We barely elected a black guy. I'm not sure that India is ready to elect a Frankenstein with a penchant for lower-degree sexual assault.
How did the Eugenics Wars start?
- Thread starter EJA
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We barely elected a black guy. I'm not sure that India is ready to elect a Frankenstein with a penchant for lower-degree sexual assault.
I don't think it was even implied the Khan was elected to office in the multiple countries he ruled. McGivers said he looked Sikh, Sikh's are maybe three percent of the Indian population, another reason he wouldn't of been elected.
I like the idea that the young supermen seize power not through invasions, but by grapping control of the seats of power, mistakenly believing that the local populaces would follow whatever strongman was wearing the sash and standing on the presidential balcony. Spock said that there were no massacres under Khan, suggesting that there were massacres under the other forty plus rulers. Except for Khan they were all out of power in three years. I've alway held that there is a difference between intelligent and smart.
Doesn't seem they were terribly smart.
I believe Star Trek exists in it's own realm, there are so many differences between "our" timeline and theirs,
So, some Sikh guy shows up in Tehran with seventy of his closest friends, and deposes Ahmadinejad? Unlikely. Even the most thuggish (there's a pun in there somewhere) coups, like Saddam Hussein's muscling out of al-Bakr and other rivals within the Ba'ath Party, nonetheless had support within an organized, nationalist party that had significant popular appeal.
The Palestinian Liberation Front in 1970-71 was better organized than seventy guys with attitude problems and above-average IQs, had far broader appeal and popular support, and they couldn't even topple Jordan. How in the world is some lab-made freak going to take over India? Or Pakistan? Or any place worth anything?
Beyond plausibility issues, I don't think the Thousand Augment scenario is all that interesting. It's just the backdrop for some villainy. The Hundred Million Augment scenario has room for moral ambiguity, and better science fiction. With genetic engineering coming along at the pace it is, I wouldn't be surprised that within twenty years "Space Seed" looks about as progressive as "The Jazz Singer."
Even without the prospect of real "supermen" coming to walk among us, the 100M Augment scenario serves as an allegory for the cultural conflict the world is facing right now, between increasingly cosmopolitan global elite and the conservative provincialists who fear the more united, but perhaps a more decadent, more meaningless, and more immoral future that they represent.
Also, fwiw--India has a Sikh prime minister right now, Manmohan (wait for it
) Singh. OMG the war has begun!
But, no, he's not genetically engineered.
The Palestinian Liberation Front in 1970-71 was better organized than seventy guys with attitude problems and above-average IQs, had far broader appeal and popular support, and they couldn't even topple Jordan. How in the world is some lab-made freak going to take over India? Or Pakistan? Or any place worth anything?
Beyond plausibility issues, I don't think the Thousand Augment scenario is all that interesting. It's just the backdrop for some villainy. The Hundred Million Augment scenario has room for moral ambiguity, and better science fiction. With genetic engineering coming along at the pace it is, I wouldn't be surprised that within twenty years "Space Seed" looks about as progressive as "The Jazz Singer."
Even without the prospect of real "supermen" coming to walk among us, the 100M Augment scenario serves as an allegory for the cultural conflict the world is facing right now, between increasingly cosmopolitan global elite and the conservative provincialists who fear the more united, but perhaps a more decadent, more meaningless, and more immoral future that they represent.
Also, fwiw--India has a Sikh prime minister right now, Manmohan (wait for it
) Singh. OMG the war has begun! But, no, he's not genetically engineered.
Also, fwiw--India has a Sikh prime minister right now, Manmohan (wait for it
AFAIK, Singh is the last name of all Sikh males.
That was the joke. : /
I took it more in the spirit that us regular dictatorial rulers tend to do massacre as a matter of course, whereas all the Augments were better dictators in general...
As for the hundred million Augment scenario, why would the wars have a death toll of only 30-35 million? Surely all the Augments had to be murdered in the end. Even a single one turning up alive in a far corner of the galaxy was shocking news in TAS, and 80 was grounds for governmental-military cover-up in TOS.
Or are we to assume that the Cold Stations held millions of adult, combatworthy Augments, in addition to the "less complete" material?
Timo Saloniemi
Hm, now that's a good counterpoint.
Forced sterilization could prevent any new Augments from popping out, and would eventually destroy the sub-species--they are mortal, after all. It is abhorrent, of course, but given that in either scenario, the sub-species was hunted to extinction (70 Augments + 1 Degenerate may not a viable population make, at least with natural reproduction). It would still perhaps be preferable than the other options--death camps or a targeted plague. Nukes aren't good for wiping out specific people...
(Btw, I'm using "70" off of memory; sorry if I'm mistaken, I thought that's how many were with Khan. I can go with 80 if that's correct for the cargo of the Botany Bay.)
Alternatively, 35 million could be merely the count for Invalid deaths--although this seems crass even by the anti-Augment standards of the Federation.
A final alternative is that Augments were permitted to live and interbreed, but that the leadership was destroyed, many nine to five Augments died, the infrastructure for genegineering was practically wiped out and what remained highly circumscribed, and the creation of lab-born Augments was outlawed by threat of fire. This is by far the most pleasant outcome, if not necessarily the most interesting.
No, I doubt many if any fullgrown Augments were kept in cold storage (if for no other reason than it might be considered a rather cruel and unusual punishment). Maybe a few got sent up with the stockbrokers and country music singers though.
Thats where the fluidity comes in, ignore the stuff the contradicts history.
Here is the scene depicting the end of the TCW with the timeline resetting itself http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzlRwW1IA9c and at 0:54 you can see the WTC towers on fire in the bottom right. That looks like the last "real" event before the images in the opening of Enterprise start and then the last three seasons.
Oh boy, I had almost forgotten how goofy that looked.
Basically, both figures are correct. About 80-90 Augs went missing, according to historical records; exactly 84 chambers were apparently occupied when our heroes found the ship, because twelve sleepers didn't survive, and that left 72 Augments including Khan, according to Scotty.
Of course, more than 90 may have escaped without Spock's records reporting it - but 90 would already be good enough for Khan's posse plus a single mad scientist.
Timo Saloniemi
Here's a question, how will the Eugenics Wars start? Genetic engineering will be commonplace by the end of this century. That'll create a great deal of inequality to add to our current inequity. Will "separate but equal" laws and accommodations come around again only this time justifiably? However it comes, there will be conflict, and likely war.
How would the situation really be different from today? If there ever were actual legislation acknowledging the existence of supermen, surely it would be of the sort that limits the rights of the supermen - if just for the looks, to make legislation at least appear equalizing. What really went on in the society shouldn't be all that different from what goes on today, in most parts of the world anyway.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
Someone will watch "Space Seed," TWoK, "Statistical Probabilities," or Enterprise's Augment trilogy, and get some rotten ideas.
So a certain historical figure won a huge award today.... Like this person or not, this is a prime example of a modern political figure and how that might be translated to Khan and his rise to power.
I think the Eugenics Wars already started. I think that the labs who are working on cloning animals and body parts also have illegal divisions growing or cloning people. We would have no idea unless they decided on rising to/replacing someone in power and even then we might not know.
For the record, the Eugenics Wars duology by Greg Cox establishes that Khan seized power covertly in most of Asia. The governments nominally stayed in place, but he had them sufficiently blackmailed that they all kowtowed to his whims. Most of the civilian populace in Asia were aware of Khan's unofficial control, but the general populace in the West remained ignorant of his influence until after the Eugenics Wars -- which Cox postulates as consisting of the large series of post-Cold War brushfire wars that mostly went ignored in the U.S. -- were over. Which is not all that unrealistic when you consider that most people in the West are ignorant of, for instance, the horrific wars in Central Africa in the past thirty years.
Those were good books, but unfortunately they would only work now if you ignored the lines in ENT about the 30-35 million death toll, Archer's great, great grandfather fighting in North Africa during the conflict (To the best of my knowledge, nothing really happened around that area in the books), and the Augments in the midst of growing thousands of Augment embryos whereas in the books I don't think they were anywhere near to doing that.
