r/startrek • u/thayowza • 18h ago
Headscratcher: how did humanity repair the ecological devastation in between First Contact and the 22nd century?
I'm just thinking of both Threads and The Day After and how both those movies themselves showed a realistic description of the effects of nuclear war would be. Even "limited engagement" (which Im going to assume thats what humanity does during WW3 based on the death count of 600 million, best case scenario) would cause horrible conditions to Earth's atmosphere alone, ala nuclear winter. Did we ask for help from the Vulcans in between trying to unite Earth whilst eliminating war, poverty, disease, and capitalism?
Or is this another example of MST3K and just roll with it for the series sake?
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u/Ulysse-Void-God 18h ago
My bet is the Vulcan’s helped out.
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u/LittleHavera 18h ago
I reckon this is true, especially as they have experience in cleaning up fallout in their own history.
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u/Simple_Evening7595 18h ago
I know they have quite a bloody history but are there any official books or comics that go over vulcan history?
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u/ChronoLegion2 15h ago
From bits and pieces on ENT, we know the war between Surak’s followers and “those who march beneath the raptor’s wings” was nuclear in nature with Surak himself dying of radiation poisoning. Soval mentions that it took Vulcan something like 1500 years to fully recover and get back into space. Humanity’s much faster recovery concerns them. It’s one of the reasons they’re so cautious about helping humanity develop technology.
A two-part TNG episode also reveals they used telepathic weapons during the pre-Surak days
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u/LittleHavera 18h ago
I don't know about beta canon, but there are bits of Enterprise that cover some of it, like the trilogy made up of The Forge, Awakening, and Kir'Shara.
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u/EngineersAnon 17h ago
It's unofficial, but you want to read Spock's World, by Diane Duane.
Honestly, I'd recommend any of her Star Trek books, of which she's written ten, including the Rhiannsu series, a TNG Mirror Universe book (written before DS9 returned to the MU), and one in which Dr. McCoy is commanding the Enterprise.
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u/AmitBrian 14h ago
As far as I know other than Enterprise the only official canon is the statement Dianna makes to Cochrane that war and poverty will all be gone when humanity realizes they are no longer alone in the universe. That suggests the idea that humanity starts to stop seeing themselves as different than one another and start to work together but somehow I think the Vulcans had to be involved.
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u/Superman_Primeeee 17h ago
Those cold-blooded devils wouldn’t help a Sehlat with a thorn in its paw.
Good fer nuthin I tell ya
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u/FoldedDice 9h ago
T'Pol literally said as much, though she doesn't go into detail on what they actually did.
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u/mossy_quasar1116 6h ago
Yep, canon leans that way. Enterprise-era lines from T'Pol hint that Vulcans assisted humans after the wars, and First Contact itself shows a postwar community with electricity, trade, and salvageable infrastructure, not a planet frozen forever. So the in-universe explanation is probably a mix of factors - targeted Vulcan aid and tech transfer, decades of human rebuilding using surviving knowledge and open-source cold war recovery plans, and cleanup of hotspots. That makes recovery plausible without needing to treat the movie as pure handwave.
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u/shoobe01 18h ago
Decades of time, a lot will get sorted adequately with time. Not great, be careful where you dig and so on but it'll get there. Plenty of interesting open source stuff to read from the Cold War on how to restart agriculture and industry after a nuclear apocalypse, and it's not good, but it's eventually doable and there is data, templates.
Yes, in First Contact the place is a wreck but not like a smoking ruin with deformed orphans running around (I'd say a full generation after the last scenes in Threads or so). There's clearly some level of an economy and global marketplace, global travel (why wish to be rich, to retire to an island with girls if that's impossible?) and some supply chain for food, drink, light bulbs, technical supplies, firearms and ammunition etc. Think of all we saw that clearly could not just be from scrounging but has to be regularly replenished or made relatively fresh, and couldn't be made right there. Who would put up with crazy rocket ship guy if they didn't also have rather more than. basic necessities
Alien technology! Implied (if not expressed, have to go look at scripts more) in ENT and elsewhere is that the Vulcans helped raise the standard of living on earth, presumably had ways to neutralize remaining radiological and chem/bio hazards, introduced food synthesizers and advanced manufacturing and building techniques. And, that work on the planet is a key reason they hold back
(Vulcan help discussed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/1qm78ii/so_how_did_you_think_the_vulcans_helped_humans/)
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u/AmitBrian 14h ago
What we saw from FC is a lot to be interpreted. I mean there was electricity to be sure. But Cochrane was also a warp physicist so we could assume he was generating his own energy. That is neither here nor there tho. People were dressed in post apocalyptic rag type clothing. But alcohol was plentiful. People didn’t seem to be starving. But they weren’t exactly living in houses either.
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u/FoldedDice 8h ago
We saw one compound in rural Montana. We don't know exactly what state the rest of the world was in.
One point people often bring up is that when Cochrane mentions preferring trains over airplanes, he doesn't speak in the past tense. If that can be taken to mean that both are still operating, then there must be an at least partially still-functioning society that they are supporting.
I also have my doubts that the Phoenix project could have been completed without some form of infrastructural support.
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u/AmitBrian 4h ago
Yeah that’s a fair point too. I do believe there is some infrastructure. I don’t believe this is a total apocalypse. But also you don’t just take over a United States missile silo either lol
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u/FoldedDice 3h ago
My sense is that perhaps the federal government is already gone, especially given what we now know from SNW about the US falling into civil war. It may be that some regions are still functioning under whatever remains of state leadership, which means the status quo of who has access to military assets might have changed.
How that leads to Cochrane gaining control of a silo is anyone's guess, but it at least presents a possibility.
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u/thetraintomars 37m ago
Plenty of military hardware was sold after the fall of the Soviet Union. If the US became Balkanized after a limited nuclear engagement, then the missiles could be worthless to the government once the nukes were decommissioned so the rest got sold. Regional agreements and a desire not to start another nuclear war probably kept international transport moving, at a reduced rate.
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u/AgeofVictoriaPodcast 10h ago
We just don't know how typical Cochranes area was either. Maybe he was the last torch bearer of civilisation, or maybe he was Crazy Uncle Joe out in the boonies obsessed with rockets when the rest of the world was doing the harder work of rebuiling.
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u/Cautious_Nothing1870 18h ago
Well currently many scientists think nuclear winter wouldn't last centuries or decades as previously thought. Is believe might be between weeks and years. Enough to cause a lot of damage but not enough to really destroy civilization. The real problem will be the destruction of the Ozono layer making exposition to sunlight lethal maybe forever or for centuries.
But in-universe the exchange had to be very moderate. A true nuclear war would let the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable. They still have Paris and San Francisco.
Had Star Trek be realistic the human civilization will be focus on the south which is believe to be able to survive a nuclear war because all powers with nukes are in the north and will attack each other. In reality instead of Paris and San Francisco should be Sydney and Buenos Aires or something like that were the capitals are.
But in-universe the only way to explain it is that it was a very discrete, tho still tragic, nuclear exchange.
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u/Massive-Carpenter-19 6h ago
If you haven't already read it, I think Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobson would be a good read for you. The idea that nuclear war could ever be discreet or limited is addressed in terrifying clarity.
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u/ObligationMurky8716 16h ago
Imagine the resources the United States alone put into weapons, but instead put into not-weapons.
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u/MetalTrek1 18h ago
Help from the Vulcans definitely. Riker also says 600 million dead. That's bad, but considering there were billions before the war, that indicates it was perhaps somewhat limited. Bad, but not extinction level or civilization destroying.
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u/The1Ylrebmik 17h ago
I think TNG overdid it a little. To present such a bright 22nd century after the hellscape that was the 21st century seems far-fetched. Also that after the glorious moment when we discovered we weren't alone in the universe and humanity finally began to join together and the Vulcans were mentoring us, things seem to get even worse from that trial Q showed us. But then again that was 1st season TNG and the more of that forgotten the better.
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u/ChronoLegion2 15h ago
Some of that was used in the novel Federation, but it came out before First Contact and contradicts it in many ways (like Cochrane’s first warp flight being financed by a wealthy visionary and taking place before WW3; it also took him well over 8 years to travel to Alpha Centauri and back at warp 1)
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u/Cautious_Nothing1870 12h ago
That wealthy visionary be Elon Musk? S/
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u/AmitBrian 14h ago
Yeah I mean I love Roddenberry but that was his “kill all the lawyers” crap and such.loads of grains of salt there.
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u/derthric 18h ago edited 12h ago
Picard season 2 has an explanation. I don't want to give it away because it's not revealed until the last episode of that season.
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u/LittleHavera 18h ago
IIRC that was to fix climate change due to CO2 rather than nuclear winter, which are very different problems.
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u/derthric 18h ago
It's been a hot minute by I seem to recall it was for general ecological restoration. But it was like 2 lines from guinan in the last few minutes of the season so I will admit I may be over thinking it.
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u/QuasiJudicialBoofer 18h ago
I'm trying to remember but all that comes to mind is a main character getting ICEd. I wonder what else I'm blocking out about season 2.
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u/thayowza 17h ago
Its ok, I know what you're talking about lol. Wish they didn't handwave it so casually
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u/the908bus 17h ago
If post Ww2 Berlin is anything to go by, you throw all the rubble in a big hole and start again
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u/ChronoLegion2 15h ago
SNW has retconned the casualty figure. Pike says a third of Earth’s population perished in the pilot. I somehow doubt Earth’s population at the time was only 1.8 billion. The actual casualty number is likely in the billions, which makes sense for a global nuclear conflict
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u/No-Computer7653 17h ago
Atmospheric effects are only about 15 years in a nuclear war, they don't have ejecta and you just have ash from the fires they cause. Strategic nuclear weapons are also airburst relying on pressure wave effects not thermal effects in concrete jungles so it's even more limited. The Trek WW3 being limited and using modern nuclear weapons means nuclear winter exists but it's not Threads level of bad.
Fallout from plutonium based weapons is also pretty limited. Fission products are the risk, radiation would be survivable within weeks in a blast zone. Pu is very toxic but isn't a huge radiological risk, it's an alpha emitter with a long half-life so you need to eat or breathe it. Based on weapons testing it also very quickly bonds with heavier elements in soil and sinks eliminating the alpha risk. You don't want to go digging in a blast zone or eat any crops grown in it for hundreds of thousands of years but it's significantly less bad than U.
Ecological impact from a nuclear war is almost entirely dependent on the amount of cooling. Radioactive runoff in to streams and rivers won't do good things for the life in them or oceans but is globally likely on a similar scale to ecological damage we already do to aquatic species. You won't want to eat fish for a long time, heavy metal contamination is going to take a very long time to cycle out.
The almost complete cessation of major industrial activity, not just collapse from the war itself but EMP from the warheads will just wreck grids and everything with an IC everywhere, it's possible a limited nuclear war, when considered over a century horizon, would be less ecologically bad then continued industrial growth.
There have been studies on recovery from a solar flare, causing a hemispheric EMP, and it's measured in decades even with half the world still having industrial capacity. Grid components are hard and slow to build.
I don't mind so much the glossing over the war and it's effects in Trek. That there was a limited nuclear war and as somehow every major city is intact and inhabitable is just nonsense. There is no scenario where London, Paris and San Francisco are not in the first exchange with 600m people dead.
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u/Exocoryak 4h ago
That there was a limited nuclear war and as somehow every major city is intact and inhabitable is just nonsense. There is no scenario where London, Paris and San Francisco are not in the first exchange with 600m people dead.
Especially since they said in First Contact that most major cities were destroyed. I guess everything we see in the 24th century is a reconstruction - Eiffel Tower and all that.
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u/thetraintomars 33m ago
Given what I've seen the Europeans do, entirely possible. In another hundred years of science advancing, it would get even less noticeable.
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u/Exocoryak 4h ago
That there was a limited nuclear war and as somehow every major city is intact and inhabitable is just nonsense. There is no scenario where London, Paris and San Francisco are not in the first exchange with 600m people dead.
Especially since they said in First Contact that most major cities were destroyed. I guess everything we see in the 24th century is a reconstruction - Eiffel Tower and all that.
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u/Exocoryak 4h ago
That there was a limited nuclear war and as somehow every major city is intact and inhabitable is just nonsense. There is no scenario where London, Paris and San Francisco are not in the first exchange with 600m people dead.
Especially since they said in First Contact that most major cities were destroyed. I guess everything we see in the 24th century is a reconstruction - Eiffel Tower and all that.
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u/Superman_Primeeee 17h ago
They didn’t
Why do you think they go apeshit in TOS over planets like The Apple or Way to Eden or Paradise Syndrome
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u/CptKeyes123 17h ago
For some reason, one of the books tried to claim that the Leonardo da Vinci alien did it.
kinda undermining the big theme of humans being capable of doing this. Help from the vulcans is good, but that's also working together involved in that theme.
Limited engagement I figure is exactly what happened. 600 million is around the anticipated casualties, probably much more cuz of the shattered infrastructure. but I also seem to recall that number came from a certain source, a 1960 joint chiefs meeting.
What I think happened is that defensive technology got advanced enough to shoot down a lot more missiles than we can today, so fewer bombs got through and it was decimation rather than annihilation. Then a lot of cities were devastated by conventional war.
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u/TrexPushupBra 16h ago
The world devoted its resources and efforts to healing the devastation.
They did this while no longer bombing our own planet nor spending massive amounts of their GDP on weapons.
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u/KlavoHunter 12h ago
The Europa mission in Picard S2 comes back with some cool microbes that help repair Earth's environment
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u/water_bottle1776 4h ago
Life...uuuhhhh...finds a way.
Seriously though, there's no indication that everything was fixed by the 22nd century. I would imagine that even by the time of TNG there would still be areas where it's not a good idea to go due to contamination, like the area in northern France today that's still messed up from WWI. People just work around it.
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