Watching the trailer today was like seeing a side of Trek I had never seen before, with some tantalising new glimpses of a world tht I had thought familiar.
But I'm sure there are a million things that have never been shown in Trek, little bits of future trivia, and elements that make up the world that just haven't been needed to tell the stories. But we can sure speculate, and probably distort canon in the process. I'm sure there are assumptions people have made about the future that will probably surprise if you actually share them.
I've always had a link between modern astronautics and space travel of the future, which I reckon would have left a mark on the Earth. We're all told that launching off the Earth is energy intensive, and wasteful of resources, which Trek solves with the use of the transporter, Inertial Damping, and Impulse Drives. But we're always told that the easy way to do it is with the orbital tether, space elevators that reach up from the equator to orbit. I always imagine in the Trekverse that people would have started down that path, and that dotted on the Equator would be massive edifices, buildings impossibly wide and reaching kilometers up into the sky, designed to be anchor points to tethers that were never constructed. Construction would have been begun, quadrillions invested, then some bright spark named Emory would have come up with a new device. Even after that, the structures would have been used for a while, as while cargo would be beamed up and down, complex items, and life forms would need to be launched the old fashioned way, and the platforms would have been a convenient kickstart into orbit. Of course when the transporter would have been certified for human life, they would have become derelict follies, destined for dismantlement, but I'm sure a human desire to preserve history would leave one or two standing.
I've also begun to retcon the future in my mind, with the Third World War being a war over dwindling resources, rather than one of ideology, and any nuclear exchange would be significantly limited, little more than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs at just a few key locations (maybe a terrorist attack that would kick the whole thing off), and the subsequent war being more conventional, and maybe biowarfare. The post atomic horror would refer to the breakdown of society rather than a wholesale dosing of the world's population. But the loss of resources would be the cause, exacerbated by climate change and pollution. The Vulcans who would arrive after Cochrane's warpflight wouldn't offer radiation cures, rather climate stabilisation and control tachnology, that would reverse the loss of polar ice, and lower sea levels to current levels. But there would still be signs of this in the future, with significant loss of land mass, and coastal cities more like Venice with canals instead of roads, than they are today, or isolated population islands, protected from the sea by massive defences.
Of course this is still in the 23rd Century, when humans are still human, not the evolved sensibilities of the moneyless 24th.
But I'm sure there are a million things that have never been shown in Trek, little bits of future trivia, and elements that make up the world that just haven't been needed to tell the stories. But we can sure speculate, and probably distort canon in the process. I'm sure there are assumptions people have made about the future that will probably surprise if you actually share them.
I've always had a link between modern astronautics and space travel of the future, which I reckon would have left a mark on the Earth. We're all told that launching off the Earth is energy intensive, and wasteful of resources, which Trek solves with the use of the transporter, Inertial Damping, and Impulse Drives. But we're always told that the easy way to do it is with the orbital tether, space elevators that reach up from the equator to orbit. I always imagine in the Trekverse that people would have started down that path, and that dotted on the Equator would be massive edifices, buildings impossibly wide and reaching kilometers up into the sky, designed to be anchor points to tethers that were never constructed. Construction would have been begun, quadrillions invested, then some bright spark named Emory would have come up with a new device. Even after that, the structures would have been used for a while, as while cargo would be beamed up and down, complex items, and life forms would need to be launched the old fashioned way, and the platforms would have been a convenient kickstart into orbit. Of course when the transporter would have been certified for human life, they would have become derelict follies, destined for dismantlement, but I'm sure a human desire to preserve history would leave one or two standing.
I've also begun to retcon the future in my mind, with the Third World War being a war over dwindling resources, rather than one of ideology, and any nuclear exchange would be significantly limited, little more than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs at just a few key locations (maybe a terrorist attack that would kick the whole thing off), and the subsequent war being more conventional, and maybe biowarfare. The post atomic horror would refer to the breakdown of society rather than a wholesale dosing of the world's population. But the loss of resources would be the cause, exacerbated by climate change and pollution. The Vulcans who would arrive after Cochrane's warpflight wouldn't offer radiation cures, rather climate stabilisation and control tachnology, that would reverse the loss of polar ice, and lower sea levels to current levels. But there would still be signs of this in the future, with significant loss of land mass, and coastal cities more like Venice with canals instead of roads, than they are today, or isolated population islands, protected from the sea by massive defences.
Of course this is still in the 23rd Century, when humans are still human, not the evolved sensibilities of the moneyless 24th.
