10 Predictions About The Future Star Trek Probably Got Wrong

There is one thing Star Trek: The Original Series writers definitely got wrong about the future: the Eugenics Wars. Well, they got the dates wrong in any case, unless I missed the Friends episode 'The One Where Genetically Engineered Tyrants Take Over the World'. There has been a lot of toing and froing over the years — Voyager once went back to 1996, for example, and everything was fine — but it now seems the Eugenics Wars have been moved more definitively from 1992-1996 to the 21st century.

In the series opener to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Captain Pike states in his video presentation to the Kiley,

This is Earth in our 21st century. Before everything went wrong. […] Our conflict also started with a fight for freedoms. We called it the Second Civil War, then the Eugenics War, and finally just World War III.

With a bit of time travel, three wars are now merged into one. From other mentions of World War III, we can also assume it lasts from about 2026 to 2056 and that it was a nuclear conflict. We'd better hope they got this one wrong, and that the MAD doctrine holds up against mad men.

Speaking of Mad men, one might wonder how Strange New Worlds will impact the story Khan Noonian Singh. For that, we have a special, separate video en route.