Ah...
What will the real 22nd Century look like?
- Thread starter Mr. Scott
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Ah...
For what it's worth, Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore noted in their audio commentary for Star Trek: First Contact that the Eastern Coalition dialogue was originally written to refer solely to China, and that the phrase "Eastern Coalition" was substituted very late in the scripting process as a substitute term for China.
^ Did they say *why* they changed it?
I seem to remember them deciding to change it so that the film wouldn't cause offense and/or end up unpopular in China, but I'm honestly not sure if that detail is accurate.
ETA:
Ah, here. Memory Alpha's entry:
"A coalition of nations in the Far East and/or Middle East would seem to be suggested by the name of this combatant. It would later be explained by Brannon Braga, in the film's audio commentary, that the ECON was at one time simply "China," but that it was changed in favor of political correctness."
^ But why should they care what China thinks? Does the Chinese government even watch films like this?
No, but Chinese people buy movie tickets.
Yep. I just didn't realize that was supposed to be the reference until I was told that, a while back. I am rather glad they changed it, because a fractured US is more interesting, and more plausible, than Chinese seemingly able and willing to continue attacking the US even though the war was--evidently--over, and both sides had likely fallen into anarchy.
Two points here--
1)It's passing hilarious that, had it been the Chinese, they probably would have succeeded in destroying Cochrane's facility, because they would have used futuristic Delta Quadrant ultra-advanced weapons that are unaccountably much less destructive than an ICBM, even with no warhead attached to it.
2)If it had been China, and the war was ongoing, that paints a much more disturbing picture of Cochrane. Sure, he was a kind of greedy putz, but if the war with the PRC is still on, he is building a faster than light war machine for the US military. Cochrane = Oppenheimer? (Oppenheimer, is of course, a hero of humanity who helped end a brutal war and probably saved hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives otherwise lost to famine and conventional firebombing, but Trek has generally been rather ambivalent about weapons designers--see "Jetrel," and, less on-point, Generations.)
Kinda weird, that. Is it really more politically correct to simply code the enemy? I mean, I guess "Central Powers" is somewhat more PC than "the Hun," but if the reference is to China, then it's still "offensive" to China.
Of course, a putative war between the two of the world's great powers, who have fought a devastating war once already, were uneasy enemies-of-enemies until they became uneasy major trading partners, is not (imo) likely to be really offensive to anyone. Would anyone in 1905 get bent out of shape about a novel that made passing reference to a future war between France and Germany? (Well, maybe, I guess--iirc, the big thing in speculative fiction then was to postulate a Western alliance against the vast power of the Russian Empire, and in execution they were in many respects offensive. Interestingly, they were eventually proven right, at least about the geopolitics. However, as long as Zefram didn't pull out World War II-era terminology for Asians, I don't really see the effrontery.)
Thank you....! You caught that....
hahahaha
(One reason I don't want to work in the film business over there; things have changed since China 'took over.')
*shrugs* When Lily thinks it's the Eastern Coalition, she mentions something about how weird it was that they'd broken the cease-fire. So I don't think we really know enough about the geopolitical situation of 2063 Earth to say that that's implausible.
I think it's pretty clear that Lily had no idea what kind of weapon they used.
I don't agree at all. None of the people working in the silo were wearing military uniforms, and Lily, who is explicitly identified as Cochrane's primary materials supplier ("It took me six months just to scrounge up enough titanium for a two-meter cockpit"), is obviously not military or military contractor. And on top of that, apparently Cochrane was always going to be piloting the thing, even before the Borg attack -- and in real life, engineers simply do not double as test pilots. The film seems to be making it pretty clear that the silo in Montana had been abandoned by the U.S. military (presuming the military or government even still existed) and that Cochrane was working by himself, using abandoned federal property, in order to create a warp-drive that would make him wealthy.
I think the idea was that by giving it an ambiguous name, they could just avoid having to identify the Eastern Coalition with any real-life political actor. Thus, in their minds, it could remain China -- and indeed, the Trek novel The Lost Era: The Sundered depicts the Eastern Coalition as an Asian alliance of states hostile to the United States and European Union -- while to anyone else, it could mean whatever they wanted it to mean. A prime example being you, who took it to be a faction of a divided America.
Crap, I meant would not have used. Ruined the joke, it did.
I suppose his intended market might have been "the unaccountably wealthy who still exist After The Rain, and who want to leave Earth." There's definitely room for interpretation, although it'd have been nice if they'd explained how one expects to make money from an expensive high-technology item in a post-nuclear armageddon economy.
Apropos of not much, why is "armageddon" not recognized by the board spellcheck software? It's a ridiculously common English word.
Well, sure, in that regard, it works.
Joel_Kirk said:
Next they'll set their sights on Macau! Even Tsingtao and Port Arthur may not be safe! Man the barricades!
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All things considered, my guess is this is what the 22nd century will look like -- if we're lucky...
If we're lucky? What if we're unlucky?
Civilian test pilots (military one's too) are usually engineers. And civilian test pilot normally get first crack at military aircraft.
It's ridiculous that the Phoenix would be considered a FTL war machine. However if the "Eastern Coalition" were also building a FTL ship of their own, then Lily's supposition about who was attacking them could have been based upon that, and also from Cochrane's statement, the Econ might have attacked Cockrane's project years before.
A nuclear war a half century from now wouldn't automatically involve America. Although there would likely be a economic drop , maybe a depression, if other nations were in such a war. Neither of the previous world wars actual involved the entire world. In a strange turn of events, the war might have created millionaires/billionaires all over the Earth. The war was after all about a decade in the past. The post atomic horror spoken of the TNG pilot easily could have existed only in certain areas, but not the majority of the planet.
Agreed. And even though sci-fi stories often allude to a 3rd world war that involved atomic weaponry, it's of course just fiction. We could very well not see any more atomic weaponry used in world wars ever again. I think the odds are greater that either a terrorist group or unstable middle eastern country will be the first to use an atomic bomb, post WWII.
My speculation is that this century will be fraught with conflicts of religious ideals, struggles with having to shrink industrial production, and the continued instabilities of 3rd world nations. Because of this, we're going to witness a significant shrinking of extracurricular activities like space exploration. Before we can even think about moving forward into space, our societies must mature much more. Poverty and conflict need to be reduced significantly. And... we've got to find a way to reduce our footprint on the environment. Natural energy breakthroughs. All of this will take us well into the 22nd century, perhaps even the 23rd. Believe me, I wish it would take much less time... but seeing how things have been going and historical tendencies of humanity, my estimates may yet be conservative.
I dont think at the rate in which we humans abuse our own world that we really need to be stuck on what will the 22nd century will be like. Between use overfishing, our dependence on oil, coal, etc. that create co2 which increases the natural rate of global warming. Not to mention how easy it is to obtain a nuclear weapon or learn how to build one on the web and the increase of voilence in terriosts attacks. So I can easily tell you what the world will be like in 22nd century, a dieing world with no hope of escaping it for humans or we killed each other off to the point of no return for us, in which case the earth would be better off.
Now I am not a depressed person, I would love for us to one day roam around the stars in ships like the enterprise and for earth to be healthy becuase we turned to cleaner energy sources, but when the world itself can't even come together and work together on one thing, it just doesn't look hopeful.
Now I am not a depressed person, I would love for us to one day roam around the stars in ships like the enterprise and for earth to be healthy becuase we turned to cleaner energy sources, but when the world itself can't even come together and work together on one thing, it just doesn't look hopeful.
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