How did the Romulans leave Vulcan?

[Timo]

Of course, if the Romulans left because they didn't like the Surakian ban on being violent towards thy neighbor, then one would assume they continued being very violent indeed after the departure. Which might keep them busy enough that they would not spare a thought to the conquest of alien planets.

And I must still insist that the idea of something like nuclear power still being expensive in the 2040s is more or less untenable. There would have to be spinoff from something as momentous as the DY-100. Electricity is absurdly expensive as a thing, too - you need installations the size of cities to power your tabletop fan. Yet electricity is also dirt cheap, because it's worth being made cheap. We could well postulate that antimatter technology becomes cheap through some similar mechanism, by some operators having an initial interest in developing it, and others finding commercial value in it. Perhaps the magic of creating it through "flipping" (rather than expending Einsteinian energies) is discovered early on?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

^The DY-100 was built or purchased by the absolute ruler of a quarter of the world's population. We're not talking about Doc Brown here, but someone with access to the industrial resources of India+.

Besides, the DY-100 could have an internal rotating section. Or it's a VFX error, whatever. We've seen Star Trek's version of 1999. It sucked as much as the regular kind.

But since you know how much I hate citing Voyager, I'll also just quote this choice line from TWoK:

On Earth, two hundred years ago, I was a prince with power over millions!

Retcon!

And I must still insist that the idea of something like nuclear power still being expensive in the 2040s is more or less untenable.

If it became very inexpensive through economies of scale, we'd hit peak uranium very rapidly*, and the price would rise again, till it was uneconomic to even use fissiles for anything but the most specialized tasks (like nuclear bombs). Or maybe you mean fusion, which they don't appear to have--especially given that a fusion energy regime would negate most of the good reasons for a nuclear war.

*Probably. Some studies indicate, anyway.

 

[USS Excelsior]

What if Romulus was the original planet and it was the Vulcans that left to arrive on Vulcan. It seems more likely that life would arise more on Romulus and could a bunch of Romulans be stuck together on ships for that long without incident, unlike the Vulcans.

 

[Myasishchev]

What if Romulus was the original planet and it was the Vulcans that left to arrive on Vulcan. It seems more likely that life would arise more on Romulus and could a bunch of Romulans be stuck together on ships for that long without incident, unlike the Vulcans.

I always thought it would have been hilariously Stalinist if the Romulans had claimed this, especially if it were demonstrably untrue.

 

[Timo]

^The DY-100 was built or purchased by the absolute ruler of a quarter of the world's population. We're not talking about Doc Brown here, but someone with access to the industrial resources of India+.

It doesn't sound like Khan had much to do with fielding the DY-100 - otherwise, our heroes would have associated the ship with the tyrant or at least his ilk from the get-go. Rather, Earth of the Trek 1990s in general possessed the means of sending so many of these ships out into the unknown that a few might get lost without anybody exactly noticing...

That's already enough to give so much spinoff and commercialization that Mythbusters: The Next Generation might purchase a used DY-100 for one of their more spectacular stunts in 2012. That Cochrane made do with a Titan V (a futuristic weapon with impressive SSTO capabilities, to be sure) would just establish him as a hopeless cheapskate, then.

Besides, the DY-100 could have an internal rotating section. Or it's a VFX error, whatever.

That's a pretty futile delaying action, though. If we don't get gravity control by the 1980s, how can we get FTL flight by the 2060s? Or, like, ever? Trek technology is centuries (if not thousands of millennia) ahead of ours in the 21st, 22nd, 23rd and 24th centuries; why not in the 20th already?

We could still have our McDonalds and Max Headroom and Sanctuary Districts and other familiar real-world sights. It's not as if Earthly life would have changed much even in the 24th century, despite all the technological wonders.

We've seen Star Trek's version of 1999. It sucked as much as the regular kind.

The slums of America did, yes.

"On Earth, two hundred years ago, I was a prince with power over millions!" -> Retcon!

...After which ENT ret-retconned it all back to the 20th or at least early 21st century. So obviously Khan was counting the years he lived through, not the years the rest of the universe did.

If it became very inexpensive through economies of scale, we'd hit peak uranium very rapidly*

Or, as a thousand scifi works have it, we'd use it to dig uranium from the Moon (which in those works would naturally have plenty of it, even though in our stupid retarded reality there's none there). Or from somewhere else in outer space. All the more reason to have a spacecraft in every garage, then. Trek has always been technology-positive like that.

Or maybe you mean fusion, which they don't appear to have

Why not? They do appear to have plenty of compact power - they can power up ships that fly to alien star systems. Perhaps they have something better than fusion, even - something that, instead of producing more energy, allows energy to be used more efficiently, perhaps circumventing a natural law or two. Gravity control would certainly help with that.

especially given that a fusion energy regime would negate most of the good reasons for a nuclear war

Increase in the standard of living has never reduced the odds of a war happening. Quite to the contrary, really. If the haves have spacecraft in their garages when the have-nots only have gravitic flitters, the war will be all the more devastating than the one that was over the haves having chimneys to their hearths and the have-nots using open fires...

I always thought it would have been hilariously Stalinist if the Romulans had claimed this, especially if it were demonstrably untrue.

...And all the better if an episode similar to "The Chase" then revealed that the Romulans were actually right without even realizing it!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Anwar]

Well, to be fair DS9 was the show that got Khan's timing wrong when they mentioned the Superman being from 200 years prior.

As for VOY, well if they had time-traveled back to the 90s and we saw a totally different world ravaged by the Eugenics Wars the audience would be "WTF?!" and change the channel. Keeping it as close to the real world as possible was for the benefit of the common average joe who never knew about the Wars to begin with.

 

[T'Girl]

the 90s and we saw a totally different world ravaged by the Eugenics Wars

In fifty-one years, when we don't get a FTL first flight, I am (at 73 years old) really going to be pissed off.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I'll also just quote this choice line from TWoK:

On Earth, two hundred years ago, I was a prince with power over millions!

Retcon!

And yet in the same film, Khan says he is from the year 1996.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I've never understood the Romulan ridges...I don't think TNG should have changed the Romulans. Part of the 'sinister' villain (or devious semi-allies) aspect of the Romulans is that they were outwardly identical to Vulcans. But it's canon, so I bite my tongue.

I agree, the brow ridges look dorky and for the Rommies to be identical to Vulcans except for things like hairstyle and clothing would be far more sinister.

But brow ridges don't mean there needs to have been time for Rommies to evolve separately. They might have come largely from a single ethnic group of Vulcans that tended to have the ridges more than common among the general population. Brow ridges may be a recessive trait that is usually suppressed and comes out more due to inbreeding.

 

[USS Excelsior]

If Vulcan is mostly desertlike then why would there be white, black, and even Chinese Vulcans there...

Maybe that is in fact the colonized planet.

 

[Anwar]

It wasn't always desert-like.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

And to be fair, we have never seen *all* of Vulcan. In all of Trek, there's been maybe two or three episodes taking place there. We didn't get to see all that much.

 

[Nerys Myk]

If Vulcan is mostly desertlike then why would there be white, black, and even Chinese Vulcans there...

Maybe that is in fact the colonized planet.

There are black, white and chinese humans living in deserts all over the Earth.

 

[T'Girl]

If Vulcan is mostly desert like then why would there be white, black, and even Chinese Vulcans there..

Look at desert people on Earth. - Moroccans, Arabs, Persians, Aborigines, Apaches, all desert people who don't really look very much like each others. Somalians are black, the interior of China is desert, Chinese are yellow, Apaches are red (actual I think they're more brown). Whites are the color they are because their ancestors were isolated from others by bodies of water and mountain ranges, they reproduced together. Their skin color has nothing to do with forests or the cloud cover over Europe.

Scots from northern Britain and Indians from future eastern Canada, both came from basically the same climate, they don't look the same.

With the except of Tuvok, it's possible that the majority of the (speaking role) Vulcans we've met have come from a relatively small geographical area.

 

[Timo]

The basic point still stands, though: for these phenotypes to have emerged in the first place, Vulcan would have needed "special places" where either these characteristics would be favored or at least they could be allowed to surface without interference. Then these folks could move across the planet and inhabit its deserts.

We could of course argue that Vulcans came from a less homogeneous world originally. Either Vulcan was less homogeneous a few hundred thousand years ago, or then Vulcans were brought to this desert world from some other planet only a few hundred thousand years ago (as perhaps suggested by "Return to Tomorrow").

That would still leave us wondering how an alien world (either old Vulcan, or planet X where the species last dwelt before transplantation) would give rise to the exact same phenotypes we have here on Earth. It would be possible to argue that big noses and white skin go together, as both appear to be adaptations to cold climates at high latitudes. Ditto with curly hair, flat noses and dark skin all being equatorial adaptations. But why would "Asiatic eyes" be only found on Asiatic-looking Vulcans? Why not on dark-skinned ones? Why are the Asiatic cheekbones associated with straight, dark hair and not wavy and blonde hair, or with short curls? Why is there no green or purple hair? Those are very odd coincidences even when we suspend our disbelief enough to believe in human-shaped aliens in the first place.

I have relatively little objection to phenotypically diverse Vulcans, though. The existence of black and white Bajorans is far more troublesome. Supposedly, Vulcans at least were kept from intermingling by their swathes of impassable desert. But Bajorans on their Earth-like planet have pursued an urban lifestyle since before humans walked erect, as per Picard's exact words. They should certainly have thoroughly stirred their gene pool already, becoming as homogeneous phenotypically as advanced genetic homogeneity allows.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

I'll also just quote this choice line from TWoK:

On Earth, two hundred years ago, I was a prince with power over millions!

Retcon!

And yet in the same film, Khan says he is from the year 1996.

And he also says two hundred years before Kirk was born, which by TWoK's timeframe would be very different than two centuries. I suppose I can surrender that point as being a little spurious.

I guess the main basis of my argument is that the near-future chronology of Trek is a total mess--from endemic bad arithmetic with the dates, to the plain sight of 1999 as completely identical to ours to references in SS to the "last so-called world war" totally contradicted in EaF by the invention of World War 3. So there's plenty of wiggle room for many interpretations.

If Vulcan is mostly desertlike then why would there be white, black, and even Chinese Vulcans there...

White, black, and even Chinese Earthicans aren't separated by significant water barriers, but terrestrial ones.

And to be fair, we have never seen *all* of Vulcan. In all of Trek, there's been maybe two or three episodes taking place there. We didn't get to see all that much.

We've seen it from space. It's pretty crappy. It either has no oceans, or (via TOS) dark brownish-purple ones. I actually like that the best because it's more consistent with a recent climate change and desertification--i.e., Vulcan is undergoing a greenhouse extinction analogous to the Permian-Triassic boundary event, or what some scientists (for example, Peter Ward) predict could occur again due to anthropogenic global warming. (I'm not convinced that sulfate-reducing bacteria could actually become so prevalent and the chemocline disappear so thoroughly that it could change the color of the ocean, but it sure is a cool image.)