Trek nerd concern:
One thing established in OTL TOS canon (and since "Balance of Terror" was IIRC a first season episode and in both timelines, established here too) is that the Romulan war was 100 years before TOS. With the timeframe of TOS now nailed down to the second half of the 22nd century, that means the Romulan war has to be starting around 2060. By then, Terran humanity had clearly developed technology comparable to the Vulcans and other spacefaring founders of the Federation, otherwise we could hardly have had such a leading role in that organization. Presumably Terrans are demographically big hitters, which can be accounted for both by Sol system having a high population and Earth having lots of colonies. That too argues that we've had warp drive, at respectably high warp speeds, for some decades at the very least, to give us time to work the early bugs out, make contact with lots of alien species (well, Vulcans, Andorians, Tellarites at least) and establish a bunch of colonies in other star systems--all this before colliding with the Romulans in war, which presumably helps catalyze the formation of the Federation and a unified Starfleet.
So--presumably Zefram Cochrane (who I presume was also named as the inventor of Earth's version of warp drive, though perhaps not, in this timeline) had to do his work sometime between 2010 and 2030 at the latest.
Tick tock! Tick tock! The OTL showrunners bought themselves a whole century of wiggle room that has been rather, um, boldly, tossed away here! If the timeline were extrapolated to the present day, either the timeline has
fantastic technology we can only envy, or more likely, the Trek fans are running into a wall. I can see the more fanatical ones as panicked versions of Paul Revere, running around screaming "The Romulans are coming! Where's our warp drive??"
OTOH, between Kirk's offhand "But that never happened!" and the short timeframe that requires the pioneers of a century ago to be the grandchildren of the very generation that saw the first episode of Trek air in '64, presumably there is no devastating nuclear war. Well, canon still has the Eugenics Wars, but we might well suppose those weren't as devastating as an all out thermonuclear holocaust.
If warp drive in 2020 is ridiculously early, having it developed by the 2060s and then taking a whole dang century for Sol to get to the marginal place it is in the 2160s if we take
Enterprise for canon is even sillier, even granting Earth suffered some nasty diebacks and damage. On the whole I like the new timeframe better, if only I could believe this Cochrane person is out there even as we speak working on gravity control and inferring the possibility of warp from it. I certainly think that within a few decades of our launching our first FTL ship, we Terrans would be a much bigger deal than OTL canon has us being a century later; we'd have colonies and trade lines and might possibly have made such a nuisance of ourselves we'd have the Vulcans and Andorians uniting in a truce just to quash us.
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On the other hand, pace phx1138, I don't find Spock's remark about the need to develop ethics to restrain the otherwise destructive competitive impulses of starfaring peoples to be a "religious" one, or anyway one out of line with Roddenberry. The man clearly was, if an atheist, one of those Unitarian types of atheists who puts much store in the notion of ethical progress. In that context, the extra century arrived at by gradual consensus among the OTL post-Motion Picture showrunners (with, remember, Roddenberry hanging in there especially for TNG, until he died) makes more sense. The reasoning is, we Terrans need to reform ourselves and the costly tribulations of the upcoming century are needed more to transform our societies than to advance our tech; presumably that explains why in OTL canon, it does take us a whole century after developing warp drive to become a respectable player in interstellar affairs at last.
Now is that right, anthropologically speaking? I think the evidence of anthropology is against the idea that humanity achieved intelligence and technological potential via ruthless violence and agree that "War is a cultural construct, not a genetic imperative..." However, while I've been quite enthusiastic about the notion we Terrans might have possibly achieved high civilization without the sort of ugliness we've taken as normal the past 5000 years or so, I have to wonder if perhaps this ugliness, the "cultural construction" of people driven to ultimate savagery by the purely
social imperatives of a "dominator" mindset, might not indeed be integral to our technological progress after all. If so, then yes, it seems quite likely that regardless of whatever degree of competitive violence is the
genetic heritage of any evolving species, as soon as there's a question of that species using tools and cooperative labor to develop space-faring tech, they might well all have to go through a phase that endorses the most savage values by cultural means.
We can hope not. Or that while this might be the common path, it isn't universal.
But right or wrong, I don't hear Spock contradicting Roddenbery, I hear him voicing him.