I'm thinking of writing a fan fic about the early history of Mondas, and I'd like to try and get some details cleared up. We know from The Tenth Planet that Mondas, the original homeworld of the Cybermen, was once Earth's twin planet at some point in the distant past, and that some kind of cosmic cataclysm resulted in it breaking its orbit and drifting off to the far reaches of the solar system. However, there's no concrete date for this event. When the TARDIS crew travel back 65 million years in Earthshock, Mondas isn't visible when they're orbiting prehistoric Earth, so I reckon its date of creation was sometime after this, possibly an accident caused by alien technology. David Banks, in his Cybermen book, postulated that Mondas left Earth's orbit around 10,000 BC. But there's something else to consider: The Daemons were active on Earth in prehistoric times, and were actually responsible for destroying the Neanderthals, who are thought to have died out around 25,000 BC. I personally think that the departure of Mondas would have to have occured prior to the arrival of the Daemons, maybe around 30,000 BC.....but the Mondasian Cybermen that return to Earth nearly 32,000 years later don't seem nearly as advanced enough. Surely if they'd been developing on Mondas for all that time, they'd have progressed to something more spectacular and advanced than what they were when they finally returned in 1986? P.S: Regarding the origin of the early Mondasians, I have a theory that they were descended from some humans from Earth in the last 150 years or so, who were caught in a time/space storm and deposited on Mondas thousands of years in the past, when humans on Earth were still in a very primitive state.
The problem with that notion is that the Moon became Earth's satellite in the era when the Silurians were the dominant lifeform on the planet, when humanity's earliest ancestors were only just evolving. I think this is too far back in prehistory for the advanced civilization of Mondas to have existed. As I said, judging from the way the Cybermen look in The Tenth Planet, they can't have been in development for that long. The reason I reckon the departure of Mondas would have to have occured before the Daemons came on the scene is that I find it difficult to think the Daemons would've allowed a group of advanced humans to settle on a planet they had their eyes on.
I prefer David Banks' approach of trying to connect as many different things together as possible to come up with a somewhat plausible scenario. I would have Mondas drift off tens of thousands of years earlier than 10,000 BC, but then I'd have to explain the Mondasian's extremely slow technological progress up to 1986 AD. I can't think of an adequate explanation of why this would be.
think about it this way. if the Silurians were in control of mondas and mondas was knocked for six when the moon came in to bust up a good time... Are they going to sleep or evacuate? probably both. So you've got man wandering around on a planet loaded with silurian technology which might not be so well hidden by ice ages (there was probably an ice age) made from the half the planet colliding with a cyber bomb. Think Planet of the Apes. How many generations would pass that humans could assimilate Silurian technology before it became too cold to live on the surface without even partial cyber conversion?
simple - lack of a Sun. no sun, no light no sun, no photosythesis no photosynthesis, no plant growth no plant growth, no food no food, no Mondosians. They would of needed to find a way to continue to grown plants in order to make their keep their food chain thus diverting resorces from other technological improvements, and you could go from there. In the audio, Spare Parts, Mondas is enclosed by a shell of ice as it's up atmosphere would slowly have frozen as it moved away from the Sun.
Re. the thread title: It didn't. Mondas was piloted out of the solar system for some unknown but no doubt respectable reason, unless I'm misremembering Attack Of The Cybermen. I've heard the 10,000BC date elsewhere, though, and it does sound ok. Garfield isn't fat, just big-boned.
As I recall (I may be completely wrong) there are references to Mondas 'drifting to the edge of space' in The Tenth Planet, whilst Attack Of The Cybermen states the planet had a propulsion system. Banks suggests that the world may have been thrown from it's orbit by a cosmic event, drifting as far as the heliopause (the edge of our solar system, the beginning of interplanetary space) before the inhabitants developed a drive and returned for 1986. And as Marc says, the relatively slow technological development could be down to the lack of resources. Acting now to save lives takes precedence over developing new technologies.
Well, why not take a page from Earth history? We had the Dark Ages, during which pretty much no progress was made. Give Mondas a religious order that decided technology was Teh Evil! and they ruled with an iron fist for thousands of years before being overthrown. Uh oh, now that they're gone, we have various groups all trying to come to power now that there's a vacuum. One group makes startling technological discoveries, another is trying to sabotage them, another comes up with its own religion that happens to involve replacing body organs, and on and on.
A completely robotic society without sentience is going to remain static until it's effected by an outside force(advanced tech) because they have no intuition for invention. The Cybermen (like the Borg) only get advances in technology through invasion and assimilation. You leave them alone for a thousand years left to their own devices (Pun? Barely.) and they're not going to advance or decline an inch.
The entire concept of Mondas is so ridiculous that I find myself hoping it was swallowed up by a Crack in Time and never restored.
Well, I do have an idea that as it drifted further away from Earth, Mondas passed through a temporal schism, and reemerged in the exact same position, but tens of thousands (or maybe even millions) of years later, closer to the 10,000 BC date suggested by Banks. Opinions? In his book, Banks notes that the Mondasian Cybermen in The Tenth Planet were only really partially cyber-converted, and retained many aspects of their earlier existence. It was during the period when Mondas was on its way back to Earth that a renegade faction of Mondasians decided it was better to take cyber-conversion much further than that, and become even more machine-like. This group, which Banks called CyberFaction, left Mondas to settle on Planet 14, an undiscovered world in the solar system, and were the Cybermen that appeared in Troughton era stories.
Here is the Doctor Who Wiki article on Mondas. Not really much there but maybe it will help you out EJA. http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Mondas
I would check out the audio Spare Parts, it's sort of a "Genesis of the Cybermen" featuring the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa and deals with Mondas. Parts of it did inspire the Nu-Cybermen, but apart from that... Also I don't see what's so silly about artifically moved planets in the context of Doctor Who, when we've seen Nuwho do it a few times.
^ With Earth it's self as a prime example. I have no problem with Mondas either...to me and I must admit I'm not really familiar with it, it reminds me of the "Miri" Earth from "Star Trek". That's the closest parallel that I can come up with.