How did the Romulans leave Vulcan?

[Timo]

...After which Diane Duane sort of parsed it together by establishing that three first names is the norm for Romulans.

Really, one could read these books as one integral whole like one reads a Dostoyevsky novel. And I don't merely mean the length... I mean one would need to keep a notepad handy so that one could keep track of the six or so ways by which any given character may be addressed (name, patronymic, diminutive, profession, rank/honorific, nickname).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Captain Robert April]

I'd rather get ahold of Dorothy Fontana and ask her. She created the character, so as far as I'm concerned, she's got dibs on naming her.

 

[Warped9]

Diane Duane's rationale works for me. And if I recall correctly I think she said the Rihannsu had been in flight for something on the order of 900 years (realtime). Of course it would seem less than that because of time dilation and that Vulcans are long lived. That also allows them to get some distance from Vulcan.

 

[Timo]

It might not jibe perfectly with factoids established later, though: we have "ancient Romulan offshoot" inhabiting a planet "approximately 2,000 years" before "Gambit", not 1,100 years before as a 900-year exodus, settling, and shooting-off would call for. Assuming, of course, that the Romulans left 2,000 years before the episode rather than 3,000. But we have some concrete reason to believe in this departure date now, with Surak's life and times explicitly described in ENT "Awakening" as having happened 18 centuries before the 22nd. Not much room for "rounding errors" there. We don't have complete proof, though - nothing directly associates the departure of the Romulans with Surak's life yet...

But if we choose to believe the Romulans left before Surak's time, then we have to ditch Duane's version anyway. Or if we decide that the population group known as Romulans launched the Debrune expedition before themselves leaving planet Vulcan, we're within our canonical rights but again at odds with Duane (or S&S).

One or the other of these two possibilities explains the Debrune, though, while allowing for sublight travel. The third possibility is that Romulans departed at warp, in which case they could have branched off the Debrune with ease some time after settling on Romulus. I can't really think of a fourth possibility, save for our TNG heroes being in grave error in identifying the origins or timing of the Debrune outpost in "Gambit".

...Unless Romulus and her offshoot worlds are within a very short sublight trip from Vulcan, that is. And certain hints such as "Unification" and perhaps STXI might indeed indicate that Romulus is at spitting distance from Vulcan, and that the RNZ brushes against the Vulcan system like the "38th Parallel" brushes against Seoul.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[publiusr]

As I suggested over at www.federationreference.com On their discussion about Vulcan--the idea of Vulcans coming from Romulus itself might make for a good Dan Brownesque --Vulcan Acadamy Murder type plot. Vulcan really isn't a whole lot better off than Ceti Alpha V after the devastation, after all.

 

[Timo]

FWIW, these fierce warriors breeding their way to galactic prominence and even dominance on the desert hellhole has some Dune echoes as well. Perhaps the Vulcanoids were planted on Vulcan by some master race specifically in order to create a species with a serious chip on their seriously muscular shoulder? And perhaps this project carried fruit when the fierce warriors began expanding and founded the Romulan Star Empire? But perhaps it then fizzled when Surak put a damper on the development on the original breeding world, and the spinoff star empire no longer lived in a "motivational" desert hellhole and thus grew complacent?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

The problem is that any species with remotely modern sciences of biology and geology could determine with relative certainty whether or not they evolved on the planet they're on.

 

[Timo]

Only if they had reason to suspect that in the first place, though. Otherwise, they'd spend millennia thinking of the biological equivalent of celestial spheres and how their absolutely certain existence could be made to fit the newest facts (or vice versa).

Even if confronted with something that finally forced a paradigm change of civilization-shattering proportions, most species would rather come to the conclusion that the rest of the universe had been transplanted or faked and they themselves were the genuine article...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

I suppose that the lack of any obvious cousins on the new planet could certainly bolster creationists--but only if the goofballs completely forgot their not-very-distant ancestors, who themselves had writing, books, computers, and history, arrived from another planet.

An Ingsoc-style revisionist campaign is slightly more plausible, but leaving aside the difficult-to-reconcile advanced science with a Spanish Inquisition, it would take more than editing the Romulan Wikipedia. It would require a sustained effort to prevent anyone from ever doing DNA comparisons between Romulans and anything.

Especially since evolution would still explain everything on the planet except them and the lifeforms they brought with them. No need to resort to celestial spheres, which only makes sense as a theory when observation methods are primtive. Romulan observation methods are not primitive, and we know this because they built interstellar spaceships, which requires so much and so many kinds of science* that only an advanced, rationalist society could accomplish it. On Romulus, even if they had completely (somehow) lost their historical knowledge, compiled by rationalists in survivable forms, recent panspermia/ancient astronauts is not only the correct answer, but the only one that could fit the facts and have the explanatory power of a lasting theory. An isolated example would hardly disprove evolution--especially if that one example is already demonstrably capable of interstellar travel.**

Also, they could dig up their ships.

*Partial list: astronomy, optics, gravitational physics, nuclear physics, chemistry, geology, ecology, and probably computer science, all at least 1960s levels and in some cases probably more like 2010+.

 

[Timo]

but only if the goofballs completely forgot their not-very-distant ancestors, who themselves had writing, books, computers, and history, arrived from another planet.

That's probably not the case with Vulcans, though. They might have been transplanted before they had culture of any sort (Sargon's folks lived hundreds of millennia ago, and Spock thinks they account for Vulcan prehistory) - or might have undergone a total loss of culture after transplantation, because they were essentially dropped on the sands without their gods bothering to install any factories, railroads or telephone lines first.

It's all fine and well to think that culture would survive apocalypse if a hardy few kept treasuring their books and writing diaries. It's also quite possible, though, that such preservation attempts would completely fail within a generation or two, whereas basic survival would work out better.

Especially since evolution would still explain everything on the planet except them and the lifeforms they brought with them.

But since it would only be a partial explanation, serious science would probably prefer a theory that allows for the observed two separate sets of evolution from the start.

Research on methods that allow research on evolution is driven by belief in evolution in the first place. One might work out the mechanism of DNA-based propagation of information when the general study of small dimensions got good enough, but one wouldn't be inclined to use that as a basis of a theory of evolution if the first two samples studied proved to be completely unrelated already. One'd just think that the existence of native dogs and transplanted dogs side by side would be the result of convergent evolution of two unrelated branches of native life, unless there were some pressing reason to already believe in ancient star travel and interstellar meddling.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

Any evidence that the DNA of Vulcan's flora and fauna is highly related to that of the Vulcan people? Versus Romulan which should not have much in common with its flora and fauna?

 

[T'Girl]

Spock says thet it may explain "certain elements of Vulcan pre-history". Lots of room there for explanations other than Vulcans being tansplanted.

Spock could be referring to a civilization on Vulcan that predates the rise of the Vulcan civilization. A non-Vulcan race of beings. There could be archeological "leavings" all over the surface of Vulcan and on the other planets and moons in the Vulcan star system. 600,000 years is a long time, but a profoundly advanced material science would leave who knows what. Fossil remain of a Humanoid species physically unlike Vulcans would be an enduring mystery for the Vulcan people.

Also, 600,000 years (or less) would be plenty of time for the early Vulcans to become the sapient beings of Vulcan, after Sargon's people went away.

Well again, either Vulcans were transplanted or they were not. The genetic evidence should make it obvious whether they were or they were'nt. I don't see how there could be any doubt either way.

Given that we only have the genetics of one world to study, it hard to say just how different it really going to be once we begin to travel from planet to planet.

 

[Ronald Held]

unless a whole ecology was transplanted, beings transported from elsewhere to Vulcan should not have the DNA similarity of the local flora and fauna.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Food for thought:

From "How Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth":

SPOCK: Interesting, Captain. The creature was the Mayan god from the ancient legends.

KIRK: And the Toltec's Quetzalcoatl, the Chinese dragon and all the rest. But not quite a god. Just an old, lonely being who wanted to help others.

MCCOY: Spock, I wouldn't suppose that Vulcan has legends like those?

SPOCK: Not legends, Doctor. Fact. Vulcan was visited by alien beings. They left much wiser.

 

[Myasishchev]

Ha, I don't really like the chronology of it, but that is a good line.

 

[Timo]

...One wonders what sort of wisdom the visitors gained? Surakian logic, from within the past 2,000 years? Or (in case they came earlier) the important bit of wisdom that setting tentacle on Vulcan soil will cost you dearly?

"Serpent's Tooth" would nicely fit Diane Duane's idea of what brought the Vulcan/Romulan schism to culmination and launched the exodus - an alien invasion attempt where Surakists and S'Taskians took different approaches to whipping BEM ass.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

^That was actually the one thing I really hated about Duane's history of Vulcan in The Romulan Way. It seemed really... deus ex mechanic. S'Task Han Soloing on an Orion pirate ship was just kinda uncool, you know?

Also it was the major use, in that novel, of her notions of magic weaponized Vulcan telepathy, which is probably my biggest peeve with My Enemy, My Ally.

Second place peeve: Element worship. The concept is sound, but fire, earth, air, and water? Wow, that must have taken almost two or three seconds of thought.

 

[Meredith]

As I suggested over at www.federationreference.com On their discussion about Vulcan--the idea of Vulcans coming from Romulus itself might make for a good Dan Brownesque --Vulcan Acadamy Murder type plot. Vulcan really isn't a whole lot better off than Ceti Alpha V after the devastation, after all.

It would be better if Romulus was the original planet that the vulcans evolved on, they were later plucked off the planet by another race as slave labourers or soemthing, then the slaves on vulcan developed their own society and the romulan faction on vulcan knew where their home planet was so that was ONE of the motivating factors for them leaving.

 

[Meredith]

Any evidence that the DNA of Vulcan's flora and fauna is highly related to that of the Vulcan people? Versus Romulan which should not have much in common with its flora and fauna?

If they brought alot of the fauna and flora with them to a lifeless world it would be a different case.

 

[Ronald Held]

it might make for good stories, but the current Vulcans seems have been on the their planet for a longer period of time than the Romulans occupied Romulus and Remus.
Whether Vulcan was seeded much earlier is unknown canonically.