RobertScorpio said:
Okay let me get this straight...I may be shakey on the facts but here it goes..
Some time around 5000 years ago a faction of Vulcans did not want to follow Surak and they left, into space, and would later become the Romulan Empire.
During the time of ENT, actually it was around 1800 years before. By TNG, it was 2000 years before. So, it would have happened sometime in the 4th Century CE.
It's important to note that TNG's "Gambit" seems to imply that the anti-Surakian Vulcans founded a number of different settlements across a number of different starsystems. It would appear that the Romulan settlement was the one that survived to the present day, and which may or may not have later conquered the other anti-Surakian settlements.
[qutoe]This doesn't make any sense.
For these Vulcans to have gotten far off into space as they did, they had to have Warp Technology.
[/QUOTE]
Or fleet of generation ships, which is what the
Rihannsu novels depict them as using. Or sleepr ship technology.
But, yeah, it's also possible that they had warp in the 300s CE.
But more amazing? Not only did these Vulcans (now Romulans) forget where they came from, the Vulcans who stayed forget that they left.
There's no evidence from the canon that the Romulan Vulcans ever forgot their ancestry. On the contrary, the implication in ENT seems to be that they were deliberately concealing their origins.
As for the Vulcans who stayed on the homeworld: Sure, they knew that some folks left Vulcan after Surak's philosophy (known as
cthia in the novel
Spock's World) took root, but how would they have any way of knowing what happened to them? There'd certainly be no reason for them to presume that of all the hundreds of cultures in known space that the Romulans would be the descendents of the Sundered.
This is where is gets stranger. If the vulcans who left had warp speed, then we must assume the Vulcans who stayed did too. And we are supposed to believe that not only did they forget who left and who stayed, they also never bumped into each other again for the next 5000 years?
TOS established that horrific wars were associated with the Time of Awakening and the Sundering of the Vulcan race. ENT elaborates further, establishing in "Awakening" that the wars made use of nuclear weapons, and establishing in "The Forge" that Vulcan spent approximately 1500 years recovering from those wars before becoming a major space power.
It's entirely possible that Vulcan had, and then lost, and then regained warp technology. After all, the United States went to Luna in 1966 and has spent nearly half a century since just putzing around in Earth orbit. Technological development does not always occur linearly.
As for the Vulcans and Romulans never bumping into each other -- why not? Space is
big, there are 360 degrees on the x, y, and z axises to worry about, warp drive during the ENT and pre-ENT eras simply wasn't as fast as it was during the TOS and TNG eras, and Romulus is very, very far away from Vulcan -- expecting them to bump into each other during the pre-ENT era is like expecting Aztecs from Tenochtitlan to occasionally encounter Yuan dynasty-era Chinese from Dadu or Plantagenet dynasty Englishmen from London. What's the problem?
To put it another way: Human beings in Europe and Asia share a common ancestry, but there's certainly no cultural memory of that particular sundering, nor was there widespread travel between Europe and Asia until recent centuries. Or, to take it even further, humans native to Europe and to North America share a common ancestry, but there's no cultural memory of that common ancestry, nor did Europeans and North Americans encounter one-another for thousands of years until the Vikings and, to a far greater extent, Columbus, reached the New World.
Obviously I must be missing something here, so someone please do tell!!!
You're missing a grasp of how cultures evolve and interact over great distances with significant technological limitations and under the duress of disasters. I daresay that Trek's vision of the Vulcan race sundering thousands of years in the past into multiple ethnic groups, several of which do not survive and one of which grows into a major galactic power, even as the home planet devolves and then rebuilds, is perhaps one of the more realistic depictions of a species' history.
SFRabid said:
It always amazes me that Romulans have an empire that rivals the Federation and Klingons, and Vulcans don't.
Actually, in a lot of ways, the Vulcan state during the era of ENT resembles a sort of "soft" empire akin to what the United States has today or had during the Cold War. Not a formal empire in the sense of annexing other states into their polity -- but a definite monopoly on power across known space, using third parties as surrogates in their wars with the Andorians, etc.
RobertScorpio said:
Just doesn't make sense to me, at all, that Spock did not know, nor did the Romulan, that they both came from the same stock.
Well, at least the Romulans at the top of the Star Empire heirarchy did in ENT. But, remember, the Romulans kept their origins secret from other species upon rediscovering their Vulcan cousins, and the Vulcans had certainly not kept in touch with the Romulans after they left, so why WOULD they know about the common origin until they obtained visual evidence of Romulan physiology in "Balance of Terror?"
The time required for the Vulcans to have left Vulcan, and get as far away from planet Vulcan as they did, would require far more than generational ships. We're only talking 1800 years.
That depends on how far away Romulus is, and whether or not there were any mitigating factors (did they run into a wormhole, for instance?).
If they did have warp speed, then not going back, or never coming across each other for the next nearly 2000 years is a bit silly.
No, it isn't, especially if the Romulans picked a planet that journey to would be difficult in that era. If their intent was to GET AWAY from the Vulcans, they certainly wouldn't be running into them a lot, now would they?
