trekkist
The following summarizes the oft-conflicting near-past, contemporary, and near-future events cited in the various series (and the Motion Picture), concluding with a rationalization of all into a single timeline.
Science fiction set in the near future can be taken as more or less “predictive” upon its creation, but is inevitably “proved” fictional upon arrival of its stated time of occurrence. This needn’t diminish its dramatic power; reading 1984 today still evokes the shiver of “what if,” and seeing “Blade Runner” is unlikely to raise thoughts of its “unrealistic” 2018 setting. Star Trek, however, is unique in having continued as a franchise from a time shortly before, and for some years after, dates cited in its first incarnation. The sequels’ creators therefore faced a dilemma. To ignore previously-cited events was impossible, being as how one such had been the heart of the second film. To forgo further citation of events of the then-future 21st century would hobble storytelling. The most “logical” course – to simply accept that, having been overtaken by history, Star Trek was by definition not a portrayal of our future, but that of a similar, but readily distinct parallel reality – was presumably deemed unthinkable for reasons of complexity and mass audience appeal. At the same time, the franchise’s painstakingly attentive fan base put an outright reboot – the recasting of then-future, now-passed, dates into still-future times – beyond the pale.
The result was a mix of events whose cited dates stand in conflict, further muddled by the occasional re-dating of the Eugenics Wars (1992-96, per their introduction in an episode aired in 1967). As seen below, four of the five Star Trek series present mutually irreconcilable timelines of some three centuries’ duration.
THE ORIGINAL SERIES
Star Trek’s first glimpse of the 20th century was that of F-104 Starfighters, one of which attempts to intercept the errant U.S.S. Enterprise. Issues of F-104 interceptor deployment and nuclear air-to-air missiles aside, “Tomorrow is Yesterday” thus begins in exact correspondence with reality. Next comes Uhura’s monitoring of a news broadcast, whose words “Cape Kennedy. The first manned moon shot is scheduled for Wednesday, six am Eastern Standard time” is all but prescient (Apollo 11 in fact took flight at 9:32 EDT, Wednesday, July 16, 1969). Integral to the episode, however, is Captain John Christopher’s unborn son being historically vital in his command of, in Spock’s words, “the first successful Earth Saturn probe.” The date of Colonel Shaun Geoffrey Christopher’s flight goes unmentioned, as does that of his birth – but the mere occurrence of multiple (viz. “first successful”) piloted outer system missions sometime in the 21st century thrusts Star Trek into what is from our contemporary perspective a far different future than our own.
The distinction was given further heft with the broadcast of “Space Seed” three weeks later. “An old Earth vessel, similar to the DY-500 class,” says Kirk of the Botany Bay. “Much older,” says Spock. “DY-100 class, to be exact…the last such vessel was built centuries ago, back in the 1990s.” On boarding, Scott refers to the ship’s “old type atomic power” and “bulky, solid…transistor units.” Ship’s historian Marla McGivers recognizes her as a “sleeper ship…Necessary because of the time involved in space travel until about the year 2018.” As for the space-ark’s captain, Khan was “from 1992 through 1996, absolute ruler of more than a quarter of [Earth], from Asia through the Middle East.” His rule predated that of his fellow supermen, who “in 1993…seize[d] power simultaneously in over forty nations.” It was (as before, in Spock’s words) “the era of your last so-called World War…Earth was on the verge of a dark ages. Whole populations were being bombed out of existence.”
Star Trek, then, showed the late 20th century as both chaotic and revolutionary. The “DY-100 vessel was designed for interplanetary travel only” (Spock) – but what a vessel! Three hundred-odd feet in length, capable of carrying up to sixteen wedge-shaped modules (of which Khan’s ship retained but five), equipped (at least Botany Bay was) with artificial gravity, and last built in the 1990s (after which more advanced craft, among them the visually-similar DY-500, succeeded it). Small wonder the 21st century saw missions to Saturn, with such ships to draw on.
“Assignment: Earth” gave a glimpse of the infrastructure required to support such programs, as well as the more alarming uses to which spacecraft were then being put. Enterprise has been sent back in time, its mission is to determine via the monitoring of communications how the “planet survived desperate problems in the year 1968.” On the (uncited) day in question, “Current Earth crises would fill a tape bank…There will be an important assassination today, an equally dangerous government coup in Asia, and…the launching of an orbital nuclear warhead platform by the United States countering a similar launch by other powers” (Spock). The latter utilizes a Saturn V booster – visually identical to an Apollo moon rocket – launched not from the already-established Cape Kennedy, but rather “McKinley Rocket Base” (location unknown). Towards the episode’s close, the following interchange takes place:
KIRK: Our record tapes show, although not generally revealed, that on this date, a malfunctioning suborbital warhead was exploded exactly one hundred and four miles above the Earth.
GARY SEVEN: So everything happened the way it was supposed to.
SPOCK: And you'll be pleased our records show that it resulted in a new and stronger international agreement against the use of such weapons.
—which though it begs the question of why said record tapes didn’t leave Kirk & Co. knowing exactly what to do (hadn’t Spock read them?), clearly establishes that the events in question were (in Star Trek’s timeline) real.
Apart from “Space Seed,” Star Trek made but two references to interstellar spaceflight. Thematically at least, the more relevant in sequel terms was that of “The Changeling” (whose story arc would be reprised in Star Trek: The Motion Picture). The spacecraft in question was (per a clearly-seen viewscreen diagram) Nomad Mk-15C, further identified as “probe 2002-45b” (an accurate – albeit in retrospect fictional – usage of the National Space Science Data Center ID system, by which Nomad was the second orbited portion of the 45th launch of 2002). Created by Jackson Roykirk, “perhaps the most brilliant though erratic scientist of his time,” Nomad was “a perfect thinking machine, capable of independent logic…the best that could be engineered…a prototype” (Spock). “It was supposed to be the first interstellar probe to seek new life-forms” (McCoy). Apart from its quartet of magnetohydrodynamic verniers, Nomad’s (diagram-labeled) technologies are obscure, though its stated purpose would seem pointless had it lacked faster-than-light capabilities (though being the “perfect” and “independent” product of a “brilliant thought erratic” scientist might imply an autonomous mission of centuries’ duration).
Star Trek’s second pilot presented an even more startling interstellar pioneer in the form of “a recorded distress signal, the call letters of a vessel which has been missing for over two centuries” (Kirk). S.S. Valiant goes unseen but for her disaster recorder, from whose memory banks Spock reads its fate. The ship “had encountered a magnetic space storm and was being swept in this direction” (toward the galaxy’s edge, of which passage Kirk remarks “The old impulse engines weren’t strong enough”). “Swept past this point, about a half light year out of the galaxy, they were thrown clear, turned, and headed back into the galaxy here” (Spock). Of Valiant’s intended mission, Prior to this, Kirk had speculated, “Did another Earth ship once probe out of the galaxy as we intend to do?” – the implication being that, whatever the duration or imposed velocity of the “magnetic space storm,” Valiant had the intrinsic capability to conduct such a mission. Its “old impulse engines” notwithstanding, Valiant was thus indisputably hyperlight…thus establishing that Earth ships boasted an out-and-back range of at least 20,000 light years (the distance to the nearest “edge” of the galaxy) no later than 2064 (201 years prior to the later-established date of “Where No Man Has Gone Before”).
Star Trek presented a number of differences from real history prior to its dates of airing. In “The City on the Edge of Forever,” Edith Keeler uses the phrase “a Clark Gable movie” two years prior to his becoming a “name” actor. The episode’s signature tune, “Goodnight Sweetheart” is heard from a radio despite having been in reality recorded a year after the episode’s date of occurrence. The former, however, might well be explained in terms of Edith’s personal judge of Gable’s merits, while the latter is of no greater note than our timeline’s not seeing the knifing to death of seven women in Shanghai (sic) China (“Wolf in the Fold”). In no wise can the mere existence of fictional characters in a fictional universe (or for that matter a song’s being written a year early) be taken as establishing a wholly fictional timeline.
More interesting is Spock’s reference in “Bread and Circuses” to “the six million who died in your first world war, the eleven million who died in your second, the thirty-seven million who died in your third. Shall I go on?” The death toll of WWIII is of course indisputable (save that, should it be taken as the Eugenics Wars, those millions should in fact already have died) – but the prior wars’ casualties are, as stated, in error. However, a September 15, 1967 memo from the Kellam de Forest Research Company (a self-named, one-man agency utilized throughout Star Trek) points out “In WWI there were 8.5 million deaths; in WWII, 30,538,000,” and goes on to say “37 million deaths for WWIII seems conservative; suggest 260 million” (which latter comment could apply equally well to the 600 million lost to the 21st Third World War of “Star Trek: First Contact”). Memos of May 10 and September 7 left the point unaddressed, suggesting the line was the result of Gene Coon’s and Gene Roddenberry’s hasty rewrites throughout production. Given the episode’s shooting schedule of Sept. 12-20, it seems likely this memo went unread, or was received after the scene in question had been filmed (and would have been changed otherwise). In any case, so radical a reduction in casualties would so alter history as to render Star Trek’s early to mid-20th century all but unrecognizable. In the words of Herbert F. Solow (writing about something quite different), “I understand that you science fiction people with your technical jargon have a word to describe this happening. It is known as a ‘mistake’” (The Making of Star Trek, pg. 276).
The series did however suggest (albeit in passing and retrospect) a considerable divergence from actual history with Chekov’s line “This place is even better than Leningrad” (“I, Mudd”). Saint Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914, Leningrad in 1924, and resumed its original name in 1991. The first change was applied during World War I in order to remove the German words Sankt and Burg; the second followed Lenin’s death by five days. The final change was the result of a public referendum held in concert with the first Russian presidential elections. One might speculate that in Star Trek, the U.S.S.R. either did not fall, or dissolved with sufficient grace that “Leningrad” was either retained as a name, or was at some later point re-adopted. On the other hand, a one-year delay in the fall of the Soviet Union would leave it conquered by Khan, whose fall might well have left its population more eager to embrace than disavow their former heritage, however tyrannical.
Lastly, a truly cosmic divergence from contemporary accepted reality occurs at the start of “The Galileo Seven.” The episode opens with the log entry statement, “Our course leads us past Murasaki 312, a quasar-like formation, vague, undefined.” Kirk then says to Commissioner Ferris, “…may I remind you that I have standing orders to investigate all quasars and quasar-like phenomena wherever they may be encountered.” These mundane lines provided technical “flavor” in 1967, quasars having been observed for the first time only a few years before. The very term dated to May 1964, having been coined by the Chinese-born American astrophysicist Hong-Yee Chiu as an abbreviation for the previously-applied appellation “quasi-stellar radio source.” As the latter implies, quasars were at that time mysterious even in terms of location. Their high redshifts being a product of the universe’s expansion suggested they were far distant – but their apparent level of energy generation far exceeded that of even nuclear fusion. Not until the 1970s was a theoretical basis for quasars’ energy derived. Scientific consensus is now that quasars are among the most physically distant (and therefore, most far-removed into past eras) phenomena known. But there remains the minority opinion of astronomer Halton Arp, who cites his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, and quasars’ observational nearness to galaxies in general, in support of quasars being local to active-core galaxies, from which they have been ejected at high speeds (thus displaying high redshifts despite being nearby). Studies (by the Hubble space telescope, among others) suggest otherwise – but Arp maintains his dissent, which extends to his proposition of a theory of intrinsic redshift, as vs. that of the Big Bang. Arp’s claims may, per one’s taste, be taken as akin to Einstein’s long-standing (and eventually discredited) objections to quantum mechanics, or to Alfred Wegener’s long-dismissed (and later vindicated) championing of continental drift. If Arp is in reality wrong, however, Kirk’s standing orders in re: quasars prove him to be, in the Star Trek universe, at least partially right. To what degree this would imply the very warp and whoof of Star Trek space to differ from our own – whether, even, that universe is “really” steady-state, not the result of the Big Bang – is unclear.
To sum up: Kirk’s past included civilian and military use of Saturn Vs; immense, modular piloted interplanetary vessels whose building ended with the 1990s, a time considerably before DY-500-class descendants; an unmanned interstellar probe of 2002; a propulsive breakthrough rendering sleeper ships obsolete circa 2018; piloted missions as far as Saturn somewhere between the late 20th and mid-21st centuries; and a piloted faster-than-light ship of at least 40,000 light years range no later than 2064. Add to this the birth of “Zefram Cochrane of Alpha Centauri, the discoverer of the space warp” in 2030 or so (87 years prior to his disappearance, which in turn preceded “Metamorphosis” by some 150 years), and a demonstrable difference from our universe on a cosmological level, and one is left with a unique continuum indeed.
STAR TREK ANIMATED
Despite the involvement of original cast, writers and production staff, the animation went somewhat afield from established Star Trek history. It also suffered the indignity of posthumous “de-canonization” by the series’ creator, which with some exceptions persists to this day. Per the latter, it must be observed that at worst, the animation was little inferior to the least of the films (and indeed, many a sequel series’ episode) – by which token, as well as cast and crew, it merits discussion. Events of note are as follows:
• “The Infinite Vulcan” introduced Dr. Stavros Keniclius, self-exiled from Earth circa 1996 due to being the first human clone.
• The last of four wars are fought between humankind and Kzinti around 2069 (200 years prior to “The Slaver Weapon,” per Sulu). That year also sees launch of the last Space Ark, Terra 10, equipped with early transporter technology (“The Terratin Incident”).
• “The Time Trap” sees discovery of “the old Bonaventure…the first ship to have warp drive installed” and “vanished without a trace on her third voyage” (Scott). Spock’s statement “The crew’s descendants may still be living” implies grandchildren (at least), which puts the ship’s loss no later than 2149 or thereabouts.
• “The Counter-Clock Incident” sets the birth of Robert April – first captain of the Constitution-class Enterprise – as being in 2195 (April being 75 years old in the episode).
The first and last of these are of no account historically. The last war with the Kzinti preceding Bonaventure’s loss by 80-odd years is confusing, but Sulu’s “two hundred years” might be an approximation (say 180), and not knowing the duration of the warp drive ship’s missions – let alone the down-time between them – allows for an overlap. Presuming one to be necessary; “The Slaver Weapon” is itself a Trek-ization by Larry Niven of his short story of the same name, and draws on the author’s (quite un-Trek-ian) “Known Space” universe, in which the Kzinti first attacked Earth with a succession of near-lightspeed fleets.
Also Niven’s series’ invention are the stasis boxes, which are with their contents “the only remnant of a species which ruled most of this galaxy a billion years ago…In one was found a flying belt which was the key to the artificial field used by starships” (Spock) – a statement that rationalizes Botany Bay’s one-gee interior.
STAR TREK FILMS (ORIGINAL CAST)
Little of a historical nature is introduced in the movies, which tended (the transparent aluminum of “The Voyage Home” aside) to focus on their era alone. The chief exceptions have a few things in common. Both are 20th century American space probes. Both are seen to have travelled under some exterior impetus far beyond their unaided range. Both cease in their films to exist. One – either Pioneer 10 or 11 (or perhaps the proposed-but-unflown Out-Of-The-Ecliptic, or OOE, mission, which would have been Pioneer 12 had it achieved its 1974 launch date) – is blown to pieces by the Klingon Captain Klaa in “The Final Frontier.” The other – whose depiction precedes Pioneer’s in air date by roughly the duration its own launch would have followed it – is of course Voyager 6.
On the face of it, a program entailing (at least) six Voyagers seems but an expansion of the real world’s. In fact, however, the two actual spacecraft were themselves a less expensive alternative to the four-probe “Grand Tour” fleet first proposed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1967, and rendered impossible by President Nixon’s cuts to NASA’s budget in January 1969. The agency requested authorization for a pair of Mariner-class outer planet probes – each more affordable than the original spacecraft design – in its 1973 fiscal funding, and received it on May 18, 1972. The Motion Picture’s positing of treble or more that number suggests on the one hand that the Turbo-Electric Outer Planet Spacecraft (TOPS) design of 1969-70 was rejected, while its successor Voyager won heavy investment. In Star Trek terms, this is readily explainable, given that a single Voyager massed 773 kilograms, as compared to the 7135 kilos a Saturn V could accelerate to the same departure velocity. Presumably TMP’s Voyagers were launched in pairs (one probe serving as backup to the other in the event of its failure), with each Saturn V’s excess launch capacity devoted to other payloads. Given NASA’s initial four-probe Grand Tour intent, a total of at least 8 Voyagers seems likely. Such a flotilla would permit use of the Voyager spaceframe to carry Jovian (if not indeed Saturnian, Neptunian and/or Uranian) entry probes, as was in fact proposed by JPL for both TOPS and Pioneer F/G (10/11) type space probes.
Also seen in The Motion Picture are illustrations of a number of “ships named Enterprise” – a sailing vessel, the World War II aircraft carrier, the familiar (and then-recently test-flown) space shuttle orbiter, Matt Jeffries’ “ring ship Enterprise” (designed for an unmade Roddenberry TV project) and Kirk’s original ship. Among ships omitted are the nuclear carrier of the 1960s and of course Archer’s NX-01 (which after all would not be conceived for another 22 years). If a veritable flotilla of Voyagers is in keeping with TMP’s predecessor, the film’s depiction of the space shuttle Enterprise would seem to fly in the face of it – but consideration of that vehicle’s tortured design history proves otherwise. Before draconian budgets forced adoption of the solid rocket boosted configuration, the then-designed orbiter and its external fuel tank were presented as being lofted from a quite different booster – in some versions, a winged Saturn V first stage. Thus, TMP stands in twofold correspondence with the ambitious 20th century American space effort of Star Trek proper.
THE NEXT GENERATION & FILMS
Chronologically per time of occurrence, the first (then) near-future events cited by TNG (save those of a primordial nature) are the death of Claire Raymond in 1994 (“The Neutral Zone”) and the reunification of Ireland in 2025 (“The High Ground”). Per air date, the first events are those introduced in “Encounter at Farpoint” – the New United Nations’ 2036 declaration that “no Earth citizen could be made to answer for the crimes of his race or forebears,” and the appalling “post-atomic horror” of the “mid 21st century” (Picard), illustrated “a court of the year 2079, by which time more rapid progress had caused all United Earth nonsense to be abolished” (Q)…a court system which, in Picard’s words, “agreed with that line of Shakespeare. Kill all the lawyers” (“Which was done” – Q). Before audiences garbed as in the Middle Ages stood drug-using soldiers armed with machine guns, maintaining order to the tune of “the rule guilty until proven innocent” (Picard), since “Bringing the innocent to trial would be unfair” (Q). In effect, TNG’s premier revisited the then-future chaos of Kirk’s 1990s with the new-future chaos of the 21st century, the contrast to both being the quasi-perfection of the respective series’ time settings.
A year subsequent to the New UN declaration – July 23, 2037, to be precise – was the launch date of “the explorer ship Charybdis, the third manned attempt to travel beyond the confines of the Earth’s solar system” (Picard, “The Royale”), remains of which are discovered on and above the “previously unmapped Theta One Sixteen solar system.” Said system’s location goes unmentioned, save for Picard’s “No Earth ship of that time could have travelled out this far.” How Colonel Stephen Richey’s vessel in fact reached T-116 remains undiscovered. “The Royale,” however, offers the additional tantalizing datum that between 2033 and 2079 A.D., the American flag bore fifty-two stars.
TNG made two references to interstellar colonization by humans. Of but incidental interest at its time of airing is that the founders of the colony of “The Masterpiece Society,” (established some two centuries previously, around 2117) knew nothing of transporters. “Up the Long Ladder” gave a nod to “Space Seed” in a viewscreen depiction of the DY-500-class vessel SS Mariposa, UN registry NAR-7678, launched from on November 27, 2123. This 3000 metric ton vessel used a Yoyodyne pulse fusion drive with a net delta vee of 3.7 x 10E7 NVP. Yoyodyne – more formally Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems (YPS) – is best known as appearing as a red Lectroid front company in “The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension,” and makes many an appearance in signage from TNG onwards. The name’s origins are far older, however; the defense contractor Yoyodyne was a product of the imagination of Thomas Pynchon, who introduced it in his 1964 novel V, and provided further detail in 1966’s The Crying of Lot 49 (in which this “giant of the aerospace industry” had been founded by WWII veteran Clayton “Bloody” Chiclitz, and maintained a large manufacturing plant in the (fictional) town of San Narcisco, California). “Delta vee” is an astronautical term meaning change in velocity, and denotes the amount by which a spacecraft’s engines can produce same. The cited mathematical term is scientific notation for 37 million, after which the data falls into obscurity; NVP stands for nominal velocity of propagation, i.e., the speed at which a signal moves through a cable, expressed as a percentage or fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum (2.9 x E8, or 299,792,458 meters per second – or 186,282.4 feet per second, 671 million miles per hour). Thus the use of NVP following a delta vee number means – what, exactly? presumably that the ship was ftl-capable (despite its pulse fusion engine), which in fact it must have been, to have reached its destination at all. Incidentally, an alternate Okudagram to the one shown on screen cites Mariposa’s launch site as Baikonur Cosmodrome (Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Continuing Mission), which may be considered apocryphal or not, as one prefers.
After twice seeing to Kirk’s heroic death, the TNG film franchise staked out its own take on the 21st century, sending the Enterprise-E to April 4, 2063, the day before Zefram Cochrane’s historic first flight (and Earth’s titular first contact with Vulcans). The date falls about a decade after the Third World War. “Most of the major cities have been destroyed,” comments Riker. “There are few governments left. Six hundred million dead.” Despite this devastation, there exists in an apparently pristine and untouched central Montana the construction and launch site of Cochrane’s jury-built Phoenix. The settlement suffers occasional attacks by the “Eastern Coalition” (revealed by Brannon Braga in the film’s audio commentary as having in earlier draft scripts been identified simply as China), presumably due at least in part to its location: a missile base (one of whose single-stage Titan Vs boosted Phoenix to space).
DEEP SPACE NINE
DS9’s least significant 20th century event is that of “Little Green Men” (in which the Ferengi shuttlepod Quark’s Treasure ends up in Roswell, New Mexico in July of 1947, then returns home by flying through an A-bomb detonation). In “Far Beyond the Stars,” Benjamin Sisko is 1950s pulp science fiction writer Benny Russell. Though this is not a time-travel event, but rather a “Quantum Leap”-ish vision of the Bajoran Prophets, it may be that the events depicted are accurate as to DS9’s past history. What seems to be a re-dating of the Eugenics Wars takes place in “Dr. Bashir, I Presume,” but DS9 writer-producer Ronald Moore revealed in a 1997 AOL chat that Admiral Bennett’s reference to the Wars as having occurred “two hundred years” ago was a mistake on his part due to the (likewise erroneous) “200 years ago” references of “The Wrath of Khan” having stuck in his mind.
Undoubtedly the grimmest – and at the same time most likely – “prediction” of the franchise entire is that of the two-part episode “Past Tense.” The premise is that by the early 2020s, every major American city had erected cement walls about its poorer neighborhoods, the result being dubbed “Sanctuary Districts.” Within these were confined the homeless, those without jobs and/or identification, the children of jobless parents and the mentally ill. On September 1, 2024, the first-ever online transmissions of conditions within the camps took place, leading to the Bell Riots – uprisings by “unpersons” at Sanctuary Districts throughout the country. A huge protest in San Francisco’s Sanctuary District A was quelled by the Governor at a cost of hundreds of lives. These events at last galvanized public support to resolve the social issues which had beset the nation for over a century.
VOYAGER
Captain Janeway came upon two relics of 21st century human spaceflight. The first, Ares IV, disappeared into a spatial anomaly while in orbit of Mars on October 19, 2032, leaving two astronauts “stranded on the surface for weeks before a rescue ship arrived” (Paris, “One Small Step”). An International Space Agency ship, the Ares command module was forty-six meters long, her configuration comprised of several cylindrical modules. She lacked artificial gravity, and was propelled by a third-generation ion drive. Hers was “one of the early Mars missions” (Chakotay); the ship’s loss nearly ended the program. Logs kept by her pilot, Lieutenant John Mark Kelly, made reference to the burnup of the space station Mir. The second spacegoing derelict was the robotic probe Friendship 1, launched in 2067 (“Just four years after Zefram Cochrane tested his first warp engine” – Paris, “Friendship One”). Contact was maintained until 130 years prior to the episode, at which time its location was in the Delta Quadrant. Also found by Voyager were eight humans held in cryostasis by aliens since their abduction from Earth (“The 37s)”) – to one of whom, Amelia Earhart, Henry Kim remarks “Mars was colonized by people from Earth in 2103.”
The fourth Star Trek series thus introduced an interstellar probe with a range exceeding the SS Valiant’s, and the franchise’s most realistic spacecraft, its design completely at odds with the far superior DY-100 (which per their respective operational dates, preceded it by at least 36 years).
ENTERPRISE
The series’ opening titles are seeming positive proof of its being our own future, what with their inclusion of a space shuttle launch scene and the fast-forward depiction of on-orbit construction of the International Space Station. Launched in 2069 was the colony ship SS Conestoga, which took nine years at just over warp 1 to reach a nearby class M world (“Terra Nova”). The ceasefire of World War III had been signed in San Francisco some 16 years earlier (“Demons”). Possibly apocryphal per the Enterprise timeline (being as how its source, the Defiant, might have itself come from a timeline other than that from which Kirk saw his Defiant lost) is a citation from a viewscreen historical archive of “In A Mirror, Darkly, Part II” that the war began in 2026 “over the issue of genetic manipulation and human genome enhancement” and that “Colonel Phillip Green leads a faction of ultra-violent eco-terrorists resulting in 37 million deaths.” Of a late date, though not outrightly anachronistic, is the citation in “Carpenter Street” that Earth saw fossil fuels obsolete by 2061. Apparently contradicting the transporter-ignorance of TNG’s “The Masterpiece Society” colonists is the series’ use of the device, but it is unknown both when the colonists left, and the transporter became public knowledge.
The fifth incarnation of Star Trek posits barely-hyperlight colonization two years after Valiant first left the galaxy, a conflation of World War III and the Eugenics Wars entailing a three-decade-odd delay to the latter – which historic revisionism would still put at least one DY-100 operational 2 to 6 years before the Ares IV expedition. Archer’s Enterprise is launched September 16, 2151. The series concludes ten years later with Reed’s prediction that Archer “won’t be able to resist one of those warp seven beauties” (an optimistic prediction to say the least, given Spock’s of over a century later that “A sustained warp seven speed will be dangerous” – “Arena”). The series is thus – like the two of the three preceding sequels – at sharp odds with Star Trek (the original), even as each sequel series contradicts in its background, to some degree, all the others.
RETROFITTING
Consolidation of the various series’ citations into a coherent whole seems at first glance impossible. Ignoring the inter-universally lost Defiant’s implied re-dating of the Eugenics Wars leaves the following sequence of (mostly) astronautical events.
• 1968—Launch of U.S. orbital (sometimes erroneously termed “sub-orbital”) nuclear weapons platform from McKinley Rocket Base
• 1969—Launch of Apollo 11 from Cape Kennedy
• 1972-73—Launches of Pioneer 10 & 11
• 1974—Intended launch date of Pioneer H (“Pioneer 12”)
• 1976-80—Voyager “Grand Tour” launch window
• 1996—Launch of Khan’s DY-100
• 1999—Latest date of DY-100 construction
• 2002—Launch of Nomad
• 2007(?)-20??—Shaun Geoffrey Christopher commands first successful Earth-Saturn probe (former year adds age of Charlie Duke (the youngest Apollo moonwalker) to 1970 (Christopher’s earliest possible birth year)
• 2018—Sleeper ships rendered obsolete by reduction of interplanetary travel times
• 2020s—Sanctuary Districts confine undesirables to relocation camps in most American cities
• 2032—International Space Agency’s ion-driven Ares IV performs “one of the early Mars missions”
• 2037—NASA’s Charybdis is third attempt at manned extra-solar system exploration
• 2053—(approximate) World War III kills 600 million; San Francisco ceasefire
• 2063—Launch of Zefram Cochrane’s Phoenix
• 2065—Valiant leaves the galaxy
• 2067—Launch of United Earth Space Probe Agency’s Friendship 1 probe; launch of warp one-plus colony ship Conestoga
• 2069—Launch of last Space Ark, Terra 10
• 2069-89—(approximate) Fourth war with Kzinti
• 2079—Post-atomic horror
• 2103—Start of colonization of Mars
• 2110—(approximate) United Earth government
• 2123—Launch of DY-500 colony ship SS Mariposa
• 2143—Flight of warp five test ships NX-Alpha and –Beta
• 2144—NX-Delta is first Human ship to exceed warp 3
• 2149—Latest possible end to third voyage of “old Bonaventure…the first ship to have warp drive installed”
• 2151—Launch of NX-01, first Human starship equipped with warp five engine
Actual history is of course to some extent chaotic. If one presumes the DY-class ships to be of non-American origin (as implied by Khan’s geographical holdings, and possibly-apocryphal launch site of the DY-500 Mariposa), the aftermath of the Eugenics Wars and the domestic turmoil leading up to and including the Sanctuary Districts and Bell Riots might have put such advanced technologies beyond the reach of the International Space Agency, thus resulting in the Ares spacecraft being (per designer Rick Sternbach) little different in toto from Boeing’s NERVA (nuclear fission) boosted Integrated Manned Interplanetary Spacecraft design of 1968. Subsequent DY classes might be under this interpretation long-delayed, not immediate, successors to the DY-100s of the 1990s. As for the obsolescence of sleeper ships circa 2018, this too might be a non-American issue, suspended animation being unnecessary to reach Mars, and flights beyond Mars lying beyond the range of NERVA-driven spacecraft. There remains Shaun Christopher’s Earth-Saturn probe – which by definition (given the rudimentary Ares) have been conducted outside NASA/ISA auspices as well (John Christopher having presumably become an expatriate due to the Sanctuary Bill, or whatever). Description of NASA’s Charybdis as the third manned trans-solar system attempt would by the timeframe of Voyager include the Botany Bay and another unnamed vessel, the third-ever mission having become suddenly practical due a long-delayed American propulsive catchup, and/or the sharing of foreign technologies in the five years since Ares IV. World War III’s global destruction of major cities and governments might leave scattered technological enclaves, of which Cochrane’s was but one. Few inventions or innovations occur to one person alone; why should hyperlight engines have been any different? Given independent development, Valiant’s leaving the galaxy but two years after Phoenix took flight becomes something other than nonsense. The United Earth Space Probe Agency may have been a vaingloriously-titled misnomer, or the real thing (and might in either case exclude America); clearly, the ultra-long ranged Friendship 1 reflected Valiant’s capabilities, not Phoenix’s. The barely-hyperlight Conestoga, however, seems more the product of Cochrane. Did all Earth repel the Kzinti, or were the warcats in conflict with outposts established by DY-class ships? Was the post-atomic horror a global phenomenon, or one confined only to less fortunate regions?
This ex post facto exercise in cross-series rationalization renders all series’ citations equal in value (none being more equal than another’s), and directly addresses one of the franchise’s most glaring weaknesses: that of presenting nearly all advances in spaceflight as being of American origin (as most glaringly – and insultingly – seen in the Enterprise title sequence, which includes but a single identifiably “foreign” image: that of August Picard’s balloon). It eschews retroactive continuity “correction,” and forgoes invocation of change(s) to timeline(s). It does not, however, dispense with Star Trek’s earliest and most irrefutable divergences from real-world history: McKinley Rocket Base, orbital nuclear weapons, the Eugenics Wars and the DY-100s. These did not transpire; nor have sleeper ships, nor will their near-term obsolescence. In reality, we inhabit a world where the first moonwalkers will most likely die before we return to the moon, let alone reach Mars or Saturn. In fantasy – the franchise having moved on into a timeline all its own – we old-school fans can enjoy (and explore and expand upon) a quintet of series offering not just the hope of “someday,” but the bittersweetness of “if only.” We have, in short (as it were), at long last, a playground all our own.
Call it, if you will, Star Trek Redux.
Science fiction set in the near future can be taken as more or less “predictive” upon its creation, but is inevitably “proved” fictional upon arrival of its stated time of occurrence. This needn’t diminish its dramatic power; reading 1984 today still evokes the shiver of “what if,” and seeing “Blade Runner” is unlikely to raise thoughts of its “unrealistic” 2018 setting. Star Trek, however, is unique in having continued as a franchise from a time shortly before, and for some years after, dates cited in its first incarnation. The sequels’ creators therefore faced a dilemma. To ignore previously-cited events was impossible, being as how one such had been the heart of the second film. To forgo further citation of events of the then-future 21st century would hobble storytelling. The most “logical” course – to simply accept that, having been overtaken by history, Star Trek was by definition not a portrayal of our future, but that of a similar, but readily distinct parallel reality – was presumably deemed unthinkable for reasons of complexity and mass audience appeal. At the same time, the franchise’s painstakingly attentive fan base put an outright reboot – the recasting of then-future, now-passed, dates into still-future times – beyond the pale.
The result was a mix of events whose cited dates stand in conflict, further muddled by the occasional re-dating of the Eugenics Wars (1992-96, per their introduction in an episode aired in 1967). As seen below, four of the five Star Trek series present mutually irreconcilable timelines of some three centuries’ duration.
THE ORIGINAL SERIES
Star Trek’s first glimpse of the 20th century was that of F-104 Starfighters, one of which attempts to intercept the errant U.S.S. Enterprise. Issues of F-104 interceptor deployment and nuclear air-to-air missiles aside, “Tomorrow is Yesterday” thus begins in exact correspondence with reality. Next comes Uhura’s monitoring of a news broadcast, whose words “Cape Kennedy. The first manned moon shot is scheduled for Wednesday, six am Eastern Standard time” is all but prescient (Apollo 11 in fact took flight at 9:32 EDT, Wednesday, July 16, 1969). Integral to the episode, however, is Captain John Christopher’s unborn son being historically vital in his command of, in Spock’s words, “the first successful Earth Saturn probe.” The date of Colonel Shaun Geoffrey Christopher’s flight goes unmentioned, as does that of his birth – but the mere occurrence of multiple (viz. “first successful”) piloted outer system missions sometime in the 21st century thrusts Star Trek into what is from our contemporary perspective a far different future than our own.
The distinction was given further heft with the broadcast of “Space Seed” three weeks later. “An old Earth vessel, similar to the DY-500 class,” says Kirk of the Botany Bay. “Much older,” says Spock. “DY-100 class, to be exact…the last such vessel was built centuries ago, back in the 1990s.” On boarding, Scott refers to the ship’s “old type atomic power” and “bulky, solid…transistor units.” Ship’s historian Marla McGivers recognizes her as a “sleeper ship…Necessary because of the time involved in space travel until about the year 2018.” As for the space-ark’s captain, Khan was “from 1992 through 1996, absolute ruler of more than a quarter of [Earth], from Asia through the Middle East.” His rule predated that of his fellow supermen, who “in 1993…seize[d] power simultaneously in over forty nations.” It was (as before, in Spock’s words) “the era of your last so-called World War…Earth was on the verge of a dark ages. Whole populations were being bombed out of existence.”
Star Trek, then, showed the late 20th century as both chaotic and revolutionary. The “DY-100 vessel was designed for interplanetary travel only” (Spock) – but what a vessel! Three hundred-odd feet in length, capable of carrying up to sixteen wedge-shaped modules (of which Khan’s ship retained but five), equipped (at least Botany Bay was) with artificial gravity, and last built in the 1990s (after which more advanced craft, among them the visually-similar DY-500, succeeded it). Small wonder the 21st century saw missions to Saturn, with such ships to draw on.
“Assignment: Earth” gave a glimpse of the infrastructure required to support such programs, as well as the more alarming uses to which spacecraft were then being put. Enterprise has been sent back in time, its mission is to determine via the monitoring of communications how the “planet survived desperate problems in the year 1968.” On the (uncited) day in question, “Current Earth crises would fill a tape bank…There will be an important assassination today, an equally dangerous government coup in Asia, and…the launching of an orbital nuclear warhead platform by the United States countering a similar launch by other powers” (Spock). The latter utilizes a Saturn V booster – visually identical to an Apollo moon rocket – launched not from the already-established Cape Kennedy, but rather “McKinley Rocket Base” (location unknown). Towards the episode’s close, the following interchange takes place:
KIRK: Our record tapes show, although not generally revealed, that on this date, a malfunctioning suborbital warhead was exploded exactly one hundred and four miles above the Earth.
GARY SEVEN: So everything happened the way it was supposed to.
SPOCK: And you'll be pleased our records show that it resulted in a new and stronger international agreement against the use of such weapons.
—which though it begs the question of why said record tapes didn’t leave Kirk & Co. knowing exactly what to do (hadn’t Spock read them?), clearly establishes that the events in question were (in Star Trek’s timeline) real.
Apart from “Space Seed,” Star Trek made but two references to interstellar spaceflight. Thematically at least, the more relevant in sequel terms was that of “The Changeling” (whose story arc would be reprised in Star Trek: The Motion Picture). The spacecraft in question was (per a clearly-seen viewscreen diagram) Nomad Mk-15C, further identified as “probe 2002-45b” (an accurate – albeit in retrospect fictional – usage of the National Space Science Data Center ID system, by which Nomad was the second orbited portion of the 45th launch of 2002). Created by Jackson Roykirk, “perhaps the most brilliant though erratic scientist of his time,” Nomad was “a perfect thinking machine, capable of independent logic…the best that could be engineered…a prototype” (Spock). “It was supposed to be the first interstellar probe to seek new life-forms” (McCoy). Apart from its quartet of magnetohydrodynamic verniers, Nomad’s (diagram-labeled) technologies are obscure, though its stated purpose would seem pointless had it lacked faster-than-light capabilities (though being the “perfect” and “independent” product of a “brilliant thought erratic” scientist might imply an autonomous mission of centuries’ duration).
Star Trek’s second pilot presented an even more startling interstellar pioneer in the form of “a recorded distress signal, the call letters of a vessel which has been missing for over two centuries” (Kirk). S.S. Valiant goes unseen but for her disaster recorder, from whose memory banks Spock reads its fate. The ship “had encountered a magnetic space storm and was being swept in this direction” (toward the galaxy’s edge, of which passage Kirk remarks “The old impulse engines weren’t strong enough”). “Swept past this point, about a half light year out of the galaxy, they were thrown clear, turned, and headed back into the galaxy here” (Spock). Of Valiant’s intended mission, Prior to this, Kirk had speculated, “Did another Earth ship once probe out of the galaxy as we intend to do?” – the implication being that, whatever the duration or imposed velocity of the “magnetic space storm,” Valiant had the intrinsic capability to conduct such a mission. Its “old impulse engines” notwithstanding, Valiant was thus indisputably hyperlight…thus establishing that Earth ships boasted an out-and-back range of at least 20,000 light years (the distance to the nearest “edge” of the galaxy) no later than 2064 (201 years prior to the later-established date of “Where No Man Has Gone Before”).
Star Trek presented a number of differences from real history prior to its dates of airing. In “The City on the Edge of Forever,” Edith Keeler uses the phrase “a Clark Gable movie” two years prior to his becoming a “name” actor. The episode’s signature tune, “Goodnight Sweetheart” is heard from a radio despite having been in reality recorded a year after the episode’s date of occurrence. The former, however, might well be explained in terms of Edith’s personal judge of Gable’s merits, while the latter is of no greater note than our timeline’s not seeing the knifing to death of seven women in Shanghai (sic) China (“Wolf in the Fold”). In no wise can the mere existence of fictional characters in a fictional universe (or for that matter a song’s being written a year early) be taken as establishing a wholly fictional timeline.
More interesting is Spock’s reference in “Bread and Circuses” to “the six million who died in your first world war, the eleven million who died in your second, the thirty-seven million who died in your third. Shall I go on?” The death toll of WWIII is of course indisputable (save that, should it be taken as the Eugenics Wars, those millions should in fact already have died) – but the prior wars’ casualties are, as stated, in error. However, a September 15, 1967 memo from the Kellam de Forest Research Company (a self-named, one-man agency utilized throughout Star Trek) points out “In WWI there were 8.5 million deaths; in WWII, 30,538,000,” and goes on to say “37 million deaths for WWIII seems conservative; suggest 260 million” (which latter comment could apply equally well to the 600 million lost to the 21st Third World War of “Star Trek: First Contact”). Memos of May 10 and September 7 left the point unaddressed, suggesting the line was the result of Gene Coon’s and Gene Roddenberry’s hasty rewrites throughout production. Given the episode’s shooting schedule of Sept. 12-20, it seems likely this memo went unread, or was received after the scene in question had been filmed (and would have been changed otherwise). In any case, so radical a reduction in casualties would so alter history as to render Star Trek’s early to mid-20th century all but unrecognizable. In the words of Herbert F. Solow (writing about something quite different), “I understand that you science fiction people with your technical jargon have a word to describe this happening. It is known as a ‘mistake’” (The Making of Star Trek, pg. 276).
The series did however suggest (albeit in passing and retrospect) a considerable divergence from actual history with Chekov’s line “This place is even better than Leningrad” (“I, Mudd”). Saint Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914, Leningrad in 1924, and resumed its original name in 1991. The first change was applied during World War I in order to remove the German words Sankt and Burg; the second followed Lenin’s death by five days. The final change was the result of a public referendum held in concert with the first Russian presidential elections. One might speculate that in Star Trek, the U.S.S.R. either did not fall, or dissolved with sufficient grace that “Leningrad” was either retained as a name, or was at some later point re-adopted. On the other hand, a one-year delay in the fall of the Soviet Union would leave it conquered by Khan, whose fall might well have left its population more eager to embrace than disavow their former heritage, however tyrannical.
Lastly, a truly cosmic divergence from contemporary accepted reality occurs at the start of “The Galileo Seven.” The episode opens with the log entry statement, “Our course leads us past Murasaki 312, a quasar-like formation, vague, undefined.” Kirk then says to Commissioner Ferris, “…may I remind you that I have standing orders to investigate all quasars and quasar-like phenomena wherever they may be encountered.” These mundane lines provided technical “flavor” in 1967, quasars having been observed for the first time only a few years before. The very term dated to May 1964, having been coined by the Chinese-born American astrophysicist Hong-Yee Chiu as an abbreviation for the previously-applied appellation “quasi-stellar radio source.” As the latter implies, quasars were at that time mysterious even in terms of location. Their high redshifts being a product of the universe’s expansion suggested they were far distant – but their apparent level of energy generation far exceeded that of even nuclear fusion. Not until the 1970s was a theoretical basis for quasars’ energy derived. Scientific consensus is now that quasars are among the most physically distant (and therefore, most far-removed into past eras) phenomena known. But there remains the minority opinion of astronomer Halton Arp, who cites his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, and quasars’ observational nearness to galaxies in general, in support of quasars being local to active-core galaxies, from which they have been ejected at high speeds (thus displaying high redshifts despite being nearby). Studies (by the Hubble space telescope, among others) suggest otherwise – but Arp maintains his dissent, which extends to his proposition of a theory of intrinsic redshift, as vs. that of the Big Bang. Arp’s claims may, per one’s taste, be taken as akin to Einstein’s long-standing (and eventually discredited) objections to quantum mechanics, or to Alfred Wegener’s long-dismissed (and later vindicated) championing of continental drift. If Arp is in reality wrong, however, Kirk’s standing orders in re: quasars prove him to be, in the Star Trek universe, at least partially right. To what degree this would imply the very warp and whoof of Star Trek space to differ from our own – whether, even, that universe is “really” steady-state, not the result of the Big Bang – is unclear.
To sum up: Kirk’s past included civilian and military use of Saturn Vs; immense, modular piloted interplanetary vessels whose building ended with the 1990s, a time considerably before DY-500-class descendants; an unmanned interstellar probe of 2002; a propulsive breakthrough rendering sleeper ships obsolete circa 2018; piloted missions as far as Saturn somewhere between the late 20th and mid-21st centuries; and a piloted faster-than-light ship of at least 40,000 light years range no later than 2064. Add to this the birth of “Zefram Cochrane of Alpha Centauri, the discoverer of the space warp” in 2030 or so (87 years prior to his disappearance, which in turn preceded “Metamorphosis” by some 150 years), and a demonstrable difference from our universe on a cosmological level, and one is left with a unique continuum indeed.
STAR TREK ANIMATED
Despite the involvement of original cast, writers and production staff, the animation went somewhat afield from established Star Trek history. It also suffered the indignity of posthumous “de-canonization” by the series’ creator, which with some exceptions persists to this day. Per the latter, it must be observed that at worst, the animation was little inferior to the least of the films (and indeed, many a sequel series’ episode) – by which token, as well as cast and crew, it merits discussion. Events of note are as follows:
• “The Infinite Vulcan” introduced Dr. Stavros Keniclius, self-exiled from Earth circa 1996 due to being the first human clone.
• The last of four wars are fought between humankind and Kzinti around 2069 (200 years prior to “The Slaver Weapon,” per Sulu). That year also sees launch of the last Space Ark, Terra 10, equipped with early transporter technology (“The Terratin Incident”).
• “The Time Trap” sees discovery of “the old Bonaventure…the first ship to have warp drive installed” and “vanished without a trace on her third voyage” (Scott). Spock’s statement “The crew’s descendants may still be living” implies grandchildren (at least), which puts the ship’s loss no later than 2149 or thereabouts.
• “The Counter-Clock Incident” sets the birth of Robert April – first captain of the Constitution-class Enterprise – as being in 2195 (April being 75 years old in the episode).
The first and last of these are of no account historically. The last war with the Kzinti preceding Bonaventure’s loss by 80-odd years is confusing, but Sulu’s “two hundred years” might be an approximation (say 180), and not knowing the duration of the warp drive ship’s missions – let alone the down-time between them – allows for an overlap. Presuming one to be necessary; “The Slaver Weapon” is itself a Trek-ization by Larry Niven of his short story of the same name, and draws on the author’s (quite un-Trek-ian) “Known Space” universe, in which the Kzinti first attacked Earth with a succession of near-lightspeed fleets.
Also Niven’s series’ invention are the stasis boxes, which are with their contents “the only remnant of a species which ruled most of this galaxy a billion years ago…In one was found a flying belt which was the key to the artificial field used by starships” (Spock) – a statement that rationalizes Botany Bay’s one-gee interior.
STAR TREK FILMS (ORIGINAL CAST)
Little of a historical nature is introduced in the movies, which tended (the transparent aluminum of “The Voyage Home” aside) to focus on their era alone. The chief exceptions have a few things in common. Both are 20th century American space probes. Both are seen to have travelled under some exterior impetus far beyond their unaided range. Both cease in their films to exist. One – either Pioneer 10 or 11 (or perhaps the proposed-but-unflown Out-Of-The-Ecliptic, or OOE, mission, which would have been Pioneer 12 had it achieved its 1974 launch date) – is blown to pieces by the Klingon Captain Klaa in “The Final Frontier.” The other – whose depiction precedes Pioneer’s in air date by roughly the duration its own launch would have followed it – is of course Voyager 6.
On the face of it, a program entailing (at least) six Voyagers seems but an expansion of the real world’s. In fact, however, the two actual spacecraft were themselves a less expensive alternative to the four-probe “Grand Tour” fleet first proposed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1967, and rendered impossible by President Nixon’s cuts to NASA’s budget in January 1969. The agency requested authorization for a pair of Mariner-class outer planet probes – each more affordable than the original spacecraft design – in its 1973 fiscal funding, and received it on May 18, 1972. The Motion Picture’s positing of treble or more that number suggests on the one hand that the Turbo-Electric Outer Planet Spacecraft (TOPS) design of 1969-70 was rejected, while its successor Voyager won heavy investment. In Star Trek terms, this is readily explainable, given that a single Voyager massed 773 kilograms, as compared to the 7135 kilos a Saturn V could accelerate to the same departure velocity. Presumably TMP’s Voyagers were launched in pairs (one probe serving as backup to the other in the event of its failure), with each Saturn V’s excess launch capacity devoted to other payloads. Given NASA’s initial four-probe Grand Tour intent, a total of at least 8 Voyagers seems likely. Such a flotilla would permit use of the Voyager spaceframe to carry Jovian (if not indeed Saturnian, Neptunian and/or Uranian) entry probes, as was in fact proposed by JPL for both TOPS and Pioneer F/G (10/11) type space probes.
Also seen in The Motion Picture are illustrations of a number of “ships named Enterprise” – a sailing vessel, the World War II aircraft carrier, the familiar (and then-recently test-flown) space shuttle orbiter, Matt Jeffries’ “ring ship Enterprise” (designed for an unmade Roddenberry TV project) and Kirk’s original ship. Among ships omitted are the nuclear carrier of the 1960s and of course Archer’s NX-01 (which after all would not be conceived for another 22 years). If a veritable flotilla of Voyagers is in keeping with TMP’s predecessor, the film’s depiction of the space shuttle Enterprise would seem to fly in the face of it – but consideration of that vehicle’s tortured design history proves otherwise. Before draconian budgets forced adoption of the solid rocket boosted configuration, the then-designed orbiter and its external fuel tank were presented as being lofted from a quite different booster – in some versions, a winged Saturn V first stage. Thus, TMP stands in twofold correspondence with the ambitious 20th century American space effort of Star Trek proper.
THE NEXT GENERATION & FILMS
Chronologically per time of occurrence, the first (then) near-future events cited by TNG (save those of a primordial nature) are the death of Claire Raymond in 1994 (“The Neutral Zone”) and the reunification of Ireland in 2025 (“The High Ground”). Per air date, the first events are those introduced in “Encounter at Farpoint” – the New United Nations’ 2036 declaration that “no Earth citizen could be made to answer for the crimes of his race or forebears,” and the appalling “post-atomic horror” of the “mid 21st century” (Picard), illustrated “a court of the year 2079, by which time more rapid progress had caused all United Earth nonsense to be abolished” (Q)…a court system which, in Picard’s words, “agreed with that line of Shakespeare. Kill all the lawyers” (“Which was done” – Q). Before audiences garbed as in the Middle Ages stood drug-using soldiers armed with machine guns, maintaining order to the tune of “the rule guilty until proven innocent” (Picard), since “Bringing the innocent to trial would be unfair” (Q). In effect, TNG’s premier revisited the then-future chaos of Kirk’s 1990s with the new-future chaos of the 21st century, the contrast to both being the quasi-perfection of the respective series’ time settings.
A year subsequent to the New UN declaration – July 23, 2037, to be precise – was the launch date of “the explorer ship Charybdis, the third manned attempt to travel beyond the confines of the Earth’s solar system” (Picard, “The Royale”), remains of which are discovered on and above the “previously unmapped Theta One Sixteen solar system.” Said system’s location goes unmentioned, save for Picard’s “No Earth ship of that time could have travelled out this far.” How Colonel Stephen Richey’s vessel in fact reached T-116 remains undiscovered. “The Royale,” however, offers the additional tantalizing datum that between 2033 and 2079 A.D., the American flag bore fifty-two stars.
TNG made two references to interstellar colonization by humans. Of but incidental interest at its time of airing is that the founders of the colony of “The Masterpiece Society,” (established some two centuries previously, around 2117) knew nothing of transporters. “Up the Long Ladder” gave a nod to “Space Seed” in a viewscreen depiction of the DY-500-class vessel SS Mariposa, UN registry NAR-7678, launched from on November 27, 2123. This 3000 metric ton vessel used a Yoyodyne pulse fusion drive with a net delta vee of 3.7 x 10E7 NVP. Yoyodyne – more formally Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems (YPS) – is best known as appearing as a red Lectroid front company in “The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension,” and makes many an appearance in signage from TNG onwards. The name’s origins are far older, however; the defense contractor Yoyodyne was a product of the imagination of Thomas Pynchon, who introduced it in his 1964 novel V, and provided further detail in 1966’s The Crying of Lot 49 (in which this “giant of the aerospace industry” had been founded by WWII veteran Clayton “Bloody” Chiclitz, and maintained a large manufacturing plant in the (fictional) town of San Narcisco, California). “Delta vee” is an astronautical term meaning change in velocity, and denotes the amount by which a spacecraft’s engines can produce same. The cited mathematical term is scientific notation for 37 million, after which the data falls into obscurity; NVP stands for nominal velocity of propagation, i.e., the speed at which a signal moves through a cable, expressed as a percentage or fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum (2.9 x E8, or 299,792,458 meters per second – or 186,282.4 feet per second, 671 million miles per hour). Thus the use of NVP following a delta vee number means – what, exactly? presumably that the ship was ftl-capable (despite its pulse fusion engine), which in fact it must have been, to have reached its destination at all. Incidentally, an alternate Okudagram to the one shown on screen cites Mariposa’s launch site as Baikonur Cosmodrome (Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Continuing Mission), which may be considered apocryphal or not, as one prefers.
After twice seeing to Kirk’s heroic death, the TNG film franchise staked out its own take on the 21st century, sending the Enterprise-E to April 4, 2063, the day before Zefram Cochrane’s historic first flight (and Earth’s titular first contact with Vulcans). The date falls about a decade after the Third World War. “Most of the major cities have been destroyed,” comments Riker. “There are few governments left. Six hundred million dead.” Despite this devastation, there exists in an apparently pristine and untouched central Montana the construction and launch site of Cochrane’s jury-built Phoenix. The settlement suffers occasional attacks by the “Eastern Coalition” (revealed by Brannon Braga in the film’s audio commentary as having in earlier draft scripts been identified simply as China), presumably due at least in part to its location: a missile base (one of whose single-stage Titan Vs boosted Phoenix to space).
DEEP SPACE NINE
DS9’s least significant 20th century event is that of “Little Green Men” (in which the Ferengi shuttlepod Quark’s Treasure ends up in Roswell, New Mexico in July of 1947, then returns home by flying through an A-bomb detonation). In “Far Beyond the Stars,” Benjamin Sisko is 1950s pulp science fiction writer Benny Russell. Though this is not a time-travel event, but rather a “Quantum Leap”-ish vision of the Bajoran Prophets, it may be that the events depicted are accurate as to DS9’s past history. What seems to be a re-dating of the Eugenics Wars takes place in “Dr. Bashir, I Presume,” but DS9 writer-producer Ronald Moore revealed in a 1997 AOL chat that Admiral Bennett’s reference to the Wars as having occurred “two hundred years” ago was a mistake on his part due to the (likewise erroneous) “200 years ago” references of “The Wrath of Khan” having stuck in his mind.
Undoubtedly the grimmest – and at the same time most likely – “prediction” of the franchise entire is that of the two-part episode “Past Tense.” The premise is that by the early 2020s, every major American city had erected cement walls about its poorer neighborhoods, the result being dubbed “Sanctuary Districts.” Within these were confined the homeless, those without jobs and/or identification, the children of jobless parents and the mentally ill. On September 1, 2024, the first-ever online transmissions of conditions within the camps took place, leading to the Bell Riots – uprisings by “unpersons” at Sanctuary Districts throughout the country. A huge protest in San Francisco’s Sanctuary District A was quelled by the Governor at a cost of hundreds of lives. These events at last galvanized public support to resolve the social issues which had beset the nation for over a century.
VOYAGER
Captain Janeway came upon two relics of 21st century human spaceflight. The first, Ares IV, disappeared into a spatial anomaly while in orbit of Mars on October 19, 2032, leaving two astronauts “stranded on the surface for weeks before a rescue ship arrived” (Paris, “One Small Step”). An International Space Agency ship, the Ares command module was forty-six meters long, her configuration comprised of several cylindrical modules. She lacked artificial gravity, and was propelled by a third-generation ion drive. Hers was “one of the early Mars missions” (Chakotay); the ship’s loss nearly ended the program. Logs kept by her pilot, Lieutenant John Mark Kelly, made reference to the burnup of the space station Mir. The second spacegoing derelict was the robotic probe Friendship 1, launched in 2067 (“Just four years after Zefram Cochrane tested his first warp engine” – Paris, “Friendship One”). Contact was maintained until 130 years prior to the episode, at which time its location was in the Delta Quadrant. Also found by Voyager were eight humans held in cryostasis by aliens since their abduction from Earth (“The 37s)”) – to one of whom, Amelia Earhart, Henry Kim remarks “Mars was colonized by people from Earth in 2103.”
The fourth Star Trek series thus introduced an interstellar probe with a range exceeding the SS Valiant’s, and the franchise’s most realistic spacecraft, its design completely at odds with the far superior DY-100 (which per their respective operational dates, preceded it by at least 36 years).
ENTERPRISE
The series’ opening titles are seeming positive proof of its being our own future, what with their inclusion of a space shuttle launch scene and the fast-forward depiction of on-orbit construction of the International Space Station. Launched in 2069 was the colony ship SS Conestoga, which took nine years at just over warp 1 to reach a nearby class M world (“Terra Nova”). The ceasefire of World War III had been signed in San Francisco some 16 years earlier (“Demons”). Possibly apocryphal per the Enterprise timeline (being as how its source, the Defiant, might have itself come from a timeline other than that from which Kirk saw his Defiant lost) is a citation from a viewscreen historical archive of “In A Mirror, Darkly, Part II” that the war began in 2026 “over the issue of genetic manipulation and human genome enhancement” and that “Colonel Phillip Green leads a faction of ultra-violent eco-terrorists resulting in 37 million deaths.” Of a late date, though not outrightly anachronistic, is the citation in “Carpenter Street” that Earth saw fossil fuels obsolete by 2061. Apparently contradicting the transporter-ignorance of TNG’s “The Masterpiece Society” colonists is the series’ use of the device, but it is unknown both when the colonists left, and the transporter became public knowledge.
The fifth incarnation of Star Trek posits barely-hyperlight colonization two years after Valiant first left the galaxy, a conflation of World War III and the Eugenics Wars entailing a three-decade-odd delay to the latter – which historic revisionism would still put at least one DY-100 operational 2 to 6 years before the Ares IV expedition. Archer’s Enterprise is launched September 16, 2151. The series concludes ten years later with Reed’s prediction that Archer “won’t be able to resist one of those warp seven beauties” (an optimistic prediction to say the least, given Spock’s of over a century later that “A sustained warp seven speed will be dangerous” – “Arena”). The series is thus – like the two of the three preceding sequels – at sharp odds with Star Trek (the original), even as each sequel series contradicts in its background, to some degree, all the others.
RETROFITTING
Consolidation of the various series’ citations into a coherent whole seems at first glance impossible. Ignoring the inter-universally lost Defiant’s implied re-dating of the Eugenics Wars leaves the following sequence of (mostly) astronautical events.
• 1968—Launch of U.S. orbital (sometimes erroneously termed “sub-orbital”) nuclear weapons platform from McKinley Rocket Base
• 1969—Launch of Apollo 11 from Cape Kennedy
• 1972-73—Launches of Pioneer 10 & 11
• 1974—Intended launch date of Pioneer H (“Pioneer 12”)
• 1976-80—Voyager “Grand Tour” launch window
• 1996—Launch of Khan’s DY-100
• 1999—Latest date of DY-100 construction
• 2002—Launch of Nomad
• 2007(?)-20??—Shaun Geoffrey Christopher commands first successful Earth-Saturn probe (former year adds age of Charlie Duke (the youngest Apollo moonwalker) to 1970 (Christopher’s earliest possible birth year)
• 2018—Sleeper ships rendered obsolete by reduction of interplanetary travel times
• 2020s—Sanctuary Districts confine undesirables to relocation camps in most American cities
• 2032—International Space Agency’s ion-driven Ares IV performs “one of the early Mars missions”
• 2037—NASA’s Charybdis is third attempt at manned extra-solar system exploration
• 2053—(approximate) World War III kills 600 million; San Francisco ceasefire
• 2063—Launch of Zefram Cochrane’s Phoenix
• 2065—Valiant leaves the galaxy
• 2067—Launch of United Earth Space Probe Agency’s Friendship 1 probe; launch of warp one-plus colony ship Conestoga
• 2069—Launch of last Space Ark, Terra 10
• 2069-89—(approximate) Fourth war with Kzinti
• 2079—Post-atomic horror
• 2103—Start of colonization of Mars
• 2110—(approximate) United Earth government
• 2123—Launch of DY-500 colony ship SS Mariposa
• 2143—Flight of warp five test ships NX-Alpha and –Beta
• 2144—NX-Delta is first Human ship to exceed warp 3
• 2149—Latest possible end to third voyage of “old Bonaventure…the first ship to have warp drive installed”
• 2151—Launch of NX-01, first Human starship equipped with warp five engine
Actual history is of course to some extent chaotic. If one presumes the DY-class ships to be of non-American origin (as implied by Khan’s geographical holdings, and possibly-apocryphal launch site of the DY-500 Mariposa), the aftermath of the Eugenics Wars and the domestic turmoil leading up to and including the Sanctuary Districts and Bell Riots might have put such advanced technologies beyond the reach of the International Space Agency, thus resulting in the Ares spacecraft being (per designer Rick Sternbach) little different in toto from Boeing’s NERVA (nuclear fission) boosted Integrated Manned Interplanetary Spacecraft design of 1968. Subsequent DY classes might be under this interpretation long-delayed, not immediate, successors to the DY-100s of the 1990s. As for the obsolescence of sleeper ships circa 2018, this too might be a non-American issue, suspended animation being unnecessary to reach Mars, and flights beyond Mars lying beyond the range of NERVA-driven spacecraft. There remains Shaun Christopher’s Earth-Saturn probe – which by definition (given the rudimentary Ares) have been conducted outside NASA/ISA auspices as well (John Christopher having presumably become an expatriate due to the Sanctuary Bill, or whatever). Description of NASA’s Charybdis as the third manned trans-solar system attempt would by the timeframe of Voyager include the Botany Bay and another unnamed vessel, the third-ever mission having become suddenly practical due a long-delayed American propulsive catchup, and/or the sharing of foreign technologies in the five years since Ares IV. World War III’s global destruction of major cities and governments might leave scattered technological enclaves, of which Cochrane’s was but one. Few inventions or innovations occur to one person alone; why should hyperlight engines have been any different? Given independent development, Valiant’s leaving the galaxy but two years after Phoenix took flight becomes something other than nonsense. The United Earth Space Probe Agency may have been a vaingloriously-titled misnomer, or the real thing (and might in either case exclude America); clearly, the ultra-long ranged Friendship 1 reflected Valiant’s capabilities, not Phoenix’s. The barely-hyperlight Conestoga, however, seems more the product of Cochrane. Did all Earth repel the Kzinti, or were the warcats in conflict with outposts established by DY-class ships? Was the post-atomic horror a global phenomenon, or one confined only to less fortunate regions?
This ex post facto exercise in cross-series rationalization renders all series’ citations equal in value (none being more equal than another’s), and directly addresses one of the franchise’s most glaring weaknesses: that of presenting nearly all advances in spaceflight as being of American origin (as most glaringly – and insultingly – seen in the Enterprise title sequence, which includes but a single identifiably “foreign” image: that of August Picard’s balloon). It eschews retroactive continuity “correction,” and forgoes invocation of change(s) to timeline(s). It does not, however, dispense with Star Trek’s earliest and most irrefutable divergences from real-world history: McKinley Rocket Base, orbital nuclear weapons, the Eugenics Wars and the DY-100s. These did not transpire; nor have sleeper ships, nor will their near-term obsolescence. In reality, we inhabit a world where the first moonwalkers will most likely die before we return to the moon, let alone reach Mars or Saturn. In fantasy – the franchise having moved on into a timeline all its own – we old-school fans can enjoy (and explore and expand upon) a quintet of series offering not just the hope of “someday,” but the bittersweetness of “if only.” We have, in short (as it were), at long last, a playground all our own.
Call it, if you will, Star Trek Redux.
Last edited by a moderator: