What are your opinions regarding Star Trek that are, shall we say, unorthodox?
I'm British so that's just 7am every day without fail.
And then 10am, 12pm, 1pm, 3pm, 5pm and so on.
That's likely why the classic era, whenever they are in or talk about 'the past' (late 20th/early 21st century), usually adds around 30 years or so to the date of an event.
(Such as the Bell Riots in DS9's "PAST TENSE" two-parter being in 2024, which was 30 years after the episode was produced. Or in "SPACE SEED", the Eugenics Wars of the 90s were about 30 years ahead of that episode's production.)
It's far enough ahead to seem like a somewhat plausible and realistic possibility, but close enough ahead to still make whatever messages the episode is trying to say to be relatable. (Bell Riots, for example.)
Like asking when did WWII begin. The answer currently depends on where you are from and who's answering.
I read advice a long time ago that said when writing future sci fi stories that an author should pick when they want a story to take place and then add 100 years to that initial choice.
Last edited:
True but that's at least like a 2 year range, not decades.
Pike gives the number as 30% of Earth's population. So if WW3 were to start in the next few years as Star Trek occasionally implies, that's over 2 billion people.
So we get three different numbers from three different sources for a conflict that happens two to three centuries in its past.
For me, that is why it is just easier to treat it as a multiverse.
If we take the long view, the tracks for WWII were laid down with the Treaty of Versailles.
That would be a bit like saying the American Civil War started with Bleeding Kansas. Then again I once heard a pretty good argument for the entire cold war being World War III since there wasn't a single year of peace during it and the wars, with very rare exceptions like the air war in Korea, were done by proxies.
It would be interesting to see how historians several centuries down the road treat this particular era of history.
Some historians place the start of WWII at the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.
Sort of the way there's about a half century of the Roman Empire in the 200's called Crisis of the 3rd Century but its multiple, often repeated incidents. Or for that matter the 100 Years War which wasn't always being actively fought.
And technically didn't really end until 1956 when the Soviet Union and Japan were officially at peace, though no actual peace treaty between them has ever been signed. And of course the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly signed a peace treaty in 1984 after 350 years of brutal war.
I know that in my book on the history and development of aircraft carriers, written in 1969, the authors say that, while war officially broke out in the East in 1939, the seeds of World War II were planted in the West with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931; and the book was written only 24 years after the end of World War II and 38 years after the invasion of Manchuria.
So, there were some historians even as early as 1969 saying the dates need to be examined.
IMO, you both are right. Epic History has a great series on the lead-up to it. Darren, which book was that?
World War Two
Our World War Two series charts the origins and course of history’s most devastating conflict, exploring every front, every campaign and every turning point.
m.youtube.com
Last edited:
General Foch said Versailles was merely a 20 year armistice (paraphrased)
IMO, Gavrilo Princip shares some of the responsibility for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
IMO, you both are right. Epic History has a great series on the lead-up to it. Darren, which book was that?
World War Two
Our World War Two series charts the origins and course of history’s most devastating conflict, exploring every front, every campaign and every turning point.
Search 'Aircraft Carriers' by Norman Polmar, that should work.
I can think of two authors, one being H.G. Wells, who wrote 'The Shape of Things to Come', who predicted a second great conflict about twenty years after World War I.
Wells had it starting in 1938, and the second author 1940, and he got the flashpoint right, Poland.
Could be military deaths vs civillian deaths
The 37 million is later attributed to the Eugenics Wars in series like ENT. So they all kind of all point to the Eugenics Wars and WWIII being the same wider conflict or they happen close enough to one another that death tolls overlap in the minds of historians.
Ultimately, at the end of all things, it's a pointless and fruitless exercise to try to pin down specifics to a narrative that's never been defined in its own right. The Eugenics Wars isn't a story in the Star Trek universe so much it's a collection of anecdotes and random facts made up by writers working on the fly without any contextual foundation to the thing they're referring to. Much like the Clone Wars era in Star Wars before the animated Series nailed down the specifics, even what we do know is contradictory and nonspecific.
Voyager completely ignored the fact that there was a devastating World War happening when they visited 1996, while S31 and Picard season 2 seemed to confirm the 1996 date. SNW moved to the conflict to the mid 21st century, which is consistent with Voyager, but is now inconsistent with TOS, S31 and PIC.
DS9 puts the eugenics wars in the 22nd century (although Ron Moore admits that that was a math error in his head) and as cooleddie74 pointed out, ENT places them in both the late 20th and the 21st centuries.
Then there's the matter of Khan himself -- Picard establishes "Project Khan" in the 90s while SNW has the "Noonian Soong Institute" in the 2020s. And the big bad of the Eugenics Wars is somehow named after both?
Then there's the Colonel Greene of it all. Not an augment himself, but still pushing a very Eugenics based agenda.
Ultimately the reason I go with the Strange New Worlds version of events is because it's the only one that even makes an effort at addressing any of the inconsistencies, and does so in a way that works with what's been previously established in Star Trek.
Voyager completely ignored the fact that there was a devastating World War happening when they visited 1996, while S31 and Picard season 2 seemed to confirm the 1996 date. SNW moved to the conflict to the mid 21st century, which is consistent with Voyager, but is now inconsistent with TOS, S31 and PIC.
DS9 puts the eugenics wars in the 22nd century (although Ron Moore admits that that was a math error in his head) and as cooleddie74 pointed out, ENT places them in both the late 20th and the 21st centuries.
Then there's the matter of Khan himself -- Picard establishes "Project Khan" in the 90s while SNW has the "Noonian Soong Institute" in the 2020s. And the big bad of the Eugenics Wars is somehow named after both?
Then there's the Colonel Greene of it all. Not an augment himself, but still pushing a very Eugenics based agenda.
Ultimately the reason I go with the Strange New Worlds version of events is because it's the only one that even makes an effort at addressing any of the inconsistencies, and does so in a way that works with what's been previously established in Star Trek.
Last edited:
And Adam Soong pulls a 1996 file from his drawer in 2024, by which point Khan should already be alive somewhere in the world as a grown adult or even a child. So either the wars already happened in the 1990s before the temporal incursions changed the dates or that was just a nod to Adam beginning work on Project Khan-based experiments, genome work that is eventually furthered by his grandson or great-grandson Arik.
Similar threads
