With real life people it's a bit more believable and justifiable because unlike a narrative story, they do not serve a purpose to be expository where as in a story they do. Having some level of internal consistency is necessary and having to retcon scenarios like this is ultimately a cop out scenario. It's like when the Star Wars Expanded Universe retconned tiny unexplainable things like these such as Captain Needa's claim of no starship the size of a freighter like the Millennium Falcon could have a cloaking device but with subsequent entries and additions to the series in both print and visual form the claim gets contradicted and the excuse made was that Needa was an idiot who was wrong. The idea of a military officer not knowing the capabilities of starships like that is ludicrously stupid so on the surface it sounds good to say but should a military officer be so incompetent like that all the time? It's even doubly dubious of an explenation when Spock is even contradicted as being factually inaccurate of fictional events but even real world events such as casualty statistics of the first two world wars as well! (I mean yeah casualty statistics are not the same as confirmed deaths but even if you do the necessary work of mathematically altering the statistics of who actually died it still leaves you with numbers that don't add up for Spock's claims).
@@rasnac No problem. I just wanted to explain where I was coming from and go into reasons why. Again, from a realistic standpoint I would agree with you but on a narrative, unless said claims are quickly challenged, I don't like simply having the explanation of them being wrong.
@@RandyLRhoades Or if wrong information is being delivered to the audience and no one corrects it, still nice to know at some point in whose interests are the facts being twisted. But since Star Trek is supposedly set in a utopia where elites don't make up false narratives to uphold the current societal order, it makes no sense why even educated characters would be contradicting themselves on very basic facts from the 1990s where information is much more prevalent than the early 20th century.
I don't think this is all misquoted. It could also be lack of information. TOS and ENT had similar numbers for WW3. Later occuring series had upgraded numbers. We are still upgrading the numbers dead from WW2. It is quite possible and expected that some things were just not fully understood and once they learned about earth history they moved on. How many of us have gone back and studied ancient civilizations now that we have day jobs?
Back then they said, smart people today are 1.2x smart, so it stands to reason they will be able to fix all our problems once they are 4x smart... say in another generation. Humans become 0.7x smart.... oops.... nm.
Or it was just more believable that such a war could occur in the 90s. That episode was written just a few years after the Cuban Missle Crisis which saw millions of Americans families rushing to thier make shift nuclear bunkers.
Pretty legit, considering how often just the ships and characters we've followed in the shows mess with time. Imagine how many other damned people have messed with it.
There were a couple of EU books written about the Eugenics Wars and when the Berlin Wall fell Khan said that he saw a power vacuum that needed to be filled.
@@michaelflett09 they're in los Angeles. They said nearly every major city was completely destroyed. So even if L.A. wasn't completely levelled, it must have been affected. In another episode I cant think of eight now they show a bombed out San Francisco. It wouldn't,be unreasonable to assume that if San Francisco were affected by a world war, L.A. would be as well
There is a model of the Botany Bay in that episode on Starlings desk (think that was the guys name). The book and that episode support the Eugenics wars we’re going on in the background
1992 to 1996. Yes, I remember those years when Khan Noonien Singh was our ruler. Those were the days! Emperor Singh was a good emperor. He got the economy back on track, ended inflation, fixed our infrastructure, improved our system of education, and instead of just scuttling all of our old outdated Navy submarines, he reused them and turned them all into modern spaceships. He was a good leader!
@@TheNoiseySpectator I didn't even realize it until you mentioned it. 😂😂. However, I am not a huge fan of the Clinton Machine. I admit he did a few good things but IMO overall the man was a worse criminal than Khan.
@@TheNoiseySpectator Awww I'm sorry, did I hurt your feeling? I dont care who supports who or what. We all have the right to support anyone we choose. If you cant respect that about Americans and cant handle an opposing opion then maybe you should avoid political discussion altogether. I dont mind the fact that you like Bill Clinton and you shouldn't be all butt hurt that I dont. Chill and enjoy your liberties and dont be so triggerish. Thats good Islamic advice brother! LOL
Interesting that the many people, who refer to Star Trek as a naive Utopia, where human history is just getting better are unaware of the fact that Star Trek is actually a post-apocalyptic Scenario, where Reason and Enlightment came after the collapse of our current world order
How does it prevent it from being a naïve utopia? it's not like the world of star trek is scared from "the apocalypse", even considering the constant reminders of past(future) wars with roms and klingons. Though I wouldn't really be on the side of those calling it naïve, because the original series relies heavily on strife, alien menaces and even human's struggle with emotions/ego; I still find it presumptuous to assume a war, no matter how devastating, could bring "reason and enlightenment" to humanity as a species. Even more so in present days, where the average citizen of the world (sic) is a drooling retard straight out of a Brave New World.
@@SPTX. I think its more like a process of cultural process, comparable tot the age of enlightment in Europe after the medieval times. I can imagine that the world gouvernment, not only fuled by fear from the horrors of WW3 but also inspired by the (official) first contact with extraterrestrial life installed a social structure and education that channels human nature in a way to prevent the mistakes of the past. Considering the fact that concepts like religious freedom were viewed as (literally) “utopian“ in the 16th century, the ideas of the United Federation of planets doesnt seem that naive at all.
@@demianzarnoski3288 I get what you say, but realistically speaking, we have more chances of achieving space travel without trying to "unite" humanity under the rule of a one world government. And frankly that thought alone sounds more like a dystopia. The dystopia of one is the utopia of others, thus... Can anyone seriously think the solution to war would be world domination? That's the most anti-freedom thing I can think of. I guess I have to backtrack on what I said and side with the people calling the show naïve, because I don't see how one can credibly expect the whole world, with all its races and cultures that often despise each others, and often for very good reasons too, to unite together just because aliums or the "biggest baddest war evaaar". If anything, it only gives the opportunity to assure your position as a dominant group. Also lots of lies have been written about medieval times by circlejerking modernists, I really don't think anyone was ever enlightened in real life either. What makes sense now would be for the lore of Star Trek to be based upon a lie. Maybe war never happened, that consumerism won over all the planet and was used as a vessel to brainwash everyone to blindly follow a new religion (the government) and that the eugenic war they refer to is actually the extermination of the opposition.
Well if that same reason and enlightenment is what led to the cast of insufferable, condescending cosmic twits that is TNG, I'll take the apocalypse thank you very much 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣
Yeah I made this a point in response to another comment earlier, that skud however if Spock did do the math on how many died, it doesn't add up very much nor is it congruent to the math stated.
@@RandyLRhoades I mean you're right. Something to consider a possibility about Spock's comments on the first and second wars would be records available at the time the show was made. It's now common to include the deaths caused by what the USSR did to its own citizens and the sheer number of MIA's during the Great War. Of course, I don't know how that would affect the total. Nor do I know the availability of the records to the writers of the show. Just food for thought.
If it was today's population and casualties amounted to a third of the population, the number would be over 2.6 billion. 600 million sounds too small to me. The Eugenics War, sad.
People often discount the unreliable narrator concept, for some reason the idea that any random person who happens to be on the scene can easily and perfectly recall any relevant detail of their people eons long history. People today cant reliably tell you what happened last year let alone three hundred years ago, even when those people are educated and specialize in history. Hell, actual historians tend to specialize in narrow stretches of history relating to a specific geographical area! And they do this because even then they don't know everything and may spend a lifetime simply adding a small bit of knowledge to the pool!
@@DrewLSsix In Star Trek, genetic engineering is the nightmarish bogey man on par with the Holocaust. That isn't something that would just get ignored or fly under the radar of anyone with half a brain. As much of a fondness I hold for The Next Generation, DS9 was simply far more internally consistent. Star Trek needs heavy handed reasoning for why transhumanism doesn't exist.
@@patrickmccurry1563 O'Brien is a working class guy. He's not known for his deep historical or scientific knowledge. He's sort of pitched as a space mechanic.
@@patrickmccurry1563 An in-universe reason for the lack of transhumanism, I think that's just part of the philosophical enlightenment that humanity went through after WW3 and Vulcan First Contact. Other than that, the writers tend to not really think about that stuff, and how things may really be in the future. There isn't really much of an over reliance on technology outside of space stuff either. I mean, people still take pride in manually producing food sometimes instead of using the replicator or automated robots for literally everything. And because of the Borg, I wouldn't be surprised if there was further stigma against transhumanism and cybernetics. They probably also think that humanity in its current state is the way they want to be preserved, which also explains the lack of a technological singularity or "transcendence" anywhere in the thousands of years of lore outside certain niche aliens.
You can really give T.O.S. a pass, because let's face it at the time they never thought the show would become a cultural phenomenon. They didn't see endless syndication, much less imagined it spawning a string on follow-up shows and movies. They would have assumed the show would have it's initial run, and maybe 1-2 reruns then fade away as most shows at the time did. Most actors at the time opted for a one time paycheck as opposed to residual believing that to be the more lucrative option. So most of the referanced in the show were one time throw away lines with little to no thought of continuity. The burden falls to the rest of the shows... T.N.G. needed to be more conscious of what had been written 20 years earlier, D.S.9 needed to be more conscious of what was written 5 years earlier, VOY. needed to be more conscious of what was written 1 year earlier, and S.T.D. needs to be more conscious of what was written before lunch.
"In 1993 a group of these young super men did seize power simultaneouslyin over 40 nations." 1993 was also the year Last Action Hero with Arnold Schwatzwenegger came out. Arnold could definitely be described as a "young superman."
Stormerbuzz35 is that what we refer to as " random bourbon hook-up night?" woke up next to a few O'Brian s that way.... .....just can't tell if I updated them, ---or horrified them.
With regards to Spock misquoting WWI and WWII casualties, that's just sheer laziness on the writer's parts at the time. I think "canon" now has it as something like this. The Eugenics Wars did take place in the 90's, and accounted for around 30 million dead. It is now NOT referred to as WW3, and although the North Americans and Europeans got involved, much of the carnage and casualties remained local to Asia (India, Pakistan, China, etc). WW3 was what we saw in First Contact, and was more "conventional" in that it involved everyone (we can assume it was North Americans and Europeans against the Chinese). Started in 2026, 600 million dead, and Colonel's Green and Thorsen didn't really gain traction until the tail end of it going into the 2060's; they believed in purging people who had been mutated by nuclear radiation.
They where making a sci-fi show in the 50s its not like he could just google the awnsers, he would have to try and prowl trough national archives, and even those could be wrong. Heck the numbers on wikipedia could be wrong too.
@@AStrategyGameDev Not to mention a lot of nations downplayed the casualty numbers for a very long time, so even if they had gone trawling through archives to find them they could very well have been false anyway.
@@S3Cs4uN8 They certainly wouldn't know how many people in the Soviet Union died at least for a long while. They were probably just working with estimates.
@@AStrategyGameDev Star Trek was made from 1966 to 1969, not the 1950s. The numbers were readily available to anyone with access to a High School history book of the time. I even remember writing a research paper in University about World War 2 death reporting and the continually changing numbers from 1960 to about 1988. I had 5 revisions of the same High School history text dated 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990. The numbers were different in each revision as they added more 'types' of deaths to the counts. That number "Spock" quoted was pretty much identical to the 1960 edition of the book. The 1970 saw a dramatic jump as they started including some of the deaths from the death camps.
Well, Spock is talking about civilians and the civilian death toll in WW1 was about 6 to 13 million. As for WW2, Spock is most likely talking about the Holocaust victims. Many believe that they were 11 million in total but it was actually 11 million non-Jews, making it 17 million total. The Eugenics Wars was referred to as WW3 in TOS. There is a clip in the video of one of the times. Before TNG it wasn't yet decided if it would be a seperate war or not. It was in the TNG pilot that 2026 was first established as the year the war started (the script said 2016 but they decided to change it). First Contact was the first time it was mention that 600 million died during the war.
Anyone here remember when Khan shook PM John Major's hand at that conference in New Delhi? I still throw up in my mouth when I think back on the fanfare behind that farce...
Ah, found your mistakes. The Perfect Colony episode you referenced was outside on the edge of Federation space in a star system that one knew had been colonized. Because of all this, they operating outside Federation laws. Also you fidgeting about the numbers dead, in the 1960 they were going by non-nuclear numbers in the earliest instances. Later in the Picard era they had figured out the actual numbers. Plus, you have to account for the doubling of world population between 1945 and 1990.
Genetic engineering was the bogey man of Star Trek. Officers would not have responded with anything other than phobic anger if they acted consistently with otherwise accepted canon. Irritatingly, but at least consistently, Starfleet considers all humans, and probably other member species as well, to be citizens of the Federation and subsequently bound by their major laws. The simple explanation is that the writers don't care anywhere near as much about internal consistency as many fans. And that's even if the writers knew the salient canon. There's a huge data set to, "umm... actually" about. Try to come up with something as "simple" as defining what a given warp speed is. It's all over the place.
I was going to say pretty much the same thing...that in 1 of these cases, a colony was intentionally formed by a group of individuals who differed ideologically from the UFP on genetic engineering (much like certain colonies in N. America were founded by religious nonconformists, etc.) - in another, a group of rogue scientists broke the law and attempted to keep it secret - and in the case of Bashir's parents, they also went around the law when they accessed the "genetic black market," reasoning, why NOT give our precious son incomparable advantages for his future life, and go beyond repairing his genetic flaws?
@@patrickmccurry1563 Re. your in-universe, "bogey man" comment - I agree. From a contemporary, "transhumanist" standpoint, the UFP's ideology is "bio-conservative."
Stuart Young The colony also used selective breeding which is much more gradual and less extreme. And everybody was advancing at the same rate. It's been a long time since I've watched the Next Generation so I have no clue what the deal was with the children unless they were also outside of the rule of the Federation or the writers just didn't care.
Lol! My only "supposition" is that, perhaps after the 3rd World War- many of our records on genetic research was lost and the survivors had to fill in the gaps.
And yet a guy who looks suspiciously like Data was doing his own genetic experimentation. For a while there, they didn't even allow *any* genetic manipulation, which seems like a rash decision to stick with even after radiation has damage the DNA of many while still leaving them able to reproduce.
Yes but it's a wonder why Spock didn't quote his own , pre Surak Vulcan as well? It was explained by Surak's katra to Archer as he carried it. He told him of the horrors of his own world two thousand years before Archer and showed him a horror beyond horrors. A rampant Vulcan with nuclear weapons, lasers, and a bloodthirsty nearly unrivaled in the galaxy. They were a people on the brink also of annihilation. That's why Social said "We were you once". So Spock's history is just as painful.
50 years of Trek, so many writers, it's difficult to the point of impossible to keep a perfect timeline, especially as the original Trek talked about a 1990s future that's already passed. That said, CRISPR technology is currently in its infancy, taking the first steps towards genetic engineering of our own species ... might be a decade before we see our first augmented person.
Well given that Glybera was developed to replace a defective gene with a working one, technically we do have genetically augmented people albeit in terms of the repair of a faulty mutation. However, Glybera also showed that pharmaceuticals would price such one time solutions at prices that are unaffordable, they prefer treatments that need to be ongoing forever so they can make a greater profit. The same would be true of augmentation beyond normal humans, the pharmaceuticals would price such modifications extremely high as they are one time therapies rather than ongoing treatments. The eugenics war was avoided through greed.
If Kahn was Montalbons actual age during the filming of the episode he would have been in his mid 40s in 1996. This means that the eugenics programs that created Kahn must have predated the production of Star Trek by about 15-16 years. Meaning Kahn was born around 1950, meaning the program most likely dates from the mid or early 40s at least. Was the program a coopted Nazi thing? Seems like their bag. Ultimately I think trek must not be our direct future but an alternative timeline. I mean the events that were predicted that have not come to pass make this seem likely already.
Eugenics conceptually does not require direct gene modification, in fact as conceived and commonly thought of at the time of the shows production eugenics was basically human breeding and had been implemented even in the US well before the advent of genetic engineering.
DrewLSsix in the spirit of Star Trek it is supposed to be our future, what could be because of our actions, this isn’t really debatable. Eugenics doesn’t refer to any gene science directly, it’s a philosophy of selective breeding or enhancing for notions of superiority. White supremacy is a branch of Eugenics.
The genetically engineered humans in TNG were factions of humans who were not part of the Federation and didn't have to follow their laws regarding genetic engineering.
That's brilliant writing. It lets your show age better if you're writing about events that are only 30 years into the future, and even gives you wiggle room to change your mind later. Also you can have drama, like if they thaw out a different ship of different genetic supermen and they claim a completely different story.
Federation law =/= United Earth law. Earth (and Starfleet) banned genetic engineering, but Darwin Station, and a thousand other worlds (like that TMP race of clones), don't have to listen to that.
Or the Federation could be just like the United States where if you do something that's illegal in America in another country where it's legal you'll get thrown in The Slammer when you get home the "land of the free" is very expensive to get out of.
Possibly but not sure with the Maquis situation. They were no longer Federation citizens, but yet the Federation still hunted them down to appease the Cardassians and to essentially have them killed or thrown in prison to stop tarnishing the name of the Federation, even if on paper they didn't represent Federation interests, it still had the perception they did. Eddington commented on this matter, stating the Federation being no different than the Borg. Humans, and other species in the Federation, are assimilated and you cannot escape that no matter your choice. They have no free will. You belong to the Federation and the Federation will thus dictate their rules on you no matter what.
Don't forget when Janeway and Archer travel back to the 90s and early 2000s. And don't forget Janeway's ancestor who was around for the millenium gate which was being opened in like december of 2000. "The Eugenics Wars (or the Great Wars) were a series of conflicts fought on Earth between 1992 and 1996. The result of a scientific attempt to improve the Human race through selective breeding and genetic engineering, the wars devastated parts of Earth, by some estimates officially causing some thirty million deaths, and nearly plunging the planet into a new Dark Age." Nothing seemed to really have changed from OTL. These wars were ez.
Time travel meddling Loss of historical doccuments and hell seeing that Iraq has now surpassed Vietnam in length is it so hard to believe World War III could last from 1992 to 2079?
This leads to an interesting question, would it be moral to travel into the past to initiate a global war just to improve the chances of developing a post scarcity civilization earlier? What right does one future have to exist over another?
@@teruin2 Well you could bound this by the number of episodes. The maximum number of parallel universes needed to accomodate the lack of contnuity would be bounded by each episode being a separate reality therefore we know that there would be no more than the number of episodes in parallel realities to accomodate all possible discontinuities. After that it's a matter of identifying which episodes could coexist with what other episodes but I'll leave that task to someone else.
@TheGamingDitto8321 Way Earlier than that the USS Charybdis in the Star Trek TNG Episode "The Royale" Sported a version of the United States flag with 52 Stars having launched in 2037, This could suggest that fighting was already going on this year and the United States had claimed two territories as States, possibly Puerto Rico and Cuba.
Spock knows exactly the casuality numbers of all three WWs, but deliberately gave wrong numbers to Bones in conversation to study his knowledge about subject matter and his reaction to obviously false information. Bones reaction was highly illogical. Similar fashion HAL studied Frank Poole during their chess game: HAL gave wrong winning path to check mate, but Frank didn't follow, just pretented to, and gave up like only an illogical human can. Fascinating.
Still more consistency than STD. No, seriously, STD threw about the same amount of inconsistencies at us within the pilot episode TOS, the films and TNG did over the course of two decades.
They had to do something about the dates because no one in 1966 didn't think Star Trek would have have spinoffs in the actual 1990s, which was their original prediction for WWIII. and since Next Gen was still on in 1993 and it hadn't happened......
Agreed and many writers were either only partly familiar with TOS, or "yes I've seen an episode or two" which doesn't bode well for writing hence the mistakes. Berman and others should have made his writers watch every episode from beginning (including Pike's pilot episode) to end and take notes to get a feel for the show's tone and character arc.
Because I was a victim of the *Cola Wars,* I received the Grape Nehi Heart Medal... 💜 but I still have nightmares... The RC Detention Camps under the cruel supervision of Dr. Pepper. What war will be next?? The Candy Wars? When will the madness stop?!
To be fair, O’brien has been through a ton, and I mean a TON of traumatizing experiences. And he has openly been acknowledged to have depression and some kind of schizotypal (iirc) disorder after his rapidly-simulated 20 years in a rather nasty prison and the sudden whiplash back to his prior reality. You don’t get prescribed antidepressants and antipsychotics for funsies. Depression alone can do a number on your ability to recall memories. O’brien should imho at least be a regular at his Starfleet-assigned counselor.
@Connection Lost Yes, but you have to remember that it's those leaders who are going to the gallows, and they don't want to. If they have any kind of superweapon at their disposal, it doesn't matter to them if a few of their subjects get caught in the blast, as long as their opponents take the brunt of it, and don't know where the next one will go off. Just look at Stalin, or the current North Korean dynasty. Do you really think either of them would have hesitated to nuke their own people to save their own skin?
You would have to 100% wipe out the current populations of the top 50 most populated cites to even get close to 600 million. That is a *staggering* amount of people, and that's likely meant to be deaths directly caused by weapons of war and not other effects of such a war.
I missed Khan! I also missed our advance long range space crafts. To busy reading stories about how people are picking other people to colonize Mars. OMG - is that THEM!!!!!!
I have an explanation for this and all other continuity problems: 1. In TREK time travel is not only possible, it is relatively easy. Literally anybody with a warp drive can do it (as we saw in ST:IV and "Assignment: Earth"). 2. In TREK we know time travel can and does change history. 3. Given the sheer number of warp capable species in the TREK-verse, over the course of millions of years, plus those we know have engaged in time travel (Humans, Krenim, the supervisors of Gary Seven, the Borg, etc.) this means the amount of time travel in the millions and millions of galaxies with their billions and billions and trillions of civilizations must be massive beyond our imagination. 4. Thus--history must be constantly changing. Reality itself is in flux. Events are forever shifting as the remote past is altered, rippling out across the centuries and aeons. History in TREK is fluid. Just like DR.WHO. This accounts for all continuity problems--they aren't problems at all but a symptom of the nature of time as imagined in STAR TREK. Time changes. Continuously. And no one on the inside can possibly notice.
Honestly, Trek's anti-enhancement stance never made sense to me. It's like saying nature matters more than nurture, which runs counter to the very foundation of what Trek is about.
I believe that World War III was considerably after the eugenics wars. If I understand correctly, the wars weren’t ever one major conflict, but a series of smaller ones. It would then make sense that it wouldn’t be counted as World War III. WWIII then happened later, after which came the post Atomic horror, and then the united earth.
4:10 "...telepathic children restored to health by the use of our transporter beam." In other words, we had to wrap up the episode because it was running long and we didn't know how.
They used old/clean transporter data (or in the case of the doctor, an old DNA sample) to filter out/correct the genetic defects during transport, defects which were being caused _by_ the children's genetically engineered telepathic immune systems. The researchers were then left with the (already normally quarantined) children, to continue work on a solution for the newly identified reverse-disease, or whatever you wanna call it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unnatural_Selection_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) Then again, this is a sci-fi show about space magic, so "In other words, we had to wrap up the episode because it was running long and we didn't know how." could apply to almost any episode. Remember that time their holodecks got so upgraded they could create perfect mates? Or that time Q did anything Q does? Or any episode involving time travel? Its all pretty much nonsense they make up as they go =P
@4:36 is not a continuity goof. That episode featured a human colony that left Earth before the Federation existed. That means they would've been disconnected from any laws or changes during that time.
When O’Brien says there hasn’t been a case like this in over 100 years he is referring to an augmented human joining starfleet or becoming a doctor. Recall the Pulaski episode was legally sanctioned by the UFP.
There is no way to keep the Pulaski episode in canon. It overwhelmingly contradicts everything before and after it. Star Trek is actually a very Luddite form of science fiction - genetic engineering and transhumanism cannot exist for starfleet.
lucasbachmann Plus add in that they cured Pulaski with unaffected dna 🧬 from her hair fed into the transporter. First idea was to use and older pattern. Either way they made the transporter a Stargate style Sarcophagus box.
@@2bituser569 you are right about transporters. I suppose at best that episode demonstrates genetic engineering wasn't considered rude until later TNG and banned in DS9. Actually the clone colony was later in season 2. I'm sure when I was 11 years old debating tos vs TNG transporter immortality was surely problematic to us all. Transporters and rapid aging cures have enough prior examples in trek that it alone wouldn't be a deal breaker I suppose.
You hit it on the nail, almost. O'Brien was referring to Una - an augment, not human, but looks totally human so close enough. Lied to get into Starfleet, just like Bashir.
@@lucasbachmann wouldn’t Picard series contradict anti transhumanism? Wouldn’t Picard after s1 qualify as transhuman? He’s been “transferred” into a synthetic body.
Conspiracy Theory: What if some of these comic book and sci-fi writers were time travelers, using their lives as inspiration, unintentionally changed the time stream?
panther196321 or PURPOSELY trying to change/prevent a scenario just by simply being “present”, (pun intended - or NOT...hmmm). But then you must ask yourself: which Sci-fi or comic book writer(s) is/are manipulating our time line AND what scenario/outcome are they trying to change and/or prevent...?
You missed one, Major. There was an episode of Enterprise where T'Pol and Archer are sent back to 2004 era Earth (Detroit, I think) but everything looks fine and dandy with no signs of any Eugenics War.
Because back in the '60's, it WAS improving that fast. 2001: A Space Odyssey has a half-completed space-station hotel with regular shuttle service for commercial passengers, and an archeological excavation on the Moon. Real-World, the Space Shuttle was supposed to just be a bus, going back and forth between the Space Station that they were going to have built by 1975. But budget cuts in the 1970's cancelled NASA's hopes and dreams, and they had to give up on either the station, or the bus, and since a station's no good without a way to get there... If you look at all of the space fiction from the '50's and '60's, it all shows approximately the same rate of progress in the next 40-400 years, as illustrated with the best technology of the time (hence why TOS Enterprise still has CRT screens and toggle switches everywhere). If we had maintained the moon-race level of spending on NASA, we stood a realistic chance of making Star Trek a reality.
Lol what do you mean, we have all kinds of crazy shit from Star Trek. Machine Learning from the expcomp episode, artificial intelligence is possible, androids are only decades away, genetic engineering is feasible.
Those scenes from the Next Generation... they keep referring to them as children and the old woman says that the oldest is 12 but all the actors in that scene look like full grown ass adults. I think the youngest could pass for 16 at best but they're suppose to all be 12 and under? Is rapid aging part of the genetic "enhancements" they were given? The oldest in that room looks to be about 25. Aging 18 times faster than normal humans doesn't really feel like it would be a good thing. BTW there's even more contradictions now as Star Trek Picard has shown that Project Khan which will start the Eugenics Wars is revealed to happen some time after 2024 not 1993 as the Original series had claimed. That said... considering 2024 is only 2 years in our future at this point, perhaps all that time travel mucked up the time line and kept pushing back when the Eugenics Wars were actually suppose to happen... kind of like how Terminators movies keep delaying when the Cyberdyne will start a war with the human race... that's the problem with Science Fiction that tries to predict the near future, eventually that future comes and the predictions don't actually come true but because it's science fiction a lot of real world history also gets worked in and they have to keep revising the time line. I wander what Star Trek is going to be like on April 4th, 2063 if we still haven't figured out warp technology... or even if we do figure out Warp travel I kind of doubt that we're actually going to discover a species called Vulcans who look exactly like us but with pointy ears. If we ever make actual first contact with aliens and Star Trek is still around by then it would potentially change the entire canon of the franchise. If you're seeing this comment from 41 years in the future assuming this comment has actually been preserved that long, leave a reply. How much has Star Trek changed in the future.
I always kind of thought that star trek characters looked at the eugenics wars as a historical event that they can't exactly confirm. That was my impression of their view of it.
The Eugenics Wars was the one thing that TOS was extremely specific about... and the one thing that TNG seemed to do its hardest to overwrite, retcon, or completely ignore
We should probably just accept that a show first started in 1966 will inevitably be riddled with errors by now. Not many people can remember it all. I just hope a show manages to keep it own canon straight without contradicting itself.
@@fieldy409 I actually applaud Enterprise for treating the Eugenics Wars like they still happened in the 1990's, despite the show being in the early-mid 2000's. Information is more important than visuals when it comes to canon, and in that the worst offender of contradicting canon goes to Next Generation, hands down.
@@mauricioos2294 it makes sense given the level of warfare explained. One can imagine that nuclear war wouldn't be without major cyber attack wars going on simultaneously as well - massive assaults to destroy huge data centers, either through direct bombardment or hackers. Given that cloud based servers is the norm and few companies maintain their own racks anymore, this is a real issue.
I like to think that something happened with time travellers going back and stopping the Eugenics war from being a thing. Like all the other time travel stories that end with 'well i guess we can't put it back because that's how things are now.'
This illustrates a aspect of "story telling" that was very prevalent in TV fora long time, before Babylon 5 and the idea of Long term Story telling. Before that most TV show each episode existed separately, and as such writers were not a concerned with keep the story consistent across each season yet the entire series. Because of this a number of massive inconstanties arose because of the need for one story to have some very different then another.
Nope. Long format storytelling has the exact same problem. Plenty of shows that only planned for a few seasons but got renewed for way more and had to address issues accordingly.
Had they written that episode in DS9 a little better, they could have easily explained how Dr. Kingsley's experiments fit within continuity. Perhaps there was a ban on genetic engineering, but after so many centuries, the Federation began to believe those laws were reactionary and outdated. Dr. Kingley's work looked promising, so she was granted a special exemption to see where that kind of research would go. The disastrous results would then have confirmed to the Federation Council exactly why that type of research was banned.
yeah ds9 should have briefly mentioned that. they could have even said maybe that's the same place Bashir got his treatment , and it would also explain why he got off so lightly
It's a shame the writers of TNG, Discovery, Voyager, and DS9 didn't have some sort of source material to go back to so they wouldn't have contradictions like this. ;)
4:37! WOAH! HOLD ON! Those people _broke away_ from Earth and Federation Civilization! _Of Course_ they don't follow the same rules and philosophies as the larger humanity! 😒
I see why you would think these are all "contradictions" - but ripping each and every one out of context doesn't really prove a point, right? Some scenes were just thoughts of less informed characters (Miles is an engineer, not someone who strikes me as hyper-aware of all colonies or isolated incidents), some is just old skool Trek =) where they changed their minds every other episode - and some are just the latest and greatest additions to the federation and or starfleets regulations. Don't get me wrong, nice video - I appreciate the effort (rly!) - but it's not more than a collection of contradicting scene from wildly different shows and time frames.
Yeah but even Miles O’Brien knew a lot about history however, it’s a piece of knowledge we see him express in Star Trek Deep Space Nine a lot since one of his favorite holosuite programs is the battle of Hastings, and often corrected the likes of Julian whenever they made a historically ignorant claim.
i remember, in the digital enhanced version of ToS from the DVDs; the german dub was renewed setting the Events of Khan 100 years later into the 2090s. Also the voice actors sounded much older (since it were the same as the original airing ^^ )
Let’s see, Kirk and crew time travelled to the 20th century at least 4 times, making changes each time, aliens from DS-9 landed in the desert in 1940s, Voyagers crew time traveled to the 1990s and saw no evidence of world war after another time traveler had been making changes for decades. By the ‘time’ of enterprise the timeline has completely changed.
@Thelondonbadger The Guardian portal stated everything was back to normal. Which is a little hard to reconcile given that a homeless man zapped himself with their phaser.
@Thelondonbadger Normal as in "Time has resumed its shape. All is as it was before." Directly quoted by the Guardian at the end of the episode after Kirk and co returned. The context was literally about them fixing their accidental McCoy shenanigans. It wouldn't make sense to be talking about anything else. As far as the Husnock and the Q in relation to the Guardian are concerned, I don't know anything about the books except that they're officially non-canon like 99% of the time. Also doesn't help that many people, places, and events have different names and backstories because they're licensed out like candy to random unofficial authors.
@Thelondonbadger I am aware the Hunsock are mentioned in the show, but them doing anything time travel related with Q is not. It's completely irrelevant.
Producer 1 circa 1967:Should we give exact dates as to when these future events are supposed to happen?What if our series lasts until then and if nothing like this happened we'll have to invent some convoluted reason as to why. Producer 2: Don't be absurd. No one is gonna remember this series a decade from now.
The only real problem is the 1990s setting. Placing it in the 2020s and having it work as the starting conflict that leads into the 27yr WWIII would work rather well.
@@Thuazabi I can agree with that , however, as it stands it's a cannon killer. I am starting to doubt the importance of cannon as long as anyone keeps Roddenberry's dream alive in some fashion or another.
What do you mean... there are continuity failures and history contradictions in other Star Trek shows than Discovery and Picard?! From what I read online, I would have thought those two shows were the only ones that made mistakes. Weird.
Let's be fair... It's one thing to get a few numbers wrong (even if they are of historic importance, albeit in a fictional context). It's a totally different thing to mess up entire cultures, civilizations, technology, characters and take a huge dump on a show's whole foundation.
Yeah, its seems after the TOS, the came up with realistic numbers and made them fixed (although they still seem to have problems with dates). The TOS had the same problems most other scifi shows had at the time (namely 2001: A Space Odyssey which stated we should be around Jupiter by now). Also that end colony, they weren't a Federation world, they were colonized separate from Earth's rules right after the Eugenics wars, probably by humans who were like Soon and thought they could make it work. And those institutes are privately run separate for the Federation, so it makes a bit of since that a O'Brien would make that distinction.
The Eugenics Wars was always a weird note in Trek lore. Namely in that it somehow prompted the total halt of genetic improvement in humans due to the weird notion that it would just create tyrants like Khan, or simply people of a similar mindset. And yet if the name is literal, Khan is just the result of selective breeding, not genetic resequencing, as was done with Bashir; yet Bashir's status as an augment is illegal, nevermind that what was done to him is wholly different from what produced Khan and his contemporaries. They were simply the result of producing generations of offspring by pairing those with "ideal" genetic traits, whereas Julian had his DNA reconfigured postpartum. At the same time, one could say that genetic engineering still took place; humans in the future are learning things at a much more advanced rate than humans actually could, kids are learning calculus at around age 10, which isn't really feasible, even in a future with such advanced tech. We have atomic power now, but that's not to say we can begin teaching 4 year olds algebra, and you have to consider that calculus is something only a few students in high schools can take courses in. For this future to exist, humans would've needed their genetics improved. Similarly, TNG expresses the idea that headaches are a thing of the distant past, as Jean Luc had no idea what it was; this was explained by Dr Crusher as being due to the fact that the human brain was better mapped in the future and medicine had improved humans beyond such things; this would imply that at a genetic level, humanity's DNA had been improved to be typically immune to many trivial (and potentially not-so-trivial) ailments that frequently plague us; by extension, we could assume that migraines were no longer an issue.
By law, it says that you can't improve something that isn't a disabling. Well, let's say they eradicate things like being born missing some limbs first. As time goes on, perhaps things that seem normal to us such as migraines WOUD be deemed horrible to them. Humans used to drop like flies from polio but now we consider it a heinous disease we've pretty much wiped out. Maybe migranes were deemed atrocities and the gene was sequenced out gradualy?
Great book. With regards to Spock misquoting WWI and WWII casualties, that's just sheer laziness on the writer's parts at the time. I think "canon" now has it as something like this. The Eugenics Wars did take place in the 90's, and accounted for around 30 million dead. It is now NOT referred to as WW3, and although the North Americans and Europeans got involved, much of the carnage and casualties remained local to Asia (India, Pakistan, China, etc). WW3 was what we saw in First Contact, and was more "conventional" in that it involved everyone (we can assume it was North Americans and Europeans against the Chinese). Started in 2026, 600 million dead, and Colonel's Green and Thorsen didn't really gain traction until the tail end of it going into the 2060's; they believed in purging people who had been mutated by nuclear radiation.
I always thought that the rule against genetic engineering was so no one would find out what Section 31 had actually done: recoded humanity to reduce the selfish genes. It's the only way humanity could ever become what we are in Star Trek.
The prohibition on genetic engineering in Star Trek always bugged me. There’s a quote I saw at one point, “Genetic engineering has the potential to wipe out some of the most devastating diseases and disorders that can happen to anyone, and just as an unintended consequence of that make everyone better at just about everything. Saying you oppose genetic engineering is saying ‘I was lucky enough not to be born with Tay Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, Sickle Cell Anemia, etc. and that is one hundred percent of the people I care about.’” The problem with Genetic Engineering isn’t genetic engineering making people better, the problem with genetic engineering is how we decide who has access to it and how we decide who and what gets engineered in what way. When ‘better’ is proscribed and unwillingly enforced by rich white people and not being white or being neuroatypical are considered flaws, that’s real world Eugenics, that’s a problem. But the problem isn’t genetic engineering, its that people are being forced to do it without consent by people with twisted morals. When who has access to genetic engineering is defined by who has money to afford it, that’s a problem because it worsens class stratification, the same basic thing that happened in star trek’s Eugenic’s wars. The problem with G.E. Isn’t genetic engineering, its society, and the fact that society is flawed, repeat with greed and scarcity and racism and all the other myriad forms of bigotry. But if a society claims to have gotten rid of all that, exists in post scarcity with equal access to all while celebrating diversity of all forms, then the reasons for prohibiting Genetic engineering are basically nil. The argument that “superior genes breeds superior ego” is bullshit, treating people like they’re better than everyone else will make them thing they are, but that has (almost) nothing to do with genes.
I agree. In the original series genetic engineering was not outlawed, only the creation of genetically enhanced supermen, whatever that means. Its only later that all genetic engineering is outlawed, which does make no sense. I suspect the anti-GM lobby at work?
There seems to be an agenda that Star Trek NEEDS to be a direct reflection of humanity from that year forward. So, the eugenics wars continues to be retconned further and further into the future with each new incarnation causing silly inconsistencies in pursuit of keeping it ahead of our current time. In reality Star Trek's timeline derives and becomes separate from our own in the 1960s. If writers would simply embrace this idea, instead of trying to make star trek "timely" it would be a more true reflection of the series origins and philosophies and explain entirely its inconsistencies to our own timeline.
0:08 "casualties are a loss in numerical strength through any cause, as death, wounds, sickness, capture, or desertion." Spock said died, not casualties, so that wouldn't be the underlined 40 million any way, its 15 to 19 million according to Wikipedia, which is closer to Spock's quoted 6 million. Over time, research updates figures like that. In the 60s the estimates may have been lower, or keeping in the science fiction, you could say future estimates are lower based on some evidence they found.
The genetically people in “The Masterpiece Society” don’t exactly fit the situation. This society was unknown by the Federation and not under their rules. Also their breeding was not by genetic manipulation but by selective breeding which is apples to oranges to Khan or even Bashir. Everything else is spot on.
This is the prime example of the "too many cooks" continuity of television writing. Everyone wants to bring in their own elements ("ingredients") into the series ("mixture") and just plain ignore what had come before.
I was not aware of being born in the aftermath of massive nuclear war.
I just assumed Detroit always looked like this.
😂
@Olavo_PS - 🙄
The result of the secret mass destruction weapon TIR-1
I've heard Omni Consumer Products is making a lot of positive changes in your town.
Tough city. Not in a good way at that. Is it still the murder capital of the United States?
People today often misquote historical facts today; why should it be any different in the future?
With real life people it's a bit more believable and justifiable because unlike a narrative story, they do not serve a purpose to be expository where as in a story they do. Having some level of internal consistency is necessary and having to retcon scenarios like this is ultimately a cop out scenario.
It's like when the Star Wars Expanded Universe retconned tiny unexplainable things like these such as Captain Needa's claim of no starship the size of a freighter like the Millennium Falcon could have a cloaking device but with subsequent entries and additions to the series in both print and visual form the claim gets contradicted and the excuse made was that Needa was an idiot who was wrong. The idea of a military officer not knowing the capabilities of starships like that is ludicrously stupid so on the surface it sounds good to say but should a military officer be so incompetent like that all the time?
It's even doubly dubious of an explenation when Spock is even contradicted as being factually inaccurate of fictional events but even real world events such as casualty statistics of the first two world wars as well! (I mean yeah casualty statistics are not the same as confirmed deaths but even if you do the necessary work of mathematically altering the statistics of who actually died it still leaves you with numbers that don't add up for Spock's claims).
@@RandyLRhoades The overexplanation was a bit unneccesary; but I still appreciated it as a fellow nerd. :)
@@rasnac No problem. I just wanted to explain where I was coming from and go into reasons why. Again, from a realistic standpoint I would agree with you but on a narrative, unless said claims are quickly challenged, I don't like simply having the explanation of them being wrong.
@@RandyLRhoades Or if wrong information is being delivered to the audience and no one corrects it, still nice to know at some point in whose interests are the facts being twisted. But since Star Trek is supposedly set in a utopia where elites don't make up false narratives to uphold the current societal order, it makes no sense why even educated characters would be contradicting themselves on very basic facts from the 1990s where information is much more prevalent than the early 20th century.
I don't think this is all misquoted. It could also be lack of information. TOS and ENT had similar numbers for WW3. Later occuring series had upgraded numbers. We are still upgrading the numbers dead from WW2. It is quite possible and expected that some things were just not fully understood and once they learned about earth history they moved on. How many of us have gone back and studied ancient civilizations now that we have day jobs?
The distant year of 1995 and the Eugenics Wars, oh yes I remember that...
Who can forget Ricardo Montalban ruling 25% of the Earth while sitting on a throne lined with Corinthian Leather?
Actually, in wrath of Khan, we see it was 1996 the botany bay was launched
I am so glad that didnt happen. I do think the Asian Bush Wars will thank to this lopsided World Trade Agreement
I wondered if Voyagers crew might have run into Kahn when they visited 1996.... but they must have just missed him.
@@DrewLSsix Fun fact: In the 1996 episode there is a picture of one of those ships performing its take off from a launch pad.
I like how the original series made up events and stories for the '90s. Back then they really didn't expect the franchise to last this long :D
maybe they saw the future via time travel
Back then they said, smart people today are 1.2x smart, so it stands to reason they will be able to fix all our problems once they are 4x smart... say in another generation.
Humans become 0.7x smart.... oops.... nm.
Or it was just more believable that such a war could occur in the 90s.
That episode was written just a few years after the Cuban Missle Crisis which saw millions of Americans families rushing to thier make shift nuclear bunkers.
I love the world building elements in the TOS
We need t-shirts saying “I Survived The Eugenics War”.
no doubt they are being designed now and will be found on Esty very soon
Do they come in the color red?
I'd buy one
I totally want one of these.
Now I know my next con shirt
Reason for inconsistency is due to all the time travel.
Pretty legit, considering how often just the ships and characters we've followed in the shows mess with time. Imagine how many other damned people have messed with it.
Seems legit
This is probably the best answer to all the inconsistency, not just in a joke answer way, but as a legit answer.
Yes, time travel. It's also called "aging."
Wibbley Wobbly, Timey, Wimey
1992: Cold War Ends
1992 Khan Noonian Singh rules a large chunk of the planet.
DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE
Coz I see
Rwanda
Croatia
Bosnia
Serbia
Russia
South Africa and above all
ZAIRE
You mean khan Noonian Singh?
@@chuckymcnubbin1518 KHAAAAAAAAAAAAN!
Yuri get the kirov
There were a couple of EU books written about the Eugenics Wars and when the Berlin Wall fell Khan said that he saw a power vacuum that needed to be filled.
Is no one going to mention the Voyager episodes where they go back to 1995 and there's literally no evidence at a ll of the Eugenics wars
They are in California. Wouldnt be the first time North America was completely unaffected by a war raging on
@@michaelflett09 they're in los Angeles. They said nearly every major city was completely destroyed. So even if L.A. wasn't completely levelled, it must have been affected. In another episode I cant think of eight now they show a bombed out San Francisco. It wouldn't,be unreasonable to assume that if San Francisco were affected by a world war, L.A. would be as well
@@cooperwhaley3340 Eugenics war was mostly in Asia it was WW3 where most cities were levelled two seperate wars
There is a model of the Botany Bay in that episode on Starlings desk (think that was the guys name). The book and that episode support the Eugenics wars we’re going on in the background
Remember though, that one guy that used future tech changed that time line
1992 to 1996. Yes, I remember those years when Khan Noonien Singh was our ruler. Those were the days! Emperor Singh was a good emperor. He got the economy back on track, ended inflation, fixed our infrastructure, improved our system of education, and instead of just scuttling all of our old outdated Navy submarines, he reused them and turned them all into modern spaceships. He was a good leader!
Based.
Welch is opening the door for a while lot of Bill Clinton jokes, there.
@@TheNoiseySpectator I didn't even realize it until you mentioned it. 😂😂. However, I am not a huge fan of the Clinton Machine. I admit he did a few good things but IMO overall the man was a worse criminal than Khan.
@@JohnHWelch63 Yes, well I really brought it up to _avoid_ Clinton bashing, not to encourage anyone to start. 🙁
@@TheNoiseySpectator Awww I'm sorry, did I hurt your feeling? I dont care who supports who or what. We all have the right to support anyone we choose. If you cant respect that about Americans and cant handle an opposing opion then maybe you should avoid political discussion altogether. I dont mind the fact that you like Bill Clinton and you shouldn't be all butt hurt that I dont. Chill and enjoy your liberties and dont be so triggerish. Thats good Islamic advice brother! LOL
Interesting that the many people, who refer to Star Trek as a naive Utopia, where human history is just getting better are unaware of the fact that Star Trek is actually a post-apocalyptic Scenario, where Reason and Enlightment came after the collapse of our current world order
How does it prevent it from being a naïve utopia? it's not like the world of star trek is scared from "the apocalypse", even considering the constant reminders of past(future) wars with roms and klingons.
Though I wouldn't really be on the side of those calling it naïve, because the original series relies heavily on strife, alien menaces and even human's struggle with emotions/ego; I still find it presumptuous to assume a war, no matter how devastating, could bring "reason and enlightenment" to humanity as a species. Even more so in present days, where the average citizen of the world (sic) is a drooling retard straight out of a Brave New World.
@@SPTX. I think its more like a process of cultural process, comparable tot the age of enlightment in Europe after the medieval times. I can imagine that the world gouvernment, not only fuled by fear from the horrors of WW3 but also inspired by the (official) first contact with extraterrestrial life installed a social structure and education that channels human nature in a way to prevent the mistakes of the past.
Considering the fact that concepts like religious freedom were viewed as (literally) “utopian“ in the 16th century, the ideas of the United Federation of planets doesnt seem that naive at all.
@@demianzarnoski3288 I get what you say, but realistically speaking, we have more chances of achieving space travel without trying to "unite" humanity under the rule of a one world government. And frankly that thought alone sounds more like a dystopia. The dystopia of one is the utopia of others, thus...
Can anyone seriously think the solution to war would be world domination? That's the most anti-freedom thing I can think of. I guess I have to backtrack on what I said and side with the people calling the show naïve, because I don't see how one can credibly expect the whole world, with all its races and cultures that often despise each others, and often for very good reasons too, to unite together just because aliums or the "biggest baddest war evaaar". If anything, it only gives the opportunity to assure your position as a dominant group.
Also lots of lies have been written about medieval times by circlejerking modernists, I really don't think anyone was ever enlightened in real life either.
What makes sense now would be for the lore of Star Trek to be based upon a lie. Maybe war never happened, that consumerism won over all the planet and was used as a vessel to brainwash everyone to blindly follow a new religion (the government) and that the eugenic war they refer to is actually the extermination of the opposition.
@@SPTX. I do not see the "naive" part:
ua-cam.com/video/3eyiyY-6mbU/v-deo.html
Could you show us where you have seen it?
Well if that same reason and enlightenment is what led to the cast of insufferable, condescending cosmic twits that is TNG, I'll take the apocalypse thank you very much 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣
3:28 when your super human's still mint condition sealed in his orginal packaging.
😂
They're going to do an unboxing video on FedTube.
Are you kidding? Unbox it? A pristine Super Human in its original sleeve would go for thousands on eBay!
Ah, the female version. Believes women are superior to men and that all men are stupid. I'm acquainted with that one.
Of course! He's a Star Trek collectable!
I'd like to point out that casualties and deaths are two separate things.
True
Yeah I made this a point in response to another comment earlier, that skud however if Spock did do the math on how many died, it doesn't add up very much nor is it congruent to the math stated.
@@RandyLRhoades I mean you're right. Something to consider a possibility about Spock's comments on the first and second wars would be records available at the time the show was made. It's now common to include the deaths caused by what the USSR did to its own citizens and the sheer number of MIA's during the Great War. Of course, I don't know how that would affect the total. Nor do I know the availability of the records to the writers of the show. Just food for thought.
Noob101 That is true and probably the Irl explanation as to the inconsistent use of statistics, then again Star Trek and Math have never mixed well.
If it was today's population and casualties amounted to a third of the population, the number would be over 2.6 billion. 600 million sounds too small to me. The Eugenics War, sad.
The Eugenics Wars and World War III were 2 separate wars in canon. The Star Trek writers got them mixed up sometimes....especially TOS and DS9.
Well in any event it would work a lot better if they were the same thing, to be honest.
the Eugenics Wars of the 92's were bush wars in the middle east, where as the third world war was later toward the middle of the 21st century.
TOS did bot confuse them. TOS invented them. The ohers retconned them.
@@skwills1629 2021 is the centennial of the birth of Gene Roddenberry.
@@Emanuela9
And?
So what if it is, does not change the fact that there was a retcon and a lazy one at that.
“Maybe O’Brien just doesn’t remember.” Lmao
People often discount the unreliable narrator concept, for some reason the idea that any random person who happens to be on the scene can easily and perfectly recall any relevant detail of their people eons long history.
People today cant reliably tell you what happened last year let alone three hundred years ago, even when those people are educated and specialize in history. Hell, actual historians tend to specialize in narrow stretches of history relating to a specific geographical area! And they do this because even then they don't know everything and may spend a lifetime simply adding a small bit of knowledge to the pool!
@@DrewLSsix In Star Trek, genetic engineering is the nightmarish bogey man on par with the Holocaust. That isn't something that would just get ignored or fly under the radar of anyone with half a brain. As much of a fondness I hold for The Next Generation, DS9 was simply far more internally consistent.
Star Trek needs heavy handed reasoning for why transhumanism doesn't exist.
@@patrickmccurry1563 O'Brien is a working class guy. He's not known for his deep historical or scientific knowledge. He's sort of pitched as a space mechanic.
@@patrickmccurry1563 An in-universe reason for the lack of transhumanism, I think that's just part of the philosophical enlightenment that humanity went through after WW3 and Vulcan First Contact. Other than that, the writers tend to not really think about that stuff, and how things may really be in the future. There isn't really much of an over reliance on technology outside of space stuff either. I mean, people still take pride in manually producing food sometimes instead of using the replicator or automated robots for literally everything. And because of the Borg, I wouldn't be surprised if there was further stigma against transhumanism and cybernetics. They probably also think that humanity in its current state is the way they want to be preserved, which also explains the lack of a technological singularity or "transcendence" anywhere in the thousands of years of lore outside certain niche aliens.
DrewLSsix I mean to be fair they also learn calculus at like 8? (Some random episode in TNG)
You can really give T.O.S. a pass, because let's face it at the time they never thought the show would become a cultural phenomenon. They didn't see endless syndication, much less imagined it spawning a string on follow-up shows and movies. They would have assumed the show would have it's initial run, and maybe 1-2 reruns then fade away as most shows at the time did. Most actors at the time opted for a one time paycheck as opposed to residual believing that to be the more lucrative option. So most of the referanced in the show were one time throw away lines with little to no thought of continuity. The burden falls to the rest of the shows... T.N.G. needed to be more conscious of what had been written 20 years earlier, D.S.9 needed to be more conscious of what was written 5 years earlier, VOY. needed to be more conscious of what was written 1 year earlier, and S.T.D. needs to be more conscious of what was written before lunch.
@Dawson Davis Kurtzman: Did someone say Cannon? Phasers go pew pew....
@Dawson Davis "canon"
@@AgentExeider Don't encourage him
@@Connection-Lost I know how it's spelled, I'm saying Kurtzman would assume it's Cannons people are talking about. Pew pew.
😢 poor Enterprise. Always forgotten
"In 1993 a group of these young super men did seize power simultaneouslyin over 40 nations." 1993 was also the year Last Action Hero with Arnold Schwatzwenegger came out. Arnold could definitely be described as a "young superman."
The problem with some O'Brien units is that they don't always get the needed updates and patches necessary to operate as they should...
This is why you need to regularly update your O'Brien!
Stormerbuzz35
is that what we refer to as " random bourbon hook-up night?" woke up next to a few O'Brian s that way....
.....just can't tell if I updated them, ---or horrified them.
Miles O'Brien....the poor man's Montgomery Scott.
WiFi problems I guess?
That's crazy I never knew he was an android
"Not engineered, created!" 3:52
Which is completely different...in a way our writers can't figure out so let's move on.
I guess they built them from scratch instead of tweaking existing embryos, similar to how we modify animals and plants?
At least they didn't say evolved due to selective breeding.
@@InfernosReaper I think that's what engineered means.
I think she's just trying to excuse what they did. It really is genetic engineering.
I interpreted it as she felt the word engineered had a negative or neutral connotation, whereas "created" implied more thought and love.
With regards to Spock misquoting WWI and WWII casualties, that's just sheer laziness on the writer's parts at the time.
I think "canon" now has it as something like this.
The Eugenics Wars did take place in the 90's, and accounted for around 30 million dead. It is now NOT referred to as WW3, and although the North Americans and Europeans got involved, much of the carnage and casualties remained local to Asia (India, Pakistan, China, etc).
WW3 was what we saw in First Contact, and was more "conventional" in that it involved everyone (we can assume it was North Americans and Europeans against the Chinese). Started in 2026, 600 million dead, and Colonel's Green and Thorsen didn't really gain traction until the tail end of it going into the 2060's; they believed in purging people who had been mutated by nuclear radiation.
They where making a sci-fi show in the 50s its not like he could just google the awnsers, he would have to try and prowl trough national archives, and even those could be wrong. Heck the numbers on wikipedia could be wrong too.
@@AStrategyGameDev Not to mention a lot of nations downplayed the casualty numbers for a very long time, so even if they had gone trawling through archives to find them they could very well have been false anyway.
@@S3Cs4uN8 They certainly wouldn't know how many people in the Soviet Union died at least for a long while. They were probably just working with estimates.
@@AStrategyGameDev Star Trek was made from 1966 to 1969, not the 1950s.
The numbers were readily available to anyone with access to a High School history book of the time. I even remember writing a research paper in University about World War 2 death reporting and the continually changing numbers from 1960 to about 1988. I had 5 revisions of the same High School history text dated 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990. The numbers were different in each revision as they added more 'types' of deaths to the counts. That number "Spock" quoted was pretty much identical to the 1960 edition of the book. The 1970 saw a dramatic jump as they started including some of the deaths from the death camps.
Well, Spock is talking about civilians and the civilian death toll in WW1 was about 6 to 13 million.
As for WW2, Spock is most likely talking about the Holocaust victims. Many believe that they were 11 million in total but it was actually 11 million non-Jews, making it 17 million total.
The Eugenics Wars was referred to as WW3 in TOS. There is a clip in the video of one of the times. Before TNG it wasn't yet decided if it would be a seperate war or not. It was in the TNG pilot that 2026 was first established as the year the war started (the script said 2016 but they decided to change it). First Contact was the first time it was mention that 600 million died during the war.
Anyone here remember when Khan shook PM John Major's hand at that conference in New Delhi? I still throw up in my mouth when I think back on the fanfare behind that farce...
?
I thought I was the only one who had forgotten about it.
Khan and Tony Blair got on like a house on fire and compared notes.
Rent. Free. Forever.
Ah, found your mistakes. The Perfect Colony episode you referenced was outside on the edge of Federation space in a star system that one knew had been colonized. Because of all this, they operating outside Federation laws. Also you fidgeting about the numbers dead, in the 1960 they were going by non-nuclear numbers in the earliest instances. Later in the Picard era they had figured out the actual numbers. Plus, you have to account for the doubling of world population between 1945 and 1990.
Genetic engineering was the bogey man of Star Trek. Officers would not have responded with anything other than phobic anger if they acted consistently with otherwise accepted canon. Irritatingly, but at least consistently, Starfleet considers all humans, and probably other member species as well, to be citizens of the Federation and subsequently bound by their major laws.
The simple explanation is that the writers don't care anywhere near as much about internal consistency as many fans. And that's even if the writers knew the salient canon. There's a huge data set to, "umm... actually" about. Try to come up with something as "simple" as defining what a given warp speed is. It's all over the place.
I was going to say pretty much the same thing...that in 1 of these cases, a colony was intentionally formed by a group of individuals who differed ideologically from the UFP on genetic engineering (much like certain colonies in N. America were founded by religious nonconformists, etc.) - in another, a group of rogue scientists broke the law and attempted to keep it secret - and in the case of Bashir's parents, they also went around the law when they accessed the "genetic black market," reasoning, why NOT give our precious son incomparable advantages for his future life, and go beyond repairing his genetic flaws?
@@patrickmccurry1563 Re. your in-universe, "bogey man" comment - I agree. From a contemporary, "transhumanist" standpoint, the UFP's ideology is "bio-conservative."
Stuart Young The colony also used selective breeding which is much more gradual and less extreme. And everybody was advancing at the same rate. It's been a long time since I've watched the Next Generation so I have no clue what the deal was with the children unless they were also outside of the rule of the Federation or the writers just didn't care.
the colony was of humans from Earth in the 22nd century
Lol! My only "supposition" is that, perhaps after the 3rd World War- many of our records on genetic research was lost and the survivors had to fill in the gaps.
And yet a guy who looks suspiciously like Data was doing his own genetic experimentation.
For a while there, they didn't even allow *any* genetic manipulation, which seems like a rash decision to stick with even after radiation has damage the DNA of many while still leaving them able to reproduce.
The Vulcan Science Academy has ruled that you should just enjoy the show.
It's logical. 🖖
Yes but it's a wonder why Spock didn't quote his own , pre Surak Vulcan as well? It was explained by Surak's katra to Archer as he carried it. He told him of the horrors of his own world two thousand years before Archer and showed him a horror beyond horrors. A rampant Vulcan with nuclear weapons, lasers, and a bloodthirsty nearly unrivaled in the galaxy. They were a people on the brink also of annihilation. That's why Social said "We were you once". So Spock's history is just as painful.
Edit: Soval damn autocorrect.
50 years of Trek, so many writers, it's difficult to the point of impossible to keep a perfect timeline, especially as the original Trek talked about a 1990s future that's already passed.
That said, CRISPR technology is currently in its infancy, taking the first steps towards genetic engineering of our own species ... might be a decade before we see our first augmented person.
Well given that Glybera was developed to replace a defective gene with a working one, technically we do have genetically augmented people albeit in terms of the repair of a faulty mutation. However, Glybera also showed that pharmaceuticals would price such one time solutions at prices that are unaffordable, they prefer treatments that need to be ongoing forever so they can make a greater profit. The same would be true of augmentation beyond normal humans, the pharmaceuticals would price such modifications extremely high as they are one time therapies rather than ongoing treatments. The eugenics war was avoided through greed.
AvangionQ we already have
If Kahn was Montalbons actual age during the filming of the episode he would have been in his mid 40s in 1996. This means that the eugenics programs that created Kahn must have predated the production of Star Trek by about 15-16 years. Meaning Kahn was born around 1950, meaning the program most likely dates from the mid or early 40s at least. Was the program a coopted Nazi thing? Seems like their bag.
Ultimately I think trek must not be our direct future but an alternative timeline. I mean the events that were predicted that have not come to pass make this seem likely already.
Eugenics conceptually does not require direct gene modification, in fact as conceived and commonly thought of at the time of the shows production eugenics was basically human breeding and had been implemented even in the US well before the advent of genetic engineering.
DrewLSsix in the spirit of Star Trek it is supposed to be our future, what could be because of our actions, this isn’t really debatable.
Eugenics doesn’t refer to any gene science directly, it’s a philosophy of selective breeding or enhancing for notions of superiority. White supremacy is a branch of Eugenics.
The genetically engineered humans in TNG were factions of humans who were not part of the Federation and didn't have to follow their laws regarding genetic engineering.
Remember one thing though, they said a lot of the information from this time period was skewed or missing.
That's brilliant writing. It lets your show age better if you're writing about events that are only 30 years into the future, and even gives you wiggle room to change your mind later. Also you can have drama, like if they thaw out a different ship of different genetic supermen and they claim a completely different story.
Not hard to believe. Something as devastating as a Nuclear war would indeed wipe out a lot of information in libraries and server farms and such.
I remember the Eugenics War of the late 1990s. I had just graduated high school and, believe it or not, MTV used to play music! What a time.
Federation law =/= United Earth law.
Earth (and Starfleet) banned genetic engineering, but Darwin Station, and a thousand other worlds (like that TMP race of clones), don't have to listen to that.
Wasn’t Darwin station run by the Feds? Federation law applies to every fed world but you’re right non ufp worlds could do whatever
Tim Thomason seems in trek whatever sf says is law is law too.
Or the Federation could be just like the United States where if you do something that's illegal in America in another country where it's legal you'll get thrown in The Slammer when you get home the "land of the free" is very expensive to get out of.
Possibly but not sure with the Maquis situation. They were no longer Federation citizens, but yet the Federation still hunted them down to appease the Cardassians and to essentially have them killed or thrown in prison to stop tarnishing the name of the Federation, even if on paper they didn't represent Federation interests, it still had the perception they did. Eddington commented on this matter, stating the Federation being no different than the Borg. Humans, and other species in the Federation, are assimilated and you cannot escape that no matter your choice. They have no free will. You belong to the Federation and the Federation will thus dictate their rules on you no matter what.
Don't forget when Janeway and Archer travel back to the 90s and early 2000s. And don't forget Janeway's ancestor who was around for the millenium gate which was being opened in like december of 2000.
"The Eugenics Wars (or the Great Wars) were a series of conflicts fought on Earth between 1992 and 1996. The result of a scientific attempt to improve the Human race through selective breeding and genetic engineering, the wars devastated parts of Earth, by some estimates officially causing some thirty million deaths, and nearly plunging the planet into a new Dark Age."
Nothing seemed to really have changed from OTL. These wars were ez.
Hey, in a show where time travel is possible, that can explain away in difference in continuity.
Time travel meddling Loss of historical doccuments and hell seeing that Iraq has now surpassed Vietnam in length is it so hard to believe World War III could last from 1992 to 2079?
This leads to an interesting question, would it be moral to travel into the past to initiate a global war just to improve the chances of developing a post scarcity civilization earlier? What right does one future have to exist over another?
I 'm curious what the minimum number of alternate universes is to accommodate all of the continuity errors.
@@teruin2 Well you could bound this by the number of episodes. The maximum number of parallel universes needed to accomodate the lack of contnuity would be bounded by each episode being a separate reality therefore we know that there would be no more than the number of episodes in parallel realities to accomodate all possible discontinuities. After that it's a matter of identifying which episodes could coexist with what other episodes but I'll leave that task to someone else.
@TheGamingDitto8321 Way Earlier than that the USS Charybdis in the Star Trek TNG Episode "The Royale" Sported a version of the United States flag with 52 Stars having launched in 2037, This could suggest that fighting was already going on this year and the United States had claimed two territories as States, possibly Puerto Rico and Cuba.
Spock knows exactly the casuality numbers of all three WWs, but deliberately gave wrong numbers to Bones in conversation to study his knowledge about subject matter and his reaction to obviously false information. Bones reaction was highly illogical. Similar fashion HAL studied Frank Poole during their chess game: HAL gave wrong winning path to check mate, but Frank didn't follow, just pretented to, and gave up like only an illogical human can. Fascinating.
Still more consistency than STD. No, seriously, STD threw about the same amount of inconsistencies at us within the pilot episode TOS, the films and TNG did over the course of two decades.
They had to do something about the dates because no one in 1966 didn't think Star Trek would have have spinoffs in the actual 1990s, which was their original prediction for WWIII. and since Next Gen was still on in 1993 and it hadn't happened......
Shatner and Nimoy are just great here. Shatner is often put down for overacting but he was great in a lot of Star Trek.
Much as I don't like to contribute to the man's ego, his Elite Dangerous voice work shows that he is a great actor.
Actually, I think his acting in "The Search for Spock" was some of his best in all of Star Trek.
I would follow Kirk to the gates of hell.
@@DoctorRobertNeville and expect to come home. Wearing blue, of course.
I've always assumed the Eugenics Wars and WW3 were two separate conflicts
any series this big that has this many writers is bound ot have contradiction
Agreed and many writers were either only partly familiar with TOS, or "yes I've seen an episode or two" which doesn't bode well for writing hence the mistakes. Berman and others should have made his writers watch every episode from beginning (including Pike's pilot episode) to end and take notes to get a feel for the show's tone and character arc.
Because I was a victim of the *Cola Wars,*
I received the Grape Nehi Heart Medal... 💜 but I still have nightmares...
The RC Detention Camps under the cruel supervision of Dr. Pepper.
What war will be next?? The Candy Wars? When will the madness stop?!
1:53 that mathematical goof has been bugging me for years!
The early 90's was a dark time with the beginning of what would become the Eugenics Wars, and the Buffalo Bills losing 4 straight super bowls.
To be fair, O’brien has been through a ton, and I mean a TON of traumatizing experiences. And he has openly been acknowledged to have depression and some kind of schizotypal (iirc) disorder after his rapidly-simulated 20 years in a rather nasty prison and the sudden whiplash back to his prior reality. You don’t get prescribed antidepressants and antipsychotics for funsies.
Depression alone can do a number on your ability to recall memories. O’brien should imho at least be a regular at his Starfleet-assigned counselor.
3:45 - That time a Star Wars fan infiltrated the deepest layers of the Trek fortress and sabotaged an episode with Force Powers
I'm shocked ENT used the same fatality statistic as Spock - although by that season Berman & Braga were figureheads.
I gotta say 600 million dead ww3? Thats to damn low. Should've been at least 1 billion if not more.
600 billion human lives not enhanced humans?
@Connection Lost Yes, but you have to remember that it's those leaders who are going to the gallows, and they don't want to. If they have any kind of superweapon at their disposal, it doesn't matter to them if a few of their subjects get caught in the blast, as long as their opponents take the brunt of it, and don't know where the next one will go off. Just look at Stalin, or the current North Korean dynasty. Do you really think either of them would have hesitated to nuke their own people to save their own skin?
In fallout, I think it was at least two billion dead
@Connection Lost Iran, India, Pakistan? Yeah, they would.
You would have to 100% wipe out the current populations of the top 50 most populated cites to even get close to 600 million. That is a *staggering* amount of people, and that's likely meant to be deaths directly caused by weapons of war and not other effects of such a war.
3:53 "Not engineered. Created." Their literally the same thing.
This is one of your best pieces. Nicely compiled.
It's funny that we live in a post-apocalyptic society and we still have the Internet.
Wow
I thought the seemingly pristine old Trek was free of errors and contradictions.
I missed Khan!
I also missed our advance long range space crafts.
To busy reading stories about how people are picking other people to colonize Mars.
OMG - is that THEM!!!!!!
I have an explanation for this and all other continuity problems:
1. In TREK time travel is not only possible, it is relatively easy. Literally anybody with a warp drive can do it (as we saw in ST:IV and "Assignment: Earth").
2. In TREK we know time travel can and does change history.
3. Given the sheer number of warp capable species in the TREK-verse, over the course of millions of years, plus those we know have engaged in time travel (Humans, Krenim, the supervisors of Gary Seven, the Borg, etc.) this means the amount of time travel in the millions and millions of galaxies with their billions and billions and trillions of civilizations must be massive beyond our imagination.
4. Thus--history must be constantly changing. Reality itself is in flux. Events are forever shifting as the remote past is altered, rippling out across the centuries and aeons. History in TREK is fluid. Just like DR.WHO. This accounts for all continuity problems--they aren't problems at all but a symptom of the nature of time as imagined in STAR TREK. Time changes. Continuously. And no one on the inside can possibly notice.
Honestly, Trek's anti-enhancement stance never made sense to me. It's like saying nature matters more than nurture, which runs counter to the very foundation of what Trek is about.
I believe that World War III was considerably after the eugenics wars. If I understand correctly, the wars weren’t ever one major conflict, but a series of smaller ones. It would then make sense that it wouldn’t be counted as World War III. WWIII then happened later, after which came the post Atomic horror, and then the united earth.
4:10 "...telepathic children restored to health by the use of our transporter beam." In other words, we had to wrap up the episode because it was running long and we didn't know how.
Thats not how writing works
They used old/clean transporter data (or in the case of the doctor, an old DNA sample) to filter out/correct the genetic defects during transport, defects which were being caused _by_ the children's genetically engineered telepathic immune systems. The researchers were then left with the (already normally quarantined) children, to continue work on a solution for the newly identified reverse-disease, or whatever you wanna call it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unnatural_Selection_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
Then again, this is a sci-fi show about space magic, so "In other words, we had to wrap up the episode because it was running long and we didn't know how." could apply to almost any episode. Remember that time their holodecks got so upgraded they could create perfect mates? Or that time Q did anything Q does? Or any episode involving time travel? Its all pretty much nonsense they make up as they go =P
@4:36 is not a continuity goof. That episode featured a human colony that left Earth before the Federation existed. That means they would've been disconnected from any laws or changes during that time.
Oh yes, let's just run a diagnostic on O'Brien... 😏
How is that sexual?
I loved the way this was put together. :) Refreshing to have the show speak for itself, without overdubbing. :D
O'Brien a robot, never saw that one coming
This explains everything.
I mean he published robot stories. Makes sense, now.
rethinking the canon is understandable.
When O’Brien says there hasn’t been a case like this in over 100 years he is referring to an augmented human joining starfleet or becoming a doctor. Recall the Pulaski episode was legally sanctioned by the UFP.
There is no way to keep the Pulaski episode in canon. It overwhelmingly contradicts everything before and after it. Star Trek is actually a very Luddite form of science fiction - genetic engineering and transhumanism cannot exist for starfleet.
lucasbachmann
Plus add in that they cured Pulaski with unaffected dna 🧬 from her hair fed into the transporter. First idea was to use and older pattern. Either way they made the transporter a Stargate style Sarcophagus box.
@@2bituser569 you are right about transporters. I suppose at best that episode demonstrates genetic engineering wasn't considered rude until later TNG and banned in DS9. Actually the clone colony was later in season 2. I'm sure when I was 11 years old debating tos vs TNG transporter immortality was surely problematic to us all. Transporters and rapid aging cures have enough prior examples in trek that it alone wouldn't be a deal breaker I suppose.
You hit it on the nail, almost. O'Brien was referring to Una - an augment, not human, but looks totally human so close enough. Lied to get into Starfleet, just like Bashir.
@@lucasbachmann wouldn’t Picard series contradict anti transhumanism? Wouldn’t Picard after s1 qualify as transhuman? He’s been “transferred” into a synthetic body.
The thing is you could make a whole SERIES of videos dealing with the contradictions between the various Star Trek series and movies.
they already have, its called the star trek novels.
@@ahumanbeingfromtheearth1502 Those sometimes make it even MORE confusing, especially with prequel series and movies.
Yeah, I remember Khan's domination over 3/4ths of the world. It was up there with the Bowling Green Massacre!
I survived the Bowling Green Massacre!
A lot of these societies aren’t part of the Federation and wouldn’t be affected by Federation laws regarding genetics.
Conspiracy Theory: What if some of these comic book and sci-fi writers were time travelers, using their lives as inspiration, unintentionally changed the time stream?
panther196321 or PURPOSELY trying to change/prevent a scenario just by simply being “present”, (pun intended - or NOT...hmmm). But then you must ask yourself: which Sci-fi or comic book writer(s) is/are manipulating our time line AND what scenario/outcome are they trying to change and/or prevent...?
You're confusing Star Trek with Back To The Future.
You missed one, Major. There was an episode of Enterprise where T'Pol and Archer are sent back to 2004 era Earth (Detroit, I think) but everything looks fine and dandy with no signs of any Eugenics War.
the eugenics war was a secret war. the majority of the pop at the time had no clue as to the existence of the supermen
@@toomanyaccounts Okay, but how exactly do you keep the conquest of all of Asia, and most of the Middle East, a secret?
@@MirrorDimly puppets. memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Eugenics_Wars
I think star Trek over-estimated how quickly Technology was going to improve lol.
Because back in the '60's, it WAS improving that fast. 2001: A Space Odyssey has a half-completed space-station hotel with regular shuttle service for commercial passengers, and an archeological excavation on the Moon.
Real-World, the Space Shuttle was supposed to just be a bus, going back and forth between the Space Station that they were going to have built by 1975. But budget cuts in the 1970's cancelled NASA's hopes and dreams, and they had to give up on either the station, or the bus, and since a station's no good without a way to get there... If you look at all of the space fiction from the '50's and '60's, it all shows approximately the same rate of progress in the next 40-400 years, as illustrated with the best technology of the time (hence why TOS Enterprise still has CRT screens and toggle switches everywhere). If we had maintained the moon-race level of spending on NASA, we stood a realistic chance of making Star Trek a reality.
Lol what do you mean, we have all kinds of crazy shit from Star Trek. Machine Learning from the expcomp episode, artificial intelligence is possible, androids are only decades away, genetic engineering is feasible.
And yet the TNG era had those weird bulky "pseudo-laptop" computers
Well considering we haven't been to the Moon yet I think you're right
Those scenes from the Next Generation... they keep referring to them as children and the old woman says that the oldest is 12 but all the actors in that scene look like full grown ass adults. I think the youngest could pass for 16 at best but they're suppose to all be 12 and under? Is rapid aging part of the genetic "enhancements" they were given? The oldest in that room looks to be about 25. Aging 18 times faster than normal humans doesn't really feel like it would be a good thing.
BTW there's even more contradictions now as Star Trek Picard has shown that Project Khan which will start the Eugenics Wars is revealed to happen some time after 2024 not 1993 as the Original series had claimed.
That said... considering 2024 is only 2 years in our future at this point, perhaps all that time travel mucked up the time line and kept pushing back when the Eugenics Wars were actually suppose to happen... kind of like how Terminators movies keep delaying when the Cyberdyne will start a war with the human race... that's the problem with Science Fiction that tries to predict the near future, eventually that future comes and the predictions don't actually come true but because it's science fiction a lot of real world history also gets worked in and they have to keep revising the time line. I wander what Star Trek is going to be like on April 4th, 2063 if we still haven't figured out warp technology... or even if we do figure out Warp travel I kind of doubt that we're actually going to discover a species called Vulcans who look exactly like us but with pointy ears. If we ever make actual first contact with aliens and Star Trek is still around by then it would potentially change the entire canon of the franchise. If you're seeing this comment from 41 years in the future assuming this comment has actually been preserved that long, leave a reply. How much has Star Trek changed in the future.
I always kind of thought that star trek characters looked at the eugenics wars as a historical event that they can't exactly confirm. That was my impression of their view of it.
i think that with exception of a few events, there is not much left of 21st century history data
The Eugenics Wars was the one thing that TOS was extremely specific about... and the one thing that TNG seemed to do its hardest to overwrite, retcon, or completely ignore
We should probably just accept that a show first started in 1966 will inevitably be riddled with errors by now. Not many people can remember it all. I just hope a show manages to keep it own canon straight without contradicting itself.
@@fieldy409 I actually applaud Enterprise for treating the Eugenics Wars like they still happened in the 1990's, despite the show being in the early-mid 2000's. Information is more important than visuals when it comes to canon, and in that the worst offender of contradicting canon goes to Next Generation, hands down.
@@mauricioos2294 it makes sense given the level of warfare explained. One can imagine that nuclear war wouldn't be without major cyber attack wars going on simultaneously as well - massive assaults to destroy huge data centers, either through direct bombardment or hackers. Given that cloud based servers is the norm and few companies maintain their own racks anymore, this is a real issue.
Simple, *Starfleet* changed the history books.
Headcanon or Real Canon?
My own theory is the war destroyed many historical records.
I like to think that something happened with time travellers going back and stopping the Eugenics war from being a thing. Like all the other time travel stories that end with 'well i guess we can't put it back because that's how things are now.'
This illustrates a aspect of "story telling" that was very prevalent in TV fora long time, before Babylon 5 and the idea of Long term Story telling. Before that most TV show each episode existed separately, and as such writers were not a concerned with keep the story consistent across each season yet the entire series. Because of this a number of massive inconstanties arose because of the need for one story to have some very different then another.
Short story telling does not exclude fact checking and writing so called 'bibles' for each series.
Nope. Long format storytelling has the exact same problem. Plenty of shows that only planned for a few seasons but got renewed for way more and had to address issues accordingly.
Voyager did this a lot with the time travel stuff.
4:42 Cultivated not genetically inhanced
There was a Voyager episode in which they traveled back in time to the 90s.
Had they written that episode in DS9 a little better, they could have easily explained how Dr. Kingsley's experiments fit within continuity. Perhaps there was a ban on genetic engineering, but after so many centuries, the Federation began to believe those laws were reactionary and outdated. Dr. Kingley's work looked promising, so she was granted a special exemption to see where that kind of research would go. The disastrous results would then have confirmed to the Federation Council exactly why that type of research was banned.
yeah ds9 should have briefly mentioned that. they could have even said maybe that's the same place Bashir got his treatment , and it would also explain why he got off so lightly
Maybe Section 31 influenced the UFP Council in her favor...
and maybe S31 even influenced the bashirs to have their son augmented! Wheels within wheels!
Or maybe the whole thing was classified so there was no need to mention it again in DS9?
It's a shame the writers of TNG, Discovery, Voyager, and DS9 didn't have some sort of source material to go back to so they wouldn't have contradictions like this. ;)
So it started when I was a junior in high school and ended when I was a junior in college :)
This video is so well done. I love the ending! Thank you!
Casualties does not equal death in military terms.
4:37!
WOAH! HOLD ON!
Those people _broke away_ from Earth and Federation Civilization!
_Of Course_ they don't follow the same rules and philosophies as the larger humanity! 😒
I see why you would think these are all "contradictions" - but ripping each and every one out of context doesn't really prove a point, right? Some scenes were just thoughts of less informed characters (Miles is an engineer, not someone who strikes me as hyper-aware of all colonies or isolated incidents), some is just old skool Trek =) where they changed their minds every other episode - and some are just the latest and greatest additions to the federation and or starfleets regulations.
Don't get me wrong, nice video - I appreciate the effort (rly!) - but it's not more than a collection of contradicting scene from wildly different shows and time frames.
Yeah but even Miles O’Brien knew a lot about history however, it’s a piece of knowledge we see him express in Star Trek Deep Space Nine a lot since one of his favorite holosuite programs is the battle of Hastings, and often corrected the likes of Julian whenever they made a historically ignorant claim.
i remember, in the digital enhanced version of ToS from the DVDs; the german dub was renewed setting the Events of Khan 100 years later into the 2090s. Also the voice actors sounded much older (since it were the same as the original airing ^^ )
"An aggressive immunity." One of the most ridiculous concepts on TNG. Yes, let's launch antibodies into the environment to kill anything not us.
Well the Chinese have already done that
@@hankkingsley2976 Well their efforts kill the old, sick and weak, not everyone.
We have “the Last World War” to look forward to in 2026... sounds like fun.
Let’s see, Kirk and crew time travelled to the 20th century at least 4 times, making changes each time, aliens from DS-9 landed in the desert in 1940s, Voyagers crew time traveled to the 1990s and saw no evidence of world war after another time traveler had been making changes for decades. By the ‘time’ of enterprise the timeline has completely changed.
@Thelondonbadger The Guardian portal stated everything was back to normal. Which is a little hard to reconcile given that a homeless man zapped himself with their phaser.
@Thelondonbadger Normal as in "Time has resumed its shape. All is as it was before." Directly quoted by the Guardian at the end of the episode after Kirk and co returned. The context was literally about them fixing their accidental McCoy shenanigans. It wouldn't make sense to be talking about anything else.
As far as the Husnock and the Q in relation to the Guardian are concerned, I don't know anything about the books except that they're officially non-canon like 99% of the time. Also doesn't help that many people, places, and events have different names and backstories because they're licensed out like candy to random unofficial authors.
@Thelondonbadger I am aware the Hunsock are mentioned in the show, but them doing anything time travel related with Q is not. It's completely irrelevant.
Producer 1 circa 1967:Should we give exact dates as to when these future events are supposed to happen?What if our series lasts until then and if nothing like this happened we'll have to invent some convoluted reason as to why.
Producer 2: Don't be absurd. No one is gonna remember this series a decade from now.
The eugenics war cannon is completely unworkable at this point, and it's too complicated to replicate a new one.
The only real problem is the 1990s setting. Placing it in the 2020s and having it work as the starting conflict that leads into the 27yr WWIII would work rather well.
@@Thuazabi I can agree with that , however, as it stands it's a cannon killer. I am starting to doubt the importance of cannon as long as anyone keeps Roddenberry's dream alive in some fashion or another.
What do you mean... there are continuity failures and history contradictions in other Star Trek shows than Discovery and Picard?!
From what I read online, I would have thought those two shows were the only ones that made mistakes.
Weird.
Let's be fair... It's one thing to get a few numbers wrong (even if they are of historic importance, albeit in a fictional context). It's a totally different thing to mess up entire cultures, civilizations, technology, characters and take a huge dump on a show's whole foundation.
If China ever gets its hand on Genetic editing there not going to take it slow
Yeah, its seems after the TOS, the came up with realistic numbers and made them fixed (although they still seem to have problems with dates). The TOS had the same problems most other scifi shows had at the time (namely 2001: A Space Odyssey which stated we should be around Jupiter by now). Also that end colony, they weren't a Federation world, they were colonized separate from Earth's rules right after the Eugenics wars, probably by humans who were like Soon and thought they could make it work. And those institutes are privately run separate for the Federation, so it makes a bit of since that a O'Brien would make that distinction.
The events in 1990's were really just Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds doing steroids and slamming home runs.
The Eugenics Wars was always a weird note in Trek lore. Namely in that it somehow prompted the total halt of genetic improvement in humans due to the weird notion that it would just create tyrants like Khan, or simply people of a similar mindset. And yet if the name is literal, Khan is just the result of selective breeding, not genetic resequencing, as was done with Bashir; yet Bashir's status as an augment is illegal, nevermind that what was done to him is wholly different from what produced Khan and his contemporaries. They were simply the result of producing generations of offspring by pairing those with "ideal" genetic traits, whereas Julian had his DNA reconfigured postpartum.
At the same time, one could say that genetic engineering still took place; humans in the future are learning things at a much more advanced rate than humans actually could, kids are learning calculus at around age 10, which isn't really feasible, even in a future with such advanced tech. We have atomic power now, but that's not to say we can begin teaching 4 year olds algebra, and you have to consider that calculus is something only a few students in high schools can take courses in. For this future to exist, humans would've needed their genetics improved. Similarly, TNG expresses the idea that headaches are a thing of the distant past, as Jean Luc had no idea what it was; this was explained by Dr Crusher as being due to the fact that the human brain was better mapped in the future and medicine had improved humans beyond such things; this would imply that at a genetic level, humanity's DNA had been improved to be typically immune to many trivial (and potentially not-so-trivial) ailments that frequently plague us; by extension, we could assume that migraines were no longer an issue.
By law, it says that you can't improve something that isn't a disabling. Well, let's say they eradicate things like being born missing some limbs first. As time goes on, perhaps things that seem normal to us such as migraines WOUD be deemed horrible to them. Humans used to drop like flies from polio but now we consider it a heinous disease we've pretty much wiped out. Maybe migranes were deemed atrocities and the gene was sequenced out gradualy?
lesson learned: Eugenics is okay as long as the Federation does it.
That ending. Excellent definitely made me lol. Good work!
Did you read the Eugenics Wars books from 10 years ago or so? Interesting read
Great book.
With regards to Spock misquoting WWI and WWII casualties, that's just sheer laziness on the writer's parts at the time.
I think "canon" now has it as something like this.
The Eugenics Wars did take place in the 90's, and accounted for around 30 million dead. It is now NOT referred to as WW3, and although the North Americans and Europeans got involved, much of the carnage and casualties remained local to Asia (India, Pakistan, China, etc).
WW3 was what we saw in First Contact, and was more "conventional" in that it involved everyone (we can assume it was North Americans and Europeans against the Chinese). Started in 2026, 600 million dead, and Colonel's Green and Thorsen didn't really gain traction until the tail end of it going into the 2060's; they believed in purging people who had been mutated by nuclear radiation.
I always thought that the rule against genetic engineering was so no one would find out what Section 31 had actually done: recoded humanity to reduce the selfish genes. It's the only way humanity could ever become what we are in Star Trek.
The prohibition on genetic engineering in Star Trek always bugged me. There’s a quote I saw at one point, “Genetic engineering has the potential to wipe out some of the most devastating diseases and disorders that can happen to anyone, and just as an unintended consequence of that make everyone better at just about everything. Saying you oppose genetic engineering is saying ‘I was lucky enough not to be born with Tay Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, Sickle Cell Anemia, etc. and that is one hundred percent of the people I care about.’”
The problem with Genetic Engineering isn’t genetic engineering making people better, the problem with genetic engineering is how we decide who has access to it and how we decide who and what gets engineered in what way. When ‘better’ is proscribed and unwillingly enforced by rich white people and not being white or being neuroatypical are considered flaws, that’s real world Eugenics, that’s a problem. But the problem isn’t genetic engineering, its that people are being forced to do it without consent by people with twisted morals. When who has access to genetic engineering is defined by who has money to afford it, that’s a problem because it worsens class stratification, the same basic thing that happened in star trek’s Eugenic’s wars. The problem with G.E. Isn’t genetic engineering, its society, and the fact that society is flawed, repeat with greed and scarcity and racism and all the other myriad forms of bigotry. But if a society claims to have gotten rid of all that, exists in post scarcity with equal access to all while celebrating diversity of all forms, then the reasons for prohibiting Genetic engineering are basically nil. The argument that “superior genes breeds superior ego” is bullshit, treating people like they’re better than everyone else will make them thing they are, but that has (almost) nothing to do with genes.
I agree. In the original series genetic engineering was not outlawed, only the creation of genetically enhanced supermen, whatever that means. Its only later that all genetic engineering is outlawed, which does make no sense. I suspect the anti-GM lobby at work?
There seems to be an agenda that Star Trek NEEDS to be a direct reflection of humanity from that year forward. So, the eugenics wars continues to be retconned further and further into the future with each new incarnation causing silly inconsistencies in pursuit of keeping it ahead of our current time. In reality Star Trek's timeline derives and becomes separate from our own in the 1960s. If writers would simply embrace this idea, instead of trying to make star trek "timely" it would be a more true reflection of the series origins and philosophies and explain entirely its inconsistencies to our own timeline.
The Eugenics Wars are up to the 2020s now. Can't wait for them to be pushed past the dates of Space Seed and WoK.
Federation forgot all these instances where genetic engineering has taken place after the 90s
0:08 "casualties are a loss in numerical strength through any cause, as death, wounds, sickness, capture, or desertion." Spock said died, not casualties, so that wouldn't be the underlined 40 million any way, its 15 to 19 million according to Wikipedia, which is closer to Spock's quoted 6 million. Over time, research updates figures like that. In the 60s the estimates may have been lower, or keeping in the science fiction, you could say future estimates are lower based on some evidence they found.
The genetically people in “The Masterpiece Society” don’t exactly fit the situation. This society was unknown by the Federation and not under their rules. Also their breeding was not by genetic manipulation but by selective breeding which is apples to oranges to Khan or even Bashir. Everything else is spot on.
This is the prime example of the "too many cooks" continuity of television writing. Everyone wants to bring in their own elements ("ingredients") into the series ("mixture") and just plain ignore what had come before.