TOS to Picard:Family Members in Disco

[Dryson]

I was thinking, the crews of the Enterprise (ENT, TOS, TNG), along with the crews from Voyager, DS9 would have had families, eventually.

We know that Scottie and Sulu both had kids as did Sisko. With the illustrious backgrounds of the families from the series above, wouldn't Starfleet ensure that the descendants from lets say Chekov or Jake Sisko or even Nog were well protected?

Would the descendants from ENT,TOSTNG, etc. make it into the future to the Disco era?

 

[WarpTenLizard]

I forget how far into the future the Discovery traveled in Season 3, but it was at least a few centuries. Far enough that Adira could probably trace lineage back to any member of any Enterprise, if she dug deep enough. I'm sure Starfleet is happy to see any recruit that happens to have genealogy documents linking them to James T. Kirk or Seven of Nine, but I don't see them going out of their way to ensure they have any particular historical figure's descendants in office. It would be like the U.S. Army going out of its way to ensure that the descendants of George Washington and Paul Revere made it into the army.

Granted, I know Katheryn Janeway looked and sounded exactly like her ancestor from hundreds of years back. So I guess we might get a descendant that just happens to be a genetic reincarnation of a whatever character's actor is available for a guest role.

 

[Timo]

The ancient Janeway in "11:59" was a story within a story, though: might be it never happened, might be the characters looked completely different in in-universe reality.

The jump was from the mid-23rd century to the late 32nd, so that's some 800 years and thus a whopping 30+ generations ahead, unless humans in the meantime start breeding at sixty. Sure, we can still tell the direct offspring of Genghis Khan apart from the rest if we really try (and it's not a particularly exclusive club!), but there's little in the way of "family story" that would survive that much of a transition.

A bottleneck or two down the way might make everybody related to Jim Kirk in the end. But the actual impact of somebody like him would likely be between the utterly unrealistic low of direct great-grandkids of Christ in da Vinci Code and the current estimate on inheritors of Mongol genetic might - and diluted down to nothing much in all three cases.

Apart from that, why would anybody remember Chekov? Nobody remembers Kirk, either - no ships named after him, say. (Now Nog is a different matter for unknown reasons, possibly almost as famous as O'Brien... Unless it's a different Nog. Might be the name is common as dirt on Ferenginar. Or then this one was a famed Weirdonite from Absr'd Prime.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[1001001]

Discovery jumped 930 years into the future.

 

[Oddish]

I don't know who my ancestors in 1100 AD were. Mathematically, allowing for 25 years per generation, that gives me about 2^36 of them, or over 60 billion (of course, many of them are on my family tree in multiple places). But the sheer multiplicity of ancestors would make it... problematic for me to determine who I was descended from.

 

[Tim Thomason]

We know that Scottie and Sulu both had kids as did Sisko.

I don't think Scotty had any kids. He probably would have looked them up in Relics if that had been the case.

 

[Finn]

Bones did.

 

[Kor]

I don't know who my ancestors in 1100 AD were. Mathematically, allowing for 25 years per generation, that gives me about 2^36 of them, or over 60 billion (of course, many of them are on my family tree in multiple places). But the sheer multiplicity of ancestors would make it... problematic for me to determine who I was descended from.

In actual practice, we don't find double the number of ancestors in every generation going back. Otherwise the number of ancestors in one generation in the Middle Ages would be more than the world population at that time, and then go back a few more generations before that, and the number of ancestors in a single generation would be more than the number of people who ever lived on Earth.

Genealogists describe something called "pedigree collapse" which occurs because people with at least one shared ancestor reproduce. And this happened quite commonly, since, historically, populations were less mobile and most people tended to marry within the same village or town or within walking distance as a matter of practicality. So most partners would have been related at least distantly, and in some cases perhaps not so distantly. In the big picture, a family tree will look more like a directed acyclic graph than a binary tree.

Now I forgot what this thread was originally about.

Edited to add: the fact that we're all related to somebody else makes it a little easier these days to discover more of who our ancestors were. If you know the names of your great-grandparents, chances are you can find them listed in genealogical sites online, and connect yourself to bigger family trees that other people have already worked on. Doing this, I traced one line back to around the second century BC or something. Though when you go back that far you can tell it's likely that some people fabricated parts of their genealogies, doing stuff like making spurious claims to royal lineage, including legendary characters as their ancestors, etc.

Kor

 

[Oddish]

In actual practice, we don't find double the number of ancestors in every generation going back.

As I specifically stated. I don't have 60 billion ancestors. But if you took my full family tree 36 generations back (were such a thing possible), the top of the tree would have over 60 billion branches. It's just that some people would be on it in multiple places.

 

[Kor]

As I specifically stated. I don't have 60 billion ancestors. But if you took my full family tree 36 generations back (were such a thing possible), the top of the tree would have over 60 billion branches. It's just that some people would be on it in multiple places.

If it's charted accurately, then the top would actually have a lot of the "branches" joined back together instead of having the same people appear multiple times. Hence the directed acyclic graph. The completely separate branching really isn't an accurate conceptualization of a genealogy.

Kor