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USSR in the 24th century?

USSR reforming is easy. What about the eugenics war that's not happening?

The real reason the Eugenics Wars weren't shown in Trek when we see the mid-90s was because the writers didn't want to confuse the audience by showing a destroyed LA in "Future's End". So they changed it that the Eugenics Wars were some Asia-only conflict that most people weren't aware of when they happened.

They chanved it to an Asia-only conflict? Was that in Future's End?? I don't remember them saying anything about the Eugenics War in that episode, but it has been a while since I have seen it.
 
They chanved it to an Asia-only conflict? Was that in Future's End?? I don't remember them saying anything about the Eugenics War in that episode, but it has been a while since I have seen it.

Like I already said, they didn't change anything, because TOS never claimed that the Eugenics Wars were fought on American soil.

The only thing that qualifies as a reference to the Eugenics Wars in "Future's End" is a model of a DY-100-class ship on Rain Robinson's desk.
 
Christopher;4915239 The only thing that qualifies as a reference to the Eugenics Wars in "Future's End" is a model of a DY-100-class ship on Rain Robinson's desk.[/QUOTE said:
That was just because she was a Trekkie :-p

(Wasn't their a Talosian figure on her desk, too?)
 
They chanved it to an Asia-only conflict? Was that in Future's End?? I don't remember them saying anything about the Eugenics War in that episode, but it has been a while since I have seen it.

Like I already said, they didn't change anything, because TOS never claimed that the Eugenics Wars were fought on American soil.

The only thing that qualifies as a reference to the Eugenics Wars in "Future's End" is a model of a DY-100-class ship on Rain Robinson's desk.

Sorry- I didn't read your post before I commented.
 
Like I already said, they didn't change anything, because TOS never claimed that the Eugenics Wars were fought on American soil.

True, but there's the problem with Spock's lines about "your world was on the verge of another Dark Ages" and "whole populations were being bombed out of existence." That pretty much implies that everyone on Earth was invited to the Eugenics Wars party, and it makes it harder to reconcile the episode with the "stealth" concept for the EW.
 
The dark ages did come - we saw them in a TNG episode, a TNG movie and a couple of ENT episodes. They just didn't start in the 1990s yet, but "on the verge" is a good way to put it.

The line about whole populations being bombed out of existence (as opposed to being macheted or starved or infected with bioweapons) makes that bit of pseudohistory quite incompatible with the Greg Cox books, though. The war was a very "public" event in the sense of being an explicitly conventional conflict, not a stealthy or indirect one.

Doesn't mean anything in "Future's End" would contradict this, though: in the real world, whole populations were bombed out of existence in Laos without the general public in the US noticing, and an attempt was made to bomb whole populations out of existence in Vietnam with the general public in the US noticing but not reacting much. The supermen and their opponents could easily have leveled half the world and still been in harmony with "Future's End". And, of course, "Future's End" took place after the fighting had ended, in 1996; the newsstands would hardly be screaming "WAR STILL OVER!" "NO FIGHTING ANYWHERE!" "READ MORE ON PP. 2-99!"

However, we can also argue that Spock's statement about bombing of populations was not in reference to the actual Eugenics Wars. What he says seems to refer to the time when Khan was deported, in 1996, not to the preceding years of fighting; according to him, the bombing that apparently was taking place after the end of the EW would have made it unlikely that any government would have expended a starship for getting rid of Khan.

The timeline thus would seem to be something like WWI, short peace, WWII, short peace with proxy wars, Eugenics War(s), and then after the deposing of the last supermen, no peace but a continuing state of global war that dovetails into WWIII but doesn't touch North America much until the 2050s.

As for the references to Leningrad, the one from "Trouble with Tribbles" seems to refer to the ancient times - the times when scotch was invented, before the city was named Leningrad or was even built. So it's not a historically relevant reference. The one in "I, Mudd" is in reference to Leningrad being a paradise to rival Mudd's personal harem world, so it could well refer to a historical-mythological Leningrad rather than to a currently existing metropol. OTOH, the one from ST4 could reinforce an interpretation of "I, Mudd" that Leningrad is an amusement park similar to Disneyworld, a world-famous source of escapist entertainment and hence a particularly tragic place to suffer from 100% cloud cover and armageddon and the sort. :devil:

Timo Saloniemi
 
Like I already said, they didn't change anything, because TOS never claimed that the Eugenics Wars were fought on American soil.

True, but there's the problem with Spock's lines about "your world was on the verge of another Dark Ages" and "whole populations were being bombed out of existence." That pretty much implies that everyone on Earth was invited to the Eugenics Wars party, and it makes it harder to reconcile the episode with the "stealth" concept for the EW.

I'm not saying anything about a stealth war here. Look at actual history. Look at World War Two. That was a global war that affected virtually every nation on Earth, causing devastation on a scale unprecedented in human history. It was the biggest war ever fought on the planet. Whole populations were bombed out of existence. And yet the contintental United States was completely untouched by any combat in WWII, aside from a smattering of Japanese fire balloons that caused only minor damage and only once caused any fatalities.

Find a movie or a newsreel showing Los Angeles in 1944, during the height of the fiercest fighting in WWII. You'll see signs of wartime -- literal signs like "Buy War Bonds," behavior changes like rationing and scrap-metal drives, a reduced population of young adult males -- but you won't see any bombs falling or tanks rolling through the streets. Life in American cities continued fairly normally even while countless people were suffering and dying in Europe and Asia and the Pacific.

America is not Earth. America is a very, very small fraction of Earth -- less than 7 percent by area, less than 5 percent by population. So there is no contradiction in the idea of a phenomenon that affects most of the planet but doesn't affect American soil. As much as we like to assume it does, the whole world does not revolve around New York and LA.
 
I always wondered if there are national states that not only retained their national identity but didn't become part of United Earth and/or of the Federation?

It is quite likely that individual nations became nation-states after the United Earth Government was made official in 2150. There are too many examples that suggest that is the case to name, however here are just a few. Like Kirk being from Iowa (U.S), Riker being from Alaska (U.S.), and Picard being from La Barre (France).

Now as to the question about any of the old nations opting out of the UEG, Attached put that question to rest. Picard actually states, "Every member of the Federation has entered as a unified world... and that unity said something about them... that they had resolved certain social and political problems at home and were ready to join a larger community." Memory Alpha has even more to back the point that Earth was completely united at the time the Federation was formed.
 
America is not Earth. America is a very, very small fraction of Earth -- less than 7 percent by area, less than 5 percent by population. So there is no contradiction in the idea of a phenomenon that affects most of the planet but doesn't affect American soil. As much as we like to assume it does, the whole world does not revolve around New York and LA.

What? :eek:

Warp drive was invented in the US. First contact was made in the US. The Millennium Gate was build in the US. The first manned Martian mission was done by the US.

During all time travel accidents, all crash landings happened in the US. Vulcan and Ferengi crash landings were in the US. Accidental beaming through time happened to bring people to the US. During all other time travel accidents, the arriving party decided to visit the US. The reptilian Xindi were building their biological weapons in the US. The Devidians harvested humans for neural energy from the US. The Skagarans abducted people from the US to make them slaves. In alternative timeline, the Nazi adopted the US flag as part of theirs.

Except Picard, Worf and Bashir, every crew member whose home or family we've seen or listened about was in the US. Whales appeared to be most easily found in huge fish tanks in the US.

All federation starships are prefixed with USS. Starfleet headquarters and the academy are in the US. The crew of the starship is made of Americans, but their racial quotas required them to have a random Bantu girl, random Russian boy, a Scotsman, an Asian and a Vulcan.

If the world doesn't revolve around LA, it certainly seems to revolve around the US.
 
America is not Earth. America is a very, very small fraction of Earth -- less than 7 percent by area, less than 5 percent by population. So there is no contradiction in the idea of a phenomenon that affects most of the planet but doesn't affect American soil. As much as we like to assume it does, the whole world does not revolve around New York and LA.

What? :eek:

Warp drive was invented in the US. First contact was made in the US. The Millennium Gate was build in the US. The first manned Martian mission was done by the US.

During all time travel accidents, all crash landings happened in the US. Vulcan and Ferengi crash landings were in the US. Accidental beaming through time happened to bring people to the US. During all other time travel accidents, the arriving party decided to visit the US. The reptilian Xindi were building their biological weapons in the US. The Devidians harvested humans for neural energy from the US. The Skagarans abducted people from the US to make them slaves. In alternative timeline, the Nazi adopted the US flag as part of theirs.

Except Picard, Worf and Bashir, every crew member whose home or family we've seen or listened about was in the US. Whales appeared to be most easily found in huge fish tanks in the US.

All federation starships are prefixed with USS. Starfleet headquarters and the academy are in the US. The crew of the starship is made of Americans, but their racial quotas required them to have a random Bantu girl, random Russian boy, a Scotsman, an Asian and a Vulcan.

If the world doesn't revolve around LA, it certainly seems to revolve around the US.

I like how this has nothing to do with Christopher's point.
 
Except Picard, Worf and Bashir, every crew member whose home or family we've seen or listened about was in the US.

And O'Brien. And Keiko.

Granted, Trek is far too US-centric in its portrayal of humanity. But there is nothing in canon that actually asserted that the Eugenics Wars were fought on American soil or damaged Los Angeles in any way, and given the abundant historical precedent, it is entirely simple to reconcile "Future's End"'s portrayal of an intact Los Angeles with what we canonically know about the Eugenics Wars. Anyone who can't understand that a global war can leave America untouched is desperately in need of a refresher course on 20th-century history.
 
Anyone who can't understand that a global war can leave America untouched is desperately in need of a refresher course on 20th-century history.

It's certainly not hard to imagine, however it's strange, especially for Trek. Granted, there were far more strange things, and this is certainly one of the least troubles of the show, but if I was writing my own show, I wouldn't have done it this way.

Given how US-centric Trek is, I would have expected the US to develop the technology for the eugenics and to first and create the program first. I'd also expect them to be affected at least as much as to still talk about it in some way. Sure, that doesn't have to be the case, and the ship on Rain's desk should be enough, but it still remains somewhat weird for me.

If I could go back in time and change things in Trek, I would move any mentioned events at least 100-150 years in the future.
 
It might be that the US wasn't a technological leader in the Trek version of history, but rather a client state to those who grew supermen and harvested supertechnologies from their superbrains. The eugenics program sounds like something from the Old World, not from an upstart nation across the ocean: toying with bloodlines for centuries isn't gonna work if your nation wasn't founded centuries ago. And the part where selective breeding gets boosted with more modern styles of genetic engineering would come in the mid-20th century where the US is a leader in conventional technologies and thus a threat to those practicing the eugenics. Perhaps the US lacked these "strategic bioweapons", then, and might have been a target for them if not for the fact that the "bioweapons" squabbled between themselves for the big fat prize and thus lost it altogether.

OTOH, one or more of the states that fostered the supermen could have emerged as a clear winner, thanks to those very same supermen, and remained untouched by its enemies thanks to the supertech the supermen dreamed up. It is a significant leap from the primitive Saturn rocket of "Assignment: Earth" to the DY-100, a leap the real world did not make and could not have made even if the wildest dreams of von Braun or Korolev had been followed. Quite possibly the leap is spinoff from the eugenics program, then, and would have given the eugenics masters an immense edge in weapons tech, basically making them immune to nations that did not operate their own Augments.

Literally taken, "Space Seed" only speaks of the supermen fighting amongst themselves, not of them being hunted down by "mundies". 1996 might have seen the last of the infighting supermen, while 2010 could have witnessed plenty of non-fighting supermen still toiling in the think tanks of powerful nations, then.

If I could go back in time and change things in Trek, I would move any mentioned events at least 100-150 years in the future.

The trekkies of 2111 would curse you, then. :devil:

Why pretend that Trek history is our history when the Trek future clearly isn't our future?

Timo Saloniemi
 
All these inconsistencies are part of an larger story yet to be played out. Think TNG's "The Chase." Also connected are the attacks on the Romulan border outposts and the "Conspiracy" aliens. See, back in 1963, Gene Roddenberry set out to bring down the Soviet Union. How this is to be accomplished has yet to be seen, but the plan is well on its way. I believe the dethawing of Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan are scheduled for next year. Arthur and JFK should hop the 2013 ferry from Avalon - sorry, "the Nexus." I've forgotten the rest. I'm scheduled for activation shortly after the Aztec calendar ends in 2012 and, embarrassingly, didn't read the rest of the handbook. But I know Jesus will be there. I hope Kirk doesn't do his "What does God need with..." schtick again. I've never seen Vishnu get so angry. Santa loved it though. Just remember, Crusher's uniform is blue.
 
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We don't know the geo-politics of 24th century Earth. Obviously it is a member of the Federation, but there may be any number of national states in existence. And since it is a post-capitalist society, who knows, maybe there is another USSR where all work for themselves and to better humanity.

How true. The example cited in "The Naked Now" definitely indicates that, as well as references to Leningrad. :) Another example is that Worf is said to have grown up in Russia, but the DS9 finale hinted that he had lived in Minsk, the capital city of Belarus.
 
the initials for Kazakhstan's current full name is KPQRPKRK, (Қазақстан Республикасы Qazaqstan Respublïkası Республика Казахстан Respublika Kazakhstan).

:wtf: Where in the world did you find this? All that says is Republic of Kazakhstan in several languages.

During the Soviets' reign, Kazakhstan was the "Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic" in English, "Казахская Советская Социалистическая Республика" in Russian, and "Қазақ Советтік Социалистік Республикасы" in Kazakh. So the abbreviation would have been KSSR in English.
 
America is not Earth. America is a very, very small fraction of Earth -- less than 7 percent by area, less than 5 percent by population. So there is no contradiction in the idea of a phenomenon that affects most of the planet but doesn't affect American soil. As much as we like to assume it does, the whole world does not revolve around New York and LA.

What? :eek:

Warp drive was invented in the US. First contact was made in the US. The Millennium Gate was build in the US. The first manned Martian mission was done by the US.

During all time travel accidents, all crash landings happened in the US. Vulcan and Ferengi crash landings were in the US. Accidental beaming through time happened to bring people to the US. During all other time travel accidents, the arriving party decided to visit the US. The reptilian Xindi were building their biological weapons in the US. The Devidians harvested humans for neural energy from the US. The Skagarans abducted people from the US to make them slaves. In alternative timeline, the Nazi adopted the US flag as part of theirs.

Except Picard, Worf and Bashir, every crew member whose home or family we've seen or listened about was in the US. Whales appeared to be most easily found in huge fish tanks in the US.

All federation starships are prefixed with USS. Starfleet headquarters and the academy are in the US. The crew of the starship is made of Americans, but their racial quotas required them to have a random Bantu girl, random Russian boy, a Scotsman, an Asian and a Vulcan.

If the world doesn't revolve around LA, it certainly seems to revolve around the US.

Well if we are listening non TNG characters, we have

Spock
Scotty
Checkov
O'Brein
Keiko
Reed


In Star Trek USS = United Star Ship

As for most things happening in the US perhaps because it is an American show, just as in Doctor Who everything seems to happen in the UK.
 
Interestingly, we never really learned where Scotty or Chekov or Miles O'Brien were from. We just assume they're from those places whose ethnic stereotypes they manifest. But it eventually turned out that Sulu was an American - so possibly Scotty, Chekov and O'Brien were, too...

Timo Saloniemi
 
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