How did the confederation pretty much conquer the entire galaxy? I don't buy the time needed.

[Christopher]

What if Khan was lying for some reason? Or could he have had some faulty memory because of the long hibernation?

I see no reason to go there. As I said, the Shenzhen Convention and the public's outrage at the idea of genetic engineering (as seen in the news headlines Kore unearthed) make more sense if they come after the Eugenics Wars than before them. I really don't get where Terry Matalas is coming from in his public statements; they seem to clash with the implications of what's actually onscreen.

By the way, it's interesting that we are talking about Eugenic Wars not an Eugenic War, even WW2 is, despite having multiple factions and fronts, only talked about in singular.

Alternatively, could there have been more than one Eugenic War, with the first one ending with Khan going into exile aboard the Botany Bay?

There have been lots of sets of conflicts in history that have been referred to as "Wars" in the plural -- the Wars of the Roses, the Italian Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, the Ottoman-Habsburg Wars, the Navajo Wars, the Opium Wars, etc. What made the World Wars global is that the separate combatants merged into large alliances so that all the local conflicts became parts of a single clash of two main sides. I assume the Eugenics Wars were a set of smaller-scale conflicts that broke out independently when the Augments took power in their respective nations, both between Augments and non-Augments and among the Augments themselves as they jockeyed for power. Spock's description of them as a world war may have been the judgment of history in retrospect.

 

[NewHeavensNewEarth]

I don’t really find the Confederacy all that plausible myself, or at least what I saw of it. I find it hard to believe that the human race decided it was going to conquer all aliens with the resources they had. It’s been shown time and time again that other races such as the Vulcans and the Klingons were more technologically advanced, and even other races such as the Romulans were at least on equal footing with them. It’s inconceivable that these aliens couldn’t have beaten the human race, much less allow themselves to be conquered, and didn’t at least form an alliance against them. It’s all just a plot device to move the story along. I would have much preferred that the alternate future we saw was the same as the one from Past Tense, where it was implied that the human race never even left Earth by the 24th century because of the upheaval and wars due to the Bell Riots. I mean, c’mon: They even showed the Sanctuary districts, but they seemingly have nothing to do with the plot of season 2. Actually, nothing shown in Past Tense has anything to do with the story, other than some Easter egg references.

The Confed did it Pakled-style. And/or bought tech like how the Ferengi bought warp capability.

What I like about a dystopian Prime timeline is the idea that peace, freedom, tolerance, mutual understanding, etc. are things that we should never take for granted in any generation. By now we've seen a lot of the Mirror Universe, and a few things were making it look like the Terran Empire's behavior/disposition was the result of things outside of the Terrans' control. In particular the idea of "a chimeric strain on the subatomic level in the Terran stem cell," implying that this could explain the Terran inclination towards malevolence, and almost making it look like the Prime universe was immune to such a fate.

Interesting though that may be, it made it look like the differences could be chalked up to biological fate rather than choices. But even in the last century alone, we've seen in our world how wildly the pendulum can swing with regards to these values, and I like the idea that we have to be intentional about fostering such ideals in this generation and the generations to come, because nothing can be taken for granted even from one day to the next.

 

[hxclespaulplayer]

Is it just me that thinks the eugenics wars can sort of be explained by everything to do with the middle east this century? The war on terror started but some of the enemies were genetically modified instead of being the Taliban etc. I don't know of any conflict in the era that TOS sets as eugenics wars... India/Pakistan tension is too long ago.

 

[Christopher]

By now we've seen a lot of the Mirror Universe, and a few things were making it look like the Terran Empire's behavior/disposition was the result of things outside of the Terrans' control. In particular the idea of "a chimeric strain on the subatomic level in the Terran stem cell," implying that this could explain the Terran inclination towards malevolence, and almost making it look like the Prime universe was immune to such a fate.

I'm with you. That's incredibly missing the point of "Mirror, Mirror," which is that that potential for evil is and always has been within us (just look at the world today, or at much of history), and that even in the enlightened Federation, that savage potential lurks just below the surface, closer than we'd like to think. The difference was meant to be nurture, not nature.

Also, that "chimeric strain" sentence is total gibberish. Chimerism is when cells of two different genotypes exist in the same individual. Genes exist well above the subatomic level, being complex molecules made of many, many atoms. And stem cells are cells that form in the embryonic stage and can differentiate into different types of tissue cells. It's like saying "an anthology on the single-letter level in the Terran library."

Is it just me that thinks the eugenics wars can sort of be explained by everything to do with the middle east this century? The war on terror started but some of the enemies were genetically modified instead of being the Taliban etc. I don't know of any conflict in the era that TOS sets as eugenics wars... India/Pakistan tension is too long ago.

Oh, there were quite a few around the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars:_1990–2002

It's just that Americans tend to pay no attention to world events that don't involve us directly.

The Eugenics Wars were supposed to be from 1993-6, some years before the "War on Terror." I see no reason to assume they started in the Middle East, given that the eugenic supermen seized power in over forty nations worldwide, and Khan was supposedly an Indian Sikh whose empire spanned "more than a quarter of your world from Asia through the Middle East."

But I'm fairly confident that Carey Wilber intended the Eugenics Wars to be the end result of the real-life eugenics movement that started in the late 19th century, with various groups advocating breeding "superior" humans using the same principles used to breed improved strains of livestock or crops. These movements were rooted in white-supremacist beliefs and eventually led to the Nazis, so the whole eugenics movement was discredited after WWII. But I think Wilber was probably envisioning a version of history where they continued to work in secret and eventually succeeded. It would've only been four or five generations of breeding, but I think that was the intent at the time, since the idea of genetic engineering wasn't as well-known in the '60s.

 

[Dukhat]

Is it just me that thinks the eugenics wars can sort of be explained by everything to do with the middle east this century? The war on terror started but some of the enemies were genetically modified instead of being the Taliban etc. I don't know of any conflict in the era that TOS sets as eugenics wars... India/Pakistan tension is too long ago.

I’m not sure where you got that from, but I don’t think that’s their intent at all.

 

[Romulan_spy]

I don't think the Confederation conquered the entire galaxy. All we saw was evidence that they defeated several of the major powers in the Alpha and Beta Quadrant. So they conquered or crushed the Klingons, Ferengi, Romulans, Vulcan. That is actually a small part of the galaxy. I forget but did the Confederation mention the Dominion? If not, that is an entire civilization the Confederation did not conquer. So it is not that far fetched considering that "our" Federation probably could have done that too if they had been more militaristic.

In terms of the Borg, as others mentioned, maybe Species 8472 decimated the Borg and the Confederation just finished the other job. Also, as mentioned, totalitarian regimes lie and spread propaganda. Maybe the Confederation destroyed a major Borg hub and obviously captured the Queen and is spreading propaganda that they defeated the Borg when in fact, they did not destroy all Borg. Or maybe the Confederation did use some sort of virus that destroys the Borg? Also, we saw that there was resistance against the Confederation. So perhaps the Confederation did not completely conquer all those species as thoroughly as claimed?

 

[BillJ]

"We discussed endlessly. We came to the conclusion that in WW3 there were several EMP bursts that kicked everyone back decades. Records of that 75 year period, the 90s on were sketchy. Maybe Spock was wrong? No easy way to do it if you want the past to look and feel like today."

The people they were dealing with in the Confederation 25th century sure didn't act like genetic supermen. Our heroes didn't seem to have much problem dealing with them.

As far as Spock goes, that means Khan has to be wrong as well. He dates his departure from Earth as 1996 in The Wrath of Khan.

 

[Gov Kodos]

Alexander the Great didn't come close to conquering the world in spite of the hagiography attached to him. The Confederation may have taken down some big name empires but been far from taking over the galaxy.

 

[TimeIsAPredator]

I'd love to see the Confederation encounter the Terran Empire.

The Confed would be like "Really? That the best you got?"

The Terrans would just try to have sex with everyone. Were they even that evil ?

 

[hxclespaulplayer]

I forget but did the Confederation mention the Dominion?

There was an okudagram (What do we even call them now?) about a confederation/dominion peace treaty on one of the computer panels, possibly when Seven is scrolling through and trying contact Rios.

 

[Finn]

I don't think we have a complete picture. Vulcan is only 16 light years from Earth, and in middle of a brutal battle, yet they spoke of stories about the Confederation Picard beheading Dukat on Cardassia, Sarek on Vulcan. and Martok....

 

[Mudd]

Never mind the Confederation, the idea that the Federation ever effectively "banned" genetic enhancement is wildly implausible. It's the kind of monolithic, naive and unobservant assertion that a TV show could get away with in 1966.

 

[hxclespaulplayer]

Never mind the Confederation, the idea that the Federation ever effectively "banned" genetic enhancement is wildly implausible. It's the kind of monolithic, naive and unobservant assertion that a TV show could get away with in 1966.

How so? If you ban something, it just goes underground. As we saw with Julian and the Jack pack on ds9.

 

[Phily B]

I personally think the whole timeline has a lot of Q shenanigans going on, which explains how Earth seemingly became so powerful to conquer these types of planets and wage these wars.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Never mind the Confederation, the idea that the Federation ever effectively "banned" genetic enhancement is wildly implausible. It's the kind of monolithic, naive and unobservant assertion that a TV show could get away with in 1966.

I don't think TOS ever established that; DS9 did.

 

[Christopher]

I don't think TOS ever established that; DS9 did.

Right. TNG: "Unnatural Selection" showed a Federation research station experimenting with the creation of genetically engineered humans, and while Picard questioned the ethics of it, nobody questioned its legality, because the ban was a retcon that didn't come along until eight years later.

After all, the term "genetic engineering" was never used in "Space Seed," only in The Wrath of Khan and after. "Space Seed" said they were created through "selective breeding," i.e. the same method used to domesticate plants and animals since antiquity, and the method that the 19th- and early 20th-century eugenics movements in real life sought to use to "improve" humanity (which to them meant make it more white). While the term "genetic engineering" had been around in the scientific literature since the 1930s and prose science fiction since the 1950s, it wasn't until the 1970s that recombinant DNA was first created in the lab and the concept was more widely popularized.

I figure that by the time "Doctor Bashir, I Presume" was made, the DS9 producers noticed how much transhumanist science fiction was out there, stories about future humanity being genetically and bionically enhanced as a matter of routine, and decided they needed a handwave for Trek's somewhat old-fashioned portrayal of a future humanity no different from the present one. (Early TNG had dabbled with transhumanism with Geordi's VISOR and Picard's bionic heart, but that was abandoned by the Piller-era writing staff.) And so they came up with the nonsensical, ill-considered idea of genetic augmentation being outlawed because of fear of something that happened 400 years earlier.

 

[Mudd]

I don't think TOS ever established that; DS9 did.

Ah, okay. So someone in the 90s thought people would by it?

If I actually first heard it on DS9 that might explain why I've always been skeptical. At twelve years old in 1966, I'd probably have swallowed it.

 

[the Sisko]

I see a completely different backstory. The Soong family turns all of humanity into Augments and creates an android underclass. As augments, the borg can't assilimate them except by choice/lack of attention, so the borg tech ends up being assilimated.

Just because an authoritarian regime claims it's done something, that doesn't make it's true. Dictatorships always rule through lies.

As for the Borg, the most convincing theory I've heard is that without Voyager to devise a defense, Species 8472 devastated the Borg, and the Confederation just picked off the stragglers and claimed the credit.

 

[Dukhat]

I see a completely different backstory. The Soong family turns all of humanity into Augments and creates an android underclass.

Why would Soong do that? All he cares about is

Spoiler

making a faux daughter who doesn’t have a problem walking around in broad daylight.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Looking at the display screens when President Seven was going to call Rios, isn't the Confederation currently at war with the Vulcans, the Dominion and others? Far from conquering the galaxy, it's clearly all PR.

But defeating the Borg is a monumental achievement nonetheless. And likely worth the rest of the galaxy's suffering.