posted
In the latest episode of Enterprise, we are given a glimpse into American history, Since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, there were 30 presidents.
Some questions: 1. Are there elections for president in the 2150's? 2. When Zefram Cochrane flew his warp ship, was there a president in the White House?
Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
Well, ten from Eisenhower to Dubya over the course of 45 years, so that would give us an rough figure of 2092 for president number 63, which could well have been Trip's deduction of Mestral's upper age limit rather than the end of the USA.
Then again, I'd submit that it's highly unlikely that U.S. presidental history will be particularly well-known in the Trek 2150s to the point where engineers can make bang-on predictions. And that nuclear holocausts may well have the habit of creating understable states where presidents are zipped through relatively quickly.
-------------------- "I was surprised by the matter-of-factness of Kafka's narration, and the subtle humor present as a result." (Sizer 2005)
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posted
Do we have evidence that the universe of Star Trek had the same exact presidents as our universe from 1957 to 2002?
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posted
I think that if we got a closer look at some of the bogus headlines about arms talks and other 20th century horrors in that ST4 scene, we'd find out that the President of the mid-1980s had a strangely unfamiliar yet strangely familiar face...
(No, I don't really think the prop people went to that much detail. But "2010" did have ACC smiling at us from a position of power on the cover of Time.)
posted
Okay then, where does Trek History start diverging from real world history? (Just for the Earth, anyway, leaving out Alien Contact and so on)
You've got the Eugenics War in the nineties. Which must have been prefaced by some stuff in the eighties and seventies. (Possibly the war originated over the introduction of Velcro? Hmmm)
Things obviously have taken a very strange turn by, say 1989 or so, considering that Trek 4 seemed pretty much like our world. No hint of genetic super-men running around, anyway.
Registered: Jan 2001
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posted
Did I miss the paragraph in my World History textbook about the United States launching an orbital nuclear platform from a Saturn V rocket around 1968 or 1969, which went wildly off course and detonated in space over Eastern Europe?
We also have a technical end date for the USA, based on a couple of TNG throwaway lines -- IIRC they once said there were fifty-two states in the union between 2033 and 2079. Given that 2079 is post-First Contact, I'd venture that the USA ceased to exist at that time in favor of the slowly developing world government. (And as for Q's lovely "post-atomic horror" scenario -- well, not all of the world recovered evenly. Some places were still in anarchy for a while until a decent infrastructure could be built.)
Of course, that doesn't take ENT's blatant Ameri-centricism into account... I wouldn't be too surprised if ENT showed that the US and other countries still existed.
However, you can also say that Trip wasn't that well-versed in American presidents from 1957 to 2079. That's a period of 123 years. Round that up to 124, divide by 4, and you get... 31 terms. Just about right for a casual estimate in conversation.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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capped
I WAS IN THE FUTURE, IT WAS TOO LATE TO RSVP
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posted
the dissolution of the U.S. isnt the only logical conclusion that could be drawn from that line though.
i believe the novel 'Federation' put forth the idea that WW3 was a big internal problem for a lot of countries, politically and militarily, with a movement springing up that caused the secession of some states from the Union. (this was tied to a reference to Colonel Green also, people from within national militaries betraying or overthrowing their governments)
i think thats a more tasteful solution.. basically, the US government was forced to divide along certain lines, leaving one or more states out of the Union (although with the possibility that they would reform later)
Registered: Sep 2001
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posted
I think building a grandiose theory of divergent timelines is a little silly, really, considering the analysis of every other work of fiction out there isn't wrapped up in temporal theory. People don't wonder how the timeline changed so that someone named Rachel Green (who looks a lot like Jennifer Anniston) lives in New York, or how in the alternate timeline blatantly depicted in Tarantino films that "Fruit Brute" cereal is still around. They, being blessed with the gift of sanity, chalk it up to a fictionalized universe, where everything we don't see is assumed to be the same and its perfectly OK to show all sorts of minor details to differ from "our world."
So, uh, to get the Trek universe, take our time, and fictionalize it here or there with the odd detail like the existence of a character's ancestors or small towns like Labarre or Carbon Creek or aquariums in Sausalito (but not fundamental changes, like a massive nuclear war), and then fast-forward 400 years. The fact that the fictionalized present that served as the root for TOS (where a toddler named Khan is running around and is thirty years away from interplanetary flight) differs from the fictionalized present that serves as a root of Voyager (where Chronowerx exists in LA and Mars missions are twenty years away), shouldn't be relevant, really. I don't let it bother me, because being bothered by a television show is a pretty useless exercise.
Registered: Mar 1999
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Jesus. I couldn't care less about the starships or the phasers aspect of trek which dominates huge sections of this board, but you don't hear me bitching about how people talking about it is silly. Different tastes is all it is.
If you're going to call it silly, well, you're right. It is. But it's also fun, which I thought was the entire point.
You do know what fun is, right?
Registered: Jan 2001
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posted
Different tastes indeed, sure. But I'm tired of people thinking that the anal-retentive must..explain...everything can't..treat..it..like..TV..show is the only way one can have fun with Trek.
-------------------- "I was surprised by the matter-of-factness of Kafka's narration, and the subtle humor present as a result." (Sizer 2005)
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
The difference is that "Friends" and Tarantino's films aren't science fiction. Sci-fi (at least the sort that Trek is) is supposed to extrapolate the future from the present. Which means that Trek's "past" should be identical to our present and past. But it isn't.
Besides, "Friends" never did an episode involving parallel timelines.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Well in a parallel universe... "Friends" would be funny.
The orbital weapons platform/Saturn V/Gary 7 thing could have been covered up.
I think divergence occurred on December 19th 1975. The day Apollo 17 left the moon. We never went back... Star Trek did.
Missions to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn's Moons. Money spent on Space and not on Social problems? WWIII. Infrustructure and knowledge in place for Zephram Cochrane to be able to invent Warp Drive.
-------------------- "Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica." - Jim Halpert. (The Office)
posted
The seeds of the Eugenics war were planted in 1974 in the Trekverse, with the development of the program that made little ub�rmensch Khan.
Though that's from the books, and not the show, it sounds about right. Khan was around thirty subjective years old in TOS.
So the tech for genetic engineering was readily available in the early seventies. Meaning that at least the tech world was more advanced than in Reality by then, so there were subtle differences even before the Apollo missions.
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