In ST:FC, when the Enterprise-E travels back in time, Data specifically identifies the year as 2063, and calculates they've arrived 10 years after WW III. So I think we can take him at his word.
Is our Earth the original?
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
In ST:FC, when the Enterprise-E travels back in time, Data specifically identifies the year as 2063, and calculates they've arrived 10 years after WW III. So I think we can take him at his word.
As of "Space Seed", Starfleet might still be a novice in the time travel business, and some real gaps might be found in the history books. Give it a few subjective years and these folks would have the fingerprints of Jack the Ripper right alongside a copy of Burton's The Scented Garden and all the writings of Pythagoras, plus fifty hours of video on the original discovery of fire.
But we may assume that the original ambiguities in "Space Seed" were in the minutiae of shipping records only, and everything about the Eugenics Wars and WWIII was crystal clear to historians - who only chose to disagree on the interpretation.
Timo Saloniemi
But we may assume that the original ambiguities in "Space Seed" were in the minutiae of shipping records only, and everything about the Eugenics Wars and WWIII was crystal clear to historians - who only chose to disagree on the interpretation.
Timo Saloniemi
Data would be going by Federation records though. If say, Section 31 in the aftermath of First Contact (they had been around for 300 years as of DS9) altered all the chronologies to make Earth seem younger than it was, Data would just repeat what they fabricated.
No, I'm sure Data could and would make the calculations on his own. He's definitely smart enough to do that. And he's not the type to simply repeat others' results.
The date can be calculated from the orbital positions of various planets, moons, asteroids, etc. with great accuracy for tens and hundreds of thosuands, possibly milliond, of years in the future.
So for a lost centuries theory to work, all records of the orbital parameters in our solar system would have to be lost.
There is a nutty theory that several false centuries were added to the history of Europe during the middle ages as part of some plot. That ignores the fact that the history of Europe in the Middle Ages is connected with and mentioned in the histories of, for example, the Muslim world. And it also ignores that it would mess up the calculations of the proper date to celebrate Easter, and so would be consideded sinful by churchmen.
And the suggested theory about forgotten centuries in Star Trek seems just as as nutty as that real life theory.
I suggest once again that you go to the Wikipedia article Calendar Era:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_era
And take a look at the different years numbers 2021 has in different calendar eras.
Of all the hundreds of year numbers mentioned in Star Trek, only about half a dozen are specified as being years AD or BC. All the other Star Trek dates could be in the Anno Domini Calendar era or in different calendar eras.
Numerous historical errors in various Star Trek episodes make me suspect that Star Trek is almost certainly in an alternate universe which diverged from ours sometime before the first Star Trek episodes were broadcast in 1966. If the creators of Star Trek didn't want me to deduce that, they should have taken more care to include only accurate historical references in their episodes.
So those are my explainations for the diffrences between Earth's history from 1966 to 2021 in our universe and in the fictional universe of Star Trek.
So for a lost centuries theory to work, all records of the orbital parameters in our solar system would have to be lost.
There is a nutty theory that several false centuries were added to the history of Europe during the middle ages as part of some plot. That ignores the fact that the history of Europe in the Middle Ages is connected with and mentioned in the histories of, for example, the Muslim world. And it also ignores that it would mess up the calculations of the proper date to celebrate Easter, and so would be consideded sinful by churchmen.
And the suggested theory about forgotten centuries in Star Trek seems just as as nutty as that real life theory.
I suggest once again that you go to the Wikipedia article Calendar Era:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_era
And take a look at the different years numbers 2021 has in different calendar eras.
Of all the hundreds of year numbers mentioned in Star Trek, only about half a dozen are specified as being years AD or BC. All the other Star Trek dates could be in the Anno Domini Calendar era or in different calendar eras.
Numerous historical errors in various Star Trek episodes make me suspect that Star Trek is almost certainly in an alternate universe which diverged from ours sometime before the first Star Trek episodes were broadcast in 1966. If the creators of Star Trek didn't want me to deduce that, they should have taken more care to include only accurate historical references in their episodes.
So those are my explainations for the diffrences between Earth's history from 1966 to 2021 in our universe and in the fictional universe of Star Trek.
Another nutty theory of that ilk was put forth by Immanuel "Venus got where it is within historical times" Velikovsky: that there never were any missing centuries in the history of Peloponnesos, no dark ages where the very art of writing would have been lost. Accepting that the dating of the Mycenean collapse is way off is much simpler than postulating that dating in times of constant written records all across the globe could be. But having WWIII be misdated is worse still, because not only would there be global record-keeping to consider, by parties that by definition would be uninterested in cooperating in a conspiracy: interstellar records would also need to be taken into account, as Earth would be under close Vulcan surveillance, Sol visited by random Tellarites, and a number of rap sheets for interstellar criminals featuring "Abduction of Earthings for slave labor" among the offenses.
Timo Saloniemi
Which is entirely possible given the chaos of World War 3 in Trek, for all records of orbital parameters on Earth to be lost. And that's not even getting into a super-intelligent Augment like Khan altering and/or destroying all such Earth records to cover his escape in the Botany Bay (and Trek outright said Khan controlled up to 25% of Earth during the Eugenics Wars, not counting what other Augments controlled). Add into the fact that not a single alien civilization was monitoring Earth until Vulcans passed Cochrane's ship, and it seems like the lost centuries theory could still work.
Last edited:
A simpler explanation for "records of that time period [to be] fragmentary" is a combination of "cities...being bomb out of existence" and perhaps too much reliance on digital data keeping. If the Eugenics Wars involved nuclear weapons, then fried electronic records via EMPs should be part of the calculus.
Vulcans were spying on Earth in the 20th century at the very latest, with intel that suggested they had been at it for at least a century already, and probably much longer ("Carbon Creek"). When one of their spyships crashed, its SOS was observed by Tellarites. And, as said, quite a few criminals abducted Earthlings in the 20th century, and eventually got caught. I wouldn't wonder in the slightest if a continuous and consistent records base existed from the very days of Apollo till the heroes' present.
"Fragmentary" in practice means that the text of a random 20th century pulp novel is accessible in full, say. So while shipping records from the 1990s might not meet Spock's exacting standards, there doesn't seem to be any uncertainty about the dating of said 1990s. Not even when one wakes up a 1990er and asks!
Timo Saloniemi
"Fragmentary" in practice means that the text of a random 20th century pulp novel is accessible in full, say. So while shipping records from the 1990s might not meet Spock's exacting standards, there doesn't seem to be any uncertainty about the dating of said 1990s. Not even when one wakes up a 1990er and asks!
Timo Saloniemi
I tend to agree; Ephemeral transactions like shipping manifests would be especially vulnerable.
Honestly, I wouldn't be against such episodes being severely retconned or just ignored entirely if it means keeping Trek relevant. We're getting far more severe retcons in Discovery, where we're basically told to just pretend the uniforms and bridge in "The Cage" weren't what they seemed (unless you take my theory that Cage uniforms were dress uniforms and the bridge was temporarily swapped out in the same episode).
A Trek calendar retcon could just be a one off episode where Section 31 realizes that the Earth year isn't what the Federation thinks it is, but then they decide to keep it secret for the benefit of the Federation, or something like that. Something mentioned once and never mentioned again, like that TNG episode which showed all humanoid aliens were related.
I think the problem is that both Trek wars, Eugenics Wars and World War 3, were as described way too short to cause a realistic mass confusion about the Earth date (people alive before each war and who survived it would still roughly remember what year it was, even if all records were lost).
There'd need to be a full fledged war lasting well over an average person's lifetime (at least a hundred years) so that no one would even remember what life was like before the war and, with all date records lost, plausible confusion about what year or even century they were in.
Last edited:
And since McCoy (in Trouble with Tribbles) states that the TOS Klingons only differ from Humans in heartbeat and body temperature, then maybe TOS Klingons evolved (or were bio-engineered?) on a very similar world, with very similar results?
No wonder, this, from Errand of Mercy:-
AYELBORNE: It is true that in the future, you and the Klingons will become fast friends. You will work together
Last edited:
Later Trek showed Klingons to be very different internally from humans, and McCoy later stated that he didn't really know Klingon biology well in Star Trek 6 (which itself had some bizarre Klingon biology, like pink blood and a claim that Klingons can't cry).
Totally agree for TMP onwards Klingons. But, to me, TOS Klingons stand both biologically and socially apart from what followed, hence why I stipulated them in my post. .
And indeed, even in Star Fleet Battles (just pre-TMP), there is discussion of several races of Klingons (which I don't think ever got brought up again)
ENT sort of brought that up: it seems Klingons love to create new races out of themselves. They just take self-improvement very literally, and sometimes the entire species gets caught up with a particular fashion, while at other times, it's apparently just specific individuals or Houses...
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
Although I am not a fan of ENT, I did like their reasoning as to why Klingons looked like gravy-faced Mongols in the original series and Turtleheads in the later shows and episodes and even earlier in ENT itself! The affliction caused by the human augments was very clever and I thought they were suitably more vicious as humanlike baddies than their honour bound lumpy characters! As for why they looked like split conkers in DSC is of no importance and I don't hear their words! It's simply just another universe! 
JB
JB
Is any Earth original anymore?
Similar threads
