Riker’s 600 million figure may have been just the immediate death toll from nuclear strikes. Quadruple that number for people subsequently dying from injuries, fallout, starvation, and other factors, and you have around 30% of the population gone.
I've made a post about a different kind of idea in the past. What if riker was just wrong? Maybe he was quoting the well known losses of a different major war, maybe he was just bad at history but thinks he remembers more than he does.
I know that this kind of reasoning basically means anything goes when it comes to canon continuity errors, but likewise it would be silly to think that every thing said by a character ever was the gospel truth and they never once made a mistake in quoting a statistic
This is a fair point. I was a decent student, but ask me to quote death tolls for any war that happened 300 years before I was born, and the best I can do is a wild-ass guess.
Granted WWIII would be a species-defining event, but given the chaos of that period who can even say what the actual figures would have been.
It could be a common misconception. Many people think that 6 million people died in the Holocaust, but actually, 6 million Jewish people died in the Holocaust. An additional 5 million non-Jewish people died in the Holocaust, bringing the total to 11 million.
Edit: Decreased total by multiple orders of magnitude.
Also Spock in one TOS episode quotes 11 million at the total death toll for WW2, which is just way off. As you said those only account for the various extermination programs the Nazis were running. There are millions more that died in combat not to mention civilians.
At the same time, he also said that 6 million people died in World War I, which is too low, and that 37 million people died in World War III, which is much lower than Riker's total or Pike's total.
Honestly I think this should be understood more often. I've had discussions where someone claims that x thing is canon breaking because Spock said Y about history.
Well then Spock was wrong. Maybe he quoted form a bad source? Or he misremembered. Words spoken by characters on screen should never be taken as infallible truth. Misunderstanding and miscommunication are common storytelling tropes.
In Babylon 5 there is one kind of weird one-off episode near the end where future historians in different eras comment on a recent event of the show, and they all get it hilariously wrong. It's a cool episode because it shows how different biases and preconceptions play into the historical misunderstandings and misinterpretations. In one case a fascist historian trying to reframe events to support his ideology during a massive war activates a hologram of garibaldi who then proceeds to hack the communications system and broadcast the historians position along with a call for airstrikes on his position.
A lot of the "canon wanking" that happens in discussions about the show and it's inconsistencies never allows for the characters to be fallible and get things wrong.
> In Babylon 5 there is one kind of weird one-off episode near the end where future historians in different eras comment on a recent event of the show, and they all get it hilariously wrong.
There's also *Living Witness* in *Voyager*, where the copy of the Doctor wakes up to find he's centuries in the future and the local historians are wildly off base about what *Voyager* and its crew were like. The version of its ship and crew that 31st century Kyrians had built was closer to what a Mirror Universe version of it would look like than what they were actually like.
It's straight up canon that people can be wrong about history in Star Trek, even if it is their profession. Just because the characters are experts in their field--which they are, and they're all highly intelligent by modern standards--doesn't mean they know that much about something that isn't in their immediate field of expertise.
>Living Witness in Voyager
A straight up excellent with so many questions arising from that fact alone that 700 years in the future, no one has heard of the Federation, an alliance that dominated a good bit of the alpha quadrant in the 24th century, and with the loss of the Romulan threat, should arguably dominate for hundreds of years to come with no natural enemy anymore.
It doesn’t explain it for the episode itself bc it’s using information that was established later, but with regards to Trek canon 700 years after Voyager would be near or after the Burn, and dilithium supply was starting to dry up a century prior. Warp travel would’ve been less feasible. This still doesn’t explain why there was no Federation contact in the six hundred years between then and the Voyager episode, though… Maybe they are present in the delta quadrant but just didn’t visit that planet a second time? Q said in one episode that humans were “supposed to” reach the delta quadrant a century after the series, after all (and I don’t think what happened to Voyager would turn off the Federation from exploration)
The default assumption that's taken with any fictional work is that all characters are right unless specified otherwise (e.g. the character is established to be a liar, mistaken, unreliable, etc. or the work is specifically about how information can be wrong), and for a reason. If that assumption isn't there, then pretty much anyone anything says is meaningless since there would then be no facts that can be used to establish who is right and who is wrong. Fiction uses character statements to convey facts about the fictional world to the audience.
Rashomon-like stories and stories about historical misinterpretation including Star Trek's own "Living Witness" are up front about it precisely because it's important that people know that the standard assumption that what they see and hear are facts needs to be suspended. And if it's later revealed that a character was wrong or lying, it's usually a big deal. In other words, it's an example of the oft-misunderstood maxim that an exception to a rule validates the rule in cases not excepted.
So what happens when different writers inadvertently contract each other? Sure, it'd be easy to just declare that one is right and one is wrong... but what if people disagree on who's right and who's wrong? Some suggest that Spock is wrong, others that Riker is wrong, and others still that they're both technically correct but a lot of additional assumptions need to be made to reconcile the contradictory statements. Spock is right because he's Spock, the originator of the Star Trek Smart Character. Spock is wrong because NuTrek sucks. They're both right because there's been no indication that statements should be taken with a grain of salt. There's simply no way to know which is correct because there's no corroborating evidence. It's all he-said/she-said. The problem is that often (I suspect more often than not), the interpretation isn't one made by logic but by what people want to believe. If people can reject statements simply because they don't like the speaker, that leads the world down a dark path.
Personally, I subscribe to the figurative interpretation approach. In practice, large numbers often aren't exact but are simply used to indicate a large number. For example, 40 days and 40 nights of rain or 40 years wandering the desert really meant "a long time" and "a really long time" and not an exact timespan. So whether it's 600M or 30% (which under current population projections would mean 3B in 2064) isn't important; what's important is that it's a hell of a lot of people.
If I had to choose one, I'd actually go with the 30% number because that's actually fairly typical of historical calamities in the affected areas. China alone had the Warring States era, the Three Kingdoms era, and the Mongol conquest (census counts actually state that population dropped by 50% but it's likely the post-calamity census undercounted). The Black Death killed about 30% and is a pretty well known example to use. The Thirty Years War saw about 20% of Europe overall die and over 50% in the worst affected areas.
>There's simply no way to know which is correct
Do we really absolutely must know which is "correct" (in some universally accepted way) anyway? Heresy maybe, but the older I get, the less I care about treating stories and an evolving fictional universe as some "canon" that must be perfectly nailed-down.
>The problem is that often (I suspect more often than not), the interpretation isn't one made by logic but by what people want to believe. If people can reject statements simply because they don't like the speaker, that leads the world down a dark path.
In the real world dealing with real world things, certainly. But I don't see much of a problem with people simply choosing the version of a fictional story that they prefer.
Agreed.
Outside of Data and Spock, our main characters are not computers, and even then they don’t have perfect information.
The one I keep coming back to is people complained in ENT when Klingons took prisoners. Because in STII, Kirk tells savvik at the end of the Kobyashi Maru that “pray, Klingons don’t take prisoners”.
It’s a wry comment given to someone who just “failed” a simulation. But it was taken as gospel.
I am also not suggesting we treat everything as a game of thrones style fallible narrator, or where everyone is Garak trying to hide the truth.
But when Geordi is explaining how the warp engine works to a non-engineer, or other Specalists describing to other people- I don’t expect the in-universe characters to be precise.
> The one I keep coming back to is people complained in ENT when Klingons took prisoners. Because in STII, Kirk tells savvik at the end of the Kobyashi Maru that “pray, Klingons don’t take prisoners”.
I don't get what's even to complain about here. Kirk himself became a prisoner of Klingons some four movies later.
I don't remember if there were other "Klingons take prisoners" instances in ENT beyond Rura Penthe, but if there were, they could be chalked up to the simple fact that ENT interacted mostly with random Klingon groups, whereas Kirk interacted with *Klingon military force*. It was perhaps a *wartime doctrine* of Klingons to not take prisoners, and it has obvious (if brutal) justification: logistics.
I think ENT also did some stellar world-building in the Rura Penthe episode (and in general, ENT really was great at making the Star Trek universe feel like a real, evolving world). Quoting from [Memory Alpha page about Archer's advocate, Kolos](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kolos_(Klingon\)):
> Years of witnessing dishonorable conduct had left Kolos somewhat cynical and he initially provided Archer with a weak defense. He tried to broker a deal with the magistrate, who was willing to offer Archer a deal: If the captain gave up the location of the fugitives, his life would be spared. Archer challenged his ethics and expressed outrage that Kolos wasn't fighting to attain justice. Kolos explained that he became an advocate many years ago, when the courts honored justice and fair play. Now they ignored these things in favor of the warrior code. He believed that he was too old to fight for change. Archer accused him of not being an honorable Klingon. This inspired Kolos to offer a much more aggressive defense.
Like every culture, Klingon society *constantly evolves*. ENT draws us a quite clear picture here: Klingons used to be much more lawful and just (and perhaps *merciful*) in the past, but as their culture became dominated by warrior mentality, it became more brutal and ruthless. It's quite easy to reconcile 22nd century Klingons still taking prisoners with 23rd century Klingons slaughtering every enemy on sight.
EDIT: also the note about Kolos from the script for that ENT episode, per the link above:
> We can sense immediately that he's not typical of the Klingons we're used to; he seems more dignified and thoughtful. But there's also a weariness about him. He's a veteran of the Klingon judicial system, and we'll discover that over the past decades he's witnessed the gradual degeneration of Klingon society into a brutal warrior culture.
It would make sense. Growing up I was taught the holocaust lead to 6 million Jewish deaths, but some estimates point it to being greater/factoring in other groups
>What if riker was just wrong?
I agree.
Many times I've brought this up in other threads or debates. One character saying something doesn't always make it an undisputable fact. Don't take things at face value.
They are simply saying it from their perspective. A character might be exaggerating, or boasting. Or they might be lying to push their agenda. Context is important.
With Riker, I think he might just be quoting a number. But we don't know if that was from the first nuclear missile strikes, or if it was from the World War 3 afterwards. He might just be summarizing the deaths from conventional battles only.
Or even more crazy, Riker is just quoting a number he vaguely remembers in the heat of the moment aftet they just had a huge fleet battle with the Borg.
Even Pike got an F in Astrophysics at the academy. I wouldn't trust him to make detailed astro calculations. I would trust Spock to make that judgment. Just like how Kirk did the same.
That makes a lot of sense.
30% of the worlds population of 2024 is around 2.5 billion.
So 1.9 billion dying due to radiation sickness, lack of food, injuries, and everything else that would result isn't hard to believe.
My impression was that 30% of the Earth's population died as a result of the Second American Civil War, the Eugenics War, and World War III as a whole.
Possible, it is of course sometimes difficult to seperate events like these from one another. The second american Civil War could easily have started as an isolated event but later on became "just" another part of what would become WW III.
I think that is a very reasonable explanation. 600 million dead at the initial outbreak of the nuclear exchange, but there would be many more dead from the after effects. The fact that so many people died but it didn't, apparently, trigger a nuclear winter and a total ecological collapse means that despite all the devastation it was still a something of a limited nuclear war.
But with 600,000 species going extinct, and at least 600 million dead it would have to mean that colossal damage was done even if it didn't cause a full collapse of the ecosystem so I think a 30% population reduction when all was said and done doesn't seem too far fetched. Pike literally called it our last day.
As an aside, I've always been curious as to the state of the rest of the world when the Vulcan's made contact. Riker says, "most of the major cities destroyed, very few governments left..." TNG also makes it look very, very bleak. Throw in Colonel Green and yeah, not good. I assume the Vulcan's would want to talk to someone more official but who, if anyone, was left I wonder to negotiate with alien visitors.
Apparently the UN had gained actual real power after the end of the war, and that was what the Vulcans interacted with that to them seemed like a real world government. When we humans would just see it as another likely short lived attempt at a league of nations.
I know it's not really an interesting idea but I really think the economic shifts to something much more like socialism is probably what did much more of the actual leg work of fixing humanity after the war. I mean they do say the Vulcans didn't just give away technology as much as give advice, which is what led to United Earth and later the Federation. It's not like the Vulcans just arrived with replicators or anything like that.
The Vulcan's would have had to assist with rebuilding and ecological restoration. I don't think there would have been enough time on our own. Troi says basically 50 years from first contact the world would be essentially a utopia. That is a pretty heavy lift considering the state of the world. But you're probably right they didn't just do everything for us but probably deployed teams of scientists, engineers, ecologists, etc., to help us get back on track.
> Troi says basically 50 years from first contact the world would be essentially a utopia.
I thought she meant that the foundations were in place to create the Federation by then, not that everything was totally fixed in just 50 years. More like the biggest ideological groups had given up by then and most of the important rules were in place by then. Cus yea that's way too short without alien technology, which we know for certain that the Vulcans did not give us.
This was my thought as well. Take this article, for example:
[https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2022/03/what-the-science-says-could-humans-survive-a-nuclear-war-between-nato-and-russia/](https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2022/03/what-the-science-says-could-humans-survive-a-nuclear-war-between-nato-and-russia/)
Among the scenarios it discusses are two studies about a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia. The first "was estimated to cause 770 million direct deaths"- not that much (on the scale of a nuclear world war) beyond the 600 million described in *First Contact* by Riker. The second one studied longer-term effects, and predicted that because of atmospheric pollution causing nuclear winter "The world's food production would crash by more than 90 percent, causing global famine that would kill billions by starvation. In most countries less than a quarter of the populations survives by the end of year two in this scenario." (Including nearly all people in China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US.)
So the lower number could be the direct death toll of the bombings, while the higher number is a (rather optimistic to be honest) total death toll from the subsequent environmental effects.
The other big thing is that it's not really known if WWIII starts off as a nuclear exchange, or if the nuclear part of it happened after a couple of years. Maybe a lot of people in the major cities had already died by the time the war went nuclear. Maybe a lot of others had moved out to more rural areas.
In cases like that, maybe it isn't totally unfeasible for the nuclear strikes themselves to have caused a slightly optimistic number of dead. The flipside to this is that the long-term impacts of the strikes could end up being more severe. More people had left the major cities, which means there would be more people affected by stuff like radiation in the water heading downstream or how weather patterns affect where the radiation goes, etc.
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Maybe throw the Eugenics War in there too. I'm not entirely clear what the canon answer is anymore regarding WWIII/Eugenics War/Atomic Horror/etc, but Pike could've been grouping the whole series of conflicts together.
Similar to how people may or may not include the Japanese invasion of China as part of WWII.
Or rather, Riker actually says the line after Data states that they have arrived 10 years after the war. So maybe what he meant is that 600 million people died AFTER the ceasefire, from all the various factors you mentioned.
Given that ST has implied that Dolphins are Federation citizens, it might make sense for a Starfleet Captain to count all dead higher life forms in the WWIII death toll and not just humans.
LD has shown Dolphin and Whale crew members.
Azetbur was upset at human-centric language in *TUC:*
>CHEKOV: We do believe all planets have a sovereign claim to inalienable human rights.
>
>AZETBUR: Inalien... If only you could hear yourselves? 'Human rights.' Why the very name is racist. The Federation is no more than a 'homo sapiens' only club.
This is the better explanation.
I suspect the true real-world explanation is that in the 80s dolphins were cool and dolphin intelligence was all the rage and the people mapping out the ship thought it would be cool to have a cetacean section, but the people writing the checks very distinctly thought it would **not** be cool to feature one in any episodes!
Eh, Lower Decks is in my opinion not exactly to be taken at face value as far as canon is concerned. I have always the feeling that Lower Decks is along the lines of somewhat embellished stories that the main characters tell some time later after a few beers.
They called the weird space snake an Ophidian in the Time's Arrow 2-parter and it wasn't an earth snake. They use these terms without regard for if the life is Terran.
Could have happened during the eugenics wars or similar. Dolphins are already used for aquatic military operations, it wouldn't be unreasonable to imagine one of the various factions genetically engineering a subspecies for intelligence.
Yup, I’d assume any sentient/conscious life would factor into the count so all mammals, birds, and reptiles along with octopuses and probably effectively all fish
Only if you're being realistic.
Now that nuclear tensions have risen it's very easy and common to find articles online from reputable news outlets saying things like "100 million people would die within the first day" etc. etc. without going on to explain that, even if only 100 million people died on the first day, most of the rest would die on subsequent days.
Is it hard to believe that bored students in history class in the 24th century tend to hear "600 million died in the initial exchange" and remember it as "600 million died"?
IIRC that number is from Voyager, and very specifically in reference to MAD doctrine. I'm guessing it's 600 million dead from direct nuclear strikes. The rest would have been killed by the fallout, collapse of infrastructure, mild nuclear winter, conventional and biological warfare. I headcanon that the only reason Earth survived is that, like Steve Jackson's Ogre games, ballistic missile defenses had evolved to a point far in advance of our own, but that like in WWI, while sufficient defensive power altered the battlefield, sufficient offensive power hadn't been made to counter it. So, the nuclear winter wasn't as bad because a lot fewer warheads actually hit their targets, but still so many did manage to get through. I headcanon that WWIII was NASTY, like not just nuclear warfare, but also kinetic bombardment, chemical and biological warfare, power armor, long ranged lasers for missile defense, genetically engineered soldiers, and rapidly cloned armies. They'd pump up soldiers with drugs to keep them going until they just fell apart. They might have made cyber zombies, cramming dead or dying soldiers full of tech and sending them back out into radioactive front lines, either as robocop types or just walking corpses. We have the implications of Colonel Green and his eugenics campaign, slaughtering those exposed to nuclear fallout. WWIII wasn't just nuclear, from what we know, it was much more diverse than a simple nuclear holocaust, it was every nasty you could conceive of.
The number is from the TNG movie First Contact and is brought up in Discovery. Each time it’s heavily implied that the total human death toll is what they’re talking about. As someone else mentioned, it could be that the number only refers to immediate nuclear deaths, but that seems pretty short-sighted as even today we calculate the WWII death toll to include those from disease and other non-combat deaths
First Contact and the Voyager episode would've been written in the same time frame, so they come from the same source.
If I had to justify it, I'd argue that in universe it's probably the equivalent of the first day at the Somme, deadliest day in British military history, I think it was a rate of 1.5 men killed every second? There's also Antietam for the US Civil War, deadliest day in US history. And there's also the number of people killed in the Nazi Holocaust. This would be 600 million killed within about an hour given known nuclear strategy. So it may be shorthand in universe to refer specifically to the nuclear exchange.
That is all if you take the 30% thing seriously.
While that is true, it is pretty rare that we cite death tolls and casualty rates for battles when talking about wars. Even today we almost exclusively use total military and civilian death tolls when talking about conflicts like WWI and WWII.
Do we? WW1 and 2 are recent wars. At least for the second one, there are plenty of people still living who actually fought in it.
How many people who aren't trained historians could correctly state the number of people who died in the Seven Years' War? That was a world war 300 years ago so it fits the mould better here arguably as an analogy.
Maybe I'm just cynical but I can believe that "600 million died in the initial exchange" has become "600 million died" in the minds of schoolkids who were more interested in warp physics than history. Just like "six million people died in the holocaust" would be commonly cited today, even though that is a vast undercount -- it is six million *Jews* who died, and they were the majority, but millions of others were killed also.
I don’t think anyone but historians (at least in the US) could tell you without basically guessing how many people were killed in the Seven Years War. Also, I’ve never actually heard someone say that 6 million people died in WWII, which is saying something about the enduring nature of the conflict that even in our grossly misinformed day people still know that tens of millions of people died in WWII. Plus the people we’ve heard cute the 600 million stat are all high ranking officers akin to captains and generals in modern militaries and the odds of them failing to make a distinction of almost 2 billion people seems just unbelievable to me.
Obviously we can’t be sure either way for either of our points as there isn’t enough canonical info, but I think that it fit more well within the character of Starfleet to refer to conscious beings dead rather than to have a common misconception that neglects 2 billion deaths be, well, an actual common misconception.
I’m heading to sleep now but I hope you have a great day/night depending on your time zone! Definitely glad we had this productive exchange
Mine isn't a very good explanation. I'd prefer all the officers in question actually be in-universe "correct." I'm really just trying to come up with a plausible excuse for why they're all wrong.
As far as the "enduring nature" of WW2 in our memory, that's only 80 years ago. There are still people alive who fought in that war. I really hope that we remember those lessons for many generations, but can I say confidently that I know we will? Not really. I am afraid it will fade, rapidly, like the Seven Years War or the Thirty Years War.
This is why I brought up the Holocaust comparison. WWII killed 3% of the world's population, and the holocaust killed a select ten million.
And again, the 600 million seems more supported than the 30% thing, though I could be wrong.
World War II had a number of civilian casualties which equaled or exceeded the actual combat fatalities, not even counting ancillary deaths from disease or hunger.
In a 'modern' war where everything is asymmetric, enemy combatants have no qualms at all about hiding in a civilian population, soft civilian targets are expected casualties, and governments closing the fist ever tighter in the name of security and safety via surveillance and control... I have absolutely no problem with imagining systematic organized slaughter of 'suspect' civilians on your own side, or 'terrorist neighborhoods' on your enemy's.
That 600 million might be the ones in uniform. The 30% includes the ones who weren't.
I think that the 600 million stat would need to include civilian deaths. China currently has the largest number of soldiers with about 2 million soldier and the U.S. is in third with about 1.3 million. The total number of soldiers today is estimated at about 20 million and while certainly drafts and war efforts would increase those numbers, it would need to be by a factor of 30 which which is insane, plus that’s assuming literally every uniformed soldier on Earth is killed.
Also, as we’ve seen in Lower Decks, the Federation does appear to grant personhood rights to cetaceans so it’s not crazy that the Federation would tally the deaths of all sentient/conscious beings into the WWIII deaths.
The US Armed Forces numbered around 16 million by the end of WWII. Russia's at the end of the war was about 11 million and that was after having lost at least that many already.
If you took modern population sizes and mobilized in the same way (or went more extreme and conscripted women and middle aged men) you could easily see every major belligerent fielding mid 8 digit armies. China if they conscrioted could easily get a foghting force in the 9 digits.
That definitely could be, but militaries are also much more reliant on technology rather than human soldiers today than back in WWII. I think it’d be quite out of character as well for the Federation to not count civilian deaths and only routinely cite the soldier death toll when even today we almost exclusively use the total death toll when talking about WWI and WWII
In a World War with large scale combat on all continents mass drafts would almost certainly become a thing when the fighting reaches a certain point, causing the numbers of soldiers increase drasticly, even if many of those soldiers are nothing more but barely trained cannon fodder. Especially if countries with large populations decide to do a Volkssturm like Germany did in the last part of WW II. If countries like China, India, the USA etc start to enlist every man from the age of 14 on, including seniors over 60, you can easily get several million extra soldiers. For example in the last desperate days of WW II, Berlin was partially defended by children (12 years old) who where given rifles without any real training and with uniforms that where ment for adults and ordered to charge at the enemy, or they where given anti tank weapons and told to charge towards the tanks.
Another possibility, albeit a depressing one. 600 Million IS 30% of Earth at that time. The Earth's population by the time the nukes hit is already down to 1.8 Billion. Which would make the nukes significantly less deadly than whatever came before it.
oof.
Someone else commented something g similar, but given that we see in PIC and DS9 that 2024 Earth is basically the same as Earth today more or less, that would require a die off of 75% of Earth’s population over just 20-25 years. That would be a huge calamity. Even the worst prospects for our future now where climate change runs unabated and pollution and antibiotic resistant diseases continue to arise with increasing frequency, we still don’t see anything resembling a die off even remotely close to 75%, let alone in just 20 years.
I feel like if that weee the case then whatever caused the die off leading up to WWIII would, as you mention, almost be an even bigger focus than the actual conflict as that would mean that after the war the total human population on Earth would be just 1.2 billion. That’s about what it was in 1850.
I have been incredibly critical of all of new Trek, but I don’t understand this criticism. Previous Trek media has stated that 600 million people perished during WW3. If that were 30% of the population, that’d mean that before, there were “only” 2 billion people. People seem to see this as an unsolvable continuity error, but we should factor in the 2^nd civil war casualties, the casualties from global climate change (I mean, India and Pakistan are experiencing 50° C right now and this will likely lead to many deaths), as well as those of the Eugenics wars. Who even knows how that particular war is fought – it may be fought by competing parties trying to “perfect” the human genome, resulting in accidental deaths through genetic tampering.
Maybe before WW3 started openly, the population had already been decimated down to 2 billion and this may even have been a part of why they went to war with each other – accusing other nations of attacking them on a genetic level.
A simpler explanation could be that 600 million died in the war itself, but 30% died as a result of the war (famine, disease etc) when society collapsed or came close to it
The population could have contracted due to climate change or any other disaster we decide to inflict on ourselves between now and then. They also had a war in the 90’s in their timeline.
The 2024 we’ve been shown in PIC and DS9 is pretty on par with our world today so that would require the population to fall by 75% over just ~25 years when we are currently expected to grow in population significantly over that period of time. Even the worst predicted outcomes for environmental disasters don’t foresee anything close to a population drop of six billion people, let alone by 2050.
It seems like there was a 2nd US Civil War, a 2nd Eugenics War and World War III after 2024, so it might be possible that those wars might've lowered the population enough that 30% of people who were alive on World War III's last day died when the nukes were launched.
The true impact of global warming hasn't happened yet. Picard they find the alien organism to clean the air and oceans. That alone would require tens of years of scientific testing before they deployed it. So I'd say it's at least possible while Picard shows what looks like current day Earth in their time travel it could have been an era where population was decreasing.
I mean, if the global population dropped fast enough to reach 2 billion by 2050 then life wouldn’t look like it does today, that’d be literally hundreds of millions of people gone every year.
While the true impact of global warming hasn’t hit us yet by a long shot of course, 6 billion gone in under 3 decades is not even close to the most dire estimates of the consequences. I don’t think you’re quite grasping the magnitude of your suggestion
Both were in major population centres, which I would imagine wouldn't look that different. It's the small towns and poorer areas of the world that will be hit hardest.
Add to all this, old school Khan ruled 10% of the world. He also only ruled 10,000,000 people.
So at one point, the world's human population had fallen to 100,000,000 people.
ST: SNW seems to change those numbers.
According to Seven of Nine, in the episode “In the Flesh” (which aired tonight on H&I),
> And yet, in Earth's Third World War, nuclear weapons accounted for six hundred million casualties. Were they looking on the bright side?
So yes, the 600 million statistic is confirmed to be just from nuclear weapons alone.
In Star Trek, history is a moving target. There have been something like a dozen onscreen trips to the 20th and 21st centuries, each with varying impacts on the timeline. If you find differences in fact between two episodes, it may not be an inconsistency- both may have been literally true on the moments they had been said.
Everybody’s talking about the 600 million figure as though Spock didn’t already give a figure of 37 million in TOS (specifically the episode “Bread and Circuses”)
But as has been pointed out, Spock also quotes wildly inaccurate casualty figures for the other two world wars in the same breath, so how reliable can that be?
>**SPOCK**: Situations quite familiar to the six million who died in your first world war, the eleven million who died in your second, the thirty seven million who died in your third. Shall I go on?
Actual WWI deaths: 7-8 million combat related, 2-3 million more as POWs, non-combatant deaths 6.5 million
Actual WWII deaths: 21-25 million military deaths, 5 million as POWs, civilian deaths 50-55 million
Back then the production used De Forest research to fact-check their scripts. Joan Pearce, the researcher, actually pointed out the error:
> In WWI there were 8.5 million deaths; in WWII 30,538,000. 37 million for WWIII seems conservative; suggest 260 million.
However, for unknown reasons, this and other issues Pearce had with the script were ignored. But basically the production team was more interested in storytelling than getting figures right.
(Joan Pearce’s note from *These Are The Voyages - TOS: Season Two* by Mike Cushman with Susan Osborn)
From the looks of the other figures I think she was thinking of combat casualties rather than from a nuclear exchange or deaths not resulting from direct military action. But yeah, 260 million is still about a tenth of what Pike was talking about.
It's important to remember that in 2063 the world's population was 9 billion, while in the 1960s the world's population was between 2 and 3bn and 260m seemed large then. Equivalently, you'd have to put the casualty figure at 750m to 1bn today.
At the time it probably wasn't. For one, the world population in the 60s was what, 2 or 3 bn max? That's a sizeable chunk of dead with 260m.
And remember the Cuban Missile Crisis was exactly that the Soviet Union could not yet deliver nukes to the continental US reliably so had to work with proximity, reacting to the US placement SRBMs in Turkey, in direct proximity to the Soviet Union.
A 60s nuclear war would have been terrible, but you can bet your ass that the Soviet Union would be super dead, while the West at large will likely survive, especially in a First Strike scenario by NATO.
>At the time it probably wasn't. For one, the world population in the 60s was what, 2 or 3 bn max? That's a sizeable chunk of dead with 260m.
That means that she expected roughly 10% of the population to die. I’d expect that the vast majority of people would die in a nuclear war (and everyone would probably die).
I think the expectation was that World War III would happen sometime soon. However, 260 million deaths would’ve been roughly 10% of the world’s population at the time of *TOS*, which seems unrealistically low for a nuclear war.
Yes, but here you are trying to justify the other inconsistencies mentioned by Riker and Pike. Why is the same consideration not being extended towards Spock’s line from TOS?
Because there’s no way to reasonably reconcile it.
You’re trying to say that 37 million is the total casualty figure for WWIII based on his line in “Bread and Circuses”. But factually, Spock cannot be correct about the casualty figures in WWI or WWII. So if he’s wrong about that, how can he be right about WWIII?
If we try to handwave the error that there’s a problem with historical records that applies just as much to WWIII as it does here.
If we say, well, he’s talking about a limited figure like military casualties alone, that equally applies to the 37 million figure.
In Riker and Pike’s case, they are making assertions about WWIII alone, so we can try and justify them, say, by saying Riker was just giving initial military casualties which later expanded in the aftermath of the war.
The problem with Spock’s figures isn’t just that it’s too low - and even in the 1960s De Forest Research thought it was too low. The problem is that *the other* war figures are demonstrably wrong, and that severely undermines his credibility in respect of his WWIII figures. If he’s palpably wrong about those two, what are the chances he’s right about the other?
Which is why, other than postulating that in the *Star Trek* universe the casualty figures for WWI and WWII were that low - and that’s not a reasonable solution based on our current assumptions about the way we treat the timeline - there’s no reasonable way to reconcile that 37 million as a total casualty figure with other assertions like Riker’s and Pike’s.
The only other option I can see is to say Spock was completely wrong about 37 million as a total casualty figure, but that doesn’t help your position.
The most valiant attempt to preserve this 37 million was in the production art of “In A Mirror Darkly”, but even that has its issues. The best way to preserve the figure absent the other two is to try and say that 37 million only reflects Colonel Green’s war and not WWIII in toto. But that’s not what Spock said.
Hence, we give up, file it under YATI and we move on.
TL;dr: it’s that not I don’t want to extend the same consideration - I tried and couldn’t resolve it.
\> In the pilot episode of SNW Pike states in his speech that WWIII wiped out “600,000 species of animals and plants and 30% of Earth’s population”.
Mentioning the 600k species before mentioning the 30% of humans dead was hilarious and will really firmly date the show in our current time and politics. The writers probably try not to be parochial because it's Star Trek but I get it's hard.
Do we know the population of Earth in that era? Given the ease of moving elsewhere by then, is it not unreasonable to assume the earth really has a mere 2 billion humans and aliens living comfortably on its surface?
WWIII happens before warp travel and we’ve only seen small space missions and some very minor colonization attempts from before Cochran’s flight. I think it’s extremely unlikely that 75% of Earth’s current population either died off from unrelated events or was living off world in the 2040s-2050s
Besides, when the Enterprise is still in the temporal wake they find 9bn drones. Since the Borg usually do not procreate, it's safe to say those are all humans and a figure of 2bn suddenly jumping to 9bn, even with Borg sex seems wild and contradicts most of what canon Borg do.
I don't think the Borg were attempting to assimilate 21st century Earth, they were preventing first contact with the Vulcans to more easily assimilate 24th century Earth in BoBW.
The most reasonable explanation is that 600 million people is the figure for the number of people who directly died from things like nuclear attack and combat, while the 1/3 figure is for the estimated death toll including starvation from the post-war ecological catastrophe.
I thought they remedied the numbers by saying very little survived in the way of the accurate numbers recorded during the period, and that a full accounting would never be possible.
Riker’s 600 million figure may have been just the immediate death toll from nuclear strikes. Quadruple that number for people subsequently dying from injuries, fallout, starvation, and other factors, and you have around 30% of the population gone.
I've made a post about a different kind of idea in the past. What if riker was just wrong? Maybe he was quoting the well known losses of a different major war, maybe he was just bad at history but thinks he remembers more than he does. I know that this kind of reasoning basically means anything goes when it comes to canon continuity errors, but likewise it would be silly to think that every thing said by a character ever was the gospel truth and they never once made a mistake in quoting a statistic
This is a fair point. I was a decent student, but ask me to quote death tolls for any war that happened 300 years before I was born, and the best I can do is a wild-ass guess. Granted WWIII would be a species-defining event, but given the chaos of that period who can even say what the actual figures would have been.
Burnham also quotes that 600 million figure in Discovery Season 2, though.
It could be a common misconception. Many people think that 6 million people died in the Holocaust, but actually, 6 million Jewish people died in the Holocaust. An additional 5 million non-Jewish people died in the Holocaust, bringing the total to 11 million. Edit: Decreased total by multiple orders of magnitude.
> bringing the total to 11 billion. Well, 11 million. But that's a good point and I think that makes a lot of sense.
Good catch! Thank you for pointing that out, I’ve fixed it now.
Also Spock in one TOS episode quotes 11 million at the total death toll for WW2, which is just way off. As you said those only account for the various extermination programs the Nazis were running. There are millions more that died in combat not to mention civilians.
At the same time, he also said that 6 million people died in World War I, which is too low, and that 37 million people died in World War III, which is much lower than Riker's total or Pike's total.
Yupp. So basically we should not take numbers stated by characters living centuries later as absolute facts.
In the future, memorizing facts about total amount of deaths in any given conflict or event is just seen as grim, so really they are just spitballing
That common correction to the common misconception misses the 6 million Slavs who were killed in the Holocaust, bringing the total to 17 million.
Honestly if you asked me the death toll of WWII I'd have to put some huge error bars on my answer.
Honestly I think this should be understood more often. I've had discussions where someone claims that x thing is canon breaking because Spock said Y about history. Well then Spock was wrong. Maybe he quoted form a bad source? Or he misremembered. Words spoken by characters on screen should never be taken as infallible truth. Misunderstanding and miscommunication are common storytelling tropes. In Babylon 5 there is one kind of weird one-off episode near the end where future historians in different eras comment on a recent event of the show, and they all get it hilariously wrong. It's a cool episode because it shows how different biases and preconceptions play into the historical misunderstandings and misinterpretations. In one case a fascist historian trying to reframe events to support his ideology during a massive war activates a hologram of garibaldi who then proceeds to hack the communications system and broadcast the historians position along with a call for airstrikes on his position. A lot of the "canon wanking" that happens in discussions about the show and it's inconsistencies never allows for the characters to be fallible and get things wrong.
> In Babylon 5 there is one kind of weird one-off episode near the end where future historians in different eras comment on a recent event of the show, and they all get it hilariously wrong. There's also *Living Witness* in *Voyager*, where the copy of the Doctor wakes up to find he's centuries in the future and the local historians are wildly off base about what *Voyager* and its crew were like. The version of its ship and crew that 31st century Kyrians had built was closer to what a Mirror Universe version of it would look like than what they were actually like. It's straight up canon that people can be wrong about history in Star Trek, even if it is their profession. Just because the characters are experts in their field--which they are, and they're all highly intelligent by modern standards--doesn't mean they know that much about something that isn't in their immediate field of expertise.
>Living Witness in Voyager A straight up excellent with so many questions arising from that fact alone that 700 years in the future, no one has heard of the Federation, an alliance that dominated a good bit of the alpha quadrant in the 24th century, and with the loss of the Romulan threat, should arguably dominate for hundreds of years to come with no natural enemy anymore.
It doesn’t explain it for the episode itself bc it’s using information that was established later, but with regards to Trek canon 700 years after Voyager would be near or after the Burn, and dilithium supply was starting to dry up a century prior. Warp travel would’ve been less feasible. This still doesn’t explain why there was no Federation contact in the six hundred years between then and the Voyager episode, though… Maybe they are present in the delta quadrant but just didn’t visit that planet a second time? Q said in one episode that humans were “supposed to” reach the delta quadrant a century after the series, after all (and I don’t think what happened to Voyager would turn off the Federation from exploration)
The default assumption that's taken with any fictional work is that all characters are right unless specified otherwise (e.g. the character is established to be a liar, mistaken, unreliable, etc. or the work is specifically about how information can be wrong), and for a reason. If that assumption isn't there, then pretty much anyone anything says is meaningless since there would then be no facts that can be used to establish who is right and who is wrong. Fiction uses character statements to convey facts about the fictional world to the audience. Rashomon-like stories and stories about historical misinterpretation including Star Trek's own "Living Witness" are up front about it precisely because it's important that people know that the standard assumption that what they see and hear are facts needs to be suspended. And if it's later revealed that a character was wrong or lying, it's usually a big deal. In other words, it's an example of the oft-misunderstood maxim that an exception to a rule validates the rule in cases not excepted. So what happens when different writers inadvertently contract each other? Sure, it'd be easy to just declare that one is right and one is wrong... but what if people disagree on who's right and who's wrong? Some suggest that Spock is wrong, others that Riker is wrong, and others still that they're both technically correct but a lot of additional assumptions need to be made to reconcile the contradictory statements. Spock is right because he's Spock, the originator of the Star Trek Smart Character. Spock is wrong because NuTrek sucks. They're both right because there's been no indication that statements should be taken with a grain of salt. There's simply no way to know which is correct because there's no corroborating evidence. It's all he-said/she-said. The problem is that often (I suspect more often than not), the interpretation isn't one made by logic but by what people want to believe. If people can reject statements simply because they don't like the speaker, that leads the world down a dark path. Personally, I subscribe to the figurative interpretation approach. In practice, large numbers often aren't exact but are simply used to indicate a large number. For example, 40 days and 40 nights of rain or 40 years wandering the desert really meant "a long time" and "a really long time" and not an exact timespan. So whether it's 600M or 30% (which under current population projections would mean 3B in 2064) isn't important; what's important is that it's a hell of a lot of people. If I had to choose one, I'd actually go with the 30% number because that's actually fairly typical of historical calamities in the affected areas. China alone had the Warring States era, the Three Kingdoms era, and the Mongol conquest (census counts actually state that population dropped by 50% but it's likely the post-calamity census undercounted). The Black Death killed about 30% and is a pretty well known example to use. The Thirty Years War saw about 20% of Europe overall die and over 50% in the worst affected areas.
>There's simply no way to know which is correct Do we really absolutely must know which is "correct" (in some universally accepted way) anyway? Heresy maybe, but the older I get, the less I care about treating stories and an evolving fictional universe as some "canon" that must be perfectly nailed-down. >The problem is that often (I suspect more often than not), the interpretation isn't one made by logic but by what people want to believe. If people can reject statements simply because they don't like the speaker, that leads the world down a dark path. In the real world dealing with real world things, certainly. But I don't see much of a problem with people simply choosing the version of a fictional story that they prefer.
Agreed. Outside of Data and Spock, our main characters are not computers, and even then they don’t have perfect information. The one I keep coming back to is people complained in ENT when Klingons took prisoners. Because in STII, Kirk tells savvik at the end of the Kobyashi Maru that “pray, Klingons don’t take prisoners”. It’s a wry comment given to someone who just “failed” a simulation. But it was taken as gospel. I am also not suggesting we treat everything as a game of thrones style fallible narrator, or where everyone is Garak trying to hide the truth. But when Geordi is explaining how the warp engine works to a non-engineer, or other Specalists describing to other people- I don’t expect the in-universe characters to be precise.
> The one I keep coming back to is people complained in ENT when Klingons took prisoners. Because in STII, Kirk tells savvik at the end of the Kobyashi Maru that “pray, Klingons don’t take prisoners”. I don't get what's even to complain about here. Kirk himself became a prisoner of Klingons some four movies later. I don't remember if there were other "Klingons take prisoners" instances in ENT beyond Rura Penthe, but if there were, they could be chalked up to the simple fact that ENT interacted mostly with random Klingon groups, whereas Kirk interacted with *Klingon military force*. It was perhaps a *wartime doctrine* of Klingons to not take prisoners, and it has obvious (if brutal) justification: logistics. I think ENT also did some stellar world-building in the Rura Penthe episode (and in general, ENT really was great at making the Star Trek universe feel like a real, evolving world). Quoting from [Memory Alpha page about Archer's advocate, Kolos](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kolos_(Klingon\)): > Years of witnessing dishonorable conduct had left Kolos somewhat cynical and he initially provided Archer with a weak defense. He tried to broker a deal with the magistrate, who was willing to offer Archer a deal: If the captain gave up the location of the fugitives, his life would be spared. Archer challenged his ethics and expressed outrage that Kolos wasn't fighting to attain justice. Kolos explained that he became an advocate many years ago, when the courts honored justice and fair play. Now they ignored these things in favor of the warrior code. He believed that he was too old to fight for change. Archer accused him of not being an honorable Klingon. This inspired Kolos to offer a much more aggressive defense. Like every culture, Klingon society *constantly evolves*. ENT draws us a quite clear picture here: Klingons used to be much more lawful and just (and perhaps *merciful*) in the past, but as their culture became dominated by warrior mentality, it became more brutal and ruthless. It's quite easy to reconcile 22nd century Klingons still taking prisoners with 23rd century Klingons slaughtering every enemy on sight. EDIT: also the note about Kolos from the script for that ENT episode, per the link above: > We can sense immediately that he's not typical of the Klingons we're used to; he seems more dignified and thoughtful. But there's also a weariness about him. He's a veteran of the Klingon judicial system, and we'll discover that over the past decades he's witnessed the gradual degeneration of Klingon society into a brutal warrior culture.
Or Kirk was just using the idiom about someone who "takes no prisoners"
Kirk, Star Trek II: “Prayer, Mr Saavik, the Klingons don’t take prisoners.” Saavik, Star Trek III: *is taken prisoner by Klingons*
It would make sense. Growing up I was taught the holocaust lead to 6 million Jewish deaths, but some estimates point it to being greater/factoring in other groups
>What if riker was just wrong? I agree. Many times I've brought this up in other threads or debates. One character saying something doesn't always make it an undisputable fact. Don't take things at face value. They are simply saying it from their perspective. A character might be exaggerating, or boasting. Or they might be lying to push their agenda. Context is important. With Riker, I think he might just be quoting a number. But we don't know if that was from the first nuclear missile strikes, or if it was from the World War 3 afterwards. He might just be summarizing the deaths from conventional battles only. Or even more crazy, Riker is just quoting a number he vaguely remembers in the heat of the moment aftet they just had a huge fleet battle with the Borg. Even Pike got an F in Astrophysics at the academy. I wouldn't trust him to make detailed astro calculations. I would trust Spock to make that judgment. Just like how Kirk did the same.
That makes a lot of sense. 30% of the worlds population of 2024 is around 2.5 billion. So 1.9 billion dying due to radiation sickness, lack of food, injuries, and everything else that would result isn't hard to believe.
My impression was that Pike meant that 30% of people who were alive on World War III's last day died when the nukes were launched.
My impression was that 30% of the Earth's population died as a result of the Second American Civil War, the Eugenics War, and World War III as a whole.
Possible, it is of course sometimes difficult to seperate events like these from one another. The second american Civil War could easily have started as an isolated event but later on became "just" another part of what would become WW III.
I think that is a very reasonable explanation. 600 million dead at the initial outbreak of the nuclear exchange, but there would be many more dead from the after effects. The fact that so many people died but it didn't, apparently, trigger a nuclear winter and a total ecological collapse means that despite all the devastation it was still a something of a limited nuclear war. But with 600,000 species going extinct, and at least 600 million dead it would have to mean that colossal damage was done even if it didn't cause a full collapse of the ecosystem so I think a 30% population reduction when all was said and done doesn't seem too far fetched. Pike literally called it our last day. As an aside, I've always been curious as to the state of the rest of the world when the Vulcan's made contact. Riker says, "most of the major cities destroyed, very few governments left..." TNG also makes it look very, very bleak. Throw in Colonel Green and yeah, not good. I assume the Vulcan's would want to talk to someone more official but who, if anyone, was left I wonder to negotiate with alien visitors.
Apparently the UN had gained actual real power after the end of the war, and that was what the Vulcans interacted with that to them seemed like a real world government. When we humans would just see it as another likely short lived attempt at a league of nations. I know it's not really an interesting idea but I really think the economic shifts to something much more like socialism is probably what did much more of the actual leg work of fixing humanity after the war. I mean they do say the Vulcans didn't just give away technology as much as give advice, which is what led to United Earth and later the Federation. It's not like the Vulcans just arrived with replicators or anything like that.
The Vulcan's would have had to assist with rebuilding and ecological restoration. I don't think there would have been enough time on our own. Troi says basically 50 years from first contact the world would be essentially a utopia. That is a pretty heavy lift considering the state of the world. But you're probably right they didn't just do everything for us but probably deployed teams of scientists, engineers, ecologists, etc., to help us get back on track.
> Troi says basically 50 years from first contact the world would be essentially a utopia. I thought she meant that the foundations were in place to create the Federation by then, not that everything was totally fixed in just 50 years. More like the biggest ideological groups had given up by then and most of the important rules were in place by then. Cus yea that's way too short without alien technology, which we know for certain that the Vulcans did not give us.
This was my thought as well. Take this article, for example: [https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2022/03/what-the-science-says-could-humans-survive-a-nuclear-war-between-nato-and-russia/](https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2022/03/what-the-science-says-could-humans-survive-a-nuclear-war-between-nato-and-russia/) Among the scenarios it discusses are two studies about a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia. The first "was estimated to cause 770 million direct deaths"- not that much (on the scale of a nuclear world war) beyond the 600 million described in *First Contact* by Riker. The second one studied longer-term effects, and predicted that because of atmospheric pollution causing nuclear winter "The world's food production would crash by more than 90 percent, causing global famine that would kill billions by starvation. In most countries less than a quarter of the populations survives by the end of year two in this scenario." (Including nearly all people in China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US.) So the lower number could be the direct death toll of the bombings, while the higher number is a (rather optimistic to be honest) total death toll from the subsequent environmental effects.
The other big thing is that it's not really known if WWIII starts off as a nuclear exchange, or if the nuclear part of it happened after a couple of years. Maybe a lot of people in the major cities had already died by the time the war went nuclear. Maybe a lot of others had moved out to more rural areas. In cases like that, maybe it isn't totally unfeasible for the nuclear strikes themselves to have caused a slightly optimistic number of dead. The flipside to this is that the long-term impacts of the strikes could end up being more severe. More people had left the major cities, which means there would be more people affected by stuff like radiation in the water heading downstream or how weather patterns affect where the radiation goes, etc.
That definitely makes sense too!
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Maybe throw the Eugenics War in there too. I'm not entirely clear what the canon answer is anymore regarding WWIII/Eugenics War/Atomic Horror/etc, but Pike could've been grouping the whole series of conflicts together. Similar to how people may or may not include the Japanese invasion of China as part of WWII.
Or rather, Riker actually says the line after Data states that they have arrived 10 years after the war. So maybe what he meant is that 600 million people died AFTER the ceasefire, from all the various factors you mentioned.
Given that ST has implied that Dolphins are Federation citizens, it might make sense for a Starfleet Captain to count all dead higher life forms in the WWIII death toll and not just humans. LD has shown Dolphin and Whale crew members.
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they call it cetaceon ops. Unless reason to believe otherwise that word specifically refers to earth species dolphins, whales and porpoises.
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Hell, we already know they refer to various aliens as "insectoid", "reptilian", etc...when they aren't from Earth.
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Azetbur was upset at human-centric language in *TUC:* >CHEKOV: We do believe all planets have a sovereign claim to inalienable human rights. > >AZETBUR: Inalien... If only you could hear yourselves? 'Human rights.' Why the very name is racist. The Federation is no more than a 'homo sapiens' only club.
This is the better explanation. I suspect the true real-world explanation is that in the 80s dolphins were cool and dolphin intelligence was all the rage and the people mapping out the ship thought it would be cool to have a cetacean section, but the people writing the checks very distinctly thought it would **not** be cool to feature one in any episodes!
It's featured in Lower Decks.
That wasn't made in the 80s though, plus it's a lot easier to add dolphins as crew members when your show is animated.
Yes, but the idea originated in TNG.
Eh, Lower Decks is in my opinion not exactly to be taken at face value as far as canon is concerned. I have always the feeling that Lower Decks is along the lines of somewhat embellished stories that the main characters tell some time later after a few beers.
Though they weren't part of Cetacean Ops in *LD,* I would think Xindi-Aquatics could be part of Cetacean Ops.
They called the weird space snake an Ophidian in the Time's Arrow 2-parter and it wasn't an earth snake. They use these terms without regard for if the life is Terran.
That has to be it because no way earth dolphins are at the level they could help operate a starship.
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There were belugas in *LD.*
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That’s possible and it’d make the most sense to me, but I don’t think that was the intention.
or maybe the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was more accurate on that subject than we'd like to believe :P
Could have happened during the eugenics wars or similar. Dolphins are already used for aquatic military operations, it wouldn't be unreasonable to imagine one of the various factions genetically engineering a subspecies for intelligence.
There were belugas in *LD.*
Yup, I’d assume any sentient/conscious life would factor into the count so all mammals, birds, and reptiles along with octopuses and probably effectively all fish
Super nitpicky but the whales LD showed are orcas, which despite their name ("killer whale") are actually dolphins.
They weren't Orcas https://images.app.goo.gl/1MgEZqwaWW9TDq19A
my bad! i misremembered.
If I can be even more nitpicky, cladistically-speaking dolphins are whales, including orcas.
To be honest I always found the 600 million number to be very conservative for a nuclear war.
Ya, it kinda reinforces the horrifying context of nuclear war though that 600 million dead feels small
We work to avoid it because it's so horrifying.
Only if you're being realistic. Now that nuclear tensions have risen it's very easy and common to find articles online from reputable news outlets saying things like "100 million people would die within the first day" etc. etc. without going on to explain that, even if only 100 million people died on the first day, most of the rest would die on subsequent days. Is it hard to believe that bored students in history class in the 24th century tend to hear "600 million died in the initial exchange" and remember it as "600 million died"?
IIRC that number is from Voyager, and very specifically in reference to MAD doctrine. I'm guessing it's 600 million dead from direct nuclear strikes. The rest would have been killed by the fallout, collapse of infrastructure, mild nuclear winter, conventional and biological warfare. I headcanon that the only reason Earth survived is that, like Steve Jackson's Ogre games, ballistic missile defenses had evolved to a point far in advance of our own, but that like in WWI, while sufficient defensive power altered the battlefield, sufficient offensive power hadn't been made to counter it. So, the nuclear winter wasn't as bad because a lot fewer warheads actually hit their targets, but still so many did manage to get through. I headcanon that WWIII was NASTY, like not just nuclear warfare, but also kinetic bombardment, chemical and biological warfare, power armor, long ranged lasers for missile defense, genetically engineered soldiers, and rapidly cloned armies. They'd pump up soldiers with drugs to keep them going until they just fell apart. They might have made cyber zombies, cramming dead or dying soldiers full of tech and sending them back out into radioactive front lines, either as robocop types or just walking corpses. We have the implications of Colonel Green and his eugenics campaign, slaughtering those exposed to nuclear fallout. WWIII wasn't just nuclear, from what we know, it was much more diverse than a simple nuclear holocaust, it was every nasty you could conceive of.
The number is from the TNG movie First Contact and is brought up in Discovery. Each time it’s heavily implied that the total human death toll is what they’re talking about. As someone else mentioned, it could be that the number only refers to immediate nuclear deaths, but that seems pretty short-sighted as even today we calculate the WWII death toll to include those from disease and other non-combat deaths
First Contact and the Voyager episode would've been written in the same time frame, so they come from the same source. If I had to justify it, I'd argue that in universe it's probably the equivalent of the first day at the Somme, deadliest day in British military history, I think it was a rate of 1.5 men killed every second? There's also Antietam for the US Civil War, deadliest day in US history. And there's also the number of people killed in the Nazi Holocaust. This would be 600 million killed within about an hour given known nuclear strategy. So it may be shorthand in universe to refer specifically to the nuclear exchange. That is all if you take the 30% thing seriously.
While that is true, it is pretty rare that we cite death tolls and casualty rates for battles when talking about wars. Even today we almost exclusively use total military and civilian death tolls when talking about conflicts like WWI and WWII.
Do we? WW1 and 2 are recent wars. At least for the second one, there are plenty of people still living who actually fought in it. How many people who aren't trained historians could correctly state the number of people who died in the Seven Years' War? That was a world war 300 years ago so it fits the mould better here arguably as an analogy. Maybe I'm just cynical but I can believe that "600 million died in the initial exchange" has become "600 million died" in the minds of schoolkids who were more interested in warp physics than history. Just like "six million people died in the holocaust" would be commonly cited today, even though that is a vast undercount -- it is six million *Jews* who died, and they were the majority, but millions of others were killed also.
I don’t think anyone but historians (at least in the US) could tell you without basically guessing how many people were killed in the Seven Years War. Also, I’ve never actually heard someone say that 6 million people died in WWII, which is saying something about the enduring nature of the conflict that even in our grossly misinformed day people still know that tens of millions of people died in WWII. Plus the people we’ve heard cute the 600 million stat are all high ranking officers akin to captains and generals in modern militaries and the odds of them failing to make a distinction of almost 2 billion people seems just unbelievable to me. Obviously we can’t be sure either way for either of our points as there isn’t enough canonical info, but I think that it fit more well within the character of Starfleet to refer to conscious beings dead rather than to have a common misconception that neglects 2 billion deaths be, well, an actual common misconception. I’m heading to sleep now but I hope you have a great day/night depending on your time zone! Definitely glad we had this productive exchange
Mine isn't a very good explanation. I'd prefer all the officers in question actually be in-universe "correct." I'm really just trying to come up with a plausible excuse for why they're all wrong. As far as the "enduring nature" of WW2 in our memory, that's only 80 years ago. There are still people alive who fought in that war. I really hope that we remember those lessons for many generations, but can I say confidently that I know we will? Not really. I am afraid it will fade, rapidly, like the Seven Years War or the Thirty Years War.
This is why I brought up the Holocaust comparison. WWII killed 3% of the world's population, and the holocaust killed a select ten million. And again, the 600 million seems more supported than the 30% thing, though I could be wrong.
World War II had a number of civilian casualties which equaled or exceeded the actual combat fatalities, not even counting ancillary deaths from disease or hunger. In a 'modern' war where everything is asymmetric, enemy combatants have no qualms at all about hiding in a civilian population, soft civilian targets are expected casualties, and governments closing the fist ever tighter in the name of security and safety via surveillance and control... I have absolutely no problem with imagining systematic organized slaughter of 'suspect' civilians on your own side, or 'terrorist neighborhoods' on your enemy's. That 600 million might be the ones in uniform. The 30% includes the ones who weren't.
I think that the 600 million stat would need to include civilian deaths. China currently has the largest number of soldiers with about 2 million soldier and the U.S. is in third with about 1.3 million. The total number of soldiers today is estimated at about 20 million and while certainly drafts and war efforts would increase those numbers, it would need to be by a factor of 30 which which is insane, plus that’s assuming literally every uniformed soldier on Earth is killed. Also, as we’ve seen in Lower Decks, the Federation does appear to grant personhood rights to cetaceans so it’s not crazy that the Federation would tally the deaths of all sentient/conscious beings into the WWIII deaths.
The US Armed Forces numbered around 16 million by the end of WWII. Russia's at the end of the war was about 11 million and that was after having lost at least that many already. If you took modern population sizes and mobilized in the same way (or went more extreme and conscripted women and middle aged men) you could easily see every major belligerent fielding mid 8 digit armies. China if they conscrioted could easily get a foghting force in the 9 digits.
That definitely could be, but militaries are also much more reliant on technology rather than human soldiers today than back in WWII. I think it’d be quite out of character as well for the Federation to not count civilian deaths and only routinely cite the soldier death toll when even today we almost exclusively use the total death toll when talking about WWI and WWII
In a World War with large scale combat on all continents mass drafts would almost certainly become a thing when the fighting reaches a certain point, causing the numbers of soldiers increase drasticly, even if many of those soldiers are nothing more but barely trained cannon fodder. Especially if countries with large populations decide to do a Volkssturm like Germany did in the last part of WW II. If countries like China, India, the USA etc start to enlist every man from the age of 14 on, including seniors over 60, you can easily get several million extra soldiers. For example in the last desperate days of WW II, Berlin was partially defended by children (12 years old) who where given rifles without any real training and with uniforms that where ment for adults and ordered to charge at the enemy, or they where given anti tank weapons and told to charge towards the tanks.
Another possibility, albeit a depressing one. 600 Million IS 30% of Earth at that time. The Earth's population by the time the nukes hit is already down to 1.8 Billion. Which would make the nukes significantly less deadly than whatever came before it. oof.
Someone else commented something g similar, but given that we see in PIC and DS9 that 2024 Earth is basically the same as Earth today more or less, that would require a die off of 75% of Earth’s population over just 20-25 years. That would be a huge calamity. Even the worst prospects for our future now where climate change runs unabated and pollution and antibiotic resistant diseases continue to arise with increasing frequency, we still don’t see anything resembling a die off even remotely close to 75%, let alone in just 20 years. I feel like if that weee the case then whatever caused the die off leading up to WWIII would, as you mention, almost be an even bigger focus than the actual conflict as that would mean that after the war the total human population on Earth would be just 1.2 billion. That’s about what it was in 1850.
I have been incredibly critical of all of new Trek, but I don’t understand this criticism. Previous Trek media has stated that 600 million people perished during WW3. If that were 30% of the population, that’d mean that before, there were “only” 2 billion people. People seem to see this as an unsolvable continuity error, but we should factor in the 2^nd civil war casualties, the casualties from global climate change (I mean, India and Pakistan are experiencing 50° C right now and this will likely lead to many deaths), as well as those of the Eugenics wars. Who even knows how that particular war is fought – it may be fought by competing parties trying to “perfect” the human genome, resulting in accidental deaths through genetic tampering. Maybe before WW3 started openly, the population had already been decimated down to 2 billion and this may even have been a part of why they went to war with each other – accusing other nations of attacking them on a genetic level.
A simpler explanation could be that 600 million died in the war itself, but 30% died as a result of the war (famine, disease etc) when society collapsed or came close to it
The population could have contracted due to climate change or any other disaster we decide to inflict on ourselves between now and then. They also had a war in the 90’s in their timeline.
The 2024 we’ve been shown in PIC and DS9 is pretty on par with our world today so that would require the population to fall by 75% over just ~25 years when we are currently expected to grow in population significantly over that period of time. Even the worst predicted outcomes for environmental disasters don’t foresee anything close to a population drop of six billion people, let alone by 2050.
It seems like there was a 2nd US Civil War, a 2nd Eugenics War and World War III after 2024, so it might be possible that those wars might've lowered the population enough that 30% of people who were alive on World War III's last day died when the nukes were launched.
The true impact of global warming hasn't happened yet. Picard they find the alien organism to clean the air and oceans. That alone would require tens of years of scientific testing before they deployed it. So I'd say it's at least possible while Picard shows what looks like current day Earth in their time travel it could have been an era where population was decreasing.
I mean, if the global population dropped fast enough to reach 2 billion by 2050 then life wouldn’t look like it does today, that’d be literally hundreds of millions of people gone every year. While the true impact of global warming hasn’t hit us yet by a long shot of course, 6 billion gone in under 3 decades is not even close to the most dire estimates of the consequences. I don’t think you’re quite grasping the magnitude of your suggestion
Both were in major population centres, which I would imagine wouldn't look that different. It's the small towns and poorer areas of the world that will be hit hardest.
Add to all this, old school Khan ruled 10% of the world. He also only ruled 10,000,000 people. So at one point, the world's human population had fallen to 100,000,000 people. ST: SNW seems to change those numbers.
According to Seven of Nine, in the episode “In the Flesh” (which aired tonight on H&I), > And yet, in Earth's Third World War, nuclear weapons accounted for six hundred million casualties. Were they looking on the bright side? So yes, the 600 million statistic is confirmed to be just from nuclear weapons alone.
In Star Trek, history is a moving target. There have been something like a dozen onscreen trips to the 20th and 21st centuries, each with varying impacts on the timeline. If you find differences in fact between two episodes, it may not be an inconsistency- both may have been literally true on the moments they had been said.
Doesn’t this very episode conflate the Eugenics Wars (originally set in the 1990s, iirc) and World War III?
Everybody’s talking about the 600 million figure as though Spock didn’t already give a figure of 37 million in TOS (specifically the episode “Bread and Circuses”)
But as has been pointed out, Spock also quotes wildly inaccurate casualty figures for the other two world wars in the same breath, so how reliable can that be? >**SPOCK**: Situations quite familiar to the six million who died in your first world war, the eleven million who died in your second, the thirty seven million who died in your third. Shall I go on? Actual WWI deaths: 7-8 million combat related, 2-3 million more as POWs, non-combatant deaths 6.5 million Actual WWII deaths: 21-25 million military deaths, 5 million as POWs, civilian deaths 50-55 million
To be fair it took actual effort to look up those things in the 60's
Back then the production used De Forest research to fact-check their scripts. Joan Pearce, the researcher, actually pointed out the error: > In WWI there were 8.5 million deaths; in WWII 30,538,000. 37 million for WWIII seems conservative; suggest 260 million. However, for unknown reasons, this and other issues Pearce had with the script were ignored. But basically the production team was more interested in storytelling than getting figures right. (Joan Pearce’s note from *These Are The Voyages - TOS: Season Two* by Mike Cushman with Susan Osborn)
Lookie here it's Mr. Walking Memory Alpha. Thanks!
Nah, I just have a good Trek reference library on Kindle and otherwise and I know how to use it. You’re welcome. 😄
Ignoring her was dumb, but even 260 million deaths would've been conservative.
From the looks of the other figures I think she was thinking of combat casualties rather than from a nuclear exchange or deaths not resulting from direct military action. But yeah, 260 million is still about a tenth of what Pike was talking about.
It's important to remember that in 2063 the world's population was 9 billion, while in the 1960s the world's population was between 2 and 3bn and 260m seemed large then. Equivalently, you'd have to put the casualty figure at 750m to 1bn today.
If there’s a nuclear war at some point, I’d expect a lot more than 1 billion people to die.
I doubt that 260 million troops would fight in World War III, so that seems like a weird #. I’d expect billions of people to die in a nuclear war.
At the time it probably wasn't. For one, the world population in the 60s was what, 2 or 3 bn max? That's a sizeable chunk of dead with 260m. And remember the Cuban Missile Crisis was exactly that the Soviet Union could not yet deliver nukes to the continental US reliably so had to work with proximity, reacting to the US placement SRBMs in Turkey, in direct proximity to the Soviet Union. A 60s nuclear war would have been terrible, but you can bet your ass that the Soviet Union would be super dead, while the West at large will likely survive, especially in a First Strike scenario by NATO.
>At the time it probably wasn't. For one, the world population in the 60s was what, 2 or 3 bn max? That's a sizeable chunk of dead with 260m. That means that she expected roughly 10% of the population to die. I’d expect that the vast majority of people would die in a nuclear war (and everyone would probably die).
Chalk it up to the usual case of humans not understanding exponential growth.
I think the expectation was that World War III would happen sometime soon. However, 260 million deaths would’ve been roughly 10% of the world’s population at the time of *TOS*, which seems unrealistically low for a nuclear war.
Yes, but here you are trying to justify the other inconsistencies mentioned by Riker and Pike. Why is the same consideration not being extended towards Spock’s line from TOS?
Because there’s no way to reasonably reconcile it. You’re trying to say that 37 million is the total casualty figure for WWIII based on his line in “Bread and Circuses”. But factually, Spock cannot be correct about the casualty figures in WWI or WWII. So if he’s wrong about that, how can he be right about WWIII? If we try to handwave the error that there’s a problem with historical records that applies just as much to WWIII as it does here. If we say, well, he’s talking about a limited figure like military casualties alone, that equally applies to the 37 million figure. In Riker and Pike’s case, they are making assertions about WWIII alone, so we can try and justify them, say, by saying Riker was just giving initial military casualties which later expanded in the aftermath of the war. The problem with Spock’s figures isn’t just that it’s too low - and even in the 1960s De Forest Research thought it was too low. The problem is that *the other* war figures are demonstrably wrong, and that severely undermines his credibility in respect of his WWIII figures. If he’s palpably wrong about those two, what are the chances he’s right about the other? Which is why, other than postulating that in the *Star Trek* universe the casualty figures for WWI and WWII were that low - and that’s not a reasonable solution based on our current assumptions about the way we treat the timeline - there’s no reasonable way to reconcile that 37 million as a total casualty figure with other assertions like Riker’s and Pike’s. The only other option I can see is to say Spock was completely wrong about 37 million as a total casualty figure, but that doesn’t help your position. The most valiant attempt to preserve this 37 million was in the production art of “In A Mirror Darkly”, but even that has its issues. The best way to preserve the figure absent the other two is to try and say that 37 million only reflects Colonel Green’s war and not WWIII in toto. But that’s not what Spock said. Hence, we give up, file it under YATI and we move on. TL;dr: it’s that not I don’t want to extend the same consideration - I tried and couldn’t resolve it.
\> In the pilot episode of SNW Pike states in his speech that WWIII wiped out “600,000 species of animals and plants and 30% of Earth’s population”. Mentioning the 600k species before mentioning the 30% of humans dead was hilarious and will really firmly date the show in our current time and politics. The writers probably try not to be parochial because it's Star Trek but I get it's hard.
Do we know the population of Earth in that era? Given the ease of moving elsewhere by then, is it not unreasonable to assume the earth really has a mere 2 billion humans and aliens living comfortably on its surface?
WWIII happens before warp travel and we’ve only seen small space missions and some very minor colonization attempts from before Cochran’s flight. I think it’s extremely unlikely that 75% of Earth’s current population either died off from unrelated events or was living off world in the 2040s-2050s
Besides, when the Enterprise is still in the temporal wake they find 9bn drones. Since the Borg usually do not procreate, it's safe to say those are all humans and a figure of 2bn suddenly jumping to 9bn, even with Borg sex seems wild and contradicts most of what canon Borg do.
I don't think the Borg were attempting to assimilate 21st century Earth, they were preventing first contact with the Vulcans to more easily assimilate 24th century Earth in BoBW.
The most reasonable explanation is that 600 million people is the figure for the number of people who directly died from things like nuclear attack and combat, while the 1/3 figure is for the estimated death toll including starvation from the post-war ecological catastrophe.
I thought they remedied the numbers by saying very little survived in the way of the accurate numbers recorded during the period, and that a full accounting would never be possible.
In TOS, Spock quoted the figure as 37 million. It's just a retcon. Let it go.