It wasn’t that long. Started in the mid 2020’s I think.
What did Star Trek teach you INCORRECTLY?
- Thread starter wayoung
- Start date
A lot of star and constellation names are mispronounced in Trek. Ophiuchus isn't "oh-FIE-a-kuss," it's "oh-fee-OO-kus." Ceti is "SEE-tie," not "SET-ee." Beta Aurigae is "aw-RYE-ghee," not "OAR-a-guy." Alpha Centauri is "sen-TOR-eye," not "sen-CHOO-ree." And so on. (They couldn't even keep the made-up ones straight -- Benecia was "ben-uh-SEE-ya" the first time and "beh-NEESH-a" the second.) Then there's the general nonsensical treatment of Bayer designations -- getting them backward like "Ceti Alpha," putting random Greek letters together like "Omicron Delta," putting Greek letters before star names like "Beta Antares," etc.
I picked up the wrong pronunciation of "crystalline" from DeForest Kelley. Once I said it to my father the way McCoy did, as "kris-TAL-lin," and he gave me a bewildered look.
I picked up the wrong pronunciation of "crystalline" from DeForest Kelley. Once I said it to my father the way McCoy did, as "kris-TAL-lin," and he gave me a bewildered look.
Oops! It appears I have lost the rest of this post and a couple of hours of writing.
To to be brief this time, if one looks up the actual quotes from "Space Seed", "Bread and Circuses", "Up the Long Ladder", and Star Trek: First Contact, and analyzes their meanings, one will deduce that at least two, and possibly more, Earth calendars are used in those productions, and that the Eugenics wars in the mid 1990s must be the same conflict as the Third World War in about 2053..
The Gregorian Calendar, the main calendar used in the world civilization today on Earth uses the Anno Domini year count, counting the years since AD one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini
But it is not necessary to count the years from AD one. Even though the Anno Domini dating counts the year from a possible year for the birth of Christ, it is not the only possible dating system for Christians to use. Many Christian societies have counted the years from other events, to say nothing of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. societies.
So if the Space Seed" calendar uses Anno Domini dating, its first year will be AD 1, and the first year of the First Contact calendar will be about 60 to 57 BC.
If the First contact calendar uses Anno Domini dating, its first year will be AD 1, and the first year of the "Space Seed" calendar will be about AD 57 to 60.
If the SS Mariposa in "Up the Long Ladder" left Earth in AD 2123, the "Up the Long Ladder" calendar thus using Anno Domini dating, and if 2123 was about 25 to 50 years after the Third World War, which thus would be in AD 2073 to 2098, the first year in the First Contact calendar would be about AD 20 to 45, and the first year in the "Space Seed" calendar would be about AD 76 to 105.
But there is no guarantee that any of those calendars used Anno Domini dating, and thus the Third World war in Star Trek could happen even before the 1990s AD, or even more than a century later.
So there is no reason to say that Star Trek falsely teaches that World War Three happens in the 1990s AD.
Furthermore, beginning with TOS in the 1960s and continuing with every Star Trek production I have seen, many of the historical references in various productions are inaccurate in the history of our alternate universe. Thus the fictional universe of Star Trek must be an alternate universe with a different history than our one. No matter how much various creators of various Star Trek productions may have intended to set them in our universe, their inability to actually do so means that Star Trek must be in one or more alternate universes with past histories before the 1960s that are different from ours. Thus the Star Trek future is the future of an alternate universe and is not our future.
Thus there is no reason for future Star Trek productions to change the 20th and 21st century history of the Star Trek universe to make it the same as in our history.
These two reasons clearly show that Star Trek does not inaccurately teach the viewers that the Third World War happens in the 1990s AD.
Last edited:
The Eugenics Wars took place in the 1990s and were equated with the Third World War in TOS. TNG retconned WWIII into a later conflict in the mid-21st century.
As I wrote in my post # 23:
One should not rely on memory but should actually check what "Space Seed", "Bread and Circues", "Up the Long Ladder", and Star Trek: Generations actually say about world wars.
And the first thing to note is that the lists of Earth's world wars in the era of TOS and the era of TNG seem to be different:
In "Bread and Circuses":
In Star Trek: First Contact:
In the TOS era list, a war with 37 million dead is listed a the Third World War and in the TNG era a war with 600 million dead - 16.216 times as many fatalities - is listed as the Third World War.
Those are obviously different wars. So the TOS list Third World War should be either before, or after the TNG era Third World War, making it t either the first or second world war or the fourth or later world War in the TNG era list, if it is large enough to be included in the tNG era list at all.
In "City on the Edge of Forever":
.
So in the TOS era list the Second World War was the one with Hitler and Nazi Germany, just as it is in our list. That means that the Third World War on the TOS era list must be the next one after World War Two. Since it would be illogical for a Vulcan to use a list of world wars that included ones with six million, eleven million, and thirty seven million deaths, but omitted one with six hundred million deaths, the Third World War in the TNG era list must be the Fourth World war in the TOS list, or an even later one.
So the TNG era list presumably drops our World War One from its list because it wasn't big or bloody enough or something. If the TNG Third World War was the TOS Fourth World War omitting one war from the TOS era list would be enough. But if the TNG Third World War was the TOS Fifth World War, or an even later one in the TOS era list, at least one other war in the TOS list would have to be omitted from the TNG list.
Which world war was Earth's last world war?
Here I should note that in today the most used calendar around the world is the Gregorian Calendar, and the Gregorian Calendar used Anno Domni dating to number the years. Even though Anno Domni year numbering counts the years since the birth of Jesus Christ and thus is a Christianity based dating system, many Christian majority societies have counted the years from some other event, most commonly the date of the Creation. And of course Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, etc. societies don't use Anno Domni year counting unless they adopt the Gregorian calendar for non religious purposes.
And I have noted only about half a dozens examples of the use of AD or BC in all the hundreds of historic dates mentioned in various Star Trek productions I have seen. All other dates in Star Trek productions might or might not use Anno Domni year numbering as far as we know.
In "Space Seed":
So the Eugenics Wars seem to have happened during part of all of the period from 1993.333 to 1996.666 in the calendar used in "Space Seed", and might possibly have included short periods before and/or after the mid 1990s.
And they were the last world war on Earth according to the TOS era list of Earth's World Wars.
And what else dose "Space Seed" say about Earth in the 1990s in the "Space Seed" calendar?
So McGivers says that space travel became much faster around the year 2018, although she doesn't specify if that was the introduction of warp drive or a lesser development. Since the mid 1990s in the "Space Seed" calendar would be about 1993.333 to 1996.666, and about the year 2018" might be sometime between 2013.000 and 2023.999 in the "Space Seed" calendar, the introduction of a faster form of space travel should have been 16.334 to 30.666 years after the Eugenics Wars. So warp drive could not have been introduced any sooner than 16.334 to 30.666 years after the Eugenics Wars, and possibly much later.
In Star Trek: First Contact:
So Troi claims that all war on Earth will end within 50 years after First Contact with the Vulcans.
And what is the date of First Contact with the Vulcans:
So the Third World War may have been one of the last wars fought on Earth, and was probably the last war big enough to be listed as a world war.
Since the Eugenics wars were Earth's last world war, and the Third World War in Star Trek: First Contact was probably the last world war on Earth, the Eugenics Wars in the mid 1990s in the "Space Seed" calendar should have been the same conflict as the Third World War in about 2053 in the First Contact calendar..
Assuming that the Third World War happened about 2052.000 to 2055.000, and if it was the same as the Eugenics Wars, the introduction of faster forms of space travel mentioned by McGivers 16.334 to 30.666 years after the Eugenics Wars should have happened about 2068.334 to 2085.666 in the First Contact calendar, and thus about 5 to 22 years after Cochrane's first warp flight in 2063. So that should certainly be the beginning of warp travel.
As I wrote in my post number 23 above:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benicia,_California
Benicia in Star Trek was probably named after Benicia, California, and I suspect that the Spanish and English pronunciations of Benicia are different, and might still be different in the era of Star Trek..
Last edited:
Only if you're determined to force two contradictory assertions into continuity with each other. Obviously the makers of TNG decided that the 1990s were too close a date for a conjectural future world war, so they pushed it forward to the mid-21st century, ignoring the Eugenics Wars. Roddenberry saw TNG as a soft reboot, a chance to rewrite the Trek universe and get rid of the parts that he wasn't happy with or that hadn't aged well. So he wasn't trying to keep TNG's version of WWIII consistent with "Space Seed."
Besides, the later references to the Eugenics Wars in ENT and Kelvin have confirmed that they were in the 20th century (leaving aside the line in "Doctor Bashir, I Presume" that erroneously put them in the 22nd century). They've been retconned into a separate conflict from WWIII, despite what "Space Seed" said.
Arguing with someone who writes Star Trek about Star Trek chronology seems illogical... Christopher, didn't you write a book about Augments?I've never seen any timeline that lists The Eugenics war and WW3 as the same engagement. Memory Alpha also lists them as separate and I'm fairly certain there's an official timeline from startrek.com also listing them as separate.
Not that I recall. You're probably thinking of Greg Cox.
Yup. Ongoing fictional universes evolve over time and new information supplants old. That's why we don't talk about Vulcanians and lithium crystals anymore. In 1967, the 1990s seemed a reasonably distant enough date for a sci-fi future world war. In 1987, it would've been cutting it way too close, so they bumped it further forward. And later productions reconciled them by making them two different wars, ignoring Spock's statement that they were the same.
WW3 started in the late morning and was over by mid-afternoon of the same day.
(head canon only)
It taught me that everyone with a goatee is evil.
It taught me that people will take personal risks and sacrifices when it's morally imperative to do so.
That was less implausible in the '60s than it is today, since computers then used vacuum tubes that were prone to overheat and blow out if the unit worked itself too hard, e.g. if it got caught in a logic loop. Heck, that can still happen with laptops today, though now they have failsafes that shut them down before too much damage is done.
I thought American liberals were cosmopolitan and pacific.
I heard/watched the professional lip-sync versions of Star Trek where the localization directors and writers re-introduced French pronounciations of Picard into the translations and they replaced the everything about interception with rendezvous.
“I'm Jean-Luc Picard*, captain of the Federation ...”, he'd say in perfect French pronounciation of his name. And “set course for rendezvous," they say whenever the original was "set course to intercept."
I heard/watched the professional lip-sync versions of Star Trek where the localization directors and writers re-introduced French pronounciations of Picard into the translations and they replaced the everything about interception with rendezvous.
“I'm Jean-Luc Picard*, captain of the Federation ...”, he'd say in perfect French pronounciation of his name. And “set course for rendezvous," they say whenever the original was "set course to intercept."
Entities that call themselves gods (or have godlike powers) often behave remarkably much like rich, spoiled, kids with no sense of responsibility.
(At least, I'm assuming that's incorrect, given our planet's number of religious people.....)
(At least, I'm assuming that's incorrect, given our planet's number of religious people.....)
I think the topic is... "What did Star Trek teach you INCORRECTLY", but most people are forgetting the "incorrectly" part. I think I will too.
There is no need for money... therefore there is no motivation for most people to do anything. What do citizens do? What motivates them to do it? What would most people really do with themselves if they didn't need to work to live? Star Trek gave people an incorrect view of "what life would be like". Many people would not work unless forced to work. Who would force them? If they didn't have something to do, what would they do? Is it really an authoritarian state? I remember Wil Wheaton posting on twitter that liberalism and globalism was the "way" to the land of Star Trek. No, really it's the way to 200-300k homeless people living, defecating, and disposing of used needles in sidewalk tent communities.
What would people do if there was nothing to do, and why would they do it?
And it taught me that whatever is out there, it's worth exploring. And the global community should be investing in that now. The only way to lift people off of the bottom of the ladder is to raise up the whole ladder.
There is no need for money... therefore there is no motivation for most people to do anything. What do citizens do? What motivates them to do it? What would most people really do with themselves if they didn't need to work to live? Star Trek gave people an incorrect view of "what life would be like". Many people would not work unless forced to work. Who would force them? If they didn't have something to do, what would they do? Is it really an authoritarian state? I remember Wil Wheaton posting on twitter that liberalism and globalism was the "way" to the land of Star Trek. No, really it's the way to 200-300k homeless people living, defecating, and disposing of used needles in sidewalk tent communities.
What would people do if there was nothing to do, and why would they do it?
And it taught me that whatever is out there, it's worth exploring. And the global community should be investing in that now. The only way to lift people off of the bottom of the ladder is to raise up the whole ladder.
This is a whole pile of <ahem> flawed logic. First of all, Gene Roddenberry never hinted that Star Trek took place in an "alternate universe". Quite the contrary, in fact.
"The 1960s were one of the most volatile times in American history, and Roddenberry saw it as an opportunity to provide audiences with something uplifting and optimistic about the future. It was his vision of where he hoped humanity would someday evolve, learning from the mistakes of its past. In short, he was hoping to somewhat lead by example: Depict the world operating harmoniously, and perhaps people will believe it is possible."
The future. OUR future, not the future of some "alternate universe".
The "alternate universe" BS crept in only after Roddenberry died, when the current generation of Star Trek writers and producers were too chicken shit or unimaginative to create something new. Instead, they rehashed TOS characterless in those ridiculous "Kelvin Universe" movies. Thank God they didn't try to do this instead of TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT.
Star Trek is lost. Discovery is a piece of garbage that wins GLAAD awards instead of Hugo awards. I haven't seen "Picard", but I see this as stagnating instead of moving forward. The Kelvin movies showed me that without Roddenberry's guidance, none of these fools know Star Trek at all.
Similar threads
