Alien to Alien Crossbreeding Examples?

[Markonian]

Yeah. I also rewatched it two days ago. That ending is really a downer. Spending the rest of your life in that small jungle compound, without ever visiting a place in the rest of the universe, because you fear you wouldn't be accepted anywhere.

In the novel Star Trek: Klingon Empire: A Burning House, Ba'el becomes a member of Worf's diplomatic staff in 2376.


Btw, Seska's child is named Sessen and has become the maje of his tribe in Star Trek Online: Delta Rising.

Additional canon examples include the (partially Human) hybrids Agent "Daniels" and the time-pod occupant from ENT: "Future Tense". Plus, Kes and Neelix considered having children. (VOY: Elogium)

And Neelix shouldn't even count.

Why?
Neelix is a Talaxian. His grandfather was a Mylean. Myleans are a different species than Talaxians.
That means Neelix is hybrid.

 

[borgboy]

In the String Theory trilogy there was Kes's weird sort-of son, an Ocampa/Nacene hybrid.

In New Frontier there's a Vulcan/Hermat hybrid.

In the DS9 relaunch novels Rom and Leeta had a baby, a Bajoran/Ferengi hybrid.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Why?
Neelix is a Talaxian. His grandfather was a Mylean. Myleans are a different species than Talaxians.
That means Neelix is hybrid.

I was being somewhat facetious, but except for a few Talaxians (in episodes I didn't watch) and an alien-altered Neelix, we have seen neither of those species. The makers imagined a Talaxian, showed us a Talaxian and told us he is a hybrid to make it sound more interesting, without actually making it more interesting.

 

[Oerdin]

The whole cross breeding thing always got to me as there really no way species from other planets could interbreed.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

The whole cross breeding thing always got to me as there really no way species from other planets could interbreed.

There's also no way for all of them to look human. However, each one significantly increases the chances for the other.

 

[borgboy]

There is that whole thing about the ancient race that seeded the galaxy with humanoid DNA, thus making many races, including Vulcans, Human, Klingons and Cardassians to name a few, all off shoots of the same parent race and thus cross compatible to breed with each other. I like the whole set up of the major races in the galaxy being long distant kin, it gives a metaphor for all people being part of each other. Plus, I do think hybrid cross breeding is interesting. There's a lot of stories told from hybrids like Spock who are part of two different worlds but not belonging wholly to either. That's something I identify with as something of an outsider myself.

In the novels Sarek and Amanda needed help to create Spock thru in vitro fertilization, and I think that it's said that Jadzia Dax and Worf would need medical help to reproduce too. Other races seem to reproduce naturally without any help. We definitely have examples of Klingon/Human and Bajoran/Cardassian naturally reproducing without medical help.

 

[Orphalesion]

In the novels Sarek and Amanda needed help to create Spock thru in vitro fertilization, and I think that it's said that Jadzia Dax and Worf would need medical help to reproduce too. Other races seem to reproduce naturally without any help. We definitely have examples of Klingon/Human and Bajoran/Cardassian naturally reproducing without medical help.

Betazoid/Human and Betazoid/Klingon also seems to work without issues.

 

[Christopher]

Betazoid/Human and Betazoid/Klingon also seems to work without issues.

We don't know that medical help wasn't involved in those cases. If you're referring to Deanna, Kestra, and the Worf/Troi children in "Parallels," we have no reason to think that any of them were conceived by accident, so it's entirely possible that they were conceived with medical intervention.

According to the Destiny novel trilogy by David Mack, Riker and Troi needed special fertility treatments to deal with their genetic incompatibilities, and even with those treatments, they had great difficulty conceiving a child. (They eventually succeeded, though, and their daughter Natasha was born in my own Titan novel Over a Torrent Sea.)

 

[Nebusj]

There is that whole thing about the ancient race that seeded the galaxy with humanoid DNA, thus making many races, including Vulcans, Human, Klingons and Cardassians to name a few, all off shoots of the same parent race and thus cross compatible to breed with each other. I like the whole set up of the major races in the galaxy being long distant kin, it gives a metaphor for all people being part of each other.

It may have some metaphorical value, and I suppose it provides a clear answer to people who insist on having an explicit reason that Our Heroes keep finding humanoids [1], but it's really almost as ridiculous a treatment of biology as, well, any of the tech talk is a treatment of physics.

[1] The Original Trek gave an implicit reason, with Spock mentioning once or twice that humanoids were a tiny minority of the galaxy's population; the implication would then be that the Enterprise found humanoids because it went to places it had reason to think humanoids would be found. This requires the assumption that humanoids are generically likely to turn up repeatedly, but, it is a big galaxy after all.

 

[borgboy]

It's a bit OT, but this reminded me that one of the New Adventures Doctor Who novels in the 90s established that humanoids were the dominant life form in the universe because of interference in the early period of the universe by the Time Lords in their early meddling days. The menace of the book were alien horrors from another reality or something that should've existed without the Time Lord's interference.
I think that's also a great explanation for the abundance of alien humanoid life, and it added a richness to the history of the franchise, not that I expect anyone writing the tv series is even aware of this story.

 

[Christopher]

The Original Trek gave an implicit reason, with Spock mentioning once or twice that humanoids were a tiny minority of the galaxy's population; the implication would then be that the Enterprise found humanoids because it went to places it had reason to think humanoids would be found.

That was exactly the intention, as spelled out in the original series pitch and bible. The ship was specifically assigned to explore Earthlike planets, with the underlying assumption that parallel conditions would produce parallel physical and cultural evolution (a conceit to justify using humanoid aliens, backlot sets, and leftover props and costumes from historical pictures). Implicitly, there were plenty of more exotic aliens out there, just not on the planets the ship tended to visit. And indeed TOS gave us a bunch of weird monsters -- salt vampires, Gorn, Hortas, Mugatos, Melkots, Excalbians, etc. Ironically, the '80s and '90s shows, with their much higher effects budgets and more advanced makeup technology, featured far less diverse aliens than TOS showed and implied. Although Enterprise made up for this somewhat by featuring a larger range of CGI creatures.

It's a bit OT, but this reminded me that one of the New Adventures Doctor Who novels in the 90s established that humanoids were the dominant life form in the universe because of interference in the early period of the universe by the Time Lords in their early meddling days. The menace of the book were alien horrors from another reality or something that should've existed without the Time Lord's interference.

The explanation I remember from the New Adventures was the one from Lucifer Rising by Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore, involving "morphic fields," an energy that connects living things throughout the universe so that they influence each other's form (based on a bit of real-world New Age pseudoscience gobbledegook). According to the book, Gallifreyans were the first intelligent species in the universe, and their form echoed through the morphic field and increased the chance that other species would evolve into the same form; and as more humanoid species accumulated, it further increased the odds that later species would also be humanoid. So it wasn't active meddling by the Time Lords, just a sort of natural metaphysical resonance. (The concept of morphic fields was also used in Torchwood: Miracle Day.)

 

[Orphalesion]

Betazoid/Human and Betazoid/Klingon also seems to work without issues.

We don't know that medical help wasn't involved in those cases. If you're referring to Deanna, Kestra, and the Worf/Troi children in "Parallels," we have no reason to think that any of them were conceived by accident, so it's entirely possible that they were conceived with medical intervention.

According to the Destiny novel trilogy by David Mack, Riker and Troi needed special fertility treatments to deal with their genetic incompatibilities, and even with those treatments, they had great difficulty conceiving a child. (They eventually succeeded, though, and their daughter Natasha was born in my own Titan novel Over a Torrent Sea.)

There is also the Quater-Betazoid Deanna has a fling with in "The Price" who was the only one of five children to inherit psionic abilities. How did they get five children if even Half-Betazoids and Humans had so much trouble conceiving?
The Pierces in "Parallels" also had some Betazoid heritage. And there's Deanna's younger brother who is a Betazoid/Tavian. The Series makes it seem like Betazoids have ease conceiving with all sorts of species.

 

[Christopher]

There is also the Quater-Betazoid Deanna has a fling with in "The Price" who was the only one of five children to inherit psionic abilities. How did they get five children if even Half-Betazoids and Humans had so much trouble conceiving?

Nobody's saying it's impossible. Again, as I said, Riker and Troi were eventually able to have a child -- I should know, since I wrote the kid's birth scene and came up with her name. The point is simply that it requires medical assistance to compensate for the genetic and biochemical differences between species.

For instance, Amanda carrying Spock in her womb is fraught with problems because her blood is iron-based while his is copper-based; they'd be mutually toxic to each other. So there'd have to be some kind of technological intervention for Spock's conception and gestation to be possible at all. Spock's very existence proves it can be done, but it can only be done as a planned and technologically assisted pregnancy. It's not the sort of thing where you could get knocked up by accident because you forgot to take your pill that week. (Which is why I find the existence of Tora Ziyal to be rather preposterous. Bajorans and Cardassians are so different physiologically that they shouldn't be able to procreate by accident.)

Think of how many human couples have trouble conceiving on their own, but are able to have children with the assistance of fertility clinics. Just because two individuals can't procreate unassisted, that doesn't mean they can't procreate at all. They just need some help.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

I would have liked it if another storyline was eventually chosen for the explanation.

There are these others aliens that we keep avoiding – Tholians, Gorn, Melkots – as if there's an almost instinctive mistrust that goes both ways between humanoids and non-humanoids. It is eventually discovered that early homo species on Earth, considered unintelligent and insentient at the time, were taken as slaves by the more advanced civilizations in the galaxy, and due to their surprising almost people-like abilities ended up flooding half the quadrant. Eventually, through different means, most freed themselves, and – now everywhere and more curious than everybody – began to become the most commonly seen species in our part of space. But once we met again, we had diverged so much that we were no longer the same species, and the link between our cultures had been severed, practically making us aliens to one another.

I think that ties well with most of what we had. The enslavement of Orion women could be one of the remnants of that past. Romulans and Vulcans underestimated the scale of their shared ancestry. The Greek gods, whom I never liked as characters until STC, are now a natural product of our place in galaxy – though I would have also included proto-Romulans from a space-origin cult visiting Earth at the same time to explain "Balance of Terror". We can surprisingly interbreed. And to make it all dandy, I am sure the Klingons will tell you that they have nothing in common with Romulans and that a Klingon would never allow themself to be enslaved.

As budgets grow and the exploration goes deeper into the galaxy, we meet more unusual species, and eventually humanize them too like District 9 did.

I am somewhat less comfortable with appealing to higher powers, i.e. ancient aliens – now extinct – seeding the galaxy with us as their children. Ah, whatever, it is just that "The Chase" bothered me for some reason.

ETA: Actually, I had no problem with human-looking aliens, until Kirk tells an officer "Spock's Chinese". Yeah, it was funny. But it would have been funnier if Spock wasn't supposed to be a different life form, and the joke was hiding a different history.

 

[Orphalesion]

Nobody's saying it's impossible. Again, as I said, Riker and Troi were eventually able to have a child -- I should know, since I wrote the kid's birth scene and came up with her name. The point is simply that it requires medical assistance to compensate for the genetic and biochemical differences between species.

For instance, Amanda carrying Spock in her womb is fraught with problems because her blood is iron-based while his is copper-based; they'd be mutually toxic to each other.

Think of how many human couples have trouble conceiving on their own, but are able to have children with the assistance of fertility clinics. Just because two individuals can't procreate unassisted, that doesn't mean they can't procreate at all. They just need some help.

I understand that and I understood you the first time when you wrote that you are the author of "Over a Torrent Sea". And so what you say is good for the Novel Verse.

The thing is just Will and Deanna having trouble conceiving doesn't seem quite to fit in context with the Series Verse, considering that Deanna was already 50% human and that the other family went through the process five times. Why would they, if they had such trouble conceiving unassisted? Usually when couples have trouble conceiving they go through the process successfully once or twice, not five times.
And why would Deanna have been genetically bonded to a human if they would have trouble creating offspring unassisted? (not that anything else about Haven made sense, but still....)
And would Deanna also have the same problems conceiving with a Betazoid male?

You give no indication at the type of assistance Will and Deanna needed, was it just fertility meds or a treatment that would prevent Deanna's body from rejecting the fertilized ovum/fetus? If so did she need them for the whole duration of the pregnancy or just initially? If the treatment was very elaborate and potentially harmful like the example with Spock, it again makes it weird that Devioni Rai's mother would go through with it five (+ considering that a more extensive procedure had a higher chance of failing) times.
Plus Betazoid/Human hybrids seem to be more common than Vulcan/Human ones (even factoring in Romulan ones)

Again I'm not doubting your authority as far as the Novel Verse goes, but I consider it to be its own thing, not necessarily 100% in synch with the Series Verse and what's written there does not necessarily impact the Series Verse, as far as I understand, just as the Abrams verse is its own thing and indeed one series within the Novel Verse can be its own thing from the rest of it. Different canons.
I can see that making them have trouble conceiving made for the more story possibilities, but making it due to Deanna's 1/2 Betazoid DNA doesn't necessarily mesh with some snippets we got from the show.
Of course I'm also not saying that a line of dialog in one episode should stand in the way of a potentially good story a new author wants to tell. I'm just saying that I was talking about the Betazoids as shown on the series.

Of course the two situations could be easily reconciled by saying that either Deanna or Will had problems conceiving/siring period, without bringing their species into it. Or that Rai's mother simply had a mix of Betazoid/Human genes that made it easier for her to conceive with his father.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

What he's trying to say is that these things aren't really inconsistent. For them to be, you need an absolute or an almost absolute – not difficult, but impossible or nearly impossible. It's an example used among statisticians on how logic doesn't work on non-absolutes – it's nearly impossible for an American to become the president of the US, but so far 44 Americans have become one in spite of that.

Also, statistically, having a second, third and fourth child successfully is not independent of having your first child. Having done it once makes the rest easier, whether it is because of experience, or because part of the product of the medical assistance is reusable.

Or they had twins.

 

[Christopher]

The thing is just Will and Deanna having trouble conceiving doesn't seem quite to fit in context with the Series Verse, considering that Deanna was already 50% human and that the other family went through the process five times. Why would they, if they had such trouble conceiving unassisted? Usually when couples have trouble conceiving they go through the process successfully once or twice, not five times.

You're overgeneralizing. Of course it would happen differently with different couples, since individuals are not totally uniform. The novel didn't say that all human-Betazoid couples would have as hard a time as Will and Deanna did; indeed, it's a major plot point that it was far more difficult for them than they expected even after the fertility treatments. And since Deanna is herself half-human, that implicitly proves that her own conception was not nearly as difficult. But the treatments were still necessary from the get-go, even before they started having troubles. There are biological obstacles that all human-Betazoid couples need medical help to overcome, but Will and Deanna had an exceptionally hard time overcoming them.

Let me make this clear: I am absolutely not saying that interspecies breeding is prohibitively difficult in Trek. That's obviously an absurd premise, because there are so many interspecies hybrids in Trek. I'm simply saying that it makes more sense if such conceptions require medical assistance. It's like warp drive. Going faster than light is an enormous physical hurdle, just as interspecies breeding is an enormous biological hurdle. Both are impossible by current medical science, but Federation technology is so advanced that both can be achieved routinely and with a seeming lack of difficulty, except in unusual cases. But just because the technology makes it look easy, that doesn't mean it can be done without technology -- or at least that it's plausible when the show claims it can, as in Ziyal's case.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

My memory of DS9 is limited, but was it ever explicitly said that Dukat had no medical help in having a daughter? He might have wanted a child to blackmail his Bajoran girlfriend. I know that him seeking medical help to get a child with a Bajoran woman is... hard to believe, but it might have happened.

 

[Christopher]

My memory of DS9 is limited, but was it ever explicitly said that Dukat had no medical help in having a daughter? He might have wanted a child to blackmail his Bajoran girlfriend. I know that him seeking medical help to get a child with a Bajoran woman is... hard to believe, but it might have happened.

Given that he initially intended to kill Ziyal due to the impropriety of having a half-Bajoran bastard daughter, it seems unlikely that he would've wanted to conceive her on purpose. And in "Covenant," Dukat seemed surprised when his Bajoran cult member's baby turned out to be half-Cardassian, as if he didn't realize he was the father.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Thanks, I seem to remember now. Yeah. It is weird indeed.