Earliest divergence of Trek from "our" reality??

[FordSVT]

I reject the whole premise of the thread. You'll never find any record of the murders depicted in Law & order or CSI in the real NYPD's files, that doesn't mean they're set in an alternate universe.

The nuclear platform? Hushed up. The Eugenics Wars? Greg Cox handled that to my satisfaction. Ad infinitum.


Marian

so how do you handle the far more advanced at this time period space program.

oh and our voyager program stopped at two.

the realities are very different and i dont buy the cox explanation for the eugenics wars either.

Considering he also tied in Jonny Quest and the Bionic Woman into the story, me neither. Space Seed implies a large scale global conflict, Cox's books were an admirable fan-nod to "reality" but in the end are not canon and don't really even make that much sense when taken as a whole.

 

[captcalhoun]

he also tied in the Stepford Wives, Wicker Man and christ knows what else.

 

[erastus25]

Setting aside any time-travel shenanigans as off-point ... how about Flint (from TOS' "Requiem for Methuselah") actually having been Solomon, Da Vinci, Brahms, etc.? Not buyin' that for a minute, of course, but ...

I think JM may be the winner. Flint being all those people, I always liked that idea. So I think this is your earliest divergence of "our" reality from the ST reality. I was going to say the TNG ep Time's Arrow, where Data and company wind up in the 19th century, but no, Flint had been around since I think 3000 B.C. or thereabouts.

Having said that, here are a couple of my own ideas of when this divergence may have happened.

First, depending on when Apollo and his associates from Who Mourns For Adonais? first made contact with ancient Earth, their existence and interaction with our ancestors could be the earliest point of divergence.

Here is another possibility of when the realities diverged, but the timeline is a little fuzzy. You'll recall the enigmatic race known as the Preservers from The Paradise Syndrome, who were responsible for transplanting an Indian tribe from Earth to another planet? We don't know how far back they began transplanting people from Earth to other worlds, but I think it went back thousands of years. And it's hinted they had something to do with the Vulcan/Romulan separation.

Red Ranger

I don't think Apollo's back story or Flint create a necessary divergence from reality. In both cases the writer's build on the actual history of the people referenced. An actual conflict won't exist until the 2260s when nobody actually finds Flint or Apollo.

 

[Starbreaker]

I think First Contact is going to be the major divergence. The Mirror Universe, The ST one, and ours will all begin at that point.

 

[FordSVT]

I think First Contact is going to be the major divergence. The Mirror Universe, The ST one, and ours will all begin at that point.

But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that all three universe were created well before 2069, much of it in this thread. The biggest being, of course, the Eugenics wars.

 

[Balthier the Great]

I reject the whole premise of the thread. You'll never find any record of the murders depicted in Law & order or CSI in the real NYPD's files, that doesn't mean they're set in an alternate universe.

The nuclear platform? Hushed up. The Eugenics Wars? Greg Cox handled that to my satisfaction. Ad infinitum.

So how would you explain the existence of fictional Trek in a universe where it really happened?

(And also the existence of a 24th-century Starfleet Chief of Staff named Gene Roddenberry. Look it up!)

No, that's just the time loop paradox. 24th centry GR is the same guy as the 20th century. he time travelled, thus inventing trek, causing the investion of warp drive, thus in the 24th century he is cheif of staff of said starfleet. So it all makes sense -- The fictional Trekverse is responsible for CREATING the real Trekverse.

PS this might also explain why there was a guy named William Shatner who rode with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders.

 

[Space Cowboy]

I think First Contact is going to be the major divergence. The Mirror Universe, The ST one, and ours will all begin at that point.

But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that all three universe were created well before 2069, much of it in this thread. The biggest being, of course, the Eugenics wars.

After which, there was the Bell Riots in 2024 San Francisco, in which a random man will be replaced by a man bearing a peculiar resemblance to Avery Brooks. That is if you buy the government coverup of the Eugenics Wars.

 

[pookha]

on flint,
one theory that has been bandied about through the years that he actually wasnt those famous people but his long life had allowed him to become a master forger.
that he was brahms is especially bs.
brahms didnt just up and vanish . his last illness that took place over a year eventual death and burial is documented from multiple sources.

http://www.chestjournal.org/cgi/content/short/119/3/985

 

[erastus25]

on flint,
one theory that has been bandied about through the years that he actually wasnt those famous people but his long life had allowed him to become a master forger.
that he was brahms is especially bs.
brahms didnt just up and vanish . his last illness that took place over a year eventual death and burial is documented from multiple sources.

http://www.chestjournal.org/cgi/content/short/119/3/985

The writers were banking on the average person not knowing that about any of the men he supposedly was. Also, the point isn't who he was, the point was the concept of one man living an interminably long life and wanting to finally rest in peace.

Besides, after hundreds of years I'm sure Flint would have figured out a way to swap some dying dude into his place while he snuck away and found a new identity.

 

[Nerdius Maximus]

Uh, that no one will ever, ever dress like that.

Haven't you ever been to a convention?

 

[Timo]

Flint being all those people, I always liked that idea. So I think this is your earliest divergence of "our" reality from the ST reality.

Does that count? I mean, the one and the same immortal entity could have been all those people in "our" reality, too, and we would be none the wiser. Shouldn't the "event" be something that we can verify as being different?

Granted that it's a bit unlikely that Flint could have faked being Brahms, although probably not impossible. It's even less likely, but again not impossible, that an additional Saturn V was really launched and exploded while carrying a nuclear weapons payload. It's still less likely, although theoretically not impossible, that the Eugenics Wars did happen and we didn't notice. At some point, we'll have to start admitting that these things are too unlikely to be accepted as part of "our" universe. Where do you draw that line?

(FWIW, I can't go with MarianLH's project of assimilating all of Trek into "our" universe, because I don't really want WWIII to happen and I can't suspend my disbelief on the issue of pointy-eared, copper-blooded humanoids landing in 2063. The quest is futile and basically nonproductive, so why bother at all?)

The first "intervention" that should be easily verifiable is IMHO the Chronowerx thing, although we can theoretically find undeniable proof on some of the subtler things from before that date (say, we could discover the wreck of Earhart's plane). However, from the vantage point of 2008, we can't yet tell Chronowerx apart from Microsoft in terms of impact; we don't know for sure that Microsoft won't spawn the technologies of a United Federation of Planets, or that Gates didn't originally get his material from the future. So the difference might actually be considered relatively minor, from our vantage point.

In those terms, the absence of practical manned interplanetary travel from the late 1980s and early 1990s is the first thing where mere substitution of a few names and faces won't make things compatible again...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mike Farley]

Whether the Eugenics Wars were covered up or not, their existence in the Trekverse means that Earth had the ability to create genetically engineered people sometime in the early 60's or late 70's. That's a fairly major divergence from real world science.

Aside from this perhaps the biggest divergence is that maybe the USA never scaled back it's space program in the 70's. The latter Apollo missions weren't cancelled. We had a permanent presence on the moon by the 80's. By the 90's we were building DY 100 sleeper ships to probe the solar system. Maybe one of these was commanded by Shuan Geoffrey Christopher for the first manned Earth-Saturn probe.

By the mid-21st century a drunk in the middle of no-where managed to build the first FTL spaceship.

The Trekverse just seems more...science-y than our own.

 

[PhoenixIreland]

Their depiction of 19th century Ireland was just a tad off...

it was too clean, and they were short a few million starved to death corpses

 

[JM1776]

Flint being all those people, I always liked that idea. So I think this is your earliest divergence of "our" reality from the ST reality.

Does that count? I mean, the one and the same immortal entity could have been all those people in "our" reality, too, and we would be none the wiser. Shouldn't the "event" be something that we can verify as being different?

Flint could not have been either Solomon or Alexander, since both have youths and young manhoods that were sufficiently well-chronicled to preclude someone taking over for them without anybody else noting it. If you accept the Bible as verification, then Solomon was born of Bathsheba, grew to maturity in David's court and was eventually anointed King of Israel. Alexander was quite young, but extremely well known—a prince of his realm. Flint wouldn't have been able to step into his shoes, either.

If they'd been smart, the writers of this ep would have made certain that whosoever they named had had an obscure childhood, thereby making the "impersonation" plausible.

Of course, I doubt they thought anyone would be conducting eisegesis forty years later.

 

[Trekker4747]

The earliest I can think of is July of 1947. Whatever you want to think happened in Roswell it can be guaranteed that Quark and co. weren't there.

 

[BigC]

I think it changed in 1945 when Quark, Rom, Odo, and Nog crashed in Roswell.

 

[Trekker4747]

I think it changed in 1945 when Quark, Rom, Odo, and Nog crashed in Roswell.

1947.

Try and keep up with your ET history, dear.

 

[Timo]

...young manhoods that were sufficiently well-chronicled

Ah, but what does "well-chronicled" mean? Typically, there's only one eyewitness account and then an accumulation of secondhand documentation that sometimes pretends to be firsthand - Flint could have been the original chronicler, the true "creator" of Alexander (in addition to possibly playing the character as well, at least the highlight parts of him).

And while Flint looks like a man in his fifties or sixties or even well-preserved seventies in "Requiem", one might think he was a young lad physically for most of his millennia (while still on Earth and regenerating). He originally died a warrior's death back when warriors weren't wise old men, after all. Playing a healthy wunderkind would be the easy part of his roles, then; faking aging would be the true challenge, and I trust he would have a few tricks up his sleeve, such as giving himself various deadly poisons every morning.

Probably Flint would start out without much concern for detail, then experiment with the widest possible variety of people he could be, and at one point take on the challenge of becoming as public a figure as possibe while still managing to fake his aging and death. I wouldn't wonder a bit if he were Queen Victoria, too... The 19th century might be the last time he could pull that off, though, and he'd gradually scale back and get more serious about it all, reverting to the roles of influential no-names.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Geoff]

On a completely different note, I'm sure any historian in New York City can confirm that there was no such place as the "21st Street Mission" in 1930 in our universe. So the point of diversion had to be long before Kirk, Spock and McCoy showed up and turned Edith Keeler into roadkill.

 

[Timo]

If we decide that simple name-swapping and squinting is not acceptable, in the above manner, then we have to consider such issues as

-there not being a single street in New York that looks like the sets used (a 1930s issue again)
-there not being a place in Milan or Florence that would have looked like the view out of holo-Leonardo's window (a 1400s issue, even if one ignores the underlying geography)
-there not being a hole in the water off Australian coast the size and shape of New Zealand (an issue going back hundreds of millions of years)
-there not being a starfield like the one shown above Earth in the later movies (an issue involving billions of years)

And basically, we should go all the way back to the Big Bang to have the entire universe reset so that the laws of physics allow for warp drive...

Timo Saloniemi