Could Star Trek be an AH ?

Had a thought that perhaps the Star Trek universe is really an alternate history .You could also explain some of the more out there episodes of the original and next gen series as being written as stories to explain some of the "Classified "missions undertaken by the ships .
Also you could get rid of the whole star trek Enterprise venture from the cannon of trek and make it an in TL alternate history .
Whadda ya think ?
 

Remark

Banned
It's definitely AH since we haven't launched a manned mission to Saturn or launched a sleeper colony ship in 1996 as in the the original series and movies.
 
Future History technically. But it is easy to confuse the two.

AH Wiki said:
2. Future History

This category is included mainly for completeness. A future history involves how events turn out in the future, perhaps looked back on from a historical perspective or dealt with as a history. Although a future history story may share some of the trappings of an alternate history story, it is fundamentally about things that haven't happened yet, not the question of what the world might have been like if things had gone differently in the past.

Future history is not alternate history, even when multiple alternate possible futures are considered, or someone encounters or creates what is an “alternate history” from the perspective of people in a fictional future (the past to them, still in the future to us). “What if the Federation and the Klingons had nearly destroyed each other in a war” is not an alternate history, even though from the perspective of characters in the fictional Star Trek universe it could be called an alternate history. (This is, it should be noted, the closest thing to alternate history that is usually found in television, film, and comics - alternate versions of the pasts of entirely fictional worlds, often future worlds).

I think Star Trek-even in the 1960's-was more of an alternate history than a future history because of the whole Khan plot. Khan was supposed to have been born in the 1960's if I remember correctly-which means that Genetic Science must have been much more advanced in Star Trek's 1960's than the real 1960's-for whatever reason. That implies a divergence before the show was produced.

I imagine their mindset, however, was very much that of the future. So perhaps it is alternate history in a narrow technical sense (genetic experiments create Khan, alters timeline), none of the creative team was planning it as an alternate history instead they were thinking alternate future.
 
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I think Star Trek-even in the 1960's-was more of an alternate history than a future history because of the whole Khan plot. Khan was supposed to have been born in the 1960's if I remember correctly-which means that Genetic Science must have been much more advanced in Star Trek's 1960's than the real 1960's-for whatever reason. That implies a divergence before the show was produced.
 
I think Star Trek-even in the 1960's-was more of an alternate history than a future history because of the whole Khan plot. Khan was supposed to have been born in the 1960's if I remember correctly-which means that Genetic Science must have been much more advanced in Star Trek's 1960's than the real 1960's-for whatever reason. That implies a divergence before the show was produced.

There are other hints of an earlier divergence. For example, in "Assignment: Earth", has orbital nuclear weapons platforms launched via Saturn rockets from "McKinley Rocket Base" in 1968. Given that the show first aired in 1966, and it would take longer than 2 years to develop orbital weapons platforms or a separate facility from Cape Canaveral for launching Saturns, the POD is before the show started to air, and is thus alternate history.
 
It's not alternate history in those regards. It's just fiction. We wouldn't call Get Smart alternate history because Maxwell Smart didn't really exist in the 1960s.

Star Trek is alternate history in the fact that future history inevitably becomes alternate history. Khan wasn't on the cover of Time Magazine in 1997, nor did we get cryogenic sleeper satellites in the 2000s, etc. There's some things you can excuse, and there's some things that were clearly stated, did not happen nor can you even pretend reality and the fictional account somehow relate, so it is alternate history.
 
As I remember it, there were a lot of "different earths" in 1960s TOS, that were alternate histories of their own, such as "ee plebnista" (we the people) in the war between yangs and coms, or the one where they killed the woman who stopped America from entering WW2, or of course the main story of the later series with Zephraim Cochrane after WW3, or the "mirror universe" as alternate to that.
 
I think Star Trek-even in the 1960's-was more of an alternate history than a future history because of the whole Khan plot. Khan was supposed to have been born in the 1960's if I remember correctly-which means that Genetic Science must have been much more advanced in Star Trek's 1960's than the real 1960's-for whatever reason. That implies a divergence before the show was produced.

Greg Cox's Eugenics War series did attempt to link the events of Khan's life with historical events, most notably the nuclear explosion that destroyed the Chrysalis Project laboratory where Khan and the other superhuman were created was covered up by claiming that it was India's Smiling Buddha nuke test.
 
That was a good book series. I enjoyed reading them. Wish the Star Trek novels would be made canon (Excluding novels that contradict information given in the tv show or later novels).
 
What if the whole Star Trek Enterprise show was an alternate history within the Star Trek AH .It could have been invented by Riker so that would explain why he was in the last episode of the show .Or it could have simply been a well known holo-series used by many people .
 
It's not alternate history in those regards. It's just fiction. We wouldn't call Get Smart alternate history because Maxwell Smart didn't really exist in the 1960s.

Star Trek is alternate history in the fact that future history inevitably becomes alternate history. Khan wasn't on the cover of Time Magazine in 1997, nor did we get cryogenic sleeper satellites in the 2000s, etc. There's some things you can excuse, and there's some things that were clearly stated, did not happen nor can you even pretend reality and the fictional account somehow relate, so it is alternate history.


I think Star Trek-even in the 1960's-was more of an alternate history than a future history because of the whole Khan plot. Khan was supposed to have been born in the 1960's if I remember correctly-which means that Genetic Science must have been much more advanced in Star Trek's 1960's than the real 1960's-for whatever reason. That implies a divergence before the show was produced.

As I pointed out in the Edith Keeler Lives: A Brief History and The Eugenics Wars-A Brief History threads there is something really wonked about TOS' WWII.

Our first clue is in "City on the Edge of Forever":

In OTL both the atomic and V2 programs weren't really started until after the United States declared war.

Germany's heavy water experiments were moving at a snail's pace because Hitler believed the war would end before they would be ready: "From the start of the war until the late fall of 1941, the German 'lightning war' had marched from one victory to another, subjugating most of Europe. During this period, the Germans needed no wonder weapons. After the Soviet counterattack, Pearl Harbor, and the German declaration of war against the United States, the war had become one of attrition. For the first time, German Army Ordnance asked its scientists when it could expect nuclear weapons." (NOVA: Nazis and the bomb)

Because Germany only started looking at atom bombs in 1942 they were three years behind the US program which had started in 1939 and they never caught up--they only got to an early part the 1942 stage of Manhattan project in 1945. From what we can put together the best Germany could have produced in 1946 was a conventionally powered "dirty bomb" : "At best this would have been far less destructive than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Rather it is an example of scientists trying to make any sort of weapon they could in order to help stave off defeat." (NOVA; Nazis and the Bomb)

Another problem is the V2. In OTL when Hitler was first show the plans for the V2 in late 1941 he was dismissive of the V2 as essentially an artillery shell with a longer range and much higher cost (Irons, Roy. Hitler's terror weapons: The price of vengeance. p. 181.) It was not until 1944 with German moral waning in the face of defeat after defeat that Hitler decided on building the V2.

In anything resembling OTL it is a catch-22 situation: a more successful Nazi Germany thanks to less US involvement would mean delaying both the German A-bomb (not really viable until 1948 under the best of conditions) and the V2 to carry it. So delaying US involvement in WWII essentually delays the very weapons that supposedly let Germany win the war!

Also the V2 of OTL simply didn't have the ability to carry an A-bomb...that is why Stalin put so many resources into duplicating the Superfortress instead of simply copying the V2 and slapping an a-bomb on top of it.

Now look at what Spock tells Kirk in "City on the Edge of Forever":

SPOCK: This is how history went after McCoy changed it. Here, in the late 1930s. A growing pacifist movement whose influence delayed the United States' entry into the Second World War. While peace negotiations dragged on, Germany had time to complete its heavy-water experiments.
KIRK: Germany. Fascism. Hitler. They won the Second World War.
SPOCK: Because all this lets them develop the A-bomb first. There's no mistake, Captain. Let me run it again. Edith Keeler. Founder of the peace movement.
KIRK: But she was right. Peace was the way.
SPOCK: She was right, but at the wrong time. With the A-bomb, and with their V2 rockets to carry them, Germany captured the world.

But removing the United States from the equation removes two of the big incentives for the Nazis to even go developing the bomb... or the weapon to carry it.

For anything in "City on the Edge of Forever" to make sense Star Trek's WWII must be substantially different from ours before all the time travelers mess with it.

Our next clue is in "Patterns of Force" where John Gill, a Federation historian, says Nazi Germany "most efficient state Earth ever knew". Anyone who had bothered to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) would know that claim was a load of garbage.

Nazi Germany was spectacularly INefficient with incomparable programs duplicating effort (IIRC there were SIX rocket programs other then the Vengeance weapon one).

Other reviewers have pointed various problems with this episode
( Star Trek – Patterns of Force (Review) and Star Trek Re-Watch: “Patterns of Force”):


"It wasn’t efficiency but ruthlessness that enabled Hitler’s rise to power. Murdering or imprisoning each and every political enemy and exploiting and validating deep-seated xenophobia tends to consolidate power pretty damn effectively whether or not you have a team of industrial engineers creating a flawlessly organized state. The idea that a history professor didn’t understand or appreciate the complexity of that historical movement is unbelievable."

So either John Gill was a total incompetent in his field of history, stark raving bonkers (like nearly everyone else important in the Federation Kirk met), or TOS' Nazi Germany was very different from the one in OTL.

Going back to Khan in TOS it is spelled out several times that he is the product of selective breeding; but for that to make any sense the breeding would have had to started a long time before. Yes, the movies change it to genetic engineering but TNG and DS9 moved WWIII (ie the Eugenics Wars) to the mid point of the 21st century. Clearly the writers were trying to keep TOS complaint with our history but eventually they simply couldn't do it.
 
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What if the whole Star Trek Enterprise show was an alternate history within the Star Trek AH .It could have been invented by Riker so that would explain why he was in the last episode of the show .Or it could have simply been a well known holo-series used by many people .

It would be far better then the alternative.

The moment the Temporal Cold War plot come up I knew that the writers had an out with regards to ignoring EVERYTHING regarding what little continuity Star Trek had...and I was right.

It certainly didn't help that the show quickly degenerated into fanservice of both varieties. Not only did we get T'Pol in her underware :rolleyes: but we got the dread 'here are the Klingons', 'here are the Borg', 'here are the Pakleds?' and so on.

And why didn't anyone of Kirk's time know about most of these races? Captain Archer and his crew were basically moronic idiots.

Writing Star Trek Enterprise off as a bad holonovel ala Janeway's Victorian escapes (WHY was that in so many Voyager episodes?) is better then assuming it "really" happened and precursor of the Federation was composed people that make Homer Simpson look like a genius.

As Voltaire said in the live performance of his song: "It's such a bad idea you'd swear that Lucas was involved"
 
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