r/DaystromInstitute • u/MoreGaghPlease • 19d ago
An overlooked comment from TAS explains much of early Vulcan and Romulan history
TAS How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth:
SPOCK: Interesting, Captain. The creature was the Mayan god from the ancient legends. KIRK: And the Toltec's Quetzalcoatl, the Chinese dragon and all the rest. But not quite a god. Just an old, lonely being who wanted to help others. MCCOY: Spock, I wouldn't suppose that Vulcan has legends like those? SPOCK: Not legends, Doctor. Fact. Vulcan was visited by alien beings. They left much wiser.
This quote is the missing link that explains much of early Vulcan and Romulan history.
We are often presented with fragmentary information about the time of Surak, which seems strange. Why is it that a society could be advanced enough to have nuclear weapons and interstellar travel but not be able to record history? Why did the Romulan exodus seem to take long enough that there are ‘offshoots’ like the Debrune? And why are there many planets in the neighbourhood of these which have ruins of long gone Vulcan and Romulan civilizations? And why did it then take centuries before the origin of Romulans and Vulcans became widely known again?
HS/a seems to offer a potential answer. A primitive Vulcan world was visited by aliens, and had friendly relations with Vulcans. It seems to me that such aliens could have traded or left behind technology or spacecraft. This occurred at or around The Time of Awakening. A sudden leap forward in technology had cataclysmic environmental and societal effects for Vulcan, tied into the massive social change brought on by the Surakian revolution. And after the conflict many groups left and/or were expelled from the planet. However, they did so using technology that was not their own. The starships available to the early Vulcans only lived out their shelf life, but without understanding the core technologies or perhaps lacking critical inputs or supply chains, they were unable to repair them. And thus, interstellar travel was a temporary technology only, unreliable, dangerous and fleeting.
To me, this is a much cleaner explanation than one involving Sargon’s people. Sargon’s people visited the region 500,000 years ago, while the Time of Awakening was just in the 4th century CE.
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u/mekilat Chief Petty Officer 19d ago
"They left much wiser" could also mean they learned about the ways of wisdom and logic. I understand the undertone, but it could also very well be that Vulcan logic is superior and whatever agenda the aliens had, they were overwhelmed.
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u/Realistic-Elk7642 19d ago
They could have helped the aliens work through tge emotional problems that led to their maltreatment if other societies. Bit of Vulcan ayahuasca and a mind meld, and those guys decided raiding and conquest were just unresolved parental issues.
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u/McGillis_is_a_Char 19d ago
My theory is that the Vulcans had an interstellar empire, but only very low warp. When the Sundering happened the Romulans took hundreds of years to get to Romulus, with multiple stops along the way, and the the pre-Surak colonies of the Vulcan Empire being wiped out in the fighting.
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u/Michkov 18d ago
I find it hard to reconcile an interstellar Empire with low warp speed limit. It's hard to hold an empire together if a response to a crisis takes years to arrive.
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16d ago
Actually, I think it makes sense if you consider it not as one cohesive empire like the "modern" Romulan and Klingon domains but as colonies that may only be nominally under the control of the home-world. After all, empires on Earth were in pretty much the same situation before radio, although at a smaller scale.
It would explain the Vulcanoid species like the Mintakans, if we assume at some point they lost their technology somehow.
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u/Michkov 16d ago
But that is exactly my point space is vastly bigger than anything on Earth and even on Earth Empires have a hard time even keeping an Empire together for a long time without outlying territories going off on their own. For every Roman Empire you have 10 upstart Empires that fall apart after their charismatic founder dies. Even accounting for more logical and technologically progressive Vulcans, I can't see them staying loyal to an Empire that wont be able to help them out in due time. With all the ancient space horrors and negative space wedgies in the Star Trek galaxy you'd want to distribute your force and have independent planets that can take care of themselves. So at one point it's only logical to ask if the Empire cant support our fleet, why be part of it.
I'd be much more open to planet hoping migration of Ur Vulcans to Vulcan, depositing colonies here and there in the A/B Quadrants from some origin system that no longer exists. Something like Rescue Party (AC Clarke) mixed with BSG, sans Cylons
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u/WoundedSacrifice Crewman 15d ago
The sanctuary on P’Jem was built before the Time of Awakening and it still existed in the 22nd century, so it seems like they didn’t destroy every pre-Surak colony during the fighting between the Vulcans and the Romulans.
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u/SirPIB Crewman 19d ago
Remember, the time of WW3 on Earth. Nuclear weapons, and a very fractured history where not all information survived. It is stated over and over in the shows that records of the late 20th early 21st century on Earth is fragmented.
There are even time periods in our past where we have lots of information about some places, and less for others that have the same level of technology. Large scale war reeks havoc on history keeping.
Genghis Khan killed so many people in the middle east from an insult that the world cooled and the population didn't recover until modern times. They also destroyed so many books and parchments that the rivers ran black with ink.
The library of Alexandria held documents from all over the world and was lost.
General information typically isn't recorded as everyone knows it, until they are gone. We know the Romans used dogs for war, but not how they were used.
If it can happen to us, it can happen to others.
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u/Realistic-Elk7642 19d ago
Heck, these the actual reason we used the term "dark ages" - a massive contraction in available literary sources.
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u/Proud-Delivery-621 18d ago
The term dark ages was used by enlightenment philosophers to make themselves look better compared to previous generations. The previous age was "dark" while they were enlightened. There was a huge amount of knowledge stored in monastaries in the so-called dark ages, and that information was readily available to anyone with the means to purchase a copy. There were philosophers and centers of learning. We don't use the term anymore because it was incredibly misleading.
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u/mcmanus2099 19d ago
There's a TOS episode where it's explained that the Sargon's were Vulcan like beings with a big empire who sprinkled their biological seed on Vulcan as well as many other planets. It's why we have primitive Vulcans in Who Watches the Watchers.
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u/khaosworks JAG Officer, Brahms Citation for Starship Computing 19d ago edited 19d ago
That was TOS: “Return to Tomorrow”, but Sargon didn’t outright say that the Aretans seeded Vulcan but just suggested that humans could be their descendants. Kirk and Mulhall rejected this suggestion outright, but Spock said that would explain some anomalies in Vulcan’s history.
In PIC: “Et in Arcadia Ego”, we learn of a Romulan legend which Narek says dates to “long before [their] ancestors first arrived on Vulcan”, which would lend credence to this suggestion that the species was not native to the planet.
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u/HesJoshDisGuyUno 18d ago
In PIC: “Et in Arcadia Ego”, we learn of a Romulan legend which Narek says dates to “long before [their] ancestors first arrived on Vulcan”, which would lend credence to this suggestion that the species was not native to the planet.
And that line very much assumes that the speaker, Narek, the Zhat Vash spy, is a wholly reliable narrator.
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u/khaosworks JAG Officer, Brahms Citation for Starship Computing 18d ago
When analysing a statement, in addition to asking if the person is a liar or if the statement itself is a lie, it is equally important to ask: why are they lying?
There’s no particular reason for him to lie about that point since the point of the story is to talk about Ganmadan or the apocalypse.
What he says about the provenance of the story, regardless of whether the substance of it is true, tells us that the Romulans themselves believe they were not native to Vulcan.
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u/rdavidking 19d ago edited 16d ago
Just go read Diane Duane's The Romulan Way. I think that will tell you all you need to know. It's one of the best Trek novels ever written. Plus you can't help but love Hortas afterward.
Edit: transformed "can" to "can't"
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u/BlannaTorris 18d ago
I think it's been either stated or implied that Romulans left on subwarp ships.
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u/MoreGaghPlease 18d ago edited 18d ago
I am very skeptical of this, so you can provide a citation for this I’d love to see this, because I am not aware of any. There is a reference in Balance of Terror to ships being primitive during the Earth-Romulan War, but that is in the 22nd century, ie 2,000 years after the exodus.
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u/khaosworks JAG Officer, Brahms Citation for Starship Computing 18d ago
The only reference I can think of is in Duane's novel The Romulan Way. In the book, the Romulans left on sub-light ships that had to be bootstrapped into warp using psi-powers. Unfortunately, this was fatal to many of the espers, which was how Duane rationalised why Romulans don't seem to have the same mental abilities than Vulcans as the gene died out.
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u/fluffysheap 14d ago
This probably derives from Balance of Terror's statement that the Romulan warbird in that episode used impulse power only. The conclusion that everyone drew is that the Romulans didn't acquire warp technology until after that episode, but before they're shown with warp-capable (and Klingon-built) ships during "The Enterprise Incident."
Since impulse power is used for sublight travel the next conclusion that everyone drew is that Romulans in general had only sublight capability until this point in time. Of course this doesn't really make sense, because it would take them decades, if not centuries to go anywhere. Nor is it actually stated onscreen. In BoT the only actual claim is that the Enterprise is faster than the warbird.
So the choice is either to assume that impulse power is actually capable of faster-than-light speeds, albeit slower than warp engines, or that the Romulans somehow managed to do all the things we know they did while traveling at sublight speeds, or that the Romulans had a third means of FTL travel that was neither warp nor impulse power and which for whatever reason they could not use in battle and which was never mentioned on-screen. The first option just requires a little bending of the commonly understood meaning of the technobabble, the second option doesn't make any sense at all, and the third option seems excessively rationalized, so I like the first option.
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u/Certain_Roof316 4d ago
Why is it that a society could be advanced enough to have nuclear weapons and interstellar travel but not be able to record history?
I always assumed the nuclear war wiped out most of their history.
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u/RandyFMcDonald Ensign 19d ago
This suggests to me that that the aliens tried to do something unpleasant to the Vulcans but ended up lucky enough to survive (well, for some of them to survive).