Earth's Second Dark Age: From Eugenics War to First Contact?

[T'Girl]

Kahn was atleast 30 when he went into hibernation in 1996. That means that the science that concieved him was in place in 1966.

Unless stated elsewise, I usually assume that characters are about the same age as the actors playing them, Montalban was 45, this would have Khan being born around the year 1950. Space Seed said selective breeding, and Khan doesn't seem like a first effort, so the breeding program started maybe in the nineteenth century.

Voyager traveled back to 1996 and yet we saw no indication of any sort of global struggle against genetic supermen

The 21st century is supposed to be a reach bitch on humanity, yet some kind of way we still manage to have an incredibly robust space program.

"Post Atomic Horror"

Previous world wars didn't actually involve fighting across the entire world. Perhaps one of the reasons Earth recovered as fast as it did following WW3 (sixty years) is that those countries best able to assist in the rebuilding largely sat the war out.

Similarly, Los Angeles looks the way it does in Past Tense is because America wasn't heavily involved in the Eugenic Wars. This might also explain the ability to have a robust space program.

And you could have a post war horror in one or two countries and have it be historically infamous, but the rest of the world never had anything remotely similar.



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[Christopher]

Unless stated elsewise, I usually assume that characters are about the same age as the actors playing them, Montalban was 45, this would have Khan being born around the year 1950. Space Seed said selective breeding, and Khan doesn't seem like a first effort, so the breeding program started maybe in the nineteenth century.

Which would actually make perfect sense, since eugenics was a big fad starting in the 1880s (Francis Galton coined the term in 1883), and there were a lot of programs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries working to breed "superior" humans, culminating in the Nazi movement. Of course, they were all motivated by racist and white-supremacist assumptions about human evolution and were thus doomed to failure, but if there had been one group sensible enough to understand that genetic diversity rather than uniformity was the key to species vigor, if they'd really tried to breed stronger and smarter and healthier humans rather than just whiter humans, then in the four or five generations that followed, they might have been able to produce a somewhat improved human breed, if they'd been very lucky. It might still be necessary to assume they'd had an anachronistically advanced understanding of genetic engineering, but at least it would be reasonable to assume it was an outgrowth of the eugenics craze of the early 20th century. That's probably what Carey Wilber had in mind when he conceived of "Space Seed."

Previous world wars didn't actually involve fighting across the entire world. Perhaps one of the reasons Earth recovered as fast as it did following WW3 (sixty years) is that those countries best able to assist in the rebuilding largely sat the war out.

Similarly, Los Angeles looks the way it does in Past Tense is because America wasn't heavily involved in the Eugenic Wars. This might also explain the ability to have a robust space program.

Right. Not one war in the 20th century was fought on continental US soil, except for one or two minor firebombing attacks by Japan in WWII that barely got into the history books. So it's perfectly plausible that the continental US would've been untouched by the Eugenics Wars as well.

 

[wulfio]

What the problem with "Carpenter Street"? Other than time travel, I've forgotten its plot.

Carpenter street is our 2004, not treks 2004.

 

[Timo]

Unless stated elsewise, I usually assume that characters are about the same age as the actors playing them, Montalban was 45, this would have Khan being born around the year 1950. Space Seed said selective breeding, and Khan doesn't seem like a first effort, so the breeding program started maybe in the nineteenth century.

Agreed. However, we can also argue that supermen reach physical maturity faster (see Khan's supposed 15-year-old children in ST2), and Khan is already a bit past his prime and looking like Montalban when he's still just 30 chronologically.

I trust the creation of the supermen indeed took generations, and may have begun centuries prior to Khan, or the selective breeding references would make little sense. But no doubt modern technologies were implemented as soon as they became available, too.

Not one war in the 20th century was fought on continental US soil, except for one or two minor firebombing attacks by Japan in WWII that barely got into the history books. So it's perfectly plausible that the continental US would've been untouched by the Eugenics Wars as well.

And other modern superpowers, even though more closely in continental touch with each other, might have been able to afford immunity in the conflict, too, by various technological and political means.

So, while WWIII was devastating, it need not have been global. However, ST:FC does make references to global scope: "major cities destroyed" would be an odd expression if only referring to major cities on one or two continents...

OTOH, "major cities" could well be a category that excludes small towns such as New York, Moscow or London, if one goes by sheer population. Civilization might have gone quiet even if the traditional western capitals were still standing, for reasons unrelated to the destruction of Mexico City or Beijing or Kolkata.

Carpenter street is our 2004, not treks 2004.

Why should there be a visible difference? Trek doesn't call for flying cars in 2004. And the United States seems unchanged in the 2010s still, save for that Sanctuary District thing which is a very minor adjustment - one that the average Joe is not supposed to even notice, as the very point is to swipe certain things under the carpet!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

What the problem with "Carpenter Street"? Other than time travel, I've forgotten its plot.

Carpenter street is our 2004, not treks 2004.

It's unrealistic to expect a long-running franchise not to update its ideas to keep current with reality. In Marvel Comics, the characters originally got their powers in the early 1960s, but their origin stories have been progressively bumped forward in time. Tony Stark now got his injuries in Afghanistan rather than Vietnam. Nick Fury still fought in WWII, but has stayed young using a life-extension formula. And so on.

The problem with "Carpenter Street" is that it's a boring, pointless episode that does nothing with its time-travel premise.

 

[Nerys Myk]

What the problem with "Carpenter Street"? Other than time travel, I've forgotten its plot.

Carpenter street is our 2004, not treks 2004.

That tends to be the case when ever Trek travels to the present. (See "Tomorrow Is Yesterday", "Assignment Earth", The Voyage Home, "Futures End")The writers and most of the audience aren't interested in the "present" being an alternate reality. The idea the Trek is firmely set in an alternate reality is a fannish one that the folks who actually make the show tend to ignore. They'll throw in a few fictional characters or entities, but its pretty much the world outside our windows.

Anyhow, the 2004 seen in Star Trek is short on details, as "Carpenter St." is the only episode set in that year and takes place in Detroit. So there wouldn't be much to contradict anyway.

 

[Christopher]

^Yup, that's exactly my problem with the episode. They're in 2004 Detroit, but they don't do anything to justify the setting beyond some superficial "future people trying to figure cars out" gags -- something that "A Piece of the Action" already did much more effectively. Why was it even a time travel story? It's like the network said "Hey, guys, you haven't done anything with the Temporal Cold War in a while," and the producers groaned in protest and just halfheartedly decided to set their story about the Xindi bioweapon in the present day as the minimum possible amount of effort to satisfy the network request.

 

[The Wormhole]

I looked at Carpenter Street as trying to fill the perceived "need" to have the Enterprise characters interacting in the contemporary world. Which already seemed redundant considering the pitch of Enterprise was that these characters are closer to modern day humanity than anyone on the other shows are.

 

[T'Girl]

Carpenter street is our 2004, not treks 2004.

Alright, what should we have seen in Carpenter Street that we didn't? Or what needed to be missing?

It looked like a pretty average American city of 2004, I think that's what it was intended to be.

 

[The Wormhole]

Carpenter street is our 2004, not treks 2004.

Alright, what should we have seen in Carpenter Street that we didn't? Or what needed to be missing?

Some kind of foreshadowing of Zephram Cochrane's warp flight that's still sixty years away. You know, despite the fact Cochrane won't be born for another thirty years.

A character named Cochrane would have been nice. Perhaps the Xindi were trying a Terminator-style plan of hunting down Cochrane's parents before they conceived Zephram.

 

[Christopher]

^Why bring Cochrane into it? First Contact already did "time travelers trying to prevent Cochrane's flight," so where's the value in copying that? Not everything in Earth history revolves around Cochrane.

 

[The Wormhole]

I was mostly being sarcastic. Honestly, I don't know how to do "Trek's 2004" that would be any different than the actual 2004, and involving Cochrane was the first thought that came to mind.

Although, giving the matter more thought, maybe some reference to Sanctuary Districts or something? I don't know.

 

[T'Girl]

...maybe some reference to Sanctuary Districts or something? I don't know.

The Sanctuary Districts were fifteen plus years in the Trek-verse's future.

We just don't have a great deal on this period in Trek history, Nomad was launched about this time and that's about it.

If you want to include Trek fiction like the Spaceflight Chronology (which I love) a few years after 2004 the first child will be born on the moon, and the first L-5 colony will be finished.

 

[killerbee256]

Here's hoping Nutrek never does a time travel movie.

 

[Christopher]

^They did one in 2009.

 

[Sci]

The thing is that all of the Treks have given us radically contradictory information about the late 20th and 21st century. The 21st century is supposed to be a reach bitch on humanity, yet some kind of way we still manage to have an incredibly robust space program. The Charybdis, Christopher's mission to Saturn, the Mars probe, Friendship One etc are all happening during a period of utter chaos and collapse on Earth.

I don't think it necessarily follows that horror and chaos on Earth precludes scientific accomplishments -- particularly if those missions were few and far between. After all, the United States landed the first human on the Moon at the same time it was caught up in an incredibly barbaric, blood-soaked war in Vietnam.

All that said, DS9 gives us the best picture of what a world hurtling toward war might have looked like in "Past Tense." It shows us a US that is in something of an economic decline and a government going to rather extreme measures to control the situation. More importantly it paints a picture of a Europe that's falling apart and suggests that the situation in the US will get much worse before it gets better.The Neo Trotskyite movement in Europe and chaos it causes is supposed to spread.

Well, no, you're misremembering the episode. Nothing in "Past Tense" established the Neo-Trotskite movement to be responsible for the social and economic problems depicted in the episode.

Rather, "Past Tense" established that France, then under the governance of a Gaullist party, was gripped by social unrest and student protests in the 2020s as part of the same pattern of economic decline and mass impoverishment that led to to the creation of the Sanctuary Districts in the United States (back when they were meant to help people, before they were turned into urban concentration camps for the poor). The Neo-Trotskites came to power after this, promising to restore order, but they were unable to end the unrest.

"Past Tense" makes it very clear that the problem is mass impoverishment and lack of government action to fight inequality which caused the Bell Riots and the other bits of social unrest throughout the planet -- a problem with capitalism, in other words. The rise of a Neo-Trotskyite government implies that a turn to one anti-capitalist movement on the radical left was how the French tried to deal with the issue, but that's a side-note -- nothing about the episode establishes or even implies that the Neo-Trotskyites are the ones causing the major world problems.

All we do know about WWIII is that at least once faction in the War was called the ECoN (we'll assume that that is Eastern Coalition Nations).

In their commentary for Star Trek: First Contact, writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga note that originally, the references to the ECON/Eastern Coalition were references to China -- the implication being that the U.S. and China were the main combatants in World War III. This was changed to avoid offending anybody.... but it's a fairly reasonable scenario for a third world war.

 

[F. King Daniel]

If the Marvel movieverse can be essentially our world but with superheroes and villains and other nutty stuff dating back to the 1940's, then Star Trek's 2004 can be essentially ours, with all the Eugenics Wars stuff having gone on during the 90's and little differences like Henry Starling being the Bill Gates equivalent.

 

[killerbee256]

^They did one in 2009.

Correction: time travel to the real world present.

 

[dswynne1]

It's been ages since I've seen TOS. But I'm speaking from the 90's trek point of view, when it came to the timeline. Off the top of my head, I'd say they tried to maintain continuity. And when they came up with something new, it wasn't a massive plot hole.

ENT didn't care whatsoever for continuity. Carpenter Street, and the Borg episode completely disregarded the established timeline. And that's just 2 episodes subjects I'm referencing. That's not factoring in the glaring issues in many sub plots and plot points, etc. The whole show was essentially a walking plot hole. The only episode I can really recall that doesn't disregard continuity is Carbon Creek. There was nothing overtly invasive about what happened, and it was just a nice story that began, and wrapped itself up in 1 hour.

To be fair, there was an active temporal cold war going on, in which factions from the distant future were manipulating events in the past. Personally, I can see ENT being the result of the this conflict. Heck, the Eugenics War could have been the result of the temporal cold war.

 

[dswynne1]

On a side note, in the 'Trek timeline, I wonder what we posters would have been up to during and after the Eugenics War. Would any of us been a part of this conflict? Would we have been on the battlefield fighting for or against the Augments? Part of the "loyal" citizenry, or would any of us been insurgents? Heck, would any of us been Augments, for or against humanity? Or, would we have been on the sidelines, depending upon how involved in the conflict our respective nations would have been? Some of us were already adults circa 1992, so this would be an interesting thing to talk about...