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Eugenics WARS Timeline Completely WRONG???
ryuranger
Member Posts: 533 Arc User
in Ten Forward
I have been Watching the Original Series Episode Space Seed and Wrath of Khan and of course Strange New Worlds Season 2 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow All Dealing with Khan and then it hit me The Dates!!! I got to thinking what if the actual Eugenics Wars Aka World War 3 Actually happened in 2040s-50s Not in 1992 and here is why in The Episode of Space Seed when Kirk got Khan out of the Chamber on the SS Botney Bay Khan asked how many How long and Kirk answered 2 centuries but Spock then mentioned the 90s but the records of that era can be misleading This is from The Original Series Now Fast Forward to Strange New Worlds Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow 2024 we see a 11 year old Khan in a Toronto Genetics Lab and of course we have TOP SECRET File of the "Khan" project that Adam Soong took out in season 2 of Picard; but wait is that confirms the date of 1992 Yes and NO here is my theory that could be name of the Project Leader and Khan was his first creation in mid 2010s and Soong could have been responsible for some of the work that he did in that Project as well and what gave Khan his Super Ego. This is Why I think 2040s is the start Date of WW3 I almost forgot about Star Trek VOY S03E08 Futures End where they are in L.A. IN 1996 where the War was suppose to happen so again from all the evadince I can come up with to support this theory that WW3 happens between 2040-2050 and when The Romulan Agent when to the past in 1992 to Kill Khan she arrived on the Wrong Date Because the date was given in Spock's First Officer Log was wrong in the first place. What you Guys think any thing to add or to debunk this theory?
May the Shwartz Be With You
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Comments
2: We learned in SNW that the Temporal Cold War has altered the timing of a number of historical events - the Eugenics Wars were supposed to happen in the 1990s originally, possibly after the Third World War, but in SNW we met a Romulan temporal agent in 2024 Toronto who'd been stuck there since 1992 because her mission was to assassinate Khan before he could rise to power, but other probably unrelated temporal interventions had shifted his birthdate by a few decades. She was not happy.
If you go by the dialog in Space Seed and The Savage Curtain WWIII was about mid 21st century or slightly before and the eugenics wars were a series of rather bloody bush wars and coups started in 1996 that cranked up the tensions (and Khan implies rapidly advanced technology as well) that eventually set off WWIII. There is no direct evidence in TOS of whether there was much of a gap between the eugenics wars and WWIII or not, or even between the end of WWIII and Col. Green's anti-mutant pogrom.
Ricardo Montalbán was 47 when he played the part of Khan in TOS, which fits the description the script gives for Khan and also reinforces the impression the dialog gives of there having been multiple small wars over time instead of one big one (probably over a period of twenty years more or less judging by Khan's age).
Time travel episodes in VOY and TNG probably missed showing the start of the wars because they initially started somewhere in Asia and may have been downplayed in the media (especially since no government would be likely to want it be known that they made supersoldiers and that they were getting out of hand).
ENT had Carpenter Street set in Detroit in the fall of 2005, but it is highly unlikely that anyone would have been able to keep that increasingly dangerous cat in the bag for over nine years and so it may be the first unexplainable visible sign of event date drift. Personally, I would chalk it up to the events in VOY in Future’s End disturbing things enough to push the wars back, not only did that episode feature a complicated predestination loop, but also the only way to break that loop was to force a (somewhat controlled) paradox which had temporal fallout like the Chronowerx "Browser Hound" web browser from that loop spur being used in 2000 of the main timeline in the VOY episode 11:59, and possibly some of the other continuity gaffs.
ENT also shows the only solid date for WWIII, in In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II, when the mirror Archer was in Kirk's cabin he had a screen up with a historical overview of the Federation timeline the Tholians pulled that particular USS Defiant from, and it mentions that WWIII started in 2026 (it also reveals that Col. Green's first name is Phillip and shows his last name was back to being spelled "Green" instead of "Greene").
And then SNW shows an even bigger time slip than ENT had. In the SNW episode Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow the slip was long enough that it could put WWIII back to the "mid 21st century" Spock mentioned if the WWIII happened as the ending stroke of the pushed back eugenics wars though the timing is a bit tight.
As things stand now, CBS/Paramount/Whatever would probably do better to split off the timelines into parallel branches than to try and keep NuTrek, movie/Berman era Trek, and Cage/TOS/TAS all on the same timeline considering how incredibly awful they are at avoiding serious continuity gaffs (PIC shows that they cannot even keep a single series from majorly contradicting itself from one season to the next).
It also makes for a very convenient retcon button, any time the events as detailed in Trek lore fail to match up with reality.
In case you never saw the "spagetti time" thing, here it is:
And I'd definitely take information from YouTube channels with a large grain of salt - even Ric of Certifiably Ingame, who is pretty careful about separating alpha and beta canon. Remember that history becomes extremely malleable when time travel is involved, per Niven's Temporal Law - in any plenum that allows both time travel and changing history, time travel will never be invented. (Eventually, history will become so mucked up that someone will decide the only way to fix it is to stop the inventor of time travel before they can succeed, an option also seen in VOY. For the Trek timeline as a whole, the solution found was to destroy all existing temporal drives, delete the knowledge of how to break time from every database, and criminalize any attempt to travel through time. Upshot there is that until the 31st century, history could be adjusted in a number of relatively minor ways - the Reformation of Surak might have happened 5000 years ago or 4500, for instance, but it definitely happened, which is why the Vulcan Empire wasn't the militarily-dominant power in the Alpha Quadrant when we first left Earth. Similarly, Khan Noonien Singh went from being the product of selective breeding born in the 1960s, to the product of genetic engineering born in the 1980s, to the product of genetic engineering born in the 2010s, because one faction of the Temporal Wars kept trying to eliminate him from history and causing his birthdate to shift ever later.)
Take any dates from TOS as approximations, don't get hung up on why things look the way they do (frankly, the modified-flu explanation for Klingons is worse than the DS9 "explanation", as it implies they're too stupid to quarantine or destroy ships with infected personnel but instead just let them come out of their ships and wander around planetside spreading diseases everywhere they go), and enjoy the show for what it is - an entertainment with underlying moral and ethical lessons, not an accurate text of a future history.
The time, and perhaps nature, of certain events is more fluid than others. First Contact is pretty much a locked in stone anchor point. That doesn't change. But the Eugenics Wars have as time went on. In TOS they made the Eugenics Wars sound apocalyptic. Eventually they added WW3, but still had the Eugenics Wars before that. However as the timeline started getting filled in things were getting more cluttered so something had to move or change. Ultimately in Strange New Worlds we got a bit of a picture of that era, where the Eugenics Wars evolved into World War III. One conflict turned into another, which in turn evolved into the big one.
Your issue here is that you keep looking to old books and YouTube videos as if they were sacred writ, never to be altered. This isn't a religion, it's a fictional universe, and as such subject to change - particularly since the method by which it gets changed is a major part of the universe itself, between the 25th and 30th centuries.
Interestingly, in another SNW episode
It would explain a lot since technological development is not a single straight line, it is a messy and complex tree where the branches interact, and the relative timing of discoveries and the development of new techniques can influence the direction it takes where there are potential branches, even if those branches are on far separated parts of the tree.
Just the fact that in TOS they developed genetic engineering in the late 1940s or early 1950s (that timing is necessary for Khan's age in Space Seed) is suspicious in itself and in theory could be a side effect of the struggle to stop the Na'kuhl incursion in WWII, some piece of advanced knowledge overlooked in the chaos could have gotten out in the wild and led to that incredible-for-the-time advancement before someone else went back to clean up a bit better, or whatever. In the Kelvin timeline Khan was not born until 1959 which means the eugenics wars were probably shifted back a few years and Botany Bay didn't leave Earth until somewhere around 2006, and in SNW
One oddity in The Cage that is not seen again until SNW (NBC categorically disallowed the character when they were talked into greenlighting a second pilot episode) is that there is at least one known augment in Starfleet, she used Kantian ethics calculations to compensate for her faulty (by human standards) moral sense. Rodenberry occasionally talked about Number One being the transhuman side of an exploration of the humanist vs. transhumanist question he wanted to do as a subthread in the series. While those two (and TOS which showed understandable caution but not the outright hostility to augments the spinoffs do) are closest on the augment issue, they are the farthest apart when it comes to the timing of the wars with TOS and presumably The Cage at the earliest extreme and SNW the latest.
In any case, there is a definite time shift and so not everything meshes from one quantum timeline to another, though paradox, time agents, or some other factor seems to keep key elements in roughly the same order despite the changes, or at least it appears so anyway since there is no hard indication of exactly how many segments there are and how exactly they fit together.
In TOS, human technology advanced quite rapidly, the eugenics wars started in the early to mid 1990s, and there were already sleeper ships with colonists on their way to Alpha Centauri (presumably including Zephram Cochrane from some of the dialog in TOS) during the wars. WWIII also happened earlier than in some spinoffs (though not ENT) "in the early part of the 21st century" as Spock states in one episode (though in another one he mentions it happening mid-21st century), in that one Col. Green is mentioned to lead a genocidal crusade against mutants from the fallout. Civilization was implied to have crashed hard and fast and took generations of often severe hardship to recover from during which society developed the aversion to elitism that characterizes most of Trek.
In VOY there was a poster advertising the colony project and a DY-100 model on the desk of a 20th century space scientist Future's End and a TV news clip said something about a rapidly worsening conflict in the Far East somewhere which was probably the start of the Eugenics Wars. That probably means TOS and Voy are not too far apart timeline wise (or whatever you want to call it) though the eugenics wars seem drifted a little since in TOS they were ending in 1996, not starting. The series makes no mention of Col. Green so there is no way to tell if his part in history was the same or not.
In ENT an information screen showed a section of timeline where it mentioned that WWIII starts in 2026 and Col. Green leads a faction of eco-terrorists and bits of dialog and whatnot in other episodes (like Demons) seems to imply that he was possibly also hunting down and eliminating augments as part of his genetic purity pogrom which may explain why the original Number One's small community of augments is apparently missing from most Trek spinoffs. Oddly enough, in the script for Demons Green's name was spelled "Greene" which may or may not be significant.
Of course, the timeline as it was shown may have been out of order, fit together in some other non-obvious way, and parts may have been on branches that re-merged with others leaving anomalies that for some reason none of the characters seem to notice or find odd. My guess is that the 21st century was a major battlezone in the temporal cold war, perhaps even the hottest part of that war, and so it may never make complete, consistent, sense.
The Temporal War is fought in a way that alters the existing timeline, rather than causing new ones to split off or incorporating any "changes" into what existed before the change. The existing (from the point of view of the temporal agent) history resists change, and seems to try to move itself back where possible, but it can change. That's why the changing rates of technological advancement, and that's why the dates and circumstances of various wars on Earth (and, presumably, other worlds as well) keep shifting. For other references on this sort of thing, I recommend trying to find some of Fritz Lieber's Change War stories from the 1950s and '60s, in particular the short story "Try and Change the Past" (which illustrates the problems that the Snakes and Spiders, nicknames for the two sides, encounter in their own temporal conflict). Of course, Lieber's stories are a little simpler, as there are only two sides involved. We don't know how many interests are involved in the Temporal Wars - my personal count is four confirmed and others suspected, but YMMV.
Before Yesterday's Enterprise, Sela didn't exist. After Yesterday's Enterprise she did, but it can be argued that she ALWAYS existed. In Star Trek First Contact the Borg go back in time to attack the past to assimilate the future, forcing the Enterprise-E to go back in time to stop them to save the future. In the 2009 Star Trek, the USS Kelvin is attacked and destroyed in 2233, which branches off that timeline from the primary. So we literally have examples of all kinds of time travel temporal mechanics.
On the contrary, the first series bible placed the setting as "two hundred to five hundred years in the future", so the mid 2260s is the earliest it could have been. In fact, until the joke in Tomorrow is Yesterday Roddenberry considered it to be closer to the five hundred year end of that span, but the joke was a good one since the "we'll put you away for 200 years!" line was very common in cop shows of the 1950s and '60s and it did (barely) fit within the range agreed upon while the show was in development.
There were no "Mistakes" in the date. It was followed by other treks that tried to make it ambiguous so it did not contradict.
TNG took the history and combined the Eugenics wars with WW3. they also put a nail in the timeline.. First Contact day.
so here we are in REAL life decades past all the horrible things.. the showrunners now had a choice, make Star Trek a alternate story like Star Wars did, or kick the historical can down the road so Star Trek is a possible FUTURE for our real lives