Zefram Cochrane of Alpha Centuri

Okay, so Coon spelled it right in the script. Figures -- Shatner must've mispronounced it, and the transcriber followed what was spoken.

 

Thanks, for the script quote, Maurice.

Well, I'm not convinced that the original intent was that he was born on Earth. I rather suspect it wasn't, and that the idea was that he was a human born to human colonists who'd gotten to Alpha Centauri on sleeper ship without space warp. Perhaps the idea was that they'd discovered something out in space that led him to invent the warp drive, or maybe he was motivated to improve conditions so far out from Earth.

However, in light of ST:FC, it's in no way a stretch to have it like "Lawrence of Arabia." It's perfectly natural that the inventor of the warp drive might move out and claim a home away from Earth.

 

Quite so - Metamorphosis alone is open to many interpretations, and the human scientist simply living in an exotic location when making the discovery sounds the simplest and likeliest.

But we don't have to wait until ST:FC to start favoring the idea that warp came first and Alpha Centauri only later, as 1980s Trek quickly establishes the overall timeline of Trek and forces us to think Cochrane discovered warp "early", then describes Earth's early starflight efforts and makes us think actual interstellar colonization began "late".

Indeed, we still lack evidence that human interstellar colonies would have been founded before the invention of warp. And we learn that the Moon and Mars (admittedly more hostile and difficult locations than Class M planets orbiting distant stars) were colonized after warp, too!

But it sounds unlikely that some eccentric genius/billionaire/fanatic/other wouldn't have gone to Alpha Centauri in the 20th century already, given the level of Earth tech and the nature of its inhabitants in Trek...

Timo Saloniemi

 

"Please don't tell me how to do it. It sickens me."



Incidentally, the author of that wonderful transcript site (Chrissie/chakoteya) is quite open to corrections, which are indeed sometimes needed. There is contact info on the main page.

 

I"m Jean-Luc Picard of starship enterprise.!!!!

 

Yes, we must make some strange twist to explain events in the 1990's through mid 21st century. The first few missions to Mars only happened in 2030's while earth has had DY-100 sleeper ships for almost forty years.

Plus the ridiculously late "colonization" date for Mars, 2103 I believe. What was earth doing with all these advanced long range spacecraft during the thirty years since the ninties?

Personally I like the spaceflight chronology stuff for the early sublight voyages to Alpha Centauri and Bernard's Star. It would have to play out different in that once they arrived they found no intelligent life on these other planets.

 

There's nothing to say that the Ares series missions would have been "first". To the contrary, they seemed downright routine, with a rescue flight available within "weeks". That means either frequent and regular Mars flights, or superpropulsion on par with "Space Seed", or both.

Even this whole "Ares IV" thing may be misleading. Is it the mission designation, "Apollo 11" style? Or the name of the reusable spaceship, on her sixteenth Mars mission? Note that Kelly hails the ship's own surface team by saying "Ares Four here" - would Mike Collins have hailed Neil Armstrong with "Apollo Eleven here, how's it doing on the surface?" or with "Columbia calling Eagle"...?

The odd thing is the lack of artificial gravity aboard the orbiting part of Ares IV. Why either omit it, or shut it down, when it was such an obvious element of the Botany Bay already?

Waging devastating space wars, perhaps? There might have been a prominent colony on Mars in 2003, then none in 2015, then one again in 2041, then none in 2053. After 2063, there'd be much more attractive goals for colonization, so Mars would be settled for good in 2103 only.

Timo Saloniemi

 

The idea of Cochrane being of Alpha Centauri comes from the novel Federation, where in it Cochrane and Brack (Flint) start extrasolar colonies on Alpha Centauri and other systems 'closest' (by warp drive) to Sol. Cochrane had already been on AC as a colonist for years, and had made the first trip to that planet in the novel.

 

We see Mars in the 2150s in ENT, and the terraforming is still ongoing, with hardware in place and active for diverting comets to Mars for their water. Supposedly, air pressure at least had increased by then, as it was possible to discard environmental suits (and just wear breathing masks?) - but this was a dialogue reference, not something we actually saw up close.

A reference I missed: the Millennium Gate structure on Earth, built in 2012, "served as the model for the first Martian colony". So strike that 2003 date from my tongue-in-cheek list - but also tell me whether and how a century-old building on Earth would serve as a "model" for the 2103 colony! We could surmise that by 2103, building colonies in Mars was a triviality, and the builders decided to have a bit of fun and make their structure look like an Earth landmark, even when there was no functional advantage to that... A bit like pyramids in Las Vegas. If colonization was such a lighthearted effort then, it may have been advanced enough in the 2030s already to allow Zeppy C to live in Alpha Centauri.

Timo Saloniemi

 

FWIW, I pulled the actual shooting script (the "Revised Final Draft," dated May 3, 19670. It, too, retains the proper "Centauri" spelling.

Maybe it's a Shatnerian Canadian pronunciation, a la "sabotage."

 

I'm not convinced the Botany Bay had gravity plating. Its core body is cylindrical, so the cryogenic chambers could've been in a rotating centrifuge section like on the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Granted, the set construction is hard to reconcile with that, but it makes more sense than assuming the existence of gravity plating in 1996.

No, Shatner's not the only person to misread "Centauri" as if it were related to "century." After all, the latter is a more familiar, everyday word for most people. It's the kind of false analogy that underlies a lot of common misspellings. Like the common use of the phrase "to jive with" to mean to agree or correspond with, when it's actually "to jibe with." ("Jive" meaning to lie or talk nonsense.)

 

Well, I think we're meant to take the writers wording literally, meaning Zefram Cochrane is from Alpha Centauri. They hadn't set anything in stone yet and it was purposely left vague so as to be open for interpretation; and it was just a throw-away line.

 

Cochrane was repeatedly and explicitly called human. The Companion created near-exact Earth conditions for him on the planetoid. He said "It's not Earth, but it's home." And he was uncomfortable with the idea of romantic attachment with nonhumans. Except for the single reference to Alpha Centauri, everything else in the episode creates the impression that he's an Earthman. Yes, he was known for being "of Alpha Centauri," but probably because he settled there later in life.

Now, maybe Gene Coon might've assumed that humans settled Alpha Centauri at sublight before Cochrane invented warp drive. After all, "Space Seed" assumed that the technology for sublight interstellar travel existed by the 1990s, and Cochrane was born 235 years before "Metamorphosis," so it kind of works out (as long as you go with a later time frame for TOS than "Space Seed" implied). But that's clearly not true now, given what First Contact established.

And any fan theories about some human colony seeded on Alpha Centauri by the Preservers or something are just that, fan theories. There's no way Gene Coon had anything that convoluted in mind, especially since the Preservers wouldn't be invented for another year.

 

For what it's worth, the book Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology by Stan and Fred Goldstein and Rick Sternbach has some commentary on the issue.

They speculated that, after a five year journey, the UNSS Icarus arrived at Alpha Centauri and the crew met one of the top Centaurian scientists, Zefrem Cochrane. The alien scientist Cochrane speculated that it could be possible to travel through a space warp to achieve hyper-light speeds. The Science Officer on the Icarus speculated that the annihilation of matter and anti-matter might achieve the power necessary to warp space as Cochrane suggested.

At any rate, this book is from 1979, and would seem to predate the book Crisis on Centaurus." If Coon's original intent can't be divined, the "Cochrane is one of the first Centaurians the Earth spacefarers encountered" theory would seem to be the earliest "stake in the ground in Trek literature--predating the idea that Cochrane was just an expatriated Earther.

 

And indeed the first documented example of fan speculation. But not a very good match, given that our heroes generally can tell nonhuman aliens from "real" humans despite identical looks. And why the human first and last names, when "alien" humanoids at least bother with funny spellings?

But larger, to account for the expanse of flat floor in evidence. How to fit that within the ship without making the old derelict much larger than Kirk's hero vessel? Having the set of containers rotate around the core might do the trick, just barely, but of course those did not rotate (any longer?).

The other option would be that DY-100 was built with linear acceleration gravity in mind, and the heroes visit one of the containers but stand on its aft wall or one of the internal decks parallel to that. Since the ship no longer accelerates, the gravity must then have been imported by technology from the Enterprise, but at least we have a rationale for the non-zero-gee construction of the interiors.

But I don't think the writers would have worried about introducing artificial onboard gravity "early" when they knew they'd have to introduce all the goodies available to Kirk within mere 200 years or so anyway. The sooner, the better!

Timo Saloniemi

 

As stated in Memory Prime, his name was Zeyafram Co'Akran, bastardised by those ignorant Earthmen...

 

Coon's original intent is perfectly clear: Cochrane is repeatedly and explicitly established in "Metamorphosis" to be human. Not humanoid, human. The idea of human populations being seeded on other planets would not be introduced into Star Trek for another year. Therefore, since Coon explicitly referred to Cochrane as human, he must have intended Cochrane to be from Earth originally. And why would he have given a Scottish surname to a character he didn't intend to be of Earth origin?

The fannish notion that Cochrane is a native of Alf Cen is simply a mistake. It's based on remembering one line from "Metamorphosis" about Alf Cen and forgetting the preponderance of evidence establishing Cochrane as human. A lot of the ideas people came up with in early fandom, and even early novels, were just wrong, because they didn't have home video and Memory Alpha and couldn't as easily reference the exact details of an episode at will, so they relied on imperfect memory.

 

^^^^
Agreed. And if you go to the Franz Josef Star Fleet Technical Manual and look at the emblem for Alpha Centauri, the centaurs and greek lettering suggest (to me at least) a colony founded by humans from Earth familiar with Greek mythology. I tend go with the assumption A. Cent was founded by a group of academics/scientists and so forth that wanted to start a new society based on the intellectual ideals of the ancient greeks to try and avoid the mistakes that had led to the last century or so of utter disaster back home on Earth. Zefram Cochrane was simply one of these people.

 

As long as Alpha Centauri has tropical islands filled with naked women.