I really should post this in a little less rightfully snoby forum, but is it too hard to accept that the aliens we meet in Star Trek be Humans? 'Bread and Circuses' did it. I'm assuming the other series did it, Vgr and Enterprise, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, etc. What is the phenominon of bumpy head of the week aliens. Am I wrong about this?
A Human alien
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I wouldn't want to see that happen now. With so many of the sci-fi franchises moving away from aliens, I'd rather not lose what makes Trek unique. I mean how many of the major multi-media Sci-Fi franchises still producing new content regularly even use aliens anymore? Trek, Star Wars, Farscape, Doctor Who, Marvel, and DC are the only ones I can think of.
EDIT: And I'll admit, the aliens are one of my favorite ascpects of Trek, so my interest in it would go way down if it lost it's aliens. And I think it's also worth pointing out that part of the whole idea of Trek's aliens, is that they give us a way to look at ourselves without actually seeing ourselves, and if you make the aliens human, you lose that.
EDIT: And I'll admit, the aliens are one of my favorite ascpects of Trek, so my interest in it would go way down if it lost it's aliens. And I think it's also worth pointing out that part of the whole idea of Trek's aliens, is that they give us a way to look at ourselves without actually seeing ourselves, and if you make the aliens human, you lose that.
I like the idea that Bumpy Forehead aliens, Klingons, Vulcans, and so on are all actually humans and they hail from the Precursors being human in one fashion or another. However, I hate the idea of them all being lost colonies if that makes any sense.
Well, not all human, just all sharing a common genetic origin with humans. We also share a common ancestry (and far more directly so) with chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, etc., but one wouldn't call those human. A human is a member of Homo sapiens specifically.
Well I think TOS points out that Klingons, Vulcans, Andorians et al. are very different but TNG showed us a commen alien anscestral progenetor but how does that explain Human aliens like in BaC, who don't seem to be any different except in an alternate reality or in a parallel development way? Miri's planet was even an exact duplicate of Earth. Though Spock did point out that Humans represented only a tiny fraction of the universes population.
Not only do most of the humanoid species share a common progenitor, many of the resulting species were spread throughout the galaxy by another alien race known as The Preservers IIRC !
No he means the idea that they are literally human, just subraces. Like breeds of dogs or something.
Haha, others would say that after 45 years it's time for something fresh and new!
For another series, sure. But aliens are kind of built into Star Trek's DNA at this point. "Seeking out new life and civilizations, etc."
It would be like taking the vampires out of DARK SHADOWS . . . .
Who would watch a 3001 : Space Odessy : The Search for David Bowman t.v. series with no aliens in it or just a select few but more bigger mysteries? Sounds no different than Andromeda though or any number of countless space opera down through history starting with Starlost on through.
This reminds me of the situation facing human beings in the Traveller RPG setting. 300 thousand years before the present, for some reason a hyper-advanced civilization picked up proto-homo sapiens from Earth and scattered them on dozens of different worlds as servants and workers. A few dozen worlds--including Earth--survived the catastrophic breakdown of the Ancients' civilization in good enough shape for the human transplants to survive. By the time that Earth itself had become a civilization with independently-developed FTL technology in the early 22nd century, two other human populations (on the worlds of Vland and Zhdant) had been FTL starfarers for millennia, with any number of other transplanted human populations living at any number of tech levels (client states of one of the three FTL human civilizations with purchased FTL technology down to planets of hunter-gatherers).
Most of these human populations, incidentally, were interfertile. The exceptions were human populations that evolved on worlds different from the Earth-like norm (i.e. high-gravity worlds with abundance atmospheric sulfur dioxide) and/or were genetically engineered to be radically different from the root stock (i.e. one human species with two pairs of arms, another wth a pair of arms and a pair of wings). The population of the Third Imperium, the core state of the setting, was--some regions aside--mostly a mix of different populations, with a few smaller indigenous human populations mostly overwhelmed by Vilani conquest and settlement, themselves receiving substantial immigration from a successfully imperial Earth-based civilization that had included large Vilani populations from the start.
All this reminds me very much of the situation in the Trekverse, where any number of different species of intelligent beings which presumably evolved on different worlds are nonetheless interfertile thanks to 24th century medical technology. This suggests to me some sort of external intervention postdating the seeding of primordial oceans billons of years ago, perhaps a combination of transplanting populations from one world to another (explaining the distribution of beings very close to the human and Vulcan baselines on many different populations) and maybe elder species tailoring emerging species for extraplanetary genetic compatibility.
Yeah. It would explain a lot and we could also still have ALIEN aliens like the Horta or Changelings.
Plus, you have some good jokes in the process.
"The Precursors seeded the universe with human life?"
"That Captain, is ridiculous."
*beat*
"Obviously, they seeded it with Vulcan life."
The whole "alien planets seeded with humans" thing has been done to death by now, though, hasn't it? What would be the point in retconning ST to imitate the tropes of its successors?
Wait, excuse me Chris, but isn't that what the Preservers did or am i missing something here, where the parent progenitor race was seen in TNG episode 'The Chase'? Or were they not the preservers themselves? I hated that ep. btw. Just too contrived and strained as Menosky got sometimes.
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Would there be any retconning involved?
Even the television series has populations spread across worlds in antiquity, whether through deliberate colonization and resettlement efforts or through transplantation by a disappeared elder race. The novels expand on the theme substantially, maybe oversubstantially--the TNG novel The Captain's Honor features, in addition to Magna Roma, one Preserver-transplanted late Roman Iberian world and another with Asians--but I'd happily make the case that in the Trekverse, not only are there numerous surviving human populations on different worlds descended from transplants made by other civilizations before humans became a warp-capable species, but that many of these populations were removed so recently that their cultures are recognizable descendants of documented (if perhaps now extinct) Earth cultures.
What goes for humans might also go for other species, unless the Preservers were oddly overinterested in us. Maybe this might explain some of the broad distribution of Vulcans, alongside Surak-era colonization efforts?
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