Yes it did. Soval said so in Enterprise.
How Did Earth Get United?
- Thread starter RookieBatman
- Start date
Obama united Earth in 2013
Such things are a matter of some interpretation, though. Japan still hasn't "rebuilt" after WWII in the sense that many historical landmarks remain unreconstructed, for example.
What Soval in "The Forge" says exactly is this:
So the almost 1,500 years would include the time Vulcan would regain its interstellar reach, while the planetary infrastructure might have been re-erected in two decades already.
Still, one can make the argument that a planetary nuclear war can set back a civilization by a thousand years. It's fairly irrelevant what the real-world facts on this are, as long as it is established to be possible in the Trek universe.
Vulcan might be an exceptional case in some ways, though: it's supposedly hostile to life without civilization, sparsely populated by people living close to extreme conditions. Once such a civilization loses, say, a global network for growing and distributing food, it may well be set back much more severely than a civilization where a new farm can be erected basically overnight wherever there are people. Vulcan's population might easily have dropped to a thousandth of what it used to be before the war.
Timo Saloniemi
What Soval in "The Forge" says exactly is this:
So the almost 1,500 years would include the time Vulcan would regain its interstellar reach, while the planetary infrastructure might have been re-erected in two decades already.
Still, one can make the argument that a planetary nuclear war can set back a civilization by a thousand years. It's fairly irrelevant what the real-world facts on this are, as long as it is established to be possible in the Trek universe.
Vulcan might be an exceptional case in some ways, though: it's supposedly hostile to life without civilization, sparsely populated by people living close to extreme conditions. Once such a civilization loses, say, a global network for growing and distributing food, it may well be set back much more severely than a civilization where a new farm can be erected basically overnight wherever there are people. Vulcan's population might easily have dropped to a thousandth of what it used to be before the war.
Timo Saloniemi
However, it's entirely possible that while the United States continued to exist as a national community whose members thought of themselves as one people, the US government itself was destroyed and nonexistant during a period of time between 2053 and 2079 before being re-established.
Remember, there's a difference between the United States and the United States government.
Silly 3D Master should have known that, I hear ENT is his favourite TV show of all time
3D Master
Rear Admiral
Have you ever seen anyone increasing nuclear weapons and their payload in the past 3 decades? No. And that's not going to change. For one thing, past a certain yield, a nuclear weapon isn't going to do anymore damage. The force will simply disappear unused as heat up into the atmosphere.
So no, they will not have access to more refined, let alone more powerful technologies than we do.
The death toll should be higher than 600 million, and it undoubtedly was. Like I said, it has to be an official number limited to a certain set of deaths. What we see in Q's courtroom wouldn't happen with only 600 million dead.
The resources of asteroids would be worthless? Have you lost your mind? Asteroids are filled with who knows what, and the moon is no different. It's not a wonder that even now there are people who are having plans for off-planet industry and mining operations. And obviously it wouldn't be 2050s surviving spacecraft, it would be NEW spacecraft using Cochranes new technologies. Remember that little line from FC: "Your warp engine opened up the planets and the stars." Note, THE PLANETS.
Yeah, that's why you would be using FREIGHT space ships not starships.
But we know for a fact that it is going to change, or in fact has already changed. Why, the ICBM of choice for the past four decades has been the Saturn V!
Of course they will. They have antigravity, for chrissakes!
Why not? It has happened in plenty enough countries with just half a million dead.
Uh, yes. But the asteroids are in space. Postwar Earthlings would be on Earth.
First, Earth would have to rebuild the world of wonders that in the 1980s already controlled gravity. And that's quite a feat of rebuilding. We're not talking about struggling back to industrialism in a thoroughly bombed Germany or Japan, because that will not suffice for the purpose. We're talking about struggling back to space age in a world where "major cities" have supposedly been leveled everywhere.
Indeed, warp drive would have major benefits in interplanetary travel, as we see in ENT already (a mine/refinery hops from Moon to Mars in a matter of minutes). But first one would have to build the warpships. Cochrane had a preexisting "spare" vehicle for getting from Earth to space for his experiment. Others would have to bootstrap their industries somehow to create the new spacecraft that would allow them to bootstrap their industries. See the big problem?
Do the Vulcans have those to spare? Do they lend those to us? Do we persuade somebody else to lend?
Possibly. Perhaps even probably, as we know that Earth did recover eventually. But it's all still perfectly fuzzy, and there is no objective confirmation that access to space resources played a role in Earth's recovery - or that Vulcan material aid did.
Timo Saloniemi
That sure fits in with "Star Trek".
That's a Star Trek fact, a bit polemically put. That is, TOS "Assignment: Earth" showed that the United States in 1968 was fielding orbital nuclear weapons via Saturn V boosters, casting serious doubt on 3DMaster's idea that the Trek nuclear weapons history is based on our nuclear weapons history.
Obviously, ICBM technology kept developing, so that by the 2050s, USAF would operate a missile that looked a bit like Titan II but in fact had higher performance than Saturn V, the lower stage being able to inject Cochrane's test craft (larger than the original upper stage) into an apparent translunar orbit. It would seem USAF was in the business of lofting truly immense payloads at its enemies even at that time, payloads Picard referred to as nuclear weapons.
Whether this did the United States any good is unknown. Certainly there was widespread destruction of urban areas, but just as certainly several key US neighborhoods were saved from destruction as they are seen intact in the 24th century. (If they were simply rebuilt to their prewar glory due to their historical value or somesuch, surely they would have been subsequently protected from futuristic newbuilding, which we do see marring their faces.)
We have a pair of casualty figures to describe the war: the ST:FC 600 million that may refer to total dead, and the "Bread and Circuses" 37 million that might refer to those dead from weapons fire. We also know from "A Matter of Time" that there was a nuclear winter, although its duration and destructiveness remains unknown. From "Encounter at Farpoint" we see that there was disorder and vigilantism at least on some locations of Earth, we don't know which, but the scenes we witnessed didn't seem to speak of anarchy as such: law was being enforced by courts in command of troops in what Q earlier claimed were typical military uniforms for the time. Certainly nothing indicates casualties in the billions, although we should remember that we don't know the population of Earth in the Trek 2050s. Heck, we don't know the population of Earth in the Trek 1980s, either - population growth would be greatly affected by African and South American politics in the latter half of the 20th century.
...Suffice to say that we know sufficiently little to leave open basically every imaginable possibility, and a couple of unimaginable ones.
Timo Saloniemi
Nations and people have a way of sugarcoating the past.
Americans gloss over the genocide of the Indians for example.
One can see the people of Earth, when they helped form the Federation, downplaying the role of military conquest in uniting the planet and instead highlighting the aspects of "we all just decided to get along".
The 37 million, were casualties of Colonel Green himself and his ecoterrorists. (see IAMD II)
Since this is "Star Trek" and not real History, what's your point? "Star Trek's" philosophy rests solidly on the notion "we all just decided to get along".
Only in the Mirror Universe.
Not necessarily.
And it wasn't a Saturn V that was used to launch the orbital nuclear platform in "Assignment Earth".
Saturn Vs have only one engine in the third stage.
The rocket used in "Assignment Earth" clearly had either four or five rocket engines in the third stage.
Hah, good spotting!
However, the vehicle that launched Skylab, with zero engines on the "third stage", was still classified as a Saturn V. So this four- or five-engined nuclear payload might not actually result in a designation change for the booster, either...
One wonders where they wanted to put that third stage, really. Why more engines than in a vehicle intended to reach the Moon? Would an orbiting nuclear silo be more useful in a high orbit or a low one? Did USAF worry about Soviet ASAT?
Timo Saloniemi
That bit of pseudofact is unfortunately not legible on screen. And the more explicit description of what made him famous, in "Demons", credits him with just hundreds of thousands of victims. Surely "Demons" would have referred to those tens of millions instead, even if Green killed both sets during his career. So I'd dismiss the "IaMD" graphic completely here.
Timo Saloniemi
Huh? You don't believe that one of the guiding philosophies presented in "Star Trek" is that people should get along in spite of their differences?
3D Master
Rear Admiral
Forget Enterprise. It's junk.
We know for a fact it's not going to change. They still use nukes in the 22nd century, so there's barely been an upgrade. And whatever ICBM is used, doesn't matter.
First of all, nope, during WWIII they do NOT. That doesn't come until after Zefram Cochrane creates his warp drive. Further, antigravity has got NOTHING to do with a nuclear explosive.
No, it hasn't. The only countries that ever lost half a million was during WW1 and WWII and one or two countries under assault by a super power later, nothing like what Q's courtroom showed at all, afterward.
If that were true, there'd never be a Federation, because postwar Earthlings would be on Earth, and according to you apparently never leave there. Which would also mean no colonization of Mars and such. It's what Zefram's technologies allowed, cheap very powerful drives that allow one to reach the planets quick and easily. Humanity would GO there, after WWIII. It's the whole point of his invention after all, to leave Earth.
??? If they already controlled gravity, Star Trek IV would look very differently, also, Zefram Cochrane's warp drive would not have opened up the rest of the planets, the planets would already have been opened. Mars wouldn't have been colonized until the 2100s, it would have been colonized in the 20th century. A world war then, would indeed NOT keep Earth stranded on one planet as you like them be above. They'd be spread throughout the solar system already, with heavy industry already up and running. Earth would have been rebuild in less than a decade in that scenario, let alone a century. Also, they problably wouldn't have needed FC with the Vulcans to do anything.
Nope, because you don't get it. Cochrane obviously didn't need an industry to build his warp ship(s), and once through readings and further study of his warp flight, anti-gravity, and impulse engines and the like opened up, you wouldn't even need a first step conventional rocket engine to get your ship to space. Cochrane's invention allowed people to build space going vessels quick and easy, without a huge industrial base, without the backing of a massive governmental machine, and producing ships not just to get to orbit and the moon, but to every planet and asteroid you want to go to. All it takes is some determined people with a little start up capital, and away you go.
Humanity would be building them themselves obviously. And initial aid, if it was even necessary, would indeed be something the Vulcans would spare.
Right, I see. "Your warp drive opened up the planets and the stars", really means, "Your warp drive was a useless pile of junk, that really didn't do anything, barely helped at all; nope, it was only after decades and decades, hell, more than a century, 2 even, that humanity with desperate help from every alien species out there finally cleaned up the planet, only then invented far more useful other short-range sublight technologies could finally open up the planets, and only then allowed useful exploitation of the stars... so... wait why the hell are we here again?"
Seeing as they were blown to bits every bit as much as their enemies during WWIII, nope, because it's a. not the obvious, and b. false.
In case you hadn't noticed, the whole point of Assignment Earth, was that such things were STOPPED. Also, you line "ICBM of choice has been the Saturn V" is also RIDICULOUS. As obviously in Trek, there was a Titan II and thus a Titan I, and NOT a Saturn V, but eh.
The ICBM used, doesn't matter. It's the nuclear payload that matters. And no, this does NOT mean that the USAF was in the business of lofting truly immense payloads at its enemies, as Cochrane used a MODIFIED Titan II. He did his own tinkering with the rocket, he didn't use it as he found it without any changes.
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