7 things nobody wants to admit about Star Trek

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6. Inconsistent Earth history

Star Trek’s history of Earth and the actual course of events as we know them can be jarring for fans who appreciate a coherent world-building experience.

From the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s to a third World War in the early 21st century, the timeline does not make sense with our own reality. It’s important to remember that when Gene Roddenberry and other early contributors to the franchise wrote these ideas, they wrote a work of speculative fiction, not a carefully mapped-out projection of future events, obviously.

The series did use the future as a lens to examine the issues of the day, from social justice to technological advancements, without intending these portrayals to stand up to decades of real-world changes.

For many fans, the best way to ignore these discrepancies is to embrace the concept of Star Trek as a form of alternate history. That way, the events depicted in the franchise don’t occur in our future but in a parallel timeline where history takes a much different course. It serves as a reconciliation of the factual inconsistencies that have come up in 57 years of Star Trek stories. It’s a way to look at the series as an experiment that explores human potential and challenges without getting bogged down by inconsistencies with our own timeline. Does that make sense?