Star Trek did it first, however. I guess it would make things seem a little more "hard science" (even though I know that ship sailed in the first episode).
A Human alien
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Star Trek did it first, however. I guess it would make things seem a little more "hard science" (even though I know that ship sailed in the first episode).
I'm not talking about whether the continuity can be rationalized away, I'm talking about whether it would be creatively desirable. Why should a franchise as classic and venerable as Star Trek, one of the pioneers that so many later franchises have emulated, be reduced to imitating its own successors by ripping off Stargate's "all aliens are humans" conceit?
Okay, now you're changing the subject. What I'm objecting to is the original suggestion in this thread that there are no other species, that all Trek humanoids could be reinterpreted as transplanted humans.
Those weren't the Preservers canonically - Ron D. Moore said he thought they could be, but he specifically didn't say in order to leave it open. Literally the only thing we know for sure the Preservers did was Miranamee's planet in Paradise Syndrome; everything else is either fanon or book canon, they were never mentioned once outside that episode.
I think some of us are talking at cross purposes. Obviously some races in Trek are seeded/transplanted/colonized. But my impression of the original proposal in this thread was that it was suggesting interpreting all Trek aliens as transplanted humans. Then again, going back to the original post, I see that it was so incoherently written that I can't really figure out what it's saying.
Oh, and the idea that the Progenitors from "The Chase" are the same as the Preservers is arrant nonsense. The Preservers were around at least as recently as the 17th century, because at least one of the transplanted Native American cultures Spock cited, the Navajo, didn't even exist until c. 1600 when a branch of Athabaskans adopted agriculture and other practices from the Pueblo. Not to mention that the Native Americans weren't an endangered culture until after European colonization began, so the Preservers would've had no reason to transplant them before the 17th century anyway. So the Preservers are more a modern race (or organization?) than an "ancient" one as they're often inexplicably assumed to be. The Progenitors, on the other hand, lived and died out four billion years ago, before life even arose on Earth.
And all the Preservers did was transplant pre-existing populations they considered endangered from one world to another. The Progenitors seeded programmed DNA in the primordial soup of countless uninhabited worlds, something that requires completely different and immensely more advanced technology. The two groups have absolutely nothing in common beyond being explanations for humanoid aliens in Trek (and they're only two of the three, Sargon's people from "Return to Tomorrow" being the other).
The one Trek race the Preservers really have anything in common with is the Vians from "The Empath" -- a group that was working to transplant an endangered population to a new planet. The Vians' known activities are separated from the Preservers' known activities by only 600 years or less instead of 4,000,000,000 years, and their methods are essentially the same.
Oh, and the idea that the Progenitors from "The Chase" are the same as the Preservers is arrant nonsense. The Preservers were around at least as recently as the 17th century, because at least one of the transplanted Native American cultures Spock cited, the Navajo, didn't even exist until c. 1600 when a branch of Athabaskans adopted agriculture and other practices from the Pueblo. Not to mention that the Native Americans weren't an endangered culture until after European colonization began, so the Preservers would've had no reason to transplant them before the 17th century anyway. So the Preservers are more a modern race (or organization?) than an "ancient" one as they're often inexplicably assumed to be. The Progenitors, on the other hand, lived and died out four billion years ago, before life even arose on Earth.
And all the Preservers did was transplant pre-existing populations they considered endangered from one world to another. The Progenitors seeded programmed DNA in the primordial soup of countless uninhabited worlds, something that requires completely different and immensely more advanced technology. The two groups have absolutely nothing in common beyond being explanations for humanoid aliens in Trek (and they're only two of the three, Sargon's people from "Return to Tomorrow" being the other).
The one Trek race the Preservers really have anything in common with is the Vians from "The Empath" -- a group that was working to transplant an endangered population to a new planet. The Vians' known activities are separated from the Preservers' known activities by only 600 years or less instead of 4,000,000,000 years, and their methods are essentially the same.
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My bad.
I had forgotten completely about that episode!
Does anyone know if someone has compiled a list of Preserver-transplanted cultures, of human or other stock?
Of the Earth-duplicate cultures in TOS, I think the only one beyond "The Paradise Syndrome" that's really a viable candidate is planet 892-IV, the Roman planet in "Bread and Circuses." Miri's planet is too exact a duplicate of Earth, both physically and historically, to be merely a transplanted population. Iotia was altered by the Horizon. Omega IV had indigenous civilizations felled by war many thousands of years ago, before any civilization existed on Earth. And so on.
The fact is, there's a wealth of mythology and assumptions that have been built up around the Preservers simply because we know virtually nothing about them. People fill in the gaps with all kinds of wild speculation. I prefer to be more cautious and not make assumptions beyond the evidence. Spock said the inscriptions on the obelisk described "a super-race known as the Preservers" who "passed through the galaxy rescuing primitive cultures which were in danger of extinction and seeding them, so to speak, where they could live and grow." He said that "apparently the Preservers account for a number of" the humanoid races in the galaxy. But which cultures they seeded is a mystery. We know they were active in the 17th century, quite recently in historical terms. If they are responsible for planet 892-IV, that suggests they were active for nearly two millennia before that. If they are the Vians, then they're still active six centuries later.
Then again, maybe there wasn't one species or culture of Preservers. Maybe multiple different cultures over time have taken it upon themselves to "preserve" endangered populations.
And Spock did say "a number of" humanoids, not most or all. We'd already learned in "Return to Tomorrow" that Sargon's people may have been the ancestors of many humanoid and/or Vulcanoid populations.
Here's how I tend to break it down: the Progenitors from "The Chase" were the first humanoids and essentially the "ancestors" (or perhaps designers) of all subsequent humanoid races, meaning any race played by actors with recognizable facial features -- everything from Vulcans, Klingons, and Cardassians to Tosk, Voth, Hirogen, Tamarian, and other more exotic humanoids. Sargon's people (as I posited in Watching the Clock) included two species, one of which is ancestral to the Vulcanoids (probably Henoch's people), the other of which is ancestral to many of the more humanlike humanoids, possibly including Bajorans, Betazoids, Deltans, Argelians, etc. The Preservers are only responsible for direct transplants of familiar cultures that can't be explained by other influences.
I only mean the ones who can interbreed with humans. Odo and the shapeshifters obviously aren't human and never were to begin with. What'd be really interesting were the Preservers to be humans from an alternate reality/previous one.
That way Star Trek could be a descendant of "our" universe with all the "copy Earths" explained away.
He's not objecting based on scientific validity. He's objecting based on the fact that he doesn't like the idea, the reasons of which he already elaborated on; and honestly I have to agree with him.
I don't know why you'd even bring them up, since they aren't even humanoid. The topic is about humanoid aliens -- Klingons, Vulcans, Cardassians, etc.
And you'd be hard-pressed to find any two Trek humanoid species that can't interbreed, at least with medical help. We've had Klingon-human hybrids, Cardassian-Bajoran hybrids, and other such bizarre combinations.
I don't see why that's interesting, particularly since it's kinda what the Stargate TV franchise already did with the Ancients. I say again, why would it be desirable for Star Trek, the first great SFTV franchise, to copy what more recent franchises have already done?
And I don't know what you mean by a "previous" reality.
I think he means Galactus-style. Survivors from a universe that existed "before" the Big Bang, whose universe ended in a Big Crunch that led to our own.
Well, that's nonsense. An earlier universe wouldn't have had Earth or humans in it. Unless you buy the "in an infinite universe everything has to happen" conceit, but I'm skeptical of that. And even if it were true, the timescale from the birth to the death of an entire universe reduces the lifespan of a single species like humans to less than the blink of an eye.
Besides, as I already pointed out, the one proven instance we have of Preserver activity was only 3-400 years ago. It's a bizarre, staggering mismatch of scale to assume they're some ancient civilization that was around millions or billions of years ago as some have assumed, and even more preposterous to imagine they came from some prior universe altogether. Why is it that so many people assume the entire past happened all at once?
Yes, those would be the ones I would make transplanted humanoids. It would also highlight the fact that they're meant to be cultures as opposed to things that are genuinely ALIEN. It would help ground Star Trek in harder science and also make the setting more realistic despite my suspension of disbelief being quite high.
It's not exactly something that Stargate created. It was also used on Farscape, Halo, and has it's origins in Star Trek: The Next Generation. According to current Trek canon, the entirety of the existing humanoid races in the Alpha (and probably other Quadrants) is that they were created by a predecessor race.
It's not like Human-like Precursors are a particularly new idea either, dating back arguably to Creation Myths as a whole.
As for why STAR TREK should do it. It's primarily a way of reclaiming what is owned by Star Trek to begin with, literary pedigree-wise. Star Trek influences and permeates virtually every science-fiction franchise in the world. Taking good ideas and putting a Trek spin on them is not demeaning itself because everything owes itself to Star Trek to begin with.
It's not like humans naturally evolved on Earth in the Star Trek reality to begin with. According to TNG human evolution was affected. There's no reason to assume that all of human evolution wasn't the product of a race deliberately designing it to occur on a planet like Earths in a fashion identical to their own evolution in whatever universe they come from.
The parallel Earths, for example, might be similar experiments.
Well if they evolved the Klingons, Romulans, and so on they've obviously been at work for literally hundreds of thousands of years. At the very least, they've been at work a million years in the past because that's when human evolution really got started.
More likely, they'd have to be there from the VERY BEGINNING and routinely effecting things to keep it all on track. So, the Preservers would be there for BILLIONS of years.
Every race has to have a hobby, I guess.
The flaw in your position is that you're using "human" and "humanoid" as interchangeable. You're blurring two very distinct science-fictional concepts: the concept that various humanoids, perhaps including the species Homo sapiens (aka humans), are descended from a common ancestor originating somewhere in the universe; and the concept that all "humanoids" are actually descendants of H. sapiens itself. Heck, those aren't just distinct, they're direct opposites when it comes to where humanity falls in the hierarchy. Star Trek postulated the former; Stargate essentially posited the latter (although it went back and forth -- originally the Ancients were posited to be a hominid race that evolved on Earth earlier than H. sapiens but from the same evolutionary line, making them the first iteration of humans; but then they retconned them into immigrants from another galaxy).
But I don't understand. If you're talking about Trek aliens being descended from a humanoid ancestor that is not specifically H. sapiens, then Star Trek has already done that, as you yourself point out.
God, why even bring alternate universes into it? That's gratuitously overcomplicating the variables. It's a Rube Goldberg approach. Surely all of that can be justified (and already has been within ST) without tossing in totally random stuff about alternate or "earlier" universes. Our own universe is plenty complex enough.
You say "if," but what reason is there to believe that "if?" Why assume the Preservers are so all-fired powerful in the first damn place? All we actually know about them is that they moved a few Native American populations to another planet a few centuries ago, that they could build powerful repulsor beams and memory-wiping gizmos, and that they were so damn stupid that they thought it was a good idea to "preserve" these populations by sticking them on a planet that was routinely bombarded by asteroids. That doesn't strike me as a master race of great wisdom. There's no evidence that they have any technology significantly beyond the 24th-century Federation, and they seem to have a lot less common sense. And their one known operation took place no farther in our past than Picard's Federation is in our future, so there's zero reason to assume they're ancient.
I mean, even if you can postulate an ancient species that directed the evolution of all humanoid life (and don't we already have that in the Progenitors?), what reason is there to identify them with the Preservers? The Preservers had nothing in common with any of that.
Typically a single nation or culture has a life expectancy of a few centuries, a few millennia at best. A typical species lives an average of two million years. And even within a single culture, policies and priorities can change on the span of decades or less. If a culture, or more realistically a government or faction within a culture, adopted a policy of preserving endangered populations or whatever, it might not last more than a few generations before priorities shift, or the original goals are forgotten or corrupted, or the government or organization that supported the effort collapses. Maybe, if a society is sufficiently long-lived and dedicated to the long view (like the European cultures that committed themselves to building cathedrals that took generations to complete), you could keep up a policy for a few thousand years. But billions of years? That's just failing to comprehend the sheer immensity of the timescale being discussed. Living beings and their societies are too dynamic to remain unchanged for anywhere near that long.
Well I don't mean the aliens from Tattoo. I mean make a "creation mythology" for Star Trek. I don't much care for "humanoid" aliens without justification in-setting and frankly, I would like a bit more. At the very least, they could be made more interesting as Creators.
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It's a vast galaxy.
Quite probably there are some regions where diverse species have evolved from a single recent transplanted humanoid population; or, rather, collections of planetary systems which were neighbours at one time before stellar drift separated them. This sort of thing has probably happened again and again, different populations being transported to different worlds by different civilizations with different goals in mind. There's no reason to postulate a single civilization doing it all from the galaxy's beginning.
One treatment of this sort of layered pattern of migrations and speciations in the Trekverse that I quite like was written by a fan for a sim. Once upon the time the Yederren were a single species. This changed.
Good write-up.
I guess it's a question of whether you prefer, "Small Galaxy" or "Large Galaxy" write-ups.
ST: OTA:WTC postulated literally dozens of civilizations rising and falling from the beginning to the end with no trace remaining whatsoever of them within say, 50,000 years difference.
That honestly made me sad.
I guess it's a question of whether you prefer, "Small Galaxy" or "Large Galaxy" write-ups.
ST: OTA:WTC postulated literally dozens of civilizations rising and falling from the beginning to the end with no trace remaining whatsoever of them within say, 50,000 years difference.
That honestly made me sad.
Hmm. I gotta admit this never bothered me. I've always just accepted it as part of the STAR TREK universe without needing any sort of "plausible" explanation.
I wonder if this is a generational thing. I mean, I grew up on TOS, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and SUPERMAN comics, so scores of humanoid aliens are just a standard space opera convention for me.
I'm still waiting for clarification on the issue that's confusing the hell out of me in this discussion: Are we talking about a humanoid progenitor whose descendants include humans (which is something Star Trek already has), or are we talking about Homo sapiens itself being the progenitor? Those are two very different conversations to have, so I don't know how to respond if I don't even know which of those is actually being proposed here.
Well, since our galaxy actually is extremely large and ancient, I don't see that there's any choice there.
Do you mean DTI: Watching the Clock? I think that description is oversimplifying, but when we're talking about a galaxy that's over 13.5 billion years old and has several hundred billion stars, then yeah, we're talking about unimaginably more than mere "dozens" of civilizations and species that have risen and fallen and left few traces behind. That's the way the universe works. Life is dynamic. Its very nature is to change, and it emerges in conditions that are themselves dynamic and mutable.
And frankly, the idea that civilizations would somehow remain perpetually static and unchanging for billions of years, never growing or moving forward, is a lot sadder to me. Sure, an individual civilization may go extinct and be forgotten, but if it was dynamic and adaptive enough, then some branches of it could've evolved into new forms and kept the legacy alive. No species or civilization is as monolithic as sci-fi tends to portray them. They have diverse factions and subcultures that tend to branch off from one another and pursue different paths.
For instance, in the Axis of Time subplot of WTC,
So even though knowledge may be lost by some, it may still survive elsewhere in the galaxy. After all, it is a very huge galaxy.
Well, since our galaxy actually is extremely large and ancient, I don't see that there's any choice there.
Do you mean DTI: Watching the Clock? I think that description is oversimplifying, but when we're talking about a galaxy that's over 13.5 billion years old and has several hundred billion stars, then yeah, we're talking about unimaginably more than mere "dozens" of civilizations and species that have risen and fallen and left few traces behind. That's the way the universe works. Life is dynamic. Its very nature is to change, and it emerges in conditions that are themselves dynamic and mutable.
And frankly, the idea that civilizations would somehow remain perpetually static and unchanging for billions of years, never growing or moving forward, is a lot sadder to me. Sure, an individual civilization may go extinct and be forgotten, but if it was dynamic and adaptive enough, then some branches of it could've evolved into new forms and kept the legacy alive. No species or civilization is as monolithic as sci-fi tends to portray them. They have diverse factions and subcultures that tend to branch off from one another and pursue different paths.
For instance, in the Axis of Time subplot of WTC,
I did indicate that the Vulcanoid from the future had never heard of Vulcans, Romulans, or the Federation, implying that a lot of cultural knowledge had been forgotten, but the species, or a descendant of it, lived on. And I did hint at the end that Shiiem's people, who came from further ahead than the Vulcanoids, were in actuality a far-future descendant of humanity.
Yeah, I don't know how that typo got past me.
But yes, Star Trek already has a bit of a "small galaxy" feel in that it covers a quarter of the galaxy in the Federation and it's only a hundred inhabited planets. Meaning, despite appearances, the galaxy is a largely vastly uninhabited place filled with lots of barren rock.
Life is a rare and precious thing.
Privately, I tend to like the "small galaxy" postulation because I prefer the idea that somehow humans will make it to be beings like the Q and will remain until the end of this wonderful universe of ours. Is it remotely realistic? No, but neither are transporters.
I'm not particularly bothered by cultures which can potentially exist forever as well either since presumably after you reach a certain age you will cease to change because you've accumulated a certain amount of wisdom. After all, again, look at the Q. They have always been after all.
Excellent topic, btw.
But yes, Star Trek already has a bit of a "small galaxy" feel in that it covers a quarter of the galaxy in the Federation and it's only a hundred inhabited planets. Meaning, despite appearances, the galaxy is a largely vastly uninhabited place filled with lots of barren rock.
Life is a rare and precious thing.
Privately, I tend to like the "small galaxy" postulation because I prefer the idea that somehow humans will make it to be beings like the Q and will remain until the end of this wonderful universe of ours. Is it remotely realistic? No, but neither are transporters.
I'm not particularly bothered by cultures which can potentially exist forever as well either since presumably after you reach a certain age you will cease to change because you've accumulated a certain amount of wisdom. After all, again, look at the Q. They have always been after all.
Besides, culture is what matters to me as opposed to genetic legacy. The whole idea that Vulcanoids exist doesn't really matter. Were humans to go extinct and the Federation to continue, I'd find that a happier ending than the morbid and depressing idea that all we leave behind is our genes.
It's just a matter of taste, however.
It's just a matter of taste, however.
Excellent topic, btw.
The Federation doesn't cover a quarter of the galaxy, though. It covers a region a few hundred light years across with a few members a thousand or two out. The Novelverse takes the DS9 Federation size view for the most part.
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