11-10-2022, 12:20 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-10-2022, 06:23 PM by FaceInTheCrowd.)
Montalban was 46 when he played Khan, so if Khan and his people ruled from 1992-1996, Khan would have been 40-42 when they came to power, which would put his birth year at 1950-1952. That would line up with the real world history of Eugenics in the 20th century, which began with race-based anti-miscegenation laws and peaked with Hitler's attempt to breed an Aryan master race, which gave the science a bad name and led to its postwar decline. Conceivably, Khan and his fellow augments could have been bred by escaped Nazi lebensborn eugenicists hiding out in South America. Of course, all of this has been superseded by later Treks' retconning of WWIII into the mid 21st century, most recently by the Picard series, which has implied that geneticist Adam Soon began "Project Khan" in 2024.
In Kirk's time, they had a photo of Khan, knew who he was and something about the years of his rule, but apparently not much else, including what happened to him back then. Compare that with the encyclopedic knowledge available to us about the life of Adolf Hitler, and they really didn't have a lot of information about Khan at all.
TNG and later Treks have suggested that the nuclear destruction occurred primarily in what we call the Third World, and resulted in disastrous economic and mass migration issues in the non-warring countries leading to the collapse of governments worldwide. I imagine there was probably also a global rise in disease caused by drifting fallout. A DS9 story depicted upper-class San Franciscans in 2024 partying in their luxury high-rises while there was mass poverty down below. So I have no problem imagining whole populations being bombed out of existence on one side of the world while on the other side privileged people are watching missions to Mars take off on TV and fretting over how much all that trouble "over there" is going to impact their next fill-up or the delivery of their iPhone 125 until everything collapses around them.
In Kirk's time, they had a photo of Khan, knew who he was and something about the years of his rule, but apparently not much else, including what happened to him back then. Compare that with the encyclopedic knowledge available to us about the life of Adolf Hitler, and they really didn't have a lot of information about Khan at all.
TNG and later Treks have suggested that the nuclear destruction occurred primarily in what we call the Third World, and resulted in disastrous economic and mass migration issues in the non-warring countries leading to the collapse of governments worldwide. I imagine there was probably also a global rise in disease caused by drifting fallout. A DS9 story depicted upper-class San Franciscans in 2024 partying in their luxury high-rises while there was mass poverty down below. So I have no problem imagining whole populations being bombed out of existence on one side of the world while on the other side privileged people are watching missions to Mars take off on TV and fretting over how much all that trouble "over there" is going to impact their next fill-up or the delivery of their iPhone 125 until everything collapses around them.