However the franchise has also outlined a fictional future history of Earth prior to this, and, primarily through time travel plots, explored both past and further-future settings.
[citation needed] Dominion War Insurrection (1998) This timeline is based on the Star Trek Chronology model described below, supplemented by data from the website startrek.com.
This matter has been complicated by the continued additions to the Star Trek canon, the existence of time travel and multiple concurrent timelines, and the scarcity of Gregorian calendar dates given in the show (stardates instead being used).
This timeline system gives the following dates[56][57] The Star Fleet Battles game was published in 1979, with a license only covering the original series.
[2] Okuda originally drew up a timeline for internal use by writers, based on his own research and assumptions provided by Richard Arnold.
[46] It gives the following dates: The gap between the 1986 film Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home (2286) and the 1987 first season of The Next Generation (2364) is 78 years by this timeline, matching early press materials.
A gap of 10 years passed between the broadcast of the last episode of Star Trek: The Original Series and the release of The Motion Picture.
For Star Trek II, it was decided to acknowledge the reality of the aging actors, both by setting the film some 15 years after "Space Seed", and by having Kirk worry about getting old.
[2] The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager television series, as well as the movies, have roughly followed "real time", and are set around 377 years after their release.
The fansite Memory Alpha thus places the final eight episodes of the season ("Human Error" through "Endgame") in 2378, with other sources following suit.
Its pilot, "Broken Bow", depicts first contact with the Klingons occurring much earlier than the Okuda chronology anticipated (it suggested a date of 2218, based on a line in "Day of the Dove", noting that dialog in "First Contact" makes this problematic – though the actual line in the episode referred to hostilities between the two, and in Enterprise, Human-Klingon relations, while by no means friendly, clearly do not rise to the de facto state of war shown in TOS).
The date of the founding year of the Federation, 2161, was revealed in the fifth-season TNG episode "The Outcast," based on an early draft of the Okuda timeline.
The Eugenics Wars are described as a global conflict in which the progeny of a human genetic engineering project, most notably Khan Noonien Singh, established themselves as supermen and attempted world domination.
The episode "The Savage Curtain" features a Colonel Phillip Green, who led a genocidal war in the 21st century.
The Star Trek Concordance identifies the "Bread and Circuses" figure as the death toll for a nuclear World War III, in the mid-21st century.
Star Trek: First Contact firmly establishes World War III ended, after a nuclear exchange, in 2053, but with a body count of 600 million.
According to writer Ronald D. Moore, this was not an attempt at a retcon, but a mistake – when writing the episode, he recalled the already questionable "two centuries ago" line from "Space Seed" and forgot that DS9 takes place over 100 years later.
Soong maintained that he himself and humanity in general had learned the lessons of the Eugenics Wars and should not continue to hide behind those events when there was progress to be made now that the technology had matured and was much more practicable.
(The actions of his "children" convince him otherwise, and at the end of "The Augments" Soong declares his interest in cybernetics, beginning the work which would one day bring about Data.)
In the episode "Metamorphosis", it is stated that Zefram Cochrane of Alpha Centauri, the discoverer of the space warp, disappeared 150 years ago, at the age of 87.
The Star Trek Chronology does not hold with this theory, and asserts that Cochrane was an Earth native, who moved to Alpha Centauri later in life.