Does Trek take place in an alternate timeline from ours?
- Thread starter Commander Kielbasa
- Start date
Yes. If its the 23rd Century you place Star Trek and Captain Kirk in the 27th Century, just as Superman's adventure currently take place in 2017 not 1938. And James Bond's films take place in the 21st Century not the 20th. It's fiction you can make adjustments. Nothing is set in stone. Not mentioning the anachronisms is very simple. They aren't errors, they're just ideas that don't work anymore.
As it has been pointed out, technically all fiction not set in a completely fictional universes is alternative history. Those Poirot's famous cases never happened nor is there really a village named Emmerdale in Yorkshire. However, usually when people say 'alternative history' they tend to mean more drastic differences.
Having a probe named Voyager VI in the late 20th century is a minor difference no larger than having fictional character and events in any fiction set in 'the real world'. However having a huge war involving genetically altered super people in the late 20th century is of course a massive difference and would make Trek blatant alternative timeline.
As I prefer to think Star Trek as 'our future', my headcanon is that Eugenic Wars actually happened somewhere in the mid 21st century and is the same thing than WWIII. There is even some canon support for this. Sure, the 20th century is mentioned, but in both 'Space Seed' an TWOK it is said that EW took place two hundred years ago, so in 2060's, not 1990's. Spock also says it was "the era of your last so-called world war," implying that it was indeed the same thing as the Third World War, which has elsewhere stated to have happened in the mid 21st century.
Having a probe named Voyager VI in the late 20th century is a minor difference no larger than having fictional character and events in any fiction set in 'the real world'. However having a huge war involving genetically altered super people in the late 20th century is of course a massive difference and would make Trek blatant alternative timeline.
As I prefer to think Star Trek as 'our future', my headcanon is that Eugenic Wars actually happened somewhere in the mid 21st century and is the same thing than WWIII. There is even some canon support for this. Sure, the 20th century is mentioned, but in both 'Space Seed' an TWOK it is said that EW took place two hundred years ago, so in 2060's, not 1990's. Spock also says it was "the era of your last so-called world war," implying that it was indeed the same thing as the Third World War, which has elsewhere stated to have happened in the mid 21st century.
That's been my head canon for awhile now, too...all one has to do is consider those 1990s dates apocryphal. But even shifting things that far forward will become outdated within some of our lifetimes.
True. I will worry about that then, if I'm still alive.
EDIT: Besides, how things are going we might get WWIII sooner than we expected!
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Yeah, I hope I live to complain that Trek got WWIII wrong! 
However much Gene Roddenberry tried to inform his depiction of the future with extrapolations of technological development from the late 1960s mixed with a healthy dose of idealism, Star Trek is as much a guess of the future as anything else that tries to depict what the future might be like.
Like anyone else attempting to guess the future, reality diverged from the guess.
Star Trek is not the future, but a guess at the future.
Like anyone else attempting to guess the future, reality diverged from the guess.
Star Trek is not the future, but a guess at the future.
And it should continue to guess about the future and not be mired in the past.
Contact with what? What documentary??
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