This city's destruction does not make sense

[Sci]

I also hate to think that in the future of Star Trek, China would have been largely wiped out. But if you put together the reference to an "Eastern Coalition" being a faction in WW3 with the almost complete absence of Chinese people from Star Trek (despite it being the most populous country in the world in our time), China, or East Asia more generally, being devastated in a nuclear WW3 does seem the most likely explanation.

The relative absence of Chinese people is already pretty sinophobic of Star Trek. It would be a terrible idea to associate a "positive future" with one where the Chinese people have been genocided. Far better to assume that China fared relatively similarly to other nations and just hasn't been featured in Star Trek because of its creators' unconscious biases.

Pike's comments could be broadly interpreted. You might say, for example, that WW2 grew out of WW1, which grew out of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. To use that analogy, a Second American Civil War could somehow cause or morph into the Eugenics War, which somehow causes of morphs into World War III.

You could interpret things a lot of different ways. It depends on what your a priori assumptions are. But why hold on the the a priori assumption that WW3 was a war with China?

Remember also Riker's reference in FC that "most of the world's major cities" were destroyed. That, to my mind, again argues for the Eastern Coalition being based in the Eastern Hemisphere.

It really doesn't. It's just another example of ST wanting to have its cake and it it too: Major cities are destroyed, and they're all rebuilt and look just fine by the ENT era.

 

[BillJ]

It depends on what your a priori assumptions are. But why hold on the the a priori assumption that WW3 was a war with China?

Since the writers of the movie stated that the ECON was the Chinese, and Lily thought it was an attack by them, it makes sense that the war was with them and their allies.

Besides, the movie doesn't give any details on the right and the wrong of the war, and the war had to be fought between two sides due to the setting, and in 1995, they likely thought the Chinese and Americans were the most likely candidates.

 

[FederationHistorian]

Not exactly. The line was: "Having endured a catastrophic World War, Earth's governments came to this city for the purpose of creating a just and lasting peace among nations. Today, we have assembled here again, representatives of numerous worlds, to forge an unprecedented alliance."

That could mean a peace conference was held in San Francisco after World War III. However, in real life, the United Nations Conference on International Organization, the founding conference of the U.N., was held in San Francisco in 1945 for exactly that purpose. So I always assumed Samuels was referring to the founding of the U.N. after World War II when he said that line.

It works for the aftermath of WW3 too, since alien species visiting Earth for the first time, and generally unfamiliar with Earth history, have no reason to care or understand the significance of WW3 or how Earth recovered from it.

There's a bit in one of the historic preservation signs in PIC "The Star Gazer" that says only part of L.A. fell into the ocean.

Which is a retcon; the intent prior to PIC was that all of LA fell into the Pacific.

That is wild speculation based on not a whole lot of evidence. Like, sure, many things are possible, but frankly you're holding onto an a priori assumption ("Eastern Coalition"="China") that has no canonical support.

When producing FC, the intention for the Eastern Coalition was China. IIRC, it was Braga that said so.

Picard has to clarify that he isn’t ECON with Lily because she automatically assumes he his one on them.

While Picard is an outside of the Bozeman, Montana community, why would PIC need to reassure Lily that he is specifically not a member of the ECON unless the ECON encompassed nations outside of China/Asia?

"The Changing Face of Evil" only established that the Breen attacked Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, not Paris.

The Breen attack force attacked Earth. We just saw footage from San Francisco as Starfleet Command was the main target. It doesn't mean the attack force didn't attack Paris or did not intend to attack Paris. It just means it was not significant enough to mention by anyone.

 

[F. King Daniel]

We also see Paris in Picard and it had none of the skyscrapers that were in Discovery.
Picard:

Discovery:

Someone on Tumblr explained that by saying in Discovery, the holodeck settings were cranked up to max

 

[Sci]

It works for the aftermath of WW3 too, since alien species visiting Earth for the first time, and generally unfamiliar with Earth history, have no reason to care or understand the significance of WW3 or how Earth recovered from it.

Nothing precludes that interpretation, but that's not what the actual line establishes and we shouldn't refer to it as though it does.

Which is a retcon; the intent prior to PIC was that all of LA fell into the Pacific.

Sure.

When producing FC, the intention for the Eastern Coalition was China. IIRC, it was Braga that said so.

Yes, but nothing canonical actually establishes that.

Picard has to clarify that he isn’t ECON with Lily because she automatically assumes he his one on them.

While Picard is an outside of the Bozeman, Montana community, why would PIC need to reassure Lily that he is specifically not a member of the ECON unless the ECON encompassed nations outside of China/Asia?

1) You are, again, holding on to the canonically unsupported a priori assumption that the Eastern Coalition must equal China for no reason.

2) The idea that Lily couldn't possibly imagine Picard is an Eastern Coalition agent unless the ECON encompasses nations outside of China is fallacious, because an agent of a nation does not have to belong to that nation's racial or ethnic majority. Spies and saboteurs are a thing.

3) We don't actually know that Lily feared Picard was an ECON agent; she never says that. Picard just assumes that that is what she fears and tries to pre-emptively reassure her against it.

The Breen attack force attacked Earth. We just saw footage from San Francisco as Starfleet Command was the main target. It doesn't mean the attack force didn't attack Paris or did not intend to attack Paris. It just means it was not significant enough to mention by anyone.

I mean, sure, it's possible, but it was not canonically established. You've had a habit in this thread of asserting something as canonically explicit when it isn't.

 

[ScottJ85]

Since the writers of the movie stated that the ECON was the Chinese, and Lily thought it was an attack by them, it makes sense that the war was with them and their allies.

Wasn't Lily's original line "It's China!" and it got changed later?

 

[Ottens]

Just to level-set: @Sci is right that we don't have canonical proof that China was a party to WW3.

However, I think we have persuasive evidence:

• We know the United States and an "Eastern Coalition" fought in WW3.
• We know many of the world's major cities were destroyed in the war. So it really was a world war. That argues against the Eastern Coalition being a faction based on the Eastern United States fighting against another US- or North America-based faction with territory in Indiana (which was hit by a nuclear attack) and Montana (where the "ECON" was considered the enemy).
• We learned from Pike that the Eugenics War somehow led to WW3, and we know Khan led a faction in the Eugenics War with territory in Asia and that Archer's ancestor fought in that war in North Africa. Again: global wars with Asia involved.
• We see far fewer Asian people in the future of Star Trek than the Earth's current demographic distribution would suggest. Not just Chinese, but Central Asian, Indian, Korean, Vietnamese...
• The "post-atomic horror" courtroom scenes in "Encounter at Farpoint" did feature a lot of Asiatic people, suggesting that a part of Asia suffered tremendously in the war and still hadn't recovered by 2079.

What is the evidence against China being involved?

 

[Sci]

Just to level-set: @Sci is right that we don't have canonical proof that China was a party to WW3.

I did not say China was not a party to World War III. I said that there's no canonical evidence that the Eastern Coalition is supposed to represent China.

However, I think we have persuasive evidence:

We know the United States and an "Eastern Coalition" fought in WW3.

Actually, we don't even know that per se! It's entirely possible that the political entity we today call "the United States of America" was dissolved or sundered before World War III began, especially now that we know a 2nd U.S. Civil War eventually led in some manner to World War III.

Edited to add: Which is not to say that it must have happened that way either! I'm saying, the canonical evidence is so vague that many, many different, contradictory scenarios are consistent with the canonical evidence. End edit.

We know many of the world's major cities were destroyed in the war. So it really was a world war. That argues against the Eastern Coalition being a faction based on the Eastern United States fighting against another US- or North America-based faction with territory in Indiana (which was hit by a nuclear attack) and Montana (where the "ECON" was considered the enemy).

No it doesn't. It's entirely possible that World War III was a genuinely global conflict and that two or more factions that had previously comprised the United States were on opposing sides in that global conflict. To make a historical comparison -- if the Cold War had ignited into a world war in the late 20th Century, East Germany and West Germany would have been on opposite sides of that world war. Something similar could have happened to the U.S.

Edited to add: Which is not to say that it must have happened that way either! I'm saying, the canonical evidence is so vague that many, many different, contradictory scenarios are consistent with the canonical evidence. End edit.

We learned from Pike that the Eugenics War somehow led to WW3, and we know Khan led a faction in the Eugenics War with territory in Asia and that Archer's ancestor fought in that war in North Africa. Again: global wars with Asia involved.

Sure. No one's arguing that Asian nations were not party to World War III.

• We see far fewer Asian people in the future of Star Trek than the Earth's current demographic distribution would suggest. Not just Chinese, but Central Asian, Indian, Korean, Vietnamese...
• The "post-atomic horror" courtroom scenes in "Encounter at Farpoint" did feature a lot of Asiatic people, suggesting that a part of Asia suffered tremendously in the war and still hadn't recovered by 2079.

That's not evidence that China = the Eastern Coalition -- that's evidence the producers of Star Trek have had some deeply-rooted white ethnocentric biases.

Again, I cannot emphasize this enough: It is not a positive depiction of the future if it is one in which the Chinese nation and/or Asian nations in general have been genocided. If you try to sell Star Trek as a positive vision of the future and argue that China and/or Asia have been genocided, you're implicitly -- not intentionally, but messages that get sent aren't always the messages an artist intends to send -- saying that the genocide of Chinese and/or Asian people is a good thing.

Far, far, far better idea would be for Star Trek to explicitly establish that China and other Asian nations fared relatively no better or worse than other nations in World War III and that their great cities are in similar condition to the great cities of the rest of Afro-Eurasia, Oceania, and the Americas.

 

[Ottens]

All good points!

I just disagree on two. On the first mildly: that the canonical evidence is so vague that many different and contradictory scenarios for WW3 are possible. I think I already made my case for why I think the evidence (and I would add some extrapolation for our history and the current state of the world) points in the direction of WW3 being a primarily China-US conflict, with China leading an Eastern Coalition. I don't want to repeat myself, though, so maybe we'll have to agree to disagree on that one.

On a second point I disagree a bit more strongly: that the large-scale destruction (I think genocide is overstating it) of China or East Asia more widely is inconsistent with the positive future vision of Star Trek. The whole idea of a World War 3 is inconsistent with that vision! Star Trek gives us a pretty bleak view of humanity in the 21st century. We get a Second American Civil War, an Eugenics War, a Third World War, the murderous and eugenicist Col. Green, a "post-atomic horror", kangaroo courts. We're told hundreds of millions of people were killed and many major cities were destroyed. Clearly the positive future of Star Trek doesn't begin until later.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Which is a retcon; the intent prior to PIC was that all of LA fell into the Pacific.

Nah, there is no inconsistency between Janeway's statements in VOY Future's End Pt. 1 and the plaque shown in ST: Picard, and no retcon required. People just tend to vastly underestimate how massive and spread out a city Los Angeles is.

Here's what Janeway said:

JANEWAY: After the Hermosa quake in 2047 this entire region sank under two hundred metres of water. It became one of the world's largest coral reefs, home to thousands of different marine species. ​

http://www.chakoteya.net/Voyager/304.htm

Janeway never specified the size of the region underwater or that it covered all of the city. When she said that, Janeway and Chakotay were walking along the boardwalk at the Santa Monica Pier. Both Santa Monica and Hermosa Beach (ala' the Hermosa Quake of 2047) are located on the coast well over 16 miles away from downtown Los Angeles. If the coastal areas all subducted by 200 meters (which is not possible in reality, but I digress) and formed a coral reef, downtown Los Angeles and the surrounding region should still be intact, but obviously heavily damaged by the massive earthquake.

I went into it in-depth and made a map of the likely coral reef areas based on a USGS fault map of faults that cross through Santa Monica and Hermosa Beach here:

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/los...future-far-future.310661/page-2#post-14060217

 

[Cyrus]

Nah, there is no inconsistency between Janeway's statements in VOY Future's End Pt. 1 and the plaque shown in ST: Picard, and no retcon required. People just tend to vastly underestimate how massive and spread out a city Los Angeles is.

Yes, LA is huge especially if it's a reference to the 5 county greater LA than city of LA. I live close by to Hermosa Beach so I hope this particular prediction is way off. A Hermosa quake probably refers to a quake on the inglewood newport fault, a fault not as famous as San Andreas fault but considered more dangerous because of its proximity to population centers.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Yes, LA is huge especially if it's a reference to the 5 county greater LA than city of LA. I live close by to Hermosa Beach so I hope this particular prediction is way off. A Hermosa quake probably refers to a quake on the inglewood newport fault, a fault not as famous as San Andreas fault but considered more dangerous because of its proximity to population centers.

As a matter of fact in the link I posted, I included the Newport-Inglewood Fault as sort of the furthest inland border of the subduction zone that makes up the Los Angeles Reef, with the Palos Verdes Fault and Compton Thrust Fault (that meet under Hermosa Beach) and the Santa Monica Fault making up the other borders.

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/los...future-far-future.310661/page-2#post-14060217

I used to live in Huntington Beach until last year, and the Newport-Inglewood Fault ran right underneath where we lived, and there was a major risk of liquefaction of the underlying sand which could cause the buildings to sink into the ground in a large quake like is predicted for the Newport-Inglewood Fault.

 

[Sci]

On a second point I disagree a bit more strongly: that the large-scale destruction (I think genocide is overstating it) of China or East Asia more widely is inconsistent with the positive future vision of Star Trek. The whole idea of a World War 3 is inconsistent with that vision! Star Trek gives us a pretty bleak view of humanity in the 21st century. We get a Second American Civil War, an Eugenics War, a Third World War, the murderous and eugenicist Col. Green, a "post-atomic horror", kangaroo courts. We're told hundreds of millions of people were killed and many major cities were destroyed. Clearly the positive future of Star Trek doesn't begin until later.

To be clear: The issue I'm concerned with is not World War III or the near-extinction of humanity itself. I'm concerned with an interpretation that says that Chinese people and/or Asian nations fared relatively worse than other nations as a result of World War III than the rest of humanity. That interpretation is, I would argue, deeply problematic, because no work of fiction should declare that it's depicting a positive future if it is also depicting a future in which an entire national identity or racial grouping has been de facto wiped out.

 

[Ottens]

I don't see why we should draw the line there. Star Trek tells us 600 million people are going to die in a WW3. You think that is consistent with a positive future, but if the majority of those 600 million were Chinese it's not?

I don't think Star Trek is telling us the Chinese were (largely) "wiped out", much less that there's been a "genocide". I'm just trying to make sense of the dearth of Chinese people -- or really, Asian people in general -- in the future of Star Trek, which doesn't make a lot of sense when it's the most populous part of the world today.

I can think of two explanations:

1. Asia's share of the world population remains more or less the same, but for some reason Asian people don't serve as much in Starfleet. This, to me, would be the more problematic explanation, because it suggests there's still racism in the 23rd and 24th centuries.
2. Asian people are just as likely to serve in Starfleet, but Asia's share of the world population has declined. The obvious explanation for that would be World War 3, especially since we're told an Eastern Coalition fought in the war.

Since large cities in East and South Asia are both more populous and more dense than North America's, even a tit-for-tat nuclear exchange would lead to far more fatalities in the former than in the latter.

Consider: only two metro regions in the US have a population of more than 10 million: New York-New Jersey and Los Angeles. China has eight metro regions with 10+ million inhabitants. India has five. Pakistan has two. The Ho Chi Minh metro area has a population of 20 million. The Jakarta metro area has 30 million. Taipei 7 million.

 

[TRON JA307020]

That's always been my interpretation. I never even thought "Eastern Coalition" meant "China" though obviously I see the potential connection now. But, the way Lily talked struck me as a more local power rather than a reference to a larger world power.

Yeah but that wouldn't explain the world war. I'm it was local then they would have been taking about a civil war in first contact which they never mentioned. I believe they meant china as they originally planned but figured the film might be banned in china if they stated that.

 

[fireproof78]

Yeah but that wouldn't explain the world war.

Obviously. I just imagined that the war involved the war, and then in First Contact it was local powers trying to assert control. I'm talking after WW3 which First Contact is clearly set in.

 

[Sci]

I don't see why we should draw the line there. Star Trek tells us 600 million people are going to die in a WW3. You think that is consistent with a positive future, but if the majority of those 600 million were Chinese it's not?

Yes, because it's not a positive future if an entire national identity is wiped out.

I don't think Star Trek is telling us the Chinese were (largely) "wiped out", much less that there's been a "genocide". I'm just trying to make sense of the dearth of Chinese people -- or really, Asian people in general -- in the future of Star Trek, which doesn't make a lot of sense when it's the most populous part of the world today.

I think a better option is to assume that there is no dearth of Chinese people in-universe and that the lack of Chinese representation is a function of real-world limitations of the imagination of the producers. Not everything needs an in-universe explanation.

Obviously. I just imagined that the war involved the war, and then in First Contact it was local powers trying to assert control. I'm talking after WW3 which First Contact is clearly set in.

That's a good point -- it's entirely possible that the Eastern Coalition was not a faction that fought in World War III, but rather was a faction that arose in North America in the aftermath of World War III.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

As per the Brannon Braga's audio commentary for First Contact, the Eastern Coalition "was at one time simply 'China,'" and the name "Eastern Coalition" was created and used instead "in favor of political correctness," in the words of Memory Alpha [https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Eastern_Coalition].

 

[Nyotarules]

A Trek show where the majority of humans in Starfleet are beige, brown or black with a few white male faces dotted in the background would never get off the ground and I can see the pearl clutching from certain people if it did. Some folks can't even handle one black female as the lead in a Trek show!
We don't need an illogical in universe explanation for real life racial politics.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

An attempt to establish that service in Starfleet is a function of race or ethnicity by any mechanism is a racist idea, and it's contrary to what Star Trek is supposed to represent, in a way that goes beyond biases in who is hired to act on the shows. The reason is that it's an attempt to justify those biases.