Where did the Vulcans come from?

Discussion in 'Star Trek: Picard' started by Arpy, Mar 31, 2020.

  1. Arpy

    Arpy Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Narek says the tale of end is from a time before their ancestors came to Vulcan....! Where did the Vulcans come from before Vulcan?
     
    Last edited: Mar 31, 2020
  2. SPCTRE

    SPCTRE Badass Admiral

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    stumbled over that line as well

    it's a conspiracy!
     
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  3. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    In TOS "Return to Tomorrow", Spock thinks that "certain elements of Vulcan prehistory" would be explained by the recently unveiled fact that Sargon's people seeded various planets some 600,000 years ago.

    We don't know if the seeding involved dropping single-celled organisms in the local barren oceans, or settling humanoids in the local grasslands and forests.

    Since Vulcan is such a barren place, seeding it with life would probably call for introducing fairly advanced and robust life - essentially, Vulcans as we know them today. Very little evolution would then happen in the half a million years. Alternately, Vulcan might have been lusher back then, but if Sargon's folks didn't drop off full Vulcans, they probably still had to introduce something like the Vulcan equivalent of Neanderthals, as 600,000 years is a very short time for the evolution of human-analogues from something that isn't a caveman-analogue to begin with.

    Whether folk tales would survive for 600,000 years is debatable. It has been argued that some Australian aborigine tales can be traced back at least 30-40,000 years, being associated with verified geological events, volcanic eruptions and the like. And of course Vulcanoids live longer and may have longer generations. But not by an order of magnitude... Then again, Vulcanoid telepathy might help there a lot.

    Timo Saloniemi
     
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  4. F. King Daniel

    F. King Daniel Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    A type 13 planet in it's final stage
    Far, far away
     
  5. NCC-73515

    NCC-73515 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Sargon, the Preservers, the Chase protohumans... they could be the same group, actually
     
  6. Gov Kodos

    Gov Kodos Admiral Admiral

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    Valimar.
     
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  7. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Sure. Although Sargon last lived outside his sphere 600,000 years ago, the Preservers practiced their art 500 years before our heroes, and the "The Chase" folks existed 4,000,000,000 years prior. So it's possible they were the same folks, but only in the same sense that Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Brahms and Mr. Brack were the same person.

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  8. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    That may have just been a line flub that wasn't caught -- maybe he meant to say before they left Vulcan, or before they came to Romulus. Alternatively, maybe Narek is misinformed about Vulcan history. Maybe he buys into Romulan propaganda that they came first, or something. Just because a character says something doesn't require it to be absolute gospel -- especially when he's a liar in his own right and is a member of both a fanatical cult and an authoritarian government. Narek is anything but a reliable witness.

    "Return to Tomorrow" did imply that Sargon's people might have seeded Vulcan when they settled space 500-600,000 years ago. But that's so far in prehistory that there's no way it would be remembered, or that a group like the Zhat Vash could've been in continuous existence. That doesn't fit with anything we know about the Vulcans' history.


    No, they couldn't, any more than cavemen rode around on dinosaurs. They all date from totally different eras, and they did totally different things:

    The First Humanoids from "The Chase" lived 4 billion years ago, before even single-celled life had evolved on Earth. They seeded the primordial soup of uninhabited worlds with DNA programmed to nudge their evolution toward the eventual production of more-or-less humanoid forms -- accounting for the existence of all humanoid aliens, even the more exotic ones.

    Sargon's people, aka the Arretians, lived 5-600,000 years ago, or about 0.00015 times as long ago as the First Humanoids. Rather than seeding worlds with DNA, they directly colonized them with their own population, and may have been the ancestors of strongly humanoid species like Vulcans, and perhaps others like Deltans, Bajorans, Trill, Ocampa, etc.

    As for the Preservers, their one known act could not possibly have happened more than about 4-500 years ago our time, or about 0.0008 times as long ago as Sargon's people or 0.0000001 times as long ago as the First Humanoids. After all, they rescued several endangered populations of Native Americans from different parts of North America (Spock said Delaware, Mohican, and Navajo, the third of which didn't emerge as a distinct group until the 1400s or so), which would not all have been simultaneously endangered until the era of European colonization. And all they did was relocate pre-existing populations to supposedly "safer" worlds (although the fact that they "preserved" the Native Americans by sticking them in the middle of an asteroid field with only one deflector unit makes them seem pretty incompetent). They were only meant to justify Earth-parallel cultures in particular (although most of the Earth-parallel cultures in TOS were given different explanations).

    Personally, I suspect the Preservers are the same people as the Vians from "The Empath," since they had the exact same agenda. I'm surprised nobody else ever sees the similarity. It's because they're hung up on this false idea that the Preservers are some immeasurably ancient, long-lost civilization rather than just a few centuries old.
     
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  9. NCC-73515

    NCC-73515 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I had forgotten that they were so many years apart, you're right!
     
  10. ITDUDE

    ITDUDE Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    The Twelve Colonies
     
  11. Bad Thoughts

    Bad Thoughts Vice Admiral Admiral

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    With Darmok, on the ocean.


    (IE, wherever myths come from.)
     
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  12. valkyrie013

    valkyrie013 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I'm surprised Star Trek hasn't really delved in to civilizations that are ancient, and still around.. Sure you have the ones that "Accended" like the Organians, Q etc. but you don't have a civilization that is say 10,000 years in space.. most species seem about equal technology wise..
     
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  13. DarthTimon

    DarthTimon Commander Red Shirt

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    I saw Narek as substituting arrive for evolve. Nothing more elaborate than that.
     
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  14. NCC-73515

    NCC-73515 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Plausible since they also confused unconscious with subconscious XD
     
  15. Imaus

    Imaus Captain Captain

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    Bajor's been around for 500k odd years in Space. The Voth have been around for millions; but are mostly if not wholly gone conservative on one ship.

    It's mostly for plot convenience. (Especially everyone being at a close tech level - gives mankind a chance). Mathematically, it is often touted that a early interstellar power could had kept on going and ruled the whole thing, turned it into computorium, made great works. But Star Trek is hard pressed to find anything before Tkon and Icon, and those were rather...paltry empires that were wiped out due to one supernova.

    Cultural factors have to be accounted for, too. Just because something could mathematically be done or surmised does not mean it will. Humans now can be going to Alpha Centauri on antimatter ships if we gave a damn to do so, but since our local space is cold and dead, and Earth still exploitable, we have no pressing desire to do much out there but provide communication networks and have some scientific satellites alongside recon sats. The Voth could had been a huge empire, but decided to insulate themselves. Bajor doesn't have a lot of 'energy' to their culture (and they have a very expansive solar system), so there was little need to expand, while the Cardassians are far younger and have more pressing needs, so they expand everywhere they can.

    So on and so on. One can easily write that high-energy berserker or expansionist empires fall into mortal conflict with one another and thus die off (the Planet Killer, perhaps, as an example), fall into a rut (the APUs in the DQ?), or that the math may be wrong to begin with, seeing as we're 13 odd billion years into existence and the local area, the galaxy (as far as we know), and much less the universe does not seem to be composed of superstructures or megaprojects.

    In Trek another answer is that a lot of 'old empires' turn into beings of pure energy/leave this plane for another, such as the Q or Organians; and that seems to be the path a civilization takes in Star Trek: wither or die off, or become 'gods' that then have a whole new existence to contend with/play with.
     
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  16. Dukhat

    Dukhat Admiral Admiral

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    I think the script was just wrong and Narek was supposed to say "Romulus." Just like in DSC how Pike was supposed to say 'cavalry' and accidentally said 'Calvary' and the flub wasn't caught.
     
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  17. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Or how in Jon Cryer's first scene as Lex Luthor in Supergirl, he said Epicurus lived 230 years ago instead of 2300. Ouch.
     
  18. Dukhat

    Dukhat Admiral Admiral

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    Yep. Things like this either mean that the people whose job it is to catch this stuff weren’t doing their job, or production was rushed. Or both.
     
  19. Mr. Laser Beam

    Mr. Laser Beam Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Most likely.

    Although I'm actually loving the idea that "our ancestors arrived on Vulcan" is Romulan propaganda, intended to propagate the myth that it was the Vulcans who left Romulus, not the other way around as in reality.

    I totally buy the idea that the Romulan government would spin it that way. It paints the Vulcans as disloyal cowards who left the Motherland. Definitely within the Romulans' wheelhouse.
     
    Last edited: Apr 1, 2020
  20. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Here's the thing -- even with dozens of people paying close attention and trying to catch every mistake, a few mistakes will inevitably slip through nonetheless. I've found some howlers that made it nearly or actually into print in my books despite everyone's best efforts. The most resilient one was in Only Superhuman, a book I spent seven years rewriting and revising even before I sold it and numerous other eyes went to work on error-checking, and yet somehow the line "Bimala crossed your arms" -- yes, she reached out of the book and crossed the reader's arms -- made it all the way to the galley stage and was barely caught in time.

    The thing is, to a member of the audience, a single error can catch your attention and stand out and you can be amazed that anyone missed it. But the makers and editors of a story have to pay attention to every single word, and paradoxically, that need to pay closer attention in search of errors makes it more likely that a given error will be overlooked, lost among all the other words you're trying to check for accuracy.
     
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