Well, it's expanded quite a bit, with skyscrapers on both sides of the bridge and the elimination of the height restrictions. Plus we haven't seen how densely packed the southern part of the city is, or Oakland.
San Francisco: Never the same twice
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
We also don't know whether the Bay is populated. Earth can be more open than before to different types of living arrangements, applying tech gleaned from colonization efforts on other planets. What it means to be a livable environment would have vastly changed.
It's a push that even the United Federation of Planets has a trillion beings, never mind Starfleet itself. According to Picard in First Contact, the Federation has "over 150" members. Assuming this is somewhere between 150 and 160, so say 155ish (or else why not say "over 160", "over 170", etc), and assuming an average population of 5 billion per planet, we have a total population for the Federation of something like 775 billion sentient beings. The Star Trek Star Charts book gives a more optimistic population figure of 985 billion, but that also seems to include "affiliates" as well as 183 full members.
If we assume that the proportion of Federation population in Starfleet is roughly the same as the proportion of the US population in the military today, that would give us a total Starfleet personnel size of something like 2 to 3 billion beings – most of whom would necessarily not be on Earth at any given time.
We should also consider that Starfleet Headquarters doesn't have to be entirely contained in San Francisco. That could just be the "executive office space". There's Spacedock in Earth orbit, which can comfortably hold something like ten million people assuming the same population density as a Constitution-class starship. Are there multiple Spacedocks? We also know that Starfleet Academy specifically has "satellite campuses" on over 80 planets as of 2401, so it's not entirely located in San Francisco or even on Earth.
It's hard to judge, in one TOS episode, Metamorphasis Kirk says 'we're on 100 planets and spreading out', not sure if he meant human exploration or UFP since TV world building was irrelevant back then. In the FC movie Earth population was 8 billion, and that excludes colonies so by the 24th century, the UFP probably is 1 trillion plus
It is, I grant you, hard to figure out specifics because Star Trek doesn't often give us specific information on populations.
In First Contact Data gives the population of the assimilated Earth as "approximately 9 billion". I always assumed this was specifically a remark on the population being much higher than it would otherwise be, or else why would Data mention it – and we know the Borg like to cram drones in (cf. Borg ships containing hundreds of thousands of drones each). For comparison, in 1996 when First Contact was made the Earth's population was 5.8 billion.
We don't know if Picard's comment about "over 150" members includes colonies or not. We see several colony worlds throughout Star Trek that have very low populations of just a few hundred or thousand people. It also seems likely that Earth is a major population centre for the Federation – it is the "capital planet" after all – and it will therefore have a disproportionately high population. It's also hard to believe that desert worlds like Vulcan or ice worlds like Andoria would be able to support such large populations, even with advanced technology at their disposal.
Aren't most of the times we see it decades or centuries apart from each other?
Maybe they have underground cities
Or floating air cities. There are so many options we can't even fathom now.
BTW, related to the water cities, I read this interesting article in Reader's Digest: https://www.readersdigest.co.uk/inspire/life/floating-life-cities-preparing-for-rising-sea-levels
BTW, related to the water cities, I read this interesting article in Reader's Digest: https://www.readersdigest.co.uk/inspire/life/floating-life-cities-preparing-for-rising-sea-levels
It's the same Chateau, confirmed by the art team.
Part of it burnt down according to Generations, what we see in the series is the part that didn't burn down. You can actually spot the part that burnt down in the 2024 scenes in Picard Season 2.
https://twitter.com/gaghyogi49/status/1508153630200942599?lang=en
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"Incidentally, the wing in the back perfectly fits the layout of the Picard family home in "Family", which burnt down in 'Generations'."
Well that seems to resolve it all! Excellent find, thank you.
I believe I’ve read there’s two big problems with applying Trek’s depiction of San Francisco to the real San Francisco.
1) The current government, as well as different interests, wouldn’t support building skyscrapers bigger than the TransAmerica Pyramid, or doing some of the large-scale development that seems to have occurred in the intervening time between the 23rd-24th centuries because of the possible impact on historical districts and “NIMBY” politics.
2) The area of the Presidio where Starfleet Command and Starfleet Academy are usually depicted as being located is not exactly in a state where construction would be good-to-go ecologically to develop the area to the extent Starfleet has. And in order to flatten the area to put buildings, shuttle ports, and other facilities, it probably wouldn’t survive a modern environmental impact analysis.
1) The current government, as well as different interests, wouldn’t support building skyscrapers bigger than the TransAmerica Pyramid, or doing some of the large-scale development that seems to have occurred in the intervening time between the 23rd-24th centuries because of the possible impact on historical districts and “NIMBY” politics.
2) The area of the Presidio where Starfleet Command and Starfleet Academy are usually depicted as being located is not exactly in a state where construction would be good-to-go ecologically to develop the area to the extent Starfleet has. And in order to flatten the area to put buildings, shuttle ports, and other facilities, it probably wouldn’t survive a modern environmental impact analysis.
You could even have ship-trailer parks, so installations could be parked and flown away/switched around as needed.
They probably figured out to do it without harming the environment.
I'm guessing World War III and the deaths of 600 million people probably changes quite a few perspectives across many of the cities that survive the war – and we have no idea how much of "old" San Francisco survives and how much gets rebuilt. Is the Golden Gate Bridge in the 24th century the original or a deliberate replica?
Similar issues would affect London, but were apparently overcome in some way going by Star Trek: Into Darkness. And don't get me started on Cambridge's giant mushroom towers and glass monoliths in TNG: "All Good Things...".
see above - or see original source
Found this on Imgur showing how the buildings of Starfleet Academy/HQ have stayed roughly the same, though the city in the background has changed quite a bit.
how did you find it, on imgur directly?
It came up when I went to the url so it must have been the last thing I looked at up there since I saw it on the Prod thread. Sorry for not crediting the source, but Imgur does not list usernames, and I could not remember where I saw it first.
