Past Tense: What's worse than WW III?

[Mr. Laser Beam]

You all know the scene I mean. O'Brien, regarding the scenes where he and Kira are bouncing through time trying to find Sisko, Dax and Bashir, is talking about how he once ended up in the year 2048 of the 'alternate timeline' - meaning, the timeline where the Bell Riots did not happen. O'Brien says of that alternate 2048, "Earth history had its rough patches, but never THAT rough."

O'Brien is a reasonably educated man, he surely knows all about World War III. I wonder what he possibly could have seen that would be WORSE than that?!?

 

[Jono]

Well, Bashir is a genetically engineered super genius and he got the date of the Eugenic Wars wrong by a whole century. People can make mistakes, they are after all, only human.

I don't read much into what O'Brien said. I think he was just using a hyperbole.

 

[ares93]

when did the eugenics wars happen anyway?

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Eugenics Wars: 1992-96

WW III: 2053

 

[PorthosShadow]

In 44 years of Star Trek there has been so much time travel it's a wonder the whole universe hasn't simply collapsed. It doesn't surprise me that certain event's aren't exactly the same. In the Voyager episode "Futures End" they arrive in 1996 with no evidence of The Eugenics Wars.

 

[ares93]

In 44 years of Star Trek there has been so much time travel it's a wonder the whole universe hasn't simply collapsed. It doesn't surprise me that certain event's aren't exactly the same. In the Voyager episode "Futures End" they arrive in 1996 with no evidence of The Eugenics Wars.

i was under the impression that post-TOS rewrote the eugenics wars to world war 3. there have been so many canon violations over the years i cant make sense of it...

 

[PorthosShadow]

In 44 years of Star Trek there has been so much time travel it's a wonder the whole universe hasn't simply collapsed. It doesn't surprise me that certain event's aren't exactly the same. In the Voyager episode "Futures End" they arrive in 1996 with no evidence of The Eugenics Wars.

i was under the impression that post-TOS rewrote the eugenics wars to world war 3. there have been so many canon violations over the years i cant make sense of it...

It's like The Doctor said "timey wimey wibbly wobbly" which is basically the duct tape of the space time continum.

 

[Rush Limborg]

My guess is that, in the Alternate Timeline, WWIII happened a lot earlier. O'Brien was making a comment on it to that effect....

 

[The Librarian]

Another thing to keep in mind is that, while WW III was certainly bad - I think Riker cited a death toll of around 600 million - it still could have been a lot worse. We've seen several cities with landmarks that clearly predate the war, and 600 million is big but proportionately might not be as bad as it sounds. WWII casualties were around 60 million and the world's population was 2.3 billion at the time; while the population probably won't be 10 times bigger in the 2050s it will still have increased substantially. Also, like WWII where most of the deaths were on the Eastern front, and large parts of the planet were completely untouched, WW III could easily have been largely constrained to a few regions. This would explain how Cochrane was building a warp ship (at a missile silo - not something you expect to survive a major nuclear exchange) and how the SS Valiant, Terra Nova mission, and numerous other large warp-capable ships were launched less than a decade after the war.

In short, it's easily possible to imagine how WW III could be "not that bad" in retrospect, and how it could be a lot worse.

 

[Jono]

In 44 years of Star Trek there has been so much time travel it's a wonder the whole universe hasn't simply collapsed. It doesn't surprise me that certain event's aren't exactly the same. In the Voyager episode "Futures End" they arrive in 1996 with no evidence of The Eugenics Wars.

i was under the impression that post-TOS rewrote the eugenics wars to world war 3. there have been so many canon violations over the years i cant make sense of it...

As far as I can recall only Bashir has "re-dated" the Eugenic Wars. The writers later came out and said it was a mistake and they had forgot to take into account that a century had passed since TOS and the TOS movies. Phlox later came along and reaffirmed that the war occurred in the 20th century.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

In the Voyager episode "Futures End" they arrive in 1996 with no evidence of The Eugenics Wars.

Not surprising, since AFAIK the US wasn't even involved in those wars.

And, non canon though it may be, the Greg Cox EW novels have done a satisfactory job of explaining it.

 

[Smellincoffee]

In 44 years of Star Trek there has been so much time travel it's a wonder the whole universe hasn't simply collapsed. It doesn't surprise me that certain event's aren't exactly the same. In the Voyager episode "Futures End" they arrive in 1996 with no evidence of The Eugenics Wars.

And in "Space Seed", Spock refers to the Eugenics War as the "last of your world wars".

 

[Rush Limborg]

I think his exact words were "the last of your so-called world wars."

And Bones corrects him with, "The Eugenics Wars", with a smug smirk on his face. Spock nods, and goes, "Ah, yes..."

 

[Myasishchev]

Maybe O'Brien forgot. Seriously, how many well-educated people can casually forget the Seven Years War? A lot.

It's actually sort of bizarre that so many Trek characters are closet history nerds who can rattle off dates in service of exposition, but if you've had as many conversations with wannabes as I've had, you know it's no rarity for broad contextual stuff to be completely misplaced and specific events to be off by whole centuries.

Abraham Lincoln was a kind of lobster.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

Another thing to keep in mind is that, while WW III was certainly bad - I think Riker cited a death toll of around 600 million - it still could have been a lot worse. We've seen several cities with landmarks that clearly predate the war, and 600 million is big but proportionately might not be as bad as it sounds. WWII casualties were around 60 million and the world's population was 2.3 billion at the time; while the population probably won't be 10 times bigger in the 2050s it will still have increased substantially. Also, like WWII where most of the deaths were on the Eastern front, and large parts of the planet were completely untouched, WW III could easily have been largely constrained to a few regions. This would explain how Cochrane was building a warp ship (at a missile silo - not something you expect to survive a major nuclear exchange) and how the SS Valiant, Terra Nova mission, and numerous other large warp-capable ships were launched less than a decade after the war.

In short, it's easily possible to imagine how WW III could be "not that bad" in retrospect, and how it could be a lot worse.

Agreed. Good points.

 

[MNM]

Maybe O'Brien forgot. Seriously, how many well-educated people can casually forget the Seven Years War? A lot.

That's because no one cares about a war fought between European colonial powers, even if it was a big one.

You dont see anyone forgetting WWI or WWII do you? It would be the same with WWIII.

 

[Myasishchev]

The Seven Years War was rather important, being instrumental in the creation of the United States, as well as the French Republic, the Raj and modern India, and a Germany under Prussian leadership.

The reason no one cares, even in the above named countries, is because it was 300 years ago, not because of the identity of its belligerents, or the importance of the conflict.

Lots of people know World War I happened, but probably only through inference. Comparatively speaking, few could even write down a rough timeline of it or name more than three or four belligerents. By 2100, no one will care about WWI either. If anyone cares now, which they don't, at least in America, regardless of how deeply important WWI was to the shape of our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

[FordSVT]

I always figured the eugenics wars took place in the 1990s, but localized to maybe India and Central Asia, perhaps the Middle East. So it's reasonable to assume a world in which Khan has taken over a large portion of the world while 1996 San Francisco remained apparently unscathed. Kahn may have ruled many through strength of will and superior intelligence, but that doesn't mean he had the military power to take on the NATO countries. He was a supreme warlord, not a world conqueror.

And then WW3 happens in the first half of the 21st century, and there's never been any evidence to contradict that. I'd also imagine that any discrepancies could be explained by the fact that after such a war different places in the world would recover at different times. We also don't know the extent of nuclear arms usage, it could have been a mostly conventional war with a few dozen nukes going off over major military installations and cities, which would cripple the world economy and kill millions but not result in nuclear winter or a high kill off rate that would utterly send the world back to the stone age. We also know the Vulcans helped humanity get back on our feet, but we don't know to what extend their direct influence "saved" us. We developed warp drive on our own, maybe it just would have taken a little longer to come to the same result.