10 Most Mysterious Ancient Alien Civilisations In Star Trek

The Tkon Empire was one of the most powerful societies in the galaxy before it collapsed about 600,000 years ago. Around that time their home world was destroyed by a supernova, and they were apparently too centralised to survive. It's a bit hard to see how the destruction of one planet would doom an entire interstellar empire to extinction, though a similar disaster destroyed Romulus and plunged their society into chaos.

Out of all of their technological abilities, the most impressive was the ability to move entire stars to different locations. This begs the question of why they couldn't just replace their star with a new one when it began showing signs of going supernova. This star-moving technology has also led some to believe that the Tkon were the ones who created the Eightfold Stars: the octonary star system from Star Trek: Picard which contained the admonition against artificial lifeforms. It's possible that encountering these synthetic beings contributed to the downfall of the Tkon, though the timeline is a bit confusing seeing as the Eightfold Stars were said to be assembled only about 200,000 years ago, long after the supposed extinction of the Tkon. 

Writer Michael Chabon was asked in an Instagram Q&A if the Tkon were the ones to create the octonary system and the Admonition, and he confirmed that they were, so perhaps some members of the species survived their society’s collapse, only to be destroyed again by AI hundreds of thousands of years later.

The Tkon have only been sparsely mentioned in Trek since their introduction in TNG's The Last Outpost, but they were explored heavily in the recently released video game Star Trek: Resurgence. The game features a storyline about Tkon survivors trying to rebuild their empire by uploading digitally preserved Tkon consciousnesses into unwilling hosts all across the galaxy.