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While you make a good point I doubt I could forgive them for throwing out all of the old trek universe.

Teaos wrote:While you make a good point I doubt I could forgive them for throwing out all of the old trek universe.

I agree... When I said I felt a little ill about it before, that is actually a pretty big deal because fiction usually doesn't affect my physical well being to any extent!

Hence the "fiction" part.

They're creating a different (parallel) timeline, not saying we should throw out all the rest of it. It gives them a lot of room to manuver creatively.

I'm still neither going in saying "This is going to rock" or "This will suck". I'm curious to see what they do.

Same here. Johnny, I'd be careful of the James Bond parallels - the franchsie went WAY downhill starting with the "out-of-retirement" pictures (A View to a Kill, Never Say Never Again) and never came all the way back up.

Rochey wrote:Of course, that begs the question of why an interstellar alien race names themselves after a long dead Terran nation.

Rochey wrote:...or why the Vulcans chose to name themselves after an ancient god.

I had always assumed that in the beginning those were the names we as humans ascribed to them in English. There own language almost certainly referred to them as something else, but because it seems English seems to have become the adopted wide language of the galaxy, the English names stuck.

With them running wild with the references, it's becoming ALOT harder to explain away in any kind of rational way.

But why would we name an alien species after an ancient Roman god? And why would an alien just happen to be called "Nero"?

If we discovered intelligent life on Mars, we'd still call them "Martians" wouldn't we? So, that alien planet and alien species would be named after the Roman God of War. I'm quite sure that they WOULN'T call themselves Martians, except maybe to facilitate communication with us.

At to the Nero bit, chalk it up to bad writing or even better.............QUANTUM

Perhaps it's the universal translator having a joke with us.

Yeah.......those damn translators have been plotting our downfall for years

You gotta call them something, so when we had first contact with them and saw what they were like someone dubbed them the Romulans.

So, do the Orions really come from a star in the Orion contellation.

If we discovered intelligent life on Mars, we'd still call them "Martians" wouldn't we? So, that alien planet and alien species would be named after the Roman God of War. I'm quite sure that they WOULN'T call themselves Martians, except maybe to facilitate communication with us.

Correct, but to my knowledge there is no star designated Vulcan, so there'd still be no reason to call them that.

Rochey wrote:

If we discovered intelligent life on Mars, we'd still call them "Martians" wouldn't we? So, that alien planet and alien species would be named after the Roman God of War. I'm quite sure that they WOULN'T call themselves Martians, except maybe to facilitate communication with us.

Correct, but to my knowledge there is no star designated Vulcan, so there'd still be no reason to call them that.

Not out of universe. But in universe, why not?

Rochey wrote:

If we discovered intelligent life on Mars, we'd still call them "Martians" wouldn't we? So, that alien planet and alien species would be named after the Roman God of War. I'm quite sure that they WOULN'T call themselves Martians, except maybe to facilitate communication with us.

Correct, but to my knowledge there is no star designated Vulcan, so there'd still be no reason to call them that.

Quite true. IU I believe the Vulcan planet orbits Epsilon Erridani (correct me if I'm wrong). The naming of the people would have come first, since we met Vulcans before we ever saw their world. It could have been anything, like an off hand comment someone made when hearing about their world like "Sounds like Vulcan's forge!" or someone mispronouncing the way VULCANS pronounced their own racial name, and it just stuck. All this is speculation of course, but it makes a fair bit of sense to me.