All those human planets in TOS

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Didnt we find out on ENTERPRISE that sometime in the future, phlox finds a way to get around that?

I believe it was E^2 - a scan of Lorian's genome reveals that not only is he the son of Trip and T'Pol, but that Phlox was the one who did the genetic reworking necessary to make Lorian's existence possible.

 

[Ronald Held]

Don't they have translators, which for being not speaking in Standard, translates their terms into it, so the UT might refer to themselves as people or human, and their planet as Earth, etc?

 

[Myasishchev]

More than that. Even if we assume a Vulcan man can inseminate a human woman, in Spock's case, the resulting child has hemocyanin-based blood but is being oxygenated with his mother's hemoglobin-based blood. A baby can have problems if its mother's blood is the wrong type. I question the survival capacity of a fetus if its mother's blood is the wrong color.

Didnt we find out on ENTERPRISE that sometime in the future, phlox finds a way to get around that? We know for SURE that the terra prime doctor in DEMONS found a way ( Although not ENTIRELY succesful ) to meld human and vulcan genomes.

An artificial genetic code is totally buyable. But Amanda trying to feed Fetus Spock with a compound totally unlike his own biochemistry is simply not going to work. It would be like a human woman trying to bring to term a horseshoe crab.

I suppose he could have been surrogated, which would avoid this huge problem, but in TFF it is Amanda giving birth, right?

And if I recall, they're going to do it AGAIN in ST11.

 

[Timewalker]

It seems that the Enterprise visited practically hundreds of planets where the inhabitants looked human. But were they humans...or aliens that merely looked human? I'm asking because I find it hard to believe that, by the time of Kirk's era, humanity would have stretched so far across the galaxy to the point where they'd exist on so many worlds. But even more curious is that they'd already have such distinct, seemingly ancient, cultures. You'd think they'd look more like colonists.

In The Making of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry said they didn't consider distances, just star names that would be more familiar to viewers. That's why they have colonies on planets orbiting Vega (which doesn't have planets yet) and Rigel (a blue giant star which won't live long enough to have planets that will support life at all, let alone anything intelligent).

But if the Omegans came first, then America and China are the duplicate cultures! And we plagiarized the Omegan-American Declaration, too.

Gah, I hated that episode!

It's all to do with varying timeframes and an uncertain continuity in the early days of TOS. Squire Of Gothos put TOS as far foward as 500 years, and it could have been even further.

Trelane was aware of the events of "The Man Trap"! There's a Salt Vampire stuffed and standing in a niche in his front entry hall!

 

[Gil T.Azell]

Yeah, the Preservers, Sargon's race, and those guys from TNG's 'The Chase' sort out that whole 'all aliens look like humans' mess.

What I am not Spock said.

here is a partial quote from A Seeder in ST:TNG "The Chase"

"You are wondering who we are. Why we have done this. Time has come that I stand before you, the image of a being from so long ago. Life evolved at my planet before all others in this part of the galaxy. We left our world, explored the stars and found none like ourselves. Our civilization thrived for ages, but what is the life of one race compared to the vast stretches of cosmic time. We knew that one day we would be gone, that nothing of us would survive. So, we left you."

I believe she also mentioned the seas/oceans of each planet would determine what the inhabitants would look like.

 

[Christopher]

In The Making of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry said they didn't consider distances, just star names that would be more familiar to viewers. That's why they have colonies on planets orbiting Vega (which doesn't have planets yet) and Rigel (a blue giant star which won't live long enough to have planets that will support life at all, let alone anything intelligent).

Well, back in the 1960s, nobody had any idea which stars did or didn't have planets. And the distances weren't that well-known anyway.

Trelane was aware of the events of "The Man Trap"! There's a Salt Vampire stuffed and standing in a niche in his front entry hall!

That doesn't follow. The salt vampire in "The Man Trap" was the last survivor of a whole species. The one in Trelane's castle could've been taken from M113 hundreds or thousands of years before.

 

[Timewalker]

I know they didn't know about exoplanets and exact distances between stars. I'm just saying what I read in Roddenberry's book. But I do admit that it spoils the story a little for me now, knowing that those stars can't have life-bearing planets by the 23rd century. It's like deciding whether or not you still like the older stories by Bradbury and Heinlein, knowing what we do now about the conditions on Mars and Venus.

BTW, I'm the one who mentioned the Salt Vampire, not Pavonis. And I say there would be no reason for Trelane to have one in his front hall unless it was in reference to Kirk and his crew. After all, he wanted them to feel at home...