San Francisco: Never the same twice

https://twitter.com/gaghyogi49/status/1610330902285926403?s=20&t=NSrntWV1YLc6V92609H23g

 

I like the idea. Gave me something to think about.

San Francisco is geologically one of the last baskets anyone would want to put all their strategic eggs in, so its safe to assume they've somehow had some work done to alleviate that problem (they're building a new continent in the Atlantic by TNG, so they must have the means.. btw.. what happened to that whole thing?)

If you have that kind of geologic stability and say, thermoacoustic-cooling, why not build really far down? Screens can give you perfect views of the city, or anywhere else. Geothermal power is free. Barclay's ritzy home might actually have just been 1000 feet down

 

It was caught in the First Contact time hole and tragically sank to the bottom of the sea in the distant past.

 

I see a new spinoff coming: Star Gate Trek: Atlantis

 

Think the discepancies between the various depictions of Paris (TNG, DS9, DSC and PIC) are even bigger.

Really wonder how to explain this city looking different everytime.

 

Too bad they never showed other major cities. London was seen only once, I believe. I don't think we've ever seen New York City, Tokyo, Sydney, Nairobi, etc.

I wished they showed Boston better, with the Old North Church, Bunker Hill, the old ironsides still docked, the harbor islands, and Fenway (as a museum).

 

London only appeared in Star Trek Into Darkness too, so your mileage may vary on whether that counts since it's an alternate timeline. We know from dialogue in DS9: "Homefront/Paradise Lost" that Dublin still exists in the 2370s, though we don't see it. And we possibly glimpse Hong Kong in Voyager – the Starfleet Communications building home to Reg Barclay's Pathfinder Project is the real-life Bank of China Tower there, suggesting that the building lasts for three-and-a-half centuries and Starfleet take it over at some point!

 

We see Boston in Picard Season 1.

 

barely, and didn't show landmarks that people outside of Boston have heard of.

 

The invention of the replicator made large-scale building construction and urban re-engineering extremely easy!

 

You could change the entire look of a city for a special event, like a holiday, a sports tournament, a diplomatic visit...and swap it out for the next thing in a matter of hours.

 

Always happy to see the Banff National Park make a cameo appearance in Star Trek discussions! Lived there for a few years and I highly recommend checking it out if you can.

As for Trek's continuity (not only for San Francisco, but also for Paris, ships, etc.), it's definitely not a new issue, but it has become annoying enough that I became quite disengaged from the world-building aspect of Trek.

After all, McCoy said in Trek IV that 20th century San Francisco "doesn't look all that different" from what he's used to, and yet every new iteration seems to want to change or boost the skyline. It's okay in itself, cities change while often remaining recognizable even with new buildings being added. Others have mentioned it, but the lack of visual continuity - even if it's not the end of the world - is especially annoying when they actually point a finger at it, as they did when Tilly and the DIS crew marvelled at a tree and a park that was supposedly there for nearly a millennium while actually being an addition made to the CGI matte painting in that very episode!

But hey, while being annoyed - as these details have always been part of the interest for me - I don't believe it's Trek's most pressing problem right now.

 

At street level, it's probably not too dissimilar. It's when you get a bird's eye view, or a panoramic one, that certain differences stand out.

 

People from the 2150s didn't realize they were flying towards 1940s SF and said it looks pretty normal

 

Incredible. The bridge wasn't even ten years old at the time. If they went a bit further back, they'd have noticed

 

Replicators.

Unlike starships, buildings don't need to be composed of exotic [and fictitious] elements such as duranium, so we shouldn't expect power requirements to be huge in relation to other expenditures.

If at least 1 kg of food is consumed per person per day, then that's at least one megatonne of food per billion people per day. The Eiffel Tower weighs about 10,100 tonnes, so we're talking at least 99 Eiffel Towers of mass per day to feed one billion people.

Replicating a new skyline would be a drop in the bucket.

 

It’s possible crew members are just focusing on landmarks they recognize, a “glass half-full” kind of framing.

I lived outside Osaka for about four years around the turn of the millennium. I visited again in 2015 and everything seemed different to me. Then again, in the few years I lived there, I think one of the buildings across the street was torn down and rebuilt three times. I remember one time a friend and I were going to meet at one of our favorite cafés only to show up and find it was gone. A tiny empty lot squeezed in between the still standing row of brick shops. So, I arrived predisposed to thinking everything was going to be different.

If I had arrived with a different frame of mind, my apartment building was still standing, the train station was still there with the trains running on the same tracks, the school I taught at was still there, the amusement park was still there, heck my favorite convenience store was still there. So, I could have said "doesn't look all that different" if I’d been approaching it with a different mindset.