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rfmcdonaldYesterday, the 5th of April, was an important holiday. It was First Contact Day, marking the day in 2063 when a Vulcan survey ship detected the pioneering warp flight of Zefram Cochrane and initiated first contact with the humans of Earth.
(I love the scene from Star Trek: First Contact.)
First contact with Vulcan transformed humanity. Within a half-century of the Vulcans' initiation of open contact with Earth, the world was rebuilt on sane lines. A planet that had been devastated by internecine war--six hundred million dead, most cities destroyed, few governments remaining--ended up becoming a near-utopia, a prosperous and progressive world on the verge of starflight. Part of the reason for this successful makeover may have been fatigue on the part of humans, but surely a huge part of it was the assistance that the Vulcans lent their devastated neighbour world. Doing so, I'd suggest, was only logical on the Vulcans' part: Never mind avoiding suffering, helping a devastated neighbour world recover from its self-inflicted wounds would be a sure way to build a lasting friendship. Indeed, the Earth-Vulcan alliance went on to become the linchpin of the Federation.
This, this real and highly productive human-Vulcan friendship, is at the root of one of my problems with Star Trek: Enterprise. From the very beginning, many of the Earth Starfleet crew voiced not thankfulness for the Vulcan alliance but resentment. The Vulcans, Enterprise crew claimed, did not transfer enough technology quickly enough. The Vulcans, Enterprise crew claimed, kept humanity sheltered. The Vulcans, in short, were not very good friends.
I find this ridiculous. We actually saw the depths to which Earth fell at the very beginning of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in "Encounter at Farpoint" when Q introduced Picard and his bridge crew to the show courts of the mid-21st century.
The infamous post-atomic horror was ongoing on First Contact Day. Indeed, in parts of the world it seems to have lasted almost to the end of the 21st century.
The Vulcans have their blind spots, but theirs is a fundamentally rational civilization. What possible incentive could they be given to engage in unlimited technology transfers to a planet that had fought a devastating internal conflict with hundreds of millions of dead, that had violent dictatorships persecuting their subjects in drug-addled show trials for enthusiastic audiences, and that was still in the process of being rebuilt on sane lines? Imagine, if you would, what the international community's policy towards the potential nuclearization of Iran would have been if the Islamic Republic had a history of using weapons of mass destruction on its own citizens. Giving Earth Warp 5 technology generations earlier could have been a terrible mistake. Archer et al should have known that.
It's also not obvious to me that an unstable Earth could have managed an in-depth insertion in the galactic community at an earlier date. Earth, as of the early 22nd century, was still in the process of completing its reconstruction, still apparently not a fully unified planet. Would it have been able to handle an earlier introduction to the Andorians, say, never mind the Klingons or the Romulans? When Earth did encounter these neighbours, in the Enterprise era, it was at least somewhat prepared: stable, with extra-system colonies of its own and a growing mercantile diaspora stretching far from Earth. A broken and fragmented world would almost certainly not have done so well.
Yes, I know that Enterprise was all about rah-rah Earth, that the show had little to no room for nuance. That, maybe, just maybe, the Vulcans had good reasons to limit their technology transfers to Earth and to shield humans from a potentially threatening galactic community was something the show probably couldn't have handled structurally. That was a serious fault of the last Star Trek television series to air. May the new one handle this better.
(I love the scene from Star Trek: First Contact.)
First contact with Vulcan transformed humanity. Within a half-century of the Vulcans' initiation of open contact with Earth, the world was rebuilt on sane lines. A planet that had been devastated by internecine war--six hundred million dead, most cities destroyed, few governments remaining--ended up becoming a near-utopia, a prosperous and progressive world on the verge of starflight. Part of the reason for this successful makeover may have been fatigue on the part of humans, but surely a huge part of it was the assistance that the Vulcans lent their devastated neighbour world. Doing so, I'd suggest, was only logical on the Vulcans' part: Never mind avoiding suffering, helping a devastated neighbour world recover from its self-inflicted wounds would be a sure way to build a lasting friendship. Indeed, the Earth-Vulcan alliance went on to become the linchpin of the Federation.
This, this real and highly productive human-Vulcan friendship, is at the root of one of my problems with Star Trek: Enterprise. From the very beginning, many of the Earth Starfleet crew voiced not thankfulness for the Vulcan alliance but resentment. The Vulcans, Enterprise crew claimed, did not transfer enough technology quickly enough. The Vulcans, Enterprise crew claimed, kept humanity sheltered. The Vulcans, in short, were not very good friends.
I find this ridiculous. We actually saw the depths to which Earth fell at the very beginning of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in "Encounter at Farpoint" when Q introduced Picard and his bridge crew to the show courts of the mid-21st century.
The infamous post-atomic horror was ongoing on First Contact Day. Indeed, in parts of the world it seems to have lasted almost to the end of the 21st century.
The Vulcans have their blind spots, but theirs is a fundamentally rational civilization. What possible incentive could they be given to engage in unlimited technology transfers to a planet that had fought a devastating internal conflict with hundreds of millions of dead, that had violent dictatorships persecuting their subjects in drug-addled show trials for enthusiastic audiences, and that was still in the process of being rebuilt on sane lines? Imagine, if you would, what the international community's policy towards the potential nuclearization of Iran would have been if the Islamic Republic had a history of using weapons of mass destruction on its own citizens. Giving Earth Warp 5 technology generations earlier could have been a terrible mistake. Archer et al should have known that.
It's also not obvious to me that an unstable Earth could have managed an in-depth insertion in the galactic community at an earlier date. Earth, as of the early 22nd century, was still in the process of completing its reconstruction, still apparently not a fully unified planet. Would it have been able to handle an earlier introduction to the Andorians, say, never mind the Klingons or the Romulans? When Earth did encounter these neighbours, in the Enterprise era, it was at least somewhat prepared: stable, with extra-system colonies of its own and a growing mercantile diaspora stretching far from Earth. A broken and fragmented world would almost certainly not have done so well.
Yes, I know that Enterprise was all about rah-rah Earth, that the show had little to no room for nuance. That, maybe, just maybe, the Vulcans had good reasons to limit their technology transfers to Earth and to shield humans from a potentially threatening galactic community was something the show probably couldn't have handled structurally. That was a serious fault of the last Star Trek television series to air. May the new one handle this better.
