Starfleet Academy Tie-Ins

[Detached Nacelle]

Pelia's name is on the Wall of Heroes, where 99% of the names are people who are almost certainly dead, whatever that's worth.

That 1% margin of error could include Pelia. One assumes it includes Culber too but anything can happen in those 4 years between DSC season 5 and Academy season 1. Burnham, Booker, Tilly and Vance are the ones definitely still kicking by the 3230s anyone else is fair game

 

[Christopher]

That 1% margin of error could include Pelia. One assumes it includes Culber too but anything can happen in those 4 years between DSC season 5 and Academy season 1. Burnham, Booker, Tilly and Vance are the ones definitely still kicking by the 3230s anyone else is fair game

The question under discussion is about existing characters who might have been around "during and after the Burn," for an Ake novel set during that period. That excludes the Discovery crew, since they jumped over all of that. Booker and Vance would have been around for the later part of the post-Burn era, but not at the beginning, which is a more likely focus for an Ake novel.

Apparently pure Lanthanites are virtually immortal, unlike the half-human Ake. So Pelia presumably would still be around, barring accidents. However, having the only two known Lanthanite characters meet feels like low-hanging fruit and small-universe syndrome.

 

[Detached Nacelle]

The question under discussion is about existing characters who might have been around "during and after the Burn," for an Ake novel set during that period.

Yes I was just replying to the isolated sentence whether Pelia's inclusion on the wall of luminaries indicated her death.

 

[Christopher]

The concept of Lanthanites still bugs me, in the context of "Requiem for Methuselah." If they were living on Earth all along, why was Flint so lonely? How come he never met any of them in his 6000 years of life? Surely in all that time, he would've run into someone he recognized from decades or centuries earlier.

I can sort of buy that Kirk etc. didn't wonder if Flint was a Lanthanite, since Spock scanned Flint and determined he was human at the same time he determined he was 6000 years old. Though you'd still expect that Kirk or McCoy would've at least brought them up for clarification, like, "Are you sure he's not a Lanthanite, Spock?"

Although that requires Lanthanites to be aliens rather than a secret immortal subspecies of humans, and the shows are ambiguous about that. "Lanthanite" is Greek for "member of an unnoticed group," so it probably isn't their species name (or if it is, it's as great a coincidence as cat people named Caitians).

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Perhaps their approach to avoiding detection was largely remaining in obscurity; for instance, the roadie, not the rock star. Whereas Flint was supposedly all sorts of famous/historically significant people.

 

[F. King Daniel]

That 1% margin of error could include Pelia. One assumes it includes Culber too but anything can happen in those 4 years between DSC season 5 and Academy season 1. Burnham, Booker, Tilly and Vance are the ones definitely still kicking by the 3230s anyone else is fair game

Are the Disco time travellers not all "officially" dead when Pike and friends saw Discovery "explode" as per the end of season 2? SNW S1 even had an episode where everyone is wearing memorial pins and either Pike or Spock's was for the Discovery.

 

[The Wormhole]

Are the Disco time travellers not all "officially" dead when Pike and friends saw Discovery "explode" as per the end of season 2? SNW S1 even had an episode where everyone is wearing memorial pins and either Pike or Spock's was for the Discovery.

The problem with using that logic to explain Culber and Stamets being on the wall is that they are both listed with ranks they didn't get promoted to until after arriving in the 32nd century.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Posthumous honorary promotion for brave apparent sacrifice that was made official afterwards.

 

[David cgc]

The concept of Lanthanites still bugs me, in the context of "Requiem for Methuselah." If they were living on Earth all along, why was Flint so lonely? How come he never met any of them in his 6000 years of life? Surely in all that time, he would've run into someone he recognized from decades or centuries earlier.

The guy from "The Man From Earth" thought he spotted Flint twice, centuries apart, but he apparently wasn't in a chatty mood.

Posthumous honorary promotion for brave apparent sacrifice that was made official afterwards.

That reminds me, I was a little annoyed PIC established they didn't finalize Data's promotion to full commander after he died in the line of duty. Sure, Data has no ego (or so he would claim), he has no next of kin, nor would they get any practical benefit from Data dying at a higher rank in the moneyless Federation, but, still. The promotion was pending, he gave his life in the finest tradition of the service, his record should've ended with "Commander, First Officer of the USS Enterprise" and he should've had that rank when he was revived. Both times.

I guess Data 2.0 could still be alive in the Burn-era. The way it was described, Alton made it sound like his face was an affectation to give him gravitas (and totally not because Alton had designed the robot for himself), but he didn't seem to be intended to die of old age in a human timeframe, like Picard 2.0 or the Bicentennial Man.

Of course, the other problem is that a lot of people, especially Starfleet people who spent a lot of time on ships, would've been killed in the Burn. There's a theory that Vance and Thok and whoever else was putting together the new Academy was preferentially recruiting from the long-lived and time-displaced to get as many Academy graduates as professors as possible so it wouldn't just be the War College with friendlier branding in practice. If that's the case, it could mean Dax and the Doctor are the only 24th century Starfleet vets left, and Data, Pelia, Vic Fontaine, Odo, Moriarty, and all the other people who might've lived another eight hundred years were on space ships (or space stations and planets that used dilithium in their power infrastructure) and died.

 

[Christopher]

Perhaps their approach to avoiding detection was largely remaining in obscurity; for instance, the roadie, not the rock star. Whereas Flint was supposedly all sorts of famous/historically significant people.

Ever read Poul Anderson's The Boat of a Million Years? I once considered pitching a Trek novel about Flint's life story, but then I read Anderson's novel and realized I'd just be duplicating what he'd already done. In Anderson's novel, there are multiple immortals, and they naturally try to keep from being discovered, but over the course of millennia, they still stumble across each other from time to time. Given enough chances, even improbable things become inevitable. So I have a hard time believing that in 6000 years of actively hoping to find another immortal, Flint never managed to discover even one of the numerous other immortals hiding around him.

and Data, Pelia, Vic Fontaine, Odo, Moriarty, and all the other people who might've lived another eight hundred years

Hmm... Not sure about Odo. We know that as one of the Hundred, he survived in a dormant, undeveloped state for centuries before he was discovered, and "Children of Time" established that he could live for at least 200 years beyond his then-current age. But that doesn't prove he could've made it 800 years.

Meanwhile, I've seen it pointed out that the tendency of fiction to assume that cybernetic/robotic characters are immortal doesn't make sense if you think about it, since in real life, the life expectancy of electronic devices is generally a whole lot shorter than the life expectancy of organic beings. Machines break down as easily as organisms do. Sure, a sufficiently advanced machine might be capable of self-repair, but so are living beings, and it doesn't make them immortal.

Okay, the Doctor proves that sentient holograms are potentially capable of lifespans on the order of a millennium -- but we also saw in Voyager and in Academy that sentient holograms are vulnerable to software breakdowns that can kill them, or at least require them to be reset to their initial state, which is effectively the same thing. So there's no guarantee that all holograms would have comparable lifespans. And I'm not sure anything's been established about the life expectancy of Soong-type androids. Yes, Data's head survived being buried in a cave for about 500 years, but it was inactive during that time, so that doesn't necessarily count. We did see some millennia-old androids in TOS, and Flint built Rayna to be immortal, but that wouldn't necessarily apply to every "species" of android. (In Roddenberry's The Questor Tapes, which I like to believe took place in the Trek universe, the life expectancy of an android of Questor's "species" was about 200 years.)

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

So I have a hard time believing that in 6000 years of actively hoping to find another immortal, Flint never managed to discover even one of the numerous other immortals hiding around him.

Unless one mindwipes the other.

 

[Christopher]

Unless one mindwipes the other.

Why would they want to? You'd think immortals would want to find each other and stick together, so they wouldn't have to keep grieving the deaths of everyone they knew.

 

[Greg Cox]

Why would they want to? You'd think immortals would want to find each other and stick together, so they wouldn't have to keep grieving the deaths of everyone they knew.

Certainly, that's what "Requiem for Methuselah" implies. It's the whole reason Flint is intent on building an immortal robot companion, no matter how long it takes.

 

[Christopher]

Certainly, that's what "Requiem for Methuselah" implies. It's the whole reason Flint is intent on building an immortal robot companion, no matter how long it takes.

Yes, exactly. And while Pelia said she was troubled more by boredom than losing loved ones, that's just her, and it can't necessarily be generalized to other Lanthanites. Surely there'd be at least a few of them who'd sympathize with Flint's loneliness and want to let him share eternity with them.

 

[tenmei]

Maybe all the other Immortals are living it large at a Grateful Dead, and nobody invited Flint because they think he's a jerk for drawing attention to himself as Solomon, Alexander, Lazarus, Merlin etx. So when he pops round, they draw the curtains, don't answer the door and pretend to be out.

 

[The Wormhole]

Not sure about Odo. We know that as one of the Hundred, he survived in a dormant, undeveloped state for centuries before he was discovered, and "Children of Time" established that he could live for at least 200 years beyond his then-current age. But that doesn't prove he could've made it 800 years.

Not canon, but this is the Trek Lit forum so it can be cited here. There was a short story from Star Trek Explorer featuring Odo still alive two thousand years later.

 

[Christopher]

Not canon, but this is the Trek Lit forum so it can be cited here. There was a short story from Star Trek Explorer featuring Odo still alive two thousand years later.

Except different stories often contradict each other, so what's conjectured as a possibility in one story isn't binding on any other story. So it's still an open question.

And really, that's kind of my point. A lot of storytellers just assume that long-lived beings are effectively immortal, and I think it's important to question assumptions and consider them critically. Just because a being lives for centuries doesn't automatically mean they'll live indefinitely.

 

[David Mack]

Not canon, but this is the Trek Lit forum so it can be cited here. There was a short story from Star Trek Explorer featuring Odo still alive two thousand years later.

“Lost and Founder,” from issue 8 — penned by yours truly, and winner of the Scribe Award for Best Short Story, 2024.

 

[Detached Nacelle]

So I have a hard time believing that in 6000 years of actively hoping to find another immortal, Flint never managed to discover even one of the numerous other immortals hiding around him.

What if he just didn't know how. Like maybe Flint didn't know he was a Lanthanite say his parents were killed when he was a baby and he was adopted having absolutely no idea Lanthanites exist like every other Human up until the 23rd century. And perhaps he was able to update his identity so well that it never drew the suspicion of anyone of any subspecies.

I'm not sure he ever brought anything like that up in the episode since Ive only seen TOS once so if he didn't it's a moot point in terms of hard canon but for soft canon there's an explanation and a new story to fix an inconsistency.

Hmm... Not sure about Odo. We know that as one of the Hundred, he survived in a dormant, undeveloped state for centuries before he was discovered, and "Children of Time" established that he could live for at least 200 years beyond his then-current age. But that doesn't prove he could've made it 800 years.

Madam Founder does say Changelings are timeless. Assuming she is a reliable narrator of course, then Changelings would not age and be immortal yet not invulnerable. Lots of ways an ageless character can not make it to the 32nd century. See Data for more information.

 

[Tosk]

For my money, if you send out an infant Changeling over two hundred years ago that also isn't expected to come home for another three hundred years then I'm gonna assume your natural lifespan is significantly longer than 500 years.