So if the comics & video game are canon...

Yes it does. Trek is supposed to be the future of our world, not some parallel dimension.

That said, Trek can ficticiously retcon our history just the same as Transformers: Dark of the Moon did to the moon landing, Captain America: The First Avenger did to WWII and X-Men: First Class did to the Cuban Missile Crisis. All are meant to be our world, in the same way as Trek is.

 

Maybe it was in the 1960s, but I think that ship has sailed by now.

Huh? Neither of those latter two cases is consistent with what you're saying. They're both overt alternate histories, particularly the latter. First Class sets up a world whose history is likely to proceed significantly differently from 1963 onward due to the open participation of mutants in historical events. And much the same goes for Captain America and the MCU, because Cap was not a secret figure in the film but a national hero who played a major part in America's wartime propaganda campaign and was remembered and idolized by subsequent generations of Americans -- not to mention that Howard Stark was a major public figure who influenced the development of technology in that world. Alternate-history, not hidden-history.

 

AFAIK, none of those differences make any difference. The world of the current day Marvel movies is still essentially ours, despite the rewritten pasts and the added-in mutants. The same things happened, even if it's now caused by mutants or had superheroes involved or whatever. The only time an alternate history has really made for a noticably different present is Watchmen.

When I think of Trek's past/our present, it's a similar "more or less the same" world as in Marvel movies or most TV shows, as opposed to a word where history diverged and became more and more different as time went on.

I guess Trek is an alternate history with Henry Starling instead of Bill Gates, Voyager probes that went as far as VI, and load of differences like that, but it's still more or less our world. Time travel episodes to the relative present will always be a world recognizable as our own. If that makes any sense.

 

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean by that. It strikes me as a self-contradictory sentence. If the past happened differently and there are things in the present that don't exist in our world, then it obviously isn't our world, just one that resembles it to some extent.

That's really splitting hairs, and defining alternate history far, far too narrowly. There is no rule saying that alternate history can't have any events or individuals in common with real history. On the contrary, I daresay that a great deal of alternate history fiction is specifically about alternate versions of people and events from real history.

Again, though, that doesn't make it "our world," just something close to it.

And the more time passes, the more impossible it'll become to treat ST as anything other than an alternate history. We've already missed the Eugenics Wars, and even though Greg Cox's novel The Rings of Time pushes Shaun Christopher's manned mission to Saturn back to 2020 (rather than 2009 as the Star Trek Chronology conjectured), that's only 8 years away now, so it won't be long before it becomes impossible to pretend that's part of our future. And the Bell Riots are only 12 years in the future (though the social conditions posited in "Past Tense" are still disturbingly plausible), the Charybdis (the third attempt to explore beyond the Solar System) is only 25 years away, etc. Heck, some of us might even make it to 2063 to see warp drive and first contact not happen. Even if you don't believe the point of irreversible transition of Trek from possible future to alternate history hasn't happened already, it's bound to happen in our lifetimes. Best to accept it now.

 

811 East 68th Street in our New York is located between Rockefeller Hospital and New York Presbyterian Hospital. It's not an apartment bilding where Gary Seven lived. There was no sub-orbital nuclear platform launched and then self destructed 1n 1968. I can find no reference to an Edith Keeler being killed in a traffic accident in New York in 1930. I can't find a reference to Colonel Thaddius Riker, also known as Old Iron Boots, in any book on the American Civil War.

There were no Eugenics Wars. We don't have a DY-100 class ship.

It's not our world and never will be.