What year does Where No Man Has Gone Before take place?

[Lt. Tyler]

If going by Gary Mitchell's statement to Dr. Dehner about the poem "Nightingale Woman" she chooses for Mitchell to recite in his mind as she reads it off the computer monitor, that was written by Tarbold in 1996. Then he goes on the say that is one of the most passionate love sonnets of the past couple of centuries. Therefore do we say this episode takes place in 2195-96?? 2165 instead of 2265?? Thoughts??

 

[MacLeod]

Well TOS never really defined when it was set, and besides 2265-1996 is only 269. So saying a couple of centuries would be fine as only two full centuries had passed.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Early episodes often seem to imply we're 200 years into the future, except for "The Squire of Gothos" and "The Omega Glory," which both imply a much later date.

Nevertheless, I like The Star Trek Chronology timeline, and it puts WNMHGB at 2265.

 

[uniderth]

Well if Where No Man Has Gone Before was set in 2165 instead of 2265 then the Valiant was launched in 1965. So earth's first ship to reach the edge of the galaxy was lost four years before we landed on the moon.

If we assume an average thickness of 1000lys for the galactic disc and the Valiant left at an "upward" trajectory, they would have to cover approximately 500 light years. Now if we are very generous and assume that they could accelerate to half the speed of light. Then it would take then 1000 years to reach the edge of the galaxy. So that would put the Valiant's launch date at about 965 A.D

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Well if Where No Man Has Gone Before was set in 2165 instead of 2265 then the Valiant was launched in 1965. So earth's first ship to reach the edge of the galaxy was lost four years before we landed on the moon.

Yes, but to be fair, landings are really tricky.

 

[Lt. Tyler]

Well if Where No Man Has Gone Before was set in 2165 instead of 2265 then the Valiant was launched in 1965. So earth's first ship to reach the edge of the galaxy was lost four years before we landed on the moon.

If we assume an average thickness of 1000lys for the galactic disc and the Valiant left at an "upward" trajectory, they would have to cover approximately 500 light years. Now if we are very generous and assume that they could accelerate to half the speed of light. Then it would take then 1000 years to reach the edge of the galaxy. So that would put the Valiant's launch date at about 965 A.D

Right it would make way more sense that Where No Man Has Gone Before takes place in the 2190's. One can say 2195 which would fit perfectly with the 200 years past the Eugenics Wars when we get to the episode "Space Seed". 1996-2196/2197.

 

[telerites]

If we assume an average thickness of 1000lys for the galactic disc and the Valiant left at an "upward" trajectory, they would have to cover approximately 500 light years. Now if we are very generous and assume that they could accelerate to half the speed of light. Then it would take then 1000 years to reach the edge of the galaxy. So that would put the Valiant's launch date at about 965 A.D

I'm glad I was more than slightly imbibed when I read this. It helped me think I understood it.

 

[Mytran]

That assumes the Valiant was slower than light - surely it was a FTL vehicle wasn't it? We know from plenty of other sources that Impulse Engines can accomplish this feat.

 

[Timo]

The above only assumes that the ship was pre-warp, as specified by the combination of dialogue from "Where No Man" and "Metamorphosis".

Whether pre-warp can be FTL remains debatable. It's dependent on free interpretation of plot twists, rather than on any clear dialogue. And certainly the spirit of "Metamorphosis" is that before space warp, that is, back when the Valiant was launched, there was no human access to the stars (heck, even at Cochrane's supposed death half a century later, things like "We estimate there are millions of planets with intelligent life" were in the unseen future). Which fits with Kirk declaring it impossible that the Valiant could be where she is...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[uniderth]

The point being that if WNMHGB is set in the 2100s and the Valiant was lost two hundred years prior then the Valiant would could be no more advanced than the space shuttle or DY-100.

Since the lost date was 200 years prior to the episode we must also determine the launch date. We know that the closest galaxy edge to us is approximately 500 ly.

So if we're going to keep Kirk's ship in the 22nd century then lets assume the Valiant was lost two hundred years before 2199 at the latest. That means that the ship was lost in 1999. From this date we have to figure out when it was launched. That will determine entirely upon the velocity of the ship. The Valiant's maximum velocity can only be determined by its acceleration and fuel supply. The finite fuel supply of the Valiant would determine the maximum amount of time it could burn its engines. This time would be the maximum time it could accelerate. We would have to make assumptions to determine these values. However considering that a ship from the 1999's has nowhere near the capability of coming close to light speed this makes the journey of the Valiant impossibly long. Not to mention, the further back in time we set the launch date the less technology we have to launch the ship with.

In other words, the 2060's is the best time for the Valiant to have been launched. This means that the date for WNMHGB can be no earlier than 2263.

 

[WarpFactorZ]

If going by Gary Mitchell's statement to Dr. Dehner about the poem "Nightingale Woman" she chooses for Mitchell to recite in his mind as she reads it off the computer monitor, that was written by Tarbold in 1996. Then he goes on the say that is one of the most passionate love sonnets of the past couple of centuries. Therefore do we say this episode takes place in 2195-96?? 2165 instead of 2265?? Thoughts??

Mitchell might have been a god, but perhaps he wasn't an English language god. Substituting "couple of" in place of "several" shouldn't be held as the gold standard for pinning down the timeline.

I mean, seriously, how often do you say "I'll be there in a couple minutes"? Do you mean you'll be there in exactly 2 minutes? Do people hold you accountable for failure to do so?

 

[Timo]

However considering that a ship from the 1999's has nowhere near the capability of coming close to light speed

Well, DY-100 might well have that capability for all we know. There are no massive fuel tanks in evidence: even if those sixteen containers, of which five remain, are fuel tanks, they won't defeat the rocket equation unless we assume the engine to be supernaturally good, and after that we really can't limit our thinking to "can't reach 90% lightspeed in mere weeks" or the like.

Basically, we can assume that it would take at least several weeks and preferably months for DY-100 to do an Earth-Mars run, or else there'd be little need for cryosleep. Months would be better, because that would leave room for the known 2018 improvement after which Ares IV and her ilk could do the run in weeks. So, what does that mean?

Months to Mars could still be done with "traditional" rockets making one hell of a launch burn and then Hohmanning their way to Mars for a second such burn. Weeks would probably require some sort of a constant-thrust engine. And if that engine doesn't have outsize fuel tanks (difficult to tell, but if Ares IV had those, where were they? She'd need some for the return, too!), then we're talking constant acceleration at low fuel costs and thus very potentially spelling "interstellar".

Which leads us to "Space Seed" where two-three centuries clearly took Khan far away from Earth. Give him an engine doing 0.45c and he can turn the objective 270 years into less than 250 subjective ones, making the claim about him sleeping for two rather than three centuries truthful. In which case he's 100+ ly out already. And that only requires him to maintain one-gee thrust for less than a year, then coasting.

That's one way to estimate minimum performance for DY-100. Perhaps the Valiant wouldn't get out to the Galactic Barrier in that time yet if being pre-2018 and therefore not entitled to performance better than DY-100. But she could arguably get there in the time allotted at any point after 2018, if we go by that 500 ly approximation (far enough that it's still the final frontier for Kirk, close enough that Kirk can get back from there within a few episodes, and perhaps the closest place for encountering this fictional barrier without it being obvious to the astronomers of Earth today).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Forbin]

I mean, seriously, how often do you say "I'll be there in a couple minutes"? Do you mean you'll be there in exactly 2 minutes? Do people hold you accountable for failure to do so?

Exactly. People approximate time spans all the - er, time. If I don't actually know off the top of my head when a historical event happened, in general conversation, I'll just say "a few hundred years ago." Don't hold me to mean exactly 300 years to the day! If it turns out to have happened in 1735 rather than 1715, well, sorry, I didn't look it up first.

 

[Timo]

And there are grades to this. "A few hundred" may be anything, really. "Three hundred" may be a misspoken two or four, but probably not one or five. 35 may be more specific than 30, being a case of "rounding to the closest five" against "rounding to the closest ten" - yet "275 years" is probably less specific than "270 years", as the former really denotes nine quarters of a century and thus is only accurate to the degree "quarter of a century" is, while 270 should ideally mean something between 266 and 274.

Then there are cultural differences. "Forty nights and days" is really just saying "a lot of nights and days", in a nondecimal system where "hundred" did not hold any special position as the marker for "a lot" yet, but the literally more "handy" (and footy!) forty did.

The challenge today is telling the "it happened a century ago" references in the Trek timeline from the "it happened in 2215 specifically" ones... Trek does have its share of the latter. So, quick, which category does the "sublight propulsion got better in 2018" one belong to...?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mytran]

So Timo, you're saying that the Valiant (although launched well over 2 centuries ago) perhaps only encountered the barrier a short time before Kirk did?

An intriguing idea - is there anything in the episode that clearly states the Valiant was destroyed that long ago?

 

[uniderth]

Captain's log, Star date 1312.4. The impossible has happened. From directly ahead, we're picking up a recorded distress signal, the call letters of a vessel which has been missing for over two centuries. Did another Earth ship once probe out of the galaxy as we intend to do? What happened to it out there? Is this some warning they've left behind?

KIRK: This is the Captain speaking. The object we encountered is a ship's disaster recorder, apparently ejected from the S.S. Valiant two hundred years ago.

So we know the Valiant was lost over two centuries ago. We know the disaster recorder was ejected two hundred years ago. And we also know that the disaster recorder contained information up until the captain giving an order to destroy his own ship.There is some wiggle room in the events but I think it's pretty much set as the disaster having occurred two hundred years ago. I suppose you could say the disaster recorder was launched two hundred years ago but remained in contact with the valiant via radio transmission until the more recent destruction of the Valiant

But then again we have these lines:
KIRK: Bring it aboard. Old-style ship recorder that could be ejected when something threatened the ship.
SPOCK: More like destroyed the ship in this case. Look at it. Burnt, pitted.

So because of the damage to the recorder marker it is believed to have been ejected when the ship was destroyed.

So it's pretty much pinned down to two hundred years ago.

 

[Mytran]

apparently ejected from the S.S. Valiant two hundred years ago.

Kirk states this well before Spock gets the full story out of the pod.

We could also argue that although contact was lost from the Valiant 200 years ago, that might be simply when it was swept away by the ion storm. The onboard computers would have recorded this event for when the crew were awakened

 

[Trimm]

So Timo, you're saying that the Valiant (although launched well over 2 centuries ago) perhaps only encountered the barrier a short time before Kirk did?

An intriguing idea - is there anything in the episode that clearly states the Valiant was destroyed that long ago?

Kirk's comment about the Valiant's old style impulse engines could be taken to mean that some time had passed, but the remark is open to other interpretations.

 

[Lt. Tyler]

I am not getting the physics of all of this entirely. What does all of this mean as to when the SS Valiant was launched from Earth?

 

[Capt.Kirk]

2265 or maybe earlier depending on how you look at it.