« the squee continues... | Main Index | I'm a completist at heart... »
04/24/2003: brief Enterprise observation
Contains a spoiler for Enterprise 2x21 The Breach...
When I heard the Antaran say that his people didn't have any contact with the Denobulans in over three hundred years, because the Denobulans caused 20 million Antaran casualties in their last war, I actually rewinded a bit, because my first reaction was "three hundred years of no contact for 20 million deaths in a war between planets?" and their people don't seem to be especially long-lived either, since they say it have been about six generations. And then thought that in the Star Trek universe even the awful wars are more "harmless" than in the Earth-bound reality. I mean, for example, based on what I remember from school, the estimated total casualties of WWII were 27 million soldiers, about the same number of dead civilians, and a couple of million people more stayed missing. The Soviet Union alone lost at least 20 million people. And sure, I can imagine how if their conflicts were mostly fought in space, the general casualty number may be lower than in conflicts on the same planet, or maybe Antarans and Denobulans are just more civilized than humans, but still, I found it odd.
