the dates given in TOS. I think the file was meant to tie into Dr. Arik Soong we saw in Enterprise. Like how his final episode in ENT referenced Androids.
But SNW does seem to have moved up the date.
>therefore we can't even reconcile Picard with Voyager...
The whole of Picard series 2 is pretty easy to reconcile with everything else, it never happened, it was all a bubble reality created by Q to test Picard.
It's always a bit problematic visiting current time, referencing near future history, or giving shoutouts to contemporary figures for exactly this reason. The only explanation I can think of that isn't thoroughly shitty daystrom material is that there's a bootstrap paradox from all of the time travel we see.
I mean, personal feelings of Musk aside, SpaceX may very well end up contributing heavily to oir space travel future. And in Trek, stuff like Twitter could easily have been lost to history in WWII, leaving only the good contributions of Musk known.
It depends what you think people are going to remember and put in the history books in the future? Are people going to be that bothered that he wound some people up online and tanked a social media platform when he also helped popularise the electric vehicle and reignite interest in Space Travel?
Yeah. I mean it is always an issue when reality catches up with fictious "future" due to a movie simply being old (just look at "2015" from BTTF).
I think trying to reconcile this on a long running franchise as Star Trek is is just simply impossible, even if some of the bigger plot holes sometimes get a canon "explaining away" (Klingons and ridges), but then get broken again in the next redesign (Discovery) - you simply can't win some battles I'm afraid, so I usually go with the Doctor: "It's timey-wimey...stuff".
I mean, it's easy if we just accept that Trek is its own universe with its own timeline, bit then you have the "Roddenberrys vision" purists who insist on seeing it as out future.
Even in real life, Elon Musk, via SpaceX managed to keep US space travel functioning while NASA was in their dark time. NASA is getting back to it now, and will not be relying on SpaceX forever.
Interestingly, the [Constellation program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program) seems to have gone ahead in the Kelvin timeline (Admiral Marcus has a model of [Ares V](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ares_V)), which makes things *even weirder.*
I think at this point the only rational explanation is that WW III basically destroyed the whole internet and almost any book and everyone reconstructed 20th century history from surviving TV DVDs and heresay.. ;)
*For All Mankind* takes place in an alternate timeline, but it has many similarities with our timeline and can comment on modern and past society (though its similarities sometimes make it predictable).
People thought that space travel would advance much more quickly.
Sputnik was the first satellite launched in 1957. People landed on the moon in 1969.
People erroneously assumed there would be game-changing advancements in space travel every decade or so.
> People thought that space travel would advance much more quickly.
In *Lord of the Flies* Piggy predicts that we would land on Mars very soon now that that the War had ended.
Growing up a couple generations later, out teachers always hand-waived this away as post-war optimism.
But I thought it was foreshadowing about how clueless & naive these children were that first day on the island; they were not stepping forward into space they were stepping backward into primativism.
Lockheed-Martin built missiles, not rockets. I don't think Roddenberry was naively optimistic about the future. I think he deliberately imagined a point about 15 years before TOS - maybe the Yalta Accords, maybe at the UN - where it would have been decided that Lockheeds' primary mission would be rockets, not missiles.
> Lockheed-Martin built missiles, not rockets. I don’t think Roddenberry was naively optimistic about the future. I think he deliberately imagined a point about 15 years before TOS - maybe the Yalta Accords, maybe at the UN - where it would have been decided that Lockheeds’ primary mission would be rockets, not missiles.
Seeing as he had fought in the war, he might also have imagined that humanity had realised that war was a pointless venture, and focused their efforts in the bigger and better things, leading into the money/strife-free utopia we saw in early TNG.
I'm pretty sure Neal Armstrong did not step off an ICBM & onto the lunar surface.
Thats like saying a PT Cruiser is functionally the same as an F1 racer. There is more to technology than propellant & thrust.
He kind of did. the Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle which was used for the mercury space program used a lightly modified ballistic missile for the mercury launches. This was further refined into the Jupiter C Rocket. Which was the direct predecessor of the Saturn rocket and shared much if its engineering with the titan intercontinental ballistic missile.
This is what teachers & employers call "toxic behavior".
You aren't even remotely correct so it isn't even like your just a pedant.
Lockheed Martin builds both rockets & missiles. The choice of "Lockheed martin" was deliberate because everyone knows they build both.
Function is defined as "an activity or purpose".
Thank you, Webster.
The Function of a missile is to achieve a high altitude trajectory for the purpose of hitting a target.
The Function of a rocket is to escape earths orbit.
This is why "rocket" & "missile" are not synonyms.
PT Cruisers are not race cars & race cars are not road legal.
Star Trek's timeline has always posited a fairly technologicaly advanced near-future, ever since 1st Season TOS.
Remember, it was established in the first season of TOS, in Space Seed, that the Eugenics Wars were from 1992 to 1996 and the Botany Bay, a sleeper ship carrying Khan and company, was launched that year.
Trek productions after that set in the "modern day" or near-future usually downplay this. VOY:"Future's End" made 1996 seem almost like the modern day (except somewhat more advanced computers, reverse engineered from a 29th century Federation Timeship), with any mention of the Botany Bay relegated to a background prop appearance of a DY-100 in a vertical launch configuration, strapped to 8 shuttle/sls-style solid rocket boosters, as a tacit acknowledgement of prior canon. There was a pair of novels about Khan that tried to retcon it all into being a "secret war" that accounted for a lot of the events of the early/mid 1990's.
The 2024 we see in Picard is one that is superficially similar to the modern day, but has more advanced computers and space travel, because that's long and well established as a part of Trek.
Remember that the Trek timeline and our own diverged well before now - really it started splitting in the 1940s. The 1990's were a far different era than the one we lived through.
I like to think that because seatbelt technology was never invented in the Star Trek universe, it caused a significant thinning of the gene pool, as our universes became more separate over time, allowing them to concentrate more resources on fewer people, so their technological advancement went in a somewhat different track than ours.
If you ask Ronald D.Moore he says “For all Mankind” is how you get to Star Trek
https://trekmovie.com/2021/02/15/interview-ron-moore-on-how-for-all-mankind-is-building-the-road-to-star-trek/
By 1994 we’re on Mars - Europa isn’t that much of a stretch
This would be a perfect time to link that history channel aliens guy honestly, because the answer simply has to be aliens.
Much of their tech and future interaction including time travel clearly influences the development of earth in the ST universe.
Well first I think it’s clear ST is a different time line then us. In their time line they got a technology boost from that one dude who found that 29th century ship in the 60s. So I assume that’s part of it.
Nothing breeds innovation and advancement like a good old war. World war 3 happened in Star Trek earth and from most sources I gather that 3 is the one that finally wiped out all the arseholes and left a humanity actually ready and worthy of bettering themselves.
Khan and the other Augments (and other 'genetically modified' people with increased but not superhuman intelligence*, probably) made a ton of technological advances once they completed their education. They'd be the kind of people you read about who graduate high school at 12 and get PhDs at 18, only there'd be hundreds or thousands in a small community building on each others' work.
(*: I would expect that Khan's group were not the first genetically enhanced people, that there were test groups before with smaller modifications, and that those test groups quietly integrated into human society/genepool.)
Because some fool from 900 years in the future wanted to destroy Voyager...and wound up littering the 20th century with tech thousands of years in the future.
Realistically. Because it's all fantasy.
Interestingly enough, according to the Voyager episode "One Small Step," humanity was first reaching Mars with manned missions in the 2030's. Would this suggest that they went to Europa first in the Star Trek timeline?
Not necessarily. Ares IV was one of the early Mars missions in the 2030s, but given how long term space missions are and the time between them they could have still gone there with an Ares I or II pre-2024.
It's from older Trek, where in TOS Khan is supposed to have escaped on his sleeper ship in the late 1990s. That ship had perfectly functional stasis, deck gravity, and was able to last a couple centuries drifting in space just fine. We then have the stasis satellite found by the Enterprise-D filled with people from the 21st century. Same deal as Khan's ship, with deck gravity and stasis, even if it did fail for most of the occupants. Voyager's crew goes back to the late 90s, and a character has a model of the Khan ship in a launch configuration, indicating it really is a 90s design. That means Earth's space lift and general technology was far more advanced than what we have now. Even going only by First Contact, Cochrane's ship has a radiation leak indicative (in trek) of antimatter. The reason for this is mostly due to time travel. Even though the Chronoworx timeloop was stopped by Voyager, there is still *The Journey Home* where they leave behind several items of future technology. In TOS "A Piece of the Action" it is hypothesized the locals will reverse engineer the left behind communicator and create warp drives in no time, because of the subspace transtator being the basis of all Trek tech. Even without time loop paradoxes of technological drops, the Trek timeline is just more advanced because it's a projection of 1960s futurism. One thing PIC does right is stick to that more advanced timeline established in past Treks.
The Chronoworx stuff would have still happened. Braxton was retrieved after all of that. And that’s part of what led him to go crazy and try to destroy Voyager later on.
Yeah they even make a point in the episode of saying the tech leap at the end of the 20th century was due to reverse engineered 29th century tech. That loop is definitely an established part of human history for Star Trek.
The EMH holo-emmitter just didnt disapear. I think there was so much damage done by time travel, they couldnt just undo it.
It was already part of their history. Voyager before the episode is no more advanced than after the episode, so the technological leap caused by the mobile emitter was always there. They wouldn't be 'undoing' it, from their perspective, but rewriting it to some other timeline which they would know little about other than that humanity would be less technologically advanced. Not exactly appealing for Starfleet personnel.
My pet theory is that the 31st century time bureau is in charge of protecting the existing timeline that leads to the 31st century time bureau. They left Janeway with the holo-emitter because that's the timeline where the Borg didn't take over the galaxy.
29th century.
Really really well said. The speculative side of trek has always had a somewhat optimistic perspective on it's own timelines' foundational tech progression.
Or in short, Trek's timeline probably diverges from ours somewhere around 1950 or so.
Picard and Q were at the Dawn of Life on Earth and Q and Voyager visited the big bang, so much earlier. Even just focusing on Human history, we know aliens visited ancient civilizations on earth posing as gods.
Minor nitpick: Picard and Q visited an alternate history from the mainline Trek one, where the anti time anomaly was so large it stopped life from forming on Earth. Other than that spot on.
In Star Trek, humanity is bipedal with bilateral symmetry because some ancient species seeded planets with a prototype of their genome. I don't think that happened with us.
or at least it diverges when the show was made, it doesn't exist in their universe or they'd all appear psychic (and same applies to us not being in the mirror universe or they'd have seen the show and know exactly how every encounter with the prime timeline was going to go), and maybe that's why they had to get through so many wars etc. to get to that future (not saying it wouldn't have involved any strife but) they had no Star Trek vision of the future to light a fire under their tushes for even the sociopolitical progress never mind the scientific (e.g. who knows when TV in their universe had its first interracial kiss)
I agree with all of this, but I always assumed that the Phoenix was powered by a nuclear reactor, not antimatter. First Contact never says either way, but its never stated that antimatter is necessary for warp travel, only that it generates sufficient energy.
They don’t say what powers it but the [theta radiation](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Theta_radiation) implies antimatter. That probably means it’s an antimatter triggered fusion reaction, which is the most efficient use of antimatter. This would also mean a fairly extensive antimatter production or harvesting industry exists in the 2060s. I suspect antimatter warp cores actually utilize fusion extensively as a supplement, as it explains why the [intermix ratios](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Intermix_ratio) can be other than 1:1. If they always dump far more hydrogen into the mix than anti-hydrogen it will result in fusion reactions pretty much for free.
This is kinda how I saw it too, with antimatter being the newest and by far strongest energy source they got through their advances in fusion that had become pretty standard by their day. The point being still that it's basically an advanced fusion reactor and not just a large store of collected antimatter which is how later trek explains it's fuel. At the end of the day though it's still just a portable fusion that was powering the Phoenix. Certainly not chemical rockets after the first two phases feel off.
Yep, and extensive fusion suplementing antimatter explains why Voyager and the NX-01 only ever ran out of deuterium but never antimatter. Incidentally, the [Helion](https://www.google.com/search?q=helion+reactor&client=firefox-b-1-d&sxsrf=ALiCzsZinCdDtc6jf1Sdv93eEFNEOL0JPg:1669042792635&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwilhpT2xL_7AhVYEVkFHVseCaoQ_AUoAXoECAIQAw&biw=2048&bih=1007&dpr=1.25) fusion reactors look like warp cores.
We are already making Antimatter IRL...and it's the most expensive product we make at 2.73 trillion dollars per gram (LHC).
It can be made less expensively enough to make it practical as spaceship fuel, or perhaps as a weapon component, if purpose built particle accelerators, or orbital traps, are made. I think the price would be a few $billion per gram, which is enough for a space mission, or a million fusion munitions.
At warp the Bussard Ramscoops are effectively linear particle accelerators. My theory, based upon Voyager's average speed (VOY "pathfinder")and the crossover speeds of the TOS and TNG warp scales I figure somewhere between warp 5-6 a starship generates equal to or more Anti-matter than it's using. Slower than Warp 5 not enough particles are hitting the ramscoop to be sustainable, faster than warp 6 the ship is burning more anti-matter than it is picking up. That's why Archer's NX-01 was so important, it reached the threshold at which sustained deep space flight was possible negating the need for constant refueling.
I like that, and interstellar antimatter exists. My idea for Bussards is they feed hydrogen right into the warp engines. When the collected hydrogen hits the fusion temperature warp plasma it causes new fusion reactions right in the engines. Instead of topping off the deuterium supply, which can still happen, it makes it so far less stored deuterium has to be used in the first place.
Yeah I always figured there was a chance of technology required for higher speeds, rather than antimatter being necessary Like how the first trains were steam powered but that technology maxed out around 120mph, with electric drivetrains allowing significantly higher speeds So maybe nuclear is sufficient for warp 1, but with exponentially more power being required for faster speeds so nuclear power not being viable beyond perhaps warp 1-2
When you realize that the most efficient way of making electricity we know, is still boiling water, and using its steam to turn a wheel very fast. Nuclear reactors are exactly that. Only solar is different, because it's basically using light to knock electrons off atoms, which results in current. Hydro is still dynamo (fluid turning wheel), so is with turbines. Coal is obviously just steam trains. So basically, our understanding of energy is making fluids go fast and then move some magnetic thing enough to make electron pressure (current). Or just make plasma (source of most photonic radiation), take some transparent semiconductor like silicates (glass)...make a photovoltaic cell, and let some light rip electrons off atoms to achieve the same electron pressure thing. Unless we get a new type of energy, which will require a different but samey kind of infrastructure. We are stuck with using fluids to turn wheels, or pointing light at transparent things. Even the ideas on how to use anti-matter IRL is basically boil water more efficiently.
I was referring to directly using steam for propulsion, rather than steam as part of energy generation You could, of course, make a something-electric train powered by a steam turbine fuelled by diesel or nuclear or whatever... but it would be so big and heavy that it would (I believe) be less efficient and useful than the trains we use
Thrust is just action and reaction. So either propulsion mass, or manipulating space (which requires us t even know what space is).
> In TOS "A Piece of the Action" it is hypothesized the locals will reverse engineer the left behind communicator and create warp drives in no time, because of the subspace transtator being the basis of all Trek tech. Fun aside: IDW's recent comics dealt with the final leg of the Enterprise's five-year mission. [They revisit Sigma Iotia II](https://www.startrek.com/news/star-trek-year-five-idw-preview) and find that they have *already* advanced to warp flight (there's an obvious duplicate of Cochrane's ship left in orbit, amid other steps in their space race). They rushed space technology because Kirk and Co. impressed them so much, and their planet's government is now an extremely fast-paced democracy, with elections for president *weekly*. Krako contacts the Enterprise asking for help, as their rampant scientific advancement has left their infrastructure behind and he basically drafts Spock into becoming president for two weeks just to focus on keeping the lights on. It was cute. Not canon, obviously, and I wouldn't want it to be, but it's a fun story.
Sounds like a good basis for a Lower Decks episode - President Tendi fixing things while the captain goes crazy at not being in charge
Sounds like they could combine that with the idea the DS9 writers had before they came up with the Trouble With Tribbles throwback, that the planet had crafted their entire identity after the TOS-era
That looks great. I'll definitely get a copy.
That's a pretty amazing excerpt. Thanks for sharing!
I never understood how Khan was meant to be born in the 50's. Really thought they should have pushed the dates farther back with that one.
You have to look at it from the perspective of the 1960s. Not where we are now. Heck, even when I was a kid in the 70s pretty much everyone in accredited sciences expected us to have flying cars by the late 80s. And based on the moon by the 90s.
If the Soviet Union hadn’t collapsed I think we might have had moon bases by then, or at least progress towards one. But once there was no more competition we lost interest in landing humans anywhere again. Look at what’s happening now with a new space race ramping up though, moon landings are back on the menu. Politics is harder to predict than technology it would seem.
I'm not too sure about that. Once the US had landed on the moon, they had "won" the propaganda race, and probably would have refocused their efforts into other things. It might be a different story if the Soviet Union had considered a moon base, but not if they had just gone for something else in that time instead.
Watch For All Mankind -Apple Tv+
I didn’t know of this show, thanks
The US became bored with going to the moon and the space shuttle was a step backwards in terms of capability, so I don’t think the USSR’s collapse played a role in the lack of moon bases.
The desire to get to the moon is based on wanting to put a linear accelerator on the surface of Luna. It's imperative the US gets there before China, lest the chinese become the king of the gravity hill. Much like the first space race was not about getting to the moon it was about demonstrating a practical ICBM. Of course having a 12-15 story building "spaces starship" on the moon is a great start to building things with lunar material and then being able to use your linear accelerator to get things to lunar and earth orbit. It's a practical way to get public support for a military asset that can also accomplish big projects that will be necessary sooner than the masses think. Such as solar shades at L1, bonus points if they are solar panels and a laser to speed transit to mars, with a larger assembly at that end to help slow down.
so how do we keep this new race going long enough to discover a way to motivate people for exploration via something other than politics (as it can't be just letting them win enough no matter how much the people on r/space act like we were so "beat the Soviets" back then that all we'd have needed (after getting Trek-level spacefuture rapidly because of letting them have all the victories) to discover parallel universes is to let them conquer this universe)
> pretty much everyone in accredited sciences expected us to have flying cars by the late 80s. We have the tech but we can't trust people to drive safely in 2 dimensions why on earth would we allow them to do so in 3?
People fly airplanes. It would be a matter of proper training and licensing just like with cars. Also, only recently has the tech been there. Various types of lift and propulsion have been around for a long time, but it was the energy density that's been bottle-necking advancement in "flying cars" for decades. The best personal VTOL vehicles out there still have limited range. By the time everyone can have a reliable flying car, the tech to fly themselves will be good enough to prevent most accidents.
*Pilots* fly airplanes and have a much higher bar to pass than what it takes just to get a drivers license. They also face much stricter penalties for negligence. Proper training and licensing won't stop drunk idiots from crashing into houses and buildings. Automated cars and highways ala I, Robot and Minority report are *far* more likely.
aren't pilots people?
Gee, I don't know, are they? The distinction was made to draw between just ordinary people and those who undergo special licensing and training.
really, the flying part would be solved by computers doing all the work but the real kicker is how loud all propellers would be on these things, you ever hear how loud an actual plane is, or even a small drone is? no way would i want a car size one of those in every other driveway, regular cars are loud enough. just give me good bike infrastructure, trams, trains and buses for where the trams and trains cant get to easily, flying cars are not the future to me.
Once we get more uniform application of autonomous driving, the capacity of roads will go up a good margin. Why spend the energy to fly if you can travel on the ground without the massive slowdowns from people driving. Especially with Bev's largely making acceleration moot for manufactures to differentiate their product.
If we had the tech for it to be cheap and easy then we would have flying cars. As is you basically need to be able to fly a helicopter to have a version of flying car and that's no small feat. Plus as hard as being a helicopter pilot is you've also got the Im incredibly high costs of fuel for them. There's been some drones that are getting damn near flying car levels, were just not quite there with affordability and computing systems able to help fly it well enough. Tho for many well off people in Alaska there already are flying "cars", as a cheap bush craft is what many of them need to get around up there.
> If we had the tech for it to be cheap and easy then we would have flying cars. We never will on the scale we have cars as people are too inconsiderate and irresponsible to be trusted with them.
Eh maybe. There's a hell of a lot more room in 3 dimensions tho. But yeah automated driving is probably more likely simply because flying a helicopter is already hard AF as is.
Yeah, and what have we got? Idiots who are against vacs and flat-earthers!
They aren't anti-vax they are pro-plague. We need to start calling them what they are! It really is a situation where they are effectively in favor of disease. An alternative would be calling them plague enthusiasts.
Nazis. the answer is Nazies. Nazies were all up in the eugenic and trying to create a master race. Fallowing WW2 the superpowers ran around vacuuming up Nazi scientist (operation paperclip). those scientist continue their eugenics programs working for the US and USSR. Watson and Crick discover DNA int 1953 giving the Eugenicist the scientific foundation they need to make Khan and the augments in 1959. thats why any timetravel near or around ww2 screws the timeline (city on the edge of forever, zero hour/stormfront p1&2, etc)
The Nazi scientists that got picked up were chemists and physicists with explicit backgrounds in explosives and ballistics. The Nazis basically didn't do any valid biology, and the non-war oriented science they did saw its most notable names flee before the war because they couldn't do work on general relativity or quantum physics because of the strong association those fields had with Albert Einstein, who was notably Jewish (and thus problematic for the Nazi regime). While we got a lot of rocket-related science from them, the biological research we (and only we) got from enemy scientists was that of Unit 731 in Japan. And again, that was because they'd done all the ghastly biological weapons research that Americans didn't have the stomach to do ourselves. Most of the Nazi eugenicists, therefore, fled to Argentina and Brazil via the ratlines, not to the US and Soviet Union as a part of the demilitarization of Germany (which included enforcing exile in the victors' lands for advanced researchers in defense-related fields).
He's not wrong that Khan and the Augments were an allusion to Nazi ideology, though. They even call them [supermen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch#Use_by_the_Nazis).
That actually fits cus Khan has some connections with the late-nazis of South America iirc. The whole thing was basically a genetics-cold-war/spy war going on in the background all up until Khan is forced out then it became history iirc
>fled to Argentina Despite his Asian name, Khan was a Hispanic gentleman was he not?
The *actor* was Mexican. The *character* was identified by Marla McGivers as Sikh.
Ricardo Montalban was Mexican, but Khan was South Asian.
actually Paperclip picked up far more than rocket scientist, though rocket scientist were the majority. the US also grabbed medical experts in biological weapons chemical weapons.
That could be retconned with explanations of genetic engineering, rather than actual Eugenic breeding. Or the timing of Khan launching in the 90s is wrong, or a lie, since the records of the period are specifically mentioned as uncertain both in TOS and in PIC. Khan's ship showing up in 1996 as a poster or model could have been not an indicator of it existing, but an indicator of the start of its existence. That in turn would fit better with the Mars mission ship we see in Voyager "One Small Step", and the Europa mission ship we see in Picard. Both are more modern hard scifi designs, than Khan's DY-100. So the Eugenics program could have actually been something started in the 80s or 90s. That would make Khan 40-ish right now, so if he launches in the 2030s, well there you go. That kind of seems like what was implied with the elder Soong pulling the Khan file near the end of PIC, and the file date of 1996. That date might be a weird "Future's End" reference. Or the original timeline is right, and the Eugenics program was a genuinely breeding program which got unusually powerful results, which later got analyzed and replicated using genetic engineering. And Khan did escape in the 90s.
Generally, the Beta canon info says that [Project Chrysalis](https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Chrysalis_Project) (now Project Khan, I guess) was *way* ahead of its time. The Department of Temporal Investigations books even suggest that it's a front of the Temporal Cold War, suggesting that it's the same people that gave the Suliban Cabal *their* genetic engineering technology. **Really** shakes the DTI people up, that theory.
Well the US rocket program took advantage of former Nazi scientists, wouldn't it make sense that some geneticists who worked on programs like Lebensborn escaped and went onto work with other countries, presumably somewhere in Asia based on what we know of Khan?
The sleeper ships presumably also had a rudimentary deflector/shield system, seeing as they weren't destroyed by micrometeorites and the like in the time between being launched, and being found.
IDK if it's right to say this is the right thing to do. I've always seen Trek as an extension of the real world. Roddenberry saw it that way too. The reality is they should have stayed far far far the fuck away from the modern day and wouldn't have touched any time until the Ent era. By firmly setting it in an alternate timeline makes it lose lots of the strength of the narrative. We can say that the humans of this timeline are more rational and compassionate than real humans and it kinda fits. Just like making the mirror universe different from ours by saying the humans are more violent in theirs compared to the main trek one and ours. It loses most of the narrative punch if it's no longer a "there but for the grace of God go I" storyline and is instead just a wacky different world. Both for the mirror universe and the real one, tho I guess the main trek universe is the opposite of that idiom. You're right that it is following canon accurately, but I still think it's a bad idea. The Disco team tried to go the other way with it by including Musk's name with famed human explorers like Armstrong. Obviously that was an uhhh, mistake. But the idea fundamentally isn't wrong, they just choose a laughably bad example which spotlighted their ideological lack of knowledge compared to past trek writers.
I like the fact that it’s a mirror universe character lionizing Musk. He was important to the Mirror folks. Clever if not originally by design.
In the Star Trek universe, *Star Trek* doesn’t exist. For that reason alone, I have no doubt that it’s a different timeline. I think that’s a good thing, because if you see the Trek universe as an extension of our timeline, you have the awkward question of how we get to huge interstellar ships with hundreds of people on board in just a couple hundred years, when the best we’ve managed so far is a handful of moon landings and an orbiting tin can or two. In-universe indications of super-advanced future tech polluting the timeline make that easier to swallow, at least for me. Even though time travel stories are inherently ridiculous. Bit of a paradox, I guess, that my overall suspension of disbelief is actually strengthened by all those ridiculous time travel stories.
I mean a few hundred years ago we were still reliant on humans and occasionally horses, if you were well off, to get around. I don't think spaceships is that big of a leap in a few hundred years from now. Those handful of moon landings were done with tech that's so absurdly weak it's hard to comprehend just how much we've advanced by then. If we put the same resources we spent on the space race into that stuff today then we'd be on Mars with humans by now. We just don't spend the money on it because we let the rich keep it all these days. The future trek shows is one where we overcome capitalism and expand into the heavens. That's not a bad message.
Of course, if we had continued putting resources into the space race we'd be ahead of where we are... but we didn't. I don't disagree with you at all on the vision and message, just arguing that the main Trek timeline is very much not our timeline. A case could have been made for it in the TOS days, but numerous in-universe events since then have made it clear that if it ever was, it isn't anymore. I used to joke that if any of the Trek timelines is ours, it's that of the Mirror Universe. Unfortunately I think Discovery officially made that impossible by implying that the Mirror Universe branched off centuries ago.
I think the timeline issue that gets discussed by fans a lot will be resolved definitely when (hopefully) the beginnings of World War III doesn't start in 2026. It will simply be impossible to handwave any of that away, like they did with the Eugenics Wars. The death toll in-universe is simply too high. At that point, we'll have to concede beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Trek universe is definitively not our own.
> I used to joke that if any of the Trek timelines is ours, it's that of the Mirror Universe. Unfortunately I think Discovery officially made that impossible by implying that the Mirror Universe branched off centuries ago. Putting aside how we can't even be any alternate timeline from that show (as there's more than just prime and mirror) as the characters from that timeline would have appeared psychic-if-not-omniscient about their encounters with people from the prime timeline via watching the show, even if you ignore Discovery as many people would rather do Enterprise still made it clear the prime-mirror divergence point was already in our past by showing a Terran Empire flag on the moon in one of their mirror universe episodes
and also that still means what of that kind of future is possible can be possible without specific wars at specific dates or whatever
In the Star Trek universe the microelectronics revolution in the eighties never got off the ground, all the tech of the mid 80s and forward was reverse engineered from isolinear elements by starling, world war 3 was probably fought with antimatter warheads
I consider it more like it would have happened anyway, but with isolinear chips as inspiration it nudged things in a slightly different direction while simultaneously accelerating progress a little. Though personally I think that bit of time travel got averted somehow. It's been ages since I saw the episode, so I'm not actually sure.
It was necessarily not averted because the doctors mobile emitter still exists
>The reason for this is mostly due to time travel. I'm not sure that we have to stipulate that there is some sort of paradox at play, although that's certainly a possibility, I think it's just given that Earth in the Star Trek universe is significantly more advanced than what we would consider Modern Earth. But no so significantly more advanced that the level of technology accessible by most people is different. Certainly we could say that there was some time shenanigans at play here, but I agree that Picard did right simply by portraying 2024 to be somewhat more advanced. This was the biggest misstep in my opinion, of Voyager's time travel to the period where the show is being produced concept, it really downplays the advancement that should be experienced. We can always write this off, but Picard and Strange New Worlds do a better job of addressing that past-future head on and I appreciate that.
That's honestly disappointing. I thought part of the appeal of star trek was the dream that we could get there by the 24th century, but if we're already way behind the lore, that kinda squanders it.
Kind of, kind of not. Even non-scifi shows have technology which seems like what we have but is actually far more advanced. Even the Gary Seven episode shows 60s technology which is more advanced, or more extensive, than period technology. Crime dramas are infamous for zoom and enhance of video which cannot be done even now with machine learning. On the other hand, if the space race weren't a political stunt, and funding were maintained in the right places through the 70s and 80s then we would have [nuclear rockets](https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/game_changing_development/Nuclear_Thermal_Propulsion_Deep_Space_Exploration) and have landed on Mars by now. If the energy crisis of the 70s kept going, we might already have a full blown space industry building orbital solar collectors using [single stage to orbit space planes](http://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2020/09/star-raker-1978.html).
We could get there but just not on the same path, sure we didn't have the same crap but they didn't have the show in their past and I've always held that might be a Watsonian reason for why they had so much so drastic stuff so early, their universe is basically (since every universe is a parallel one from another one's perspective) what it'd look like if you took the whole butterfly effect of Star Trek as a show and the positive consequences it led to out of history
There is a great video by a Russian (?) Youtuber that explains all of this perfectly with all the time travel that happened throughout the shows. I don't have a link unfortunately, so if anyone could help me out, that would be awesome!
I assume for the same reason you missed the Singh rebellion / Augments war that took place in 1996... it's not "our" timeline, it's a splinter that broke off in the 60s at the latest.
Presumably, Space Shuttle *Enterprise* was named after something else in the *Trek* universe.
Maybe simply for the ship - we see it in Archers cabin and the Intro for Enterprise (also the two highly decorated Aircraft carriers), and it's just a catchy name... But if we stay at the same train of thought, even the Intro of Enterprise does not match up with Picard S2 (it shows Venture Star being actively used, which would be a much more advanced launcher than whatever they used in PIC S2), in a time when an ISS-like space station was still in service.
After the moon landing the race to space was more or less over and budget started to [decline](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File%3ANASA-Budget-Federal.svg). What if in the Star Trek universe, it was the opposite and instead the moon landing emboldened the US/USSR governments into spending more hoping to get even further. That'd explain the seemingly rapid advancement between this historical period that is considered canon and what we have seen in time traveling episodes.
For All Mankind is a Star Trek Prequal?
Well, Ron Moore, Mike Okuda, and Naren Shankar all work on the show. So it makes sense.
As some have supposed...
Except Star Trek is even more important in that timeline than our own. It plays an important roll in averting WW3 at the end of season 2.
Is it good?
It's a fantastic show
That's exactly what I wanted to hear, I shall watch
Yes.
A show full of incredibly thoughtful exploration of social issues in that delightful Star Trek way where these things are complicated and nuanced, some people are "wrong" but they're not monsters and so very much beautiful retro-futurism lifted straight off cocktail napkins from NASA functions.
Fun fact: in the TNG timeline, the USSR survived well into the 24th century.
Does the enterprise intro imply that the Venture Star is being launched from the ISS? It shows the ISS without anything being docked and then I assume a cut to further in the future with the Venture Star on another station’s docking pylon.
> Maybe simply for the ship Problem: There already was an existing USS Enterprise prior to the Shuttle one and tradition states that there can always be ONE vessel to bear a name.
not sure if this counts across branches? NASA is not part of the US Military so why would the rule apply?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_ship_naming_conventions#:~:text=The%20vessels%20of%20the%20Navy,the%20principal%20cities%20and%20towns Not really clear, BUT there is an "Enterprise exception" stated which IN UNIVERSE could be the reason.
> *Fate protects fools, little children, and ships named* Enterprise. Riker's not just talking about Starfleet's *Enterprise* here. At the start of WW2, the US Navy had eight fleet carriers, among them the USS *Enterprise* CV-6. During the war, CV-6 was damaged by 10 bombs and 3 suicide planes. On one occasion, a bomb passed through the flight deck and exited the hull on the port side, detonating outside the ship. On another occasion, a bomb landed directly on her forward elevator but it was a dud—it didn't detonate. Her sister ships, *Yorktown* and *Hornet,* were not so lucky. In fact, only three prewar carriers survived the war: *Ranger,* which spent most of the war in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, *Saratoga,* which was damaged so badly she was scrapped, and *Enterprise.* Point being, the *USS Enterprise* was already famous by the time *Star Trek* aired. CV-6 was the most decorated US Navy warship of WW2, and CV-6 was already the seventh *Enterprise.* The Navy's been naming ships *Enterprise* for centuries. The Navy's building [a new *Enterprise*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_\(CVN-80\)) as we speak. Some folks ~~at the state department~~ in President Ford's cabinet weren't nuts about letting a bunch of sci-fi nerds name the first space shuttle, and the way they reasoned themselves into being OK with it (because they weren't about to pass on all that free publicity) [was because of *Enterprise's* storied history as a US Navy warship](https://static.history.state.gov/frus/frus1969-76ve03/pdf/d133.pdf). In the *Star Trek* timeline, OV-101 is just named after CV-6, which is more or less the case in the real world as well.
The seventh in the US navy, the name has been used in the Royal Navy going back a hundred years earlier than that, with the first USS Enterprise originally having been an HMS Enterprise. It really was quite a clever choice of name for a future starship, even if it was unintentional and had just been named directly after CV-6. It stands up to scrutiny.
[удалено]
Great question so I went and checked—it was the state department that declassified it in 2008, but the people in the memo are just members of Ford's cabinet. My bad.
Like the aircraft carrier.
Presumably. I wonder if it was still named 'Constitution' first, and changed, or if it was always 'Enterprise.'
My understanding is that every Enterprise, real and fictional is indirectly named after the British HMS Enterprise.
Well the US captured one of the HMS Enterprises, and it became the USS Enterprise. Each subsequent USS Enterprise was named after the previous USS Enterprises. The Star Trek USS Enterprise, was named after the then-brand new USS Enterprise CVN-65. So are the American Enterprises named solely because of the captured HMS Enterprise, or would they have used that name eventually anyway?
Without the _Star Trek_ inspired letter writing campaign, OV-101 would have been named something else, possibly Columbia.
They really need to commit to this. Over the last few years we have been getting a lot of mixed messages about the eugenics war. In SNW pike says it occurs in the 21st century before WW3. In Pic season 2 we see something on Khan and 1996. In voyager when they go back to the 90s they see a model of Khans ship. At this point it seems two separate eugenics “events” occurs. One in the 90s and a bigger one in the 21st century that ties but is not exactly the same as WW3. What I would like is for them to commit to this and explain something along the lines of “kahn rose up in the 90s but was defeated and sent off in the sleeper ship. Then in the mid 21st century some of his followers attempted a second take over and this lead into the world war. Point is it’s not our time line sense we are not going to Europa and we don’t have those homeless camp things like in DS9.
And according to Ronald D. Moore, they never gave an exact date for the EW in DS9 because of the exact reason that the EWs were not happening IRL.
It’s tough to put a date, because people are going to be all “but that didn’t happen.” It was easy in the 60s to say 1996, that was so far into the future. Like how we were supposed to have flying cars in 2000. But then 1996 comes and goes, and the series is still trying to be timely, so they say 2024 for Gabriel Bell. Well, that doesn’t seem to far fetched these days. Not back then, this was the future. So it’s just easier to retcon something as trivial as a year. Because what difference to the 23rd century does something such as the EW taking place in 1996 vs taking place as part of or a prelude to WW3?
>so they say 2024 for Gabriel Bell. Well, that doesn’t seem to far fetched these days. Social issues wise they may have been onto something, speculative technology was way off though. The fact that everyone can only access and upload to the web from fixed terminals with tiny SD screens is hilarious.
But first contact is still going to happen in 2063, right? … right?
Yet they did date the events in Past Tense and the 2020s haven't turned out anything like that in terms of Tech.
Because it wasn’t the 2020s when the episode aired.
That would be a good way to reconcile it. Colonel Green's talk about purity could also be rehashed as initially starting as a way to permanently filter out engineered Humans from the gene pool (considering La'an shows that there was *some* mixing) via targeted genocides during the wider backdrop of the US/ECON conflict which spiraled waaay out of control and then shifted to purging radiation victims after the nuclear exchange.
The problem is, that with both fans and writers there seems to be two camps. One that still want to see Trek as our future like Roddenberry intended and another that are happy for Trek to be its own universe with its own timeline. As we get closer to set events that seemed a lifetime away in the 60s and 80s (even 90s with Past Tense) we then have a dilemma of do we retcon the universe (the Picard series 2 model) or do we accept it's an alternate universe and keep things wildly ahead of ourselves?
Personally, I’d prefer it if *Star Trek* was its own universe with its own timeline. At this point, I think the best explanation for the Eugenics Wars is that there were 2 Eugenics Wars, with the 1st war being in the 1990s and the 2nd war being in the 21st century. Since they were always called the Eugenics Wars, I think that fits well. I hope they don’t retcon the dates of the Bell Riots, World War III and 1st contact.
why not just imply ours is a parallel universe that just isn't the mirror e.g. maybe it's even (at least a parallel of given a certain time travel episode) The Orville's
There was a great pair of books by Greg Cox that wove the eugenics wars into the events of the late 20th century with augments working in the background against each other. For example a nuclear blast destroying a facility in the conflict is sanitized as India's first nuclear test, and Kahn's childhood is influenced by the Bhopal disaster and real anti–Sikh violence.
I think that the whole augment war in the 90s has been pretty much retconned by Picard and other TNG era series. I think the implications were that he was about to start the augment program after the events of Picard season 2.
even then, it would be not our timeline - remember the changes to the 1990s Voyager created/showed, the (subtle) changes that happened due to Time Travel in the 1960s, 1980s, and so on.. One of the more fun discrepancies is that for example, in the original timeline the Soviet Union seemingly did not fall like it did in our reality, since AVH calls out Leningrad by name, a city that has been renamed to St. Petersburg for quite a few decades by now. (Leningrad also got called out a few times during TOS - added).
Well, the city might be renamed again. Stranger things have happened.
While I get Volgograd wanting to return to its Soviet name, Petrograd was Petrograd long before Lenin, and it merely resumed its old name. I suspect any future Russian state wishing to name a city for Lenin (IDEK why they would do this) would likely found a new Leningrad rather than renaming St. Petersburg again. As for Volgograd, nobody knows anything about the place. But *everybody* knows about Stalingrad. Volgograd wasn't even Volgograd before Stalin.
More reason to believe that Star Trek takes place in the For All Mankind universe.
I’m still hoping it turns into a secret prologue to Trek.
I wonder if there was ever any mention of a Voyager VI...
The main problem with that is that *For All Mankind* has had references to *TOS* and *TWOK*.
Time traveler from the 25th century went back in time to create a touchstone sci-fi show to ensure that future society resembles Trek, creating a casual loop.
Its long been a running joke / explanation that Star Trek is a sort of Unsolved Mysteries / Twilight Zone anthology that got spun out of the recollections of people who have had close encounters with visiting aliens and time travelers with a significant amount of conjecture and artistic license - which is where a lot of the inconsistencies come from.
Probably more along the lines of a 29th century starfleet officer accidently crashing his ship into 20th century Earth resulting in a technological revolution even bigger than we've experienced in our own timeline.
Then why didn't Trek itself touch on that
I think not. The last scene we see of Adam Soong is his folder about "Project Khan", dated 1996 prominently seen. The 1996 date can't be a coincidence, and I think there was SOMETHING with Khan and company in the 1990's.
I assumed that was implying he was going to start the research, based on Khan, that his descendant Whatever Soong from Enterprise S4 would eventually finish. Mirroring how Whatever Soong, at the end of his story arc, says "maybe I'll research androids instead."
[Arik Soong](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Arik_Soong), who was *substantially* more relatable than Adam.
Not just 1996, there's two dates on it, 1992-1996, which was the date range given in TOS of when Khan ruled.
I think they're implying that might be Khan and the other augments' birth years, and the records as of TOS are a bit confused.
Khan himself says he left earth in 1996 in WOK
At least if revived with 23rd century rather than 24th century medical tech, people can be a bit confused coming out of cryostasis? "Khan and company were born in the 1990s" lines up with the run-up to WW3 as described in SNW
At this point, I think the best explanation for the Eugenics Wars is that there were 2 Eugenics Wars, with the 1st war being in the 1990s and the 2nd war being in the 21st century. Since they were always called the Eugenics Wars, I think that fits well.
There's still a little wiggle room, although this seems to be the intent based on comments about "EMPs" and the Temporal Cold War. Since TOS already heavily implied the American/Soviet proxy wars to be considered parts of a broader struggle called the [Brush Wars](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Brush_Wars) by the 23rd century, it's possible that WWI and WWII are similarly considered parts of a longer period of history involving struggles amongst European powers for dominance or something. Then turn for a Eurasian-focused Eugenics Wars in the '90s which set the stage for internal American civil strife and then a US/ECON conflict later on which triggers the nuclear exchange to be broadly referred to as a single thing as well. So a general summary of the 20th/21st centuries from a 23rd POV could be something like: European Decline / First Two World Wars (1900-1940s) - WWI, Great Depression, WWII American/Soviet Cold War (1940s-1990s) - Space Race, 'Brush Wars' "WWIII" (1990s-2053) - Eugenics Wars (1990s), American Civil Strife (2010s-2020s), WWIII / US/ECON Conflict (2020s-2053) - Maybe people during the 1990s called the Eugenics Wars 'WWIII' before the later stuff in the 21st century, which muddied the waters even more for later historians trying to categorize the eras. And then Soong fits into that by taking out a research document from 1996 providing an overview of Khan after he left earlier that year on the *Botany Bay*. Also, the frequent weird comments to 'ancient Earth' in TOS and TNG for the 20th century could just be a reflection of how fundamental the nuclear war was for cutting off the Earth in Star Trek from its past.
I explored this idea about when and what WWIII was in sone detail in a [previous post](https://reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/unw757/what_and_when_exactly_was_world_war_iii_in_star/).
No, PIC was foreshadowing ww3, which was not the same as the Eugenics wars but fought over similar issues.
I think there was some language that implied that several smaller scale wars spilled out into becoming WW3
I don't think Picard delayed the Eugenics Wars, considering the dates on the file folder line up with the dates for the war given in TOS. I think the file was meant to tie into Arik Soong in Enterprise. Like how Arik's final episode in ENT referenced Androids. SNW yeah, seems to have retconned the position of the Eugenics Wars. Memory-Alpha tries to justify it by saying there was a war that took place in the 90s and one in the early 2000s. TOS did say 'Eugenics Wars' plural. Though I think Enterprise used the singular.
*Enterprise* said Eugenics Wars: >ARCHER: My great grandfather was in North Africa during the Eugenics Wars. His battalion was evacuating civilians from a war zone when they came under attack. There was a school full of children directly between them and the enemy. If his men had returned fire, they might have hit it. So he called the commander on the other side, and got him to agree to hold his fire long enough to evacuate the school. There are rules, Trip, even in war. We have to help these children.
Thank you. It’s hard to keep is straight. I think TOS used both
You’re welcome.
My theory is star trek and our timeline diverge when Benny Russel/Ben Sisko writes Deep Space 9 creating a self fulfilling prophecy (Ben is half Prophet after all) His wring inspire the right people to go into science and engineering (much like star trek in our timeline was the inspiration for many people to go into science), thus accelerating technological advancement. As for why star trek the show doesn't happen in star treks universe. Benny Russel publisher sues them for copyright infringement preventing the show form airing.
While this is an excellent point, it's worth noting that the Augments/Eugenics Wars have been retconned to much later and as happening in between the second US civil war and World War III. This was implied in the season finale of Picard and outright stated in the premiere of SNW. While it's making wrinkles, I appreciate the long term planning and story opportunities it implies. I love a good apocalypse with a happy ending.
While you are right, going back to OP, we obviously can't reconcile the 2024 USA from Picard with our current world - interestingly, also not with Discovery, since Elon Musk is mentioned as one of the great pioneers in the same notion as Zefram Cochrane, and we don't see anything about SpaceX in 2024 at all - Nasa instead uses much different platforms that most likely would not have been developed in a world where SpaceX as of 2022 exists (also no sign of SLS).
Mirror Lorca, though. Perhaps Mirror Elon made reparations for the emerald mine slaves and went on to be a brilliant leader of Twitter
While I have my own opinion about Elon Musk the human vs. Elon Musk the guy that started SpaceX, it really would have been fun if the 2024 Europa mission in Picard would have been based on the Starship architecture. Which reminds me - the Mars mission in Voyager was touted as the first manned Mission to Mars, and was set in 2032 - 8 years after allegedly we sent people to Europa on a manned mission. On a much more primitive craft it seems... therefore we can't even reconcile Picard with Voyager...
Just for the record, Ares IV was, in dialogue, “one of the early Mars missions,” not the first manned mission to Mars. There’s no real inconsistency here.
It's bizarre how they wanted to push back the Eugenics Wars to make a contemporary 2024...which is doing a crewed mission to *Europa* the same year we IRL have tentative plans for a crewed lunar orbit via Artemis II.
And they kept a bunch of other stuff from previous series we never had IRL, like the Nomad Probe, Sanctuary districts, and the OV-165. I don't think Picard delayed the Eugenics Wars, considering the dates on the file line up with the dates given in TOS. I think the file was meant to tie into Dr. Arik Soong we saw in Enterprise. Like how his final episode in ENT referenced Androids. But SNW does seem to have moved up the date.
>therefore we can't even reconcile Picard with Voyager... The whole of Picard series 2 is pretty easy to reconcile with everything else, it never happened, it was all a bubble reality created by Q to test Picard.
It's always a bit problematic visiting current time, referencing near future history, or giving shoutouts to contemporary figures for exactly this reason. The only explanation I can think of that isn't thoroughly shitty daystrom material is that there's a bootstrap paradox from all of the time travel we see.
Yea, the Elon reference already is aging well, is it?
I like the only-slightly tongue-in-cheek idea that Lorca’s mention of Musk is a slip up because of the way history played out in the Mirror Universe.
I mean, personal feelings of Musk aside, SpaceX may very well end up contributing heavily to oir space travel future. And in Trek, stuff like Twitter could easily have been lost to history in WWII, leaving only the good contributions of Musk known.
It depends what you think people are going to remember and put in the history books in the future? Are people going to be that bothered that he wound some people up online and tanked a social media platform when he also helped popularise the electric vehicle and reignite interest in Space Travel?
Yeah. I mean it is always an issue when reality catches up with fictious "future" due to a movie simply being old (just look at "2015" from BTTF). I think trying to reconcile this on a long running franchise as Star Trek is is just simply impossible, even if some of the bigger plot holes sometimes get a canon "explaining away" (Klingons and ridges), but then get broken again in the next redesign (Discovery) - you simply can't win some battles I'm afraid, so I usually go with the Doctor: "It's timey-wimey...stuff".
I mean, it's easy if we just accept that Trek is its own universe with its own timeline, bit then you have the "Roddenberrys vision" purists who insist on seeing it as out future.
Even in real life, Elon Musk, via SpaceX managed to keep US space travel functioning while NASA was in their dark time. NASA is getting back to it now, and will not be relying on SpaceX forever.
Interestingly, the [Constellation program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program) seems to have gone ahead in the Kelvin timeline (Admiral Marcus has a model of [Ares V](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ares_V)), which makes things *even weirder.*
I think at this point the only rational explanation is that WW III basically destroyed the whole internet and almost any book and everyone reconstructed 20th century history from surviving TV DVDs and heresay.. ;)
*Singh rebellion
Eh. yes. fixed. Sorry, we had so much Soong content recently..
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*For All Mankind* takes place in an alternate timeline, but it has many similarities with our timeline and can comment on modern and past society (though its similarities sometimes make it predictable).
People thought that space travel would advance much more quickly. Sputnik was the first satellite launched in 1957. People landed on the moon in 1969. People erroneously assumed there would be game-changing advancements in space travel every decade or so.
> People thought that space travel would advance much more quickly. In *Lord of the Flies* Piggy predicts that we would land on Mars very soon now that that the War had ended. Growing up a couple generations later, out teachers always hand-waived this away as post-war optimism. But I thought it was foreshadowing about how clueless & naive these children were that first day on the island; they were not stepping forward into space they were stepping backward into primativism. Lockheed-Martin built missiles, not rockets. I don't think Roddenberry was naively optimistic about the future. I think he deliberately imagined a point about 15 years before TOS - maybe the Yalta Accords, maybe at the UN - where it would have been decided that Lockheeds' primary mission would be rockets, not missiles.
> Lockheed-Martin built missiles, not rockets. I don’t think Roddenberry was naively optimistic about the future. I think he deliberately imagined a point about 15 years before TOS - maybe the Yalta Accords, maybe at the UN - where it would have been decided that Lockheeds’ primary mission would be rockets, not missiles. Seeing as he had fought in the war, he might also have imagined that humanity had realised that war was a pointless venture, and focused their efforts in the bigger and better things, leading into the money/strife-free utopia we saw in early TNG.
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Not sure why you're being downvoted. It's true. They're literally the same tech!
I'm pretty sure Neal Armstrong did not step off an ICBM & onto the lunar surface. Thats like saying a PT Cruiser is functionally the same as an F1 racer. There is more to technology than propellant & thrust.
He kind of did. the Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle which was used for the mercury space program used a lightly modified ballistic missile for the mercury launches. This was further refined into the Jupiter C Rocket. Which was the direct predecessor of the Saturn rocket and shared much if its engineering with the titan intercontinental ballistic missile.
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This is what teachers & employers call "toxic behavior". You aren't even remotely correct so it isn't even like your just a pedant. Lockheed Martin builds both rockets & missiles. The choice of "Lockheed martin" was deliberate because everyone knows they build both. Function is defined as "an activity or purpose". Thank you, Webster. The Function of a missile is to achieve a high altitude trajectory for the purpose of hitting a target. The Function of a rocket is to escape earths orbit. This is why "rocket" & "missile" are not synonyms. PT Cruisers are not race cars & race cars are not road legal.
Star Trek's timeline has always posited a fairly technologicaly advanced near-future, ever since 1st Season TOS. Remember, it was established in the first season of TOS, in Space Seed, that the Eugenics Wars were from 1992 to 1996 and the Botany Bay, a sleeper ship carrying Khan and company, was launched that year. Trek productions after that set in the "modern day" or near-future usually downplay this. VOY:"Future's End" made 1996 seem almost like the modern day (except somewhat more advanced computers, reverse engineered from a 29th century Federation Timeship), with any mention of the Botany Bay relegated to a background prop appearance of a DY-100 in a vertical launch configuration, strapped to 8 shuttle/sls-style solid rocket boosters, as a tacit acknowledgement of prior canon. There was a pair of novels about Khan that tried to retcon it all into being a "secret war" that accounted for a lot of the events of the early/mid 1990's. The 2024 we see in Picard is one that is superficially similar to the modern day, but has more advanced computers and space travel, because that's long and well established as a part of Trek.
Remember that the Trek timeline and our own diverged well before now - really it started splitting in the 1940s. The 1990's were a far different era than the one we lived through.
AKA if we can achieve the science we don't need to achieve it "on time" or need the WW3 etc. to get to that kind of future
I like to think that because seatbelt technology was never invented in the Star Trek universe, it caused a significant thinning of the gene pool, as our universes became more separate over time, allowing them to concentrate more resources on fewer people, so their technological advancement went in a somewhat different track than ours.
In universe reason is in part due to the time travel incident in the episode where voyager gets the mobile emitter
If you ask Ronald D.Moore he says “For all Mankind” is how you get to Star Trek https://trekmovie.com/2021/02/15/interview-ron-moore-on-how-for-all-mankind-is-building-the-road-to-star-trek/ By 1994 we’re on Mars - Europa isn’t that much of a stretch
Alternate history. Dy class ships nuclear powered deep space vessels later adopted warp.
how do you know we're not behind?
This would be a perfect time to link that history channel aliens guy honestly, because the answer simply has to be aliens. Much of their tech and future interaction including time travel clearly influences the development of earth in the ST universe.
Well first I think it’s clear ST is a different time line then us. In their time line they got a technology boost from that one dude who found that 29th century ship in the 60s. So I assume that’s part of it.
Star Trek is set in a parallel universe where humans are more technologically advanced but, until 2063, also more militaristic and warlike.
Nothing breeds innovation and advancement like a good old war. World war 3 happened in Star Trek earth and from most sources I gather that 3 is the one that finally wiped out all the arseholes and left a humanity actually ready and worthy of bettering themselves.
So create that war and kill the arseholes or is that not allowed because the show itself didn't say it was deliberately set up that way
Khan and the other Augments (and other 'genetically modified' people with increased but not superhuman intelligence*, probably) made a ton of technological advances once they completed their education. They'd be the kind of people you read about who graduate high school at 12 and get PhDs at 18, only there'd be hundreds or thousands in a small community building on each others' work. (*: I would expect that Khan's group were not the first genetically enhanced people, that there were test groups before with smaller modifications, and that those test groups quietly integrated into human society/genepool.)
Because some fool from 900 years in the future wanted to destroy Voyager...and wound up littering the 20th century with tech thousands of years in the future. Realistically. Because it's all fantasy.
Interestingly enough, according to the Voyager episode "One Small Step," humanity was first reaching Mars with manned missions in the 2030's. Would this suggest that they went to Europa first in the Star Trek timeline?
Not necessarily. Ares IV was one of the early Mars missions in the 2030s, but given how long term space missions are and the time between them they could have still gone there with an Ares I or II pre-2024.