Guerres eugéniques

Les Guerres Eugéniques étaient une période sombre de l'histoire de la Terre, marquée par l'ingénierie génétique et par l'amélioration du génome humain.

Cet article est écrit dans l'optique d'une période globale de la fin du 20ème siècle jusqu'au milieu du 21ème siècle traitant du problème de l'eugénisme, alors qu'il est généralement considéré que les Guerres Eugéniques ne sont que la période des années 1990 marquée par l'avènement de Khan Noonien Singh et des Améliorés.
Toutefois, cette vision semble contredite par de nombreuses références qui placeraient ce conflit au milieu du 21ème siècle.

Spock indiqua d'ailleurs que le milieu des années 1990 était l'époque de la dernière Guerre Mondiale, ce qui est contradictoire avec la Troisième Guerre Mondiale qui s'est terminée en 2053 d'après "Star Trek: First Contact". Dans ENT: "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II", un okudagram indique d'ailleurs que la Troisième Guerre Mondiale a débuté en 2026 du fait de l'ingénierie génétique et de l'amélioration du génome humain. Les guerres des années 1990 seraient donc le prélude à la Troisième Guerre Mondiale, les dates conflictuelles seraient dans ce cas liées à différentes approches d'historiens.

Philoust123 (lui écrire) est en train de travailler en profondeur sur cet article. Merci de ne pas le modifier pour limiter les risques de conflit de versions jusqu'à disparition de cet avertissement.

Histoire

Conflits entre Améliorés des années 1990

Au cours du 20ème siècle, des scientifiques eurent pour objectif d'améliorer la race humaine par l'ingénierie génétique. Ces Améliorés étaient cinq fois plus forts et deux fois plus intelligents qu'un Humain normal, leur capacité pulmonaire était 50 % plus performante que la normale. Ils disposaient également de sens améliorés. (TOS: "Space Seed" ; ENT: "Borderland")

Khan Noonien Singh, 1996 — Khan Noonien Singh

En 1992-1993, un groupe d'Humains améliorés prit simultanément le contrôle de plus de 40 nations terriennes. Khan Noonien Singh devint le dirigeant absolu de plus d'un quart de la Terre, de l'Asie jusqu'au Moyen-Orient. Celui-ci se considéra d'ailleurs comme un Prince gouvernant sur des millions d'Humains. (TOS: "Space Seed" ; "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan")

Ces informations et dates sont relatées par Spock.
Les romans non-canons "The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume 1 & 2 de Greg Cox prétendent qu'aidé par des individus ambitieux dans divers gouvernements, des compagnies et des agences indépendantes, Khan est calmement parvenu à prendre le contrôle de l'Asie du Sud et du Moyen-Orient et que des dizaines de dirigeants de paille répondaient directement ou se sont directement alliés à lui, Khan lui-même n'étant pas connu du grand public à cette époque (l'épisode "Space Seed" indiquant d'ailleurs que certains faits n'apparaissent pas dans les textes historiques et étaient cachés à la population). Il dirigea son empire, le "Grand Khanate", depuis Chandigarh en Inde et disposait d'un second centre de commandement à Mururoa, d'où il lança un satellite en orbite, le Morning Star, capable de détruire la couche d'ozone terrestre.

Par la suite, les Améliorés ont commencé à se battre entre eux en raison de leurs ambitions supérieures. (TOS: "Space Seed")

Ces informations sont relatées par Spock. Scotty et McCoy indiquèrent, par ailleurs, que sous le règne de Khan, il n'y eut aucun massacre et aucune agression avant d'être attaqué.
Certaines théories (notamment les romans non-canons "The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume 1 & 2 de Greg Cox) prétendent que les Guerres eugéniques font références à divers conflits et incidents (guerres civiles, actes terroristes, émeutes, désastres naturels) dont le véritable motif a été caché à la population (l'épisode "Space Seed" indiquant d'ailleurs que certains faits n'apparaissent pas dans les textes historiques et étaient cachés à la population), les Améliorés eux-même n'étant pas connus du grand public, car des dirigeants de paille les représentaient dans les pays placés sous leur domination.

L'arrière grand-père de Jonathan Archer a combattu lors d'un conflit en Afrique du Nord durant les Guerres Eugéniques. Son bataillon évacuait des civils des zones de guerre lorsqu'ils furent attaqués. Une école, alors remplie d'enfants, était située directement entre son bataillon et l'ennemi. S'ils avaient retourné le feu contre l'ennemi, l'école aurait probablement été touchée. Il appela ainsi le commandant du camp opposé et parvint à le convaincre de cesser temporairement les hostilités pour permettre l'évacuation des écoliers. (ENT: "Hatchery")

En considérant l'âge d'Henry Archer lors de la naissance de Jonathan en 2112 (40 ans au maximum), et en considérant que l'arrière grand-père avait au moins 18 ans en 1996, voir plus compte tenu des fonctions de commandement suggérées, cet arrière grand-père aurait ainsi que le grand-père de Jonathan ont dû concevoir leur progéniture à un âge très avancé, à moins que cet évènement ne se situe au 21ème siècle.

DY-100 sleeper ship, lcars — classe *DY-100*

En 1996, après leur défaite, 85 Améliorés, Khan y compris, s'enfuirent à bord d'un vaisseau dortoir de classe DY-100, le SS Botany Bay. (TOS: "Space Seed")

La défaite des Améliorés et leur fuite sont relatées par Spock, celui-ci ne trouve, par contre, aucune référence au vaisseau Botany Bay, bien qu'il indiqua que le dernier vaisseau de classe DY-100 datait des années 1990 (Il est d'ailleurs indiqué que certains faits n'apparaissent pas dans les textes historiques et étaient cachés à la population).
Les romans non-canons "The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume 1 & 2 de Greg Cox indiquent que la classe DY-100 a été construite en secret dans la Zone 51, grâce à une partie de la technologie récupérée d'une navette ferengie crashée à Roswell en 1947. En 1996, Gary Seven et Roberta Lincoln parvinrent à voler le vaisseau et, dans le but d'empêcher la Troisième Guerre mondiale, proposèrent à Khan Noonien Singh de fuir la Terre à la recherche d'un nouveau monde.

De nombreuses questions restèrent sans réponses sur ces années, les données de cette période étant fragmentaires et certains faits n'ayant pas été révélés aux populations. (TOS: "Space Seed")

Il faut toutefois noter que les Etats-Unis d'Amérique ne semblent pas affectés par ces guerres, si on considère les épisodes VOY: "Future's End, Part I", "Future's End, Part II" situés en 1996 et ENT: "Carpenter Street" situé en 2004.

21ème siècle

A la suite des troubles de la fin du 20ème siècle, des débats controversés eurent lieu sur le sort de centaines d'embryons d'Améliorés. Les gouvernements terriens optèrent finalement pour le placement en suspension cryogénique de ces embryons, ces faits ayant été caché à l'opinion publique. (ENT: "Borderland", "Cold Station 12")

Le débat sur la manipulation génétique et l'amélioration de l'Humain continua toutefois à marquer le 21ème siècle et sera finalement l'une des causes de la Troisième Guerre Mondiale qui débuta en 2026. (ENT: "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II")

L'ingénierie génétique humaine fut finalement bannie sur Terre, ce concept étant considéré comme anti-humaniste. Les gouvernements craignaient, en effet, de voir resurgir de nouveaux tyrans comme Khan. (TAS: "The Infinite Vulcan" ; DS9: "Doctor Bashir, I Presume", "Statistical Probabilities")

En conséquence, le Docteur Stavos Keniclius, travaillant notamment sur le clonage, fut banni de la communauté et quitta finalement la Terre. (TAS: "The Infinite Vulcan")

McCoy indiqua que Keniclius aurait plus de 250 ans en 2269.

Conséquences

Références

TOS: "Space Seed"

KIRK: An old Earth vessel – similar to the DY-500 class.
SPOCK: Much older – DY-100 class, to be exact. Captain, the last such vessel was built centuries ago, back in the 1990s.

SPOCK: ...scanners make out a name – SS Botany Bay.
KIRK: Then you can check the registry.
SPOCK: No such vessel listed. Records of that period are fragmentary, however. The mid-1990s was the era of your last so-called world war.
MCCOY: The Eugenics Wars.
SPOCK: Of course, your attempt to improve the race through selective breeding.
MCCOY: Now wait a minute. Not our attempt, Mr. Spock...a group of ambitious scientists. I'm sure you know the type...

KIRK: 72 alive, a group of people dating back into the 1990s. A discovery of some importance, Mr. Spock.
SPOCK: There are a great many unanswered questions about those years. A strange, violent period in your history. I find no record what so ever of an SS Botany Bay.

SPOCK: And why no record of the trip?
KIRK: Botany Bay? That was the name of a penal colony on the shores of Australia, wasn't it? If they took that name for their vessel...
SPOCK: If you're suggesting this was a penal deportation vessel, you've arrived at a totally illogical conclusion.
KIRK: Oh?
SPOCK: Your Earth was on the verge of a dark ages. Whole populations were being bombed out of existence. A group of criminals could have been dealt with far more efficiently than wasting one of their most advanced spaceships.
KIRK: Yes. So much for my theory.

MCCOY: Even as he is now, his heart valve action has twice the power of ours, lung efficiency 50% better.
KIRK: An improved breed of human. That's what the Eugenics War was all about.
MCCOY: I'd estimate he could lift us both with one arm. Be interesting to see if his brain matches his body.

KIRK: What was the exact date of your lift off? We know it was sometime in the early 1990s.

KIRK: This Khan is not what I expected of a 20th century man.
SPOCK: I note he's making considerable use of our technical library.
KIRK: Common courtesy, Mr. Spock. He'll spend the rest of his days in our time. It's only decent to help him catch up. Would you estimate him to be a product of selective breeding?
SPOCK: There is that possibility, Captain. His age would be correct. In 1993, a group of these young supermen did seize power simultaneously in over 40 nations.
KIRK: Well, they were hardly supermen. They were aggressive, arrogant. They began to battle among themselves.
SPOCK: Because the scientists overlooked one fact-- superior ability breeds superior ambition.
KIRK: Interesting, if true. They created a group of Alexanders, Napoléons.
SPOCK: I have collected some names and made some counts. By my estimate, there were some 80 or 90 of these young supermen unaccounted for when they were finally defeated.
KIRK: That fact isn't in the history texts.
SPOCK: Would you reveal to war-weary populations that some 80 Napoleons might still be alive?

KIRK: Forgive my curiosity, Mr. Khan, but my officers are anxious to know more about your extraordinary journey.
SPOCK: And how you managed to keep it out of the history books.
KHAN: Adventure, Captain. Adventure.
SPOCK: There was little else left on Earth. There was the war to end tyranny. Many considered that a noble effort.
KHAN: Tyranny, sir? Or an attempt to unify humanity?
SPOCK: Unify, sir? Like a team of animals under one whip?
KHAN: I know something of those years, remember. It was a time of great dreams, great aspiration.
SPOCK: Under dozens of petty dictatorships.
KHAN: One man would have ruled eventually, as Rome under Caesar. Think of its accomplishments.
SPOCK: Then your sympathies were with...
KHAN: You are an excellent tactician, Captain. You let your second-in-command attack while you sit and watch for weakness.
KIRK: You have a tendency to express ideas in military terms, Mr. Khan. This is a social occasion.
KHAN: It has been said that "social occasions" are only warfare concealed. Many prefer it more honest, more open.
KIRK: You fled. Why? Were you afraid?
KHAN: I've never been afraid.
KIRK: But you left at the very time mankind needed courage.
KHAN: We offered the world order!
KIRK: We?
KHAN: Excellent. Excellent. But if you will excuse me, gentlemen and ladies, I grow fatigued again.

KIRK: Name-- Khan, as we know him today. Name-- Khan Noonien Singh.
SPOCK: From 1992 through 1996, absolute ruler of more than a quarter of your world; from Asia through the Middle East.
MCCOY: The last of the tyrants to be overthrown.
SCOTT: I must confess, gentlemen. I've always held a sneaking admiration for this one.
KIRK: He was the best of the tyrants and the most dangerous. They were supermen in a sense. Stronger, braver, certainly more ambitious, more daring.
SPOCK: Gentlemen, this romanticism about a ruthless dictator is...
KIRK: Mr. Spock, we humans have a streak of barbarism in us. Appalling, but there, nevertheless.
SCOTT: There were no massacres under his rule.
SPOCK: And as little freedom.
MCCOY: No wars until he was attacked.

TOS: "The Omega Glory"

McCOY: The infection resembles one developed by Earth during their bacteriological warfare experiments in the 1990s. Hard to believe we were once foolish enough to play around with that.

TAS: "The Infinite Vulcan"

KIRK: Lieutenant Uhura, how are you coming with that information on Keniclius?
UHURA: Nothing current, Captain. I may have found something in the history banks, I'll have it in a moment.

COMPUTER VOICE: Working. From Earth history file. Stavos Keniclius, Earth scientist. Period: Eugenics Wars. Planned to clone perfect specimen prototype into master race. Concept considered anti-humanistic, banned from community. Disappeared. No evidence of death. No further data.
MCCOY: There used to be a story about a modern Diogenes wandering the galaxy looking for someone special.
KIRK: Someone special. A perfect specimen, perhaps. Yes, I've heard it too.
MCCOY: It couldn't be Keniclius, he would be over 250 years old!
KIRK: Not if he cloned a new copy every so often to carry on the search. Remember, he said he was Keniclius 5.

UHURA: Mr. Spock, tell the Captain I've located more information about Keniclius. I had the library computers check out all known writings by Keniclius. They are obscure but there is a recurring in his later essays about using his master race as a peace keeping force throughout the galaxy. That was why Keniclius wanted a perfect specimen.

KIRK: All this has been a waste Keniclius. There's been peace in the Federation for over 100 years.
KENICLIUS 5: That is a lie! What about the Eugenics Wars? The Galactic Wars? What of the depredations of the Romulans, the Klingons and the Kzinti? An army of Spock duplicates are necessary to subdue them.

"Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan"

KHAN: Captain, captain, captain. Save your strength, Captain, these people have sworn to live and die at my command two hundred years before you were born. Do you mean he never told you the tale? To amuse you, Captain? No? Never told you how the Enterprise picked up the Botany Bay, lost in space from the year 1996, myself and the ship's company in cryogenic freeze?

KHAN: It was only the fact of my genetically engineered intellect that allowed us to survive! On Earth, two hundred years ago, I was a prince, with power over millions...

TNG: "A Matter of Time"

PICARD: How can you be? How can you be "comfortable" watching people die?
RASMUSSEN: Let me put it this way. If I were to tell you that none of those people died, you'd easily conclude that you tried your "solution" and it succeeded. So, you'd confidently try again. No harm in that. But what if I were to tell you they all died? What then? Obviously, you'd decide not to make the same mistake twice. Now, what if one of those people who...
PICARD: I know, Professor, "What if one of those lives I save down there is a child who grows up to be the next Adolf Hitler or Khan Singh?" Every first year philosophy student has been asked that question since the earliest wormholes were discovered. But this is not a class in temporal logic... It's not theoretical, it's not hypothetical, it's real. Can't you see that?

DS9: "Doctor Bashir, I Presume"

BENNETT: I don't think so. Two hundred years ago, we tried to "improve" the species through DNA resequencing and what did we get for our trouble? The Eugenics Wars. For every Julian Bashir that can be created, there's a Khan Singh waiting in the wings -- a "superhuman" whose ambition and thirst for power have been enhanced along with his intellect. The law against genetic engineering provides a firewall against such men and it's my job to keep that firewall intact.

DS9: "Statistical Probabilities"

BASHIR: They don't "put people away" for being genetically engineered.
JACK: No, they just won't let us do anything that's worth doing, they're afraid we're going to take over.
BASHIR: It happened before. People like us did try to take over.
JACK: I knew it! I knew you were going to trot out the Eugenics Wars.
BASHIR: I'm not trotting anything out. All I'm saying is that there's a reason we're barred from certain professions. That doesn't mean we can't be productive members of society.

ENT: "Hatchery"

ARCHER: My great-grandfather was in North Africa during the Eugenics Wars. His battalion was evacuating civilians from a war zone when they came under attack. There was a school full of children directly between them and the enemy. If his men had returned fire, they might have hit it. So he called the commander on the other side, got him to agree to hold his fire long enough to evacuate the school.

ENT: "Borderland"

ARCHER: Soong used to work at Cold Station 12, a top secret medical research station.
REED: Isn't that where Starfleet keeps a stockpile of infectious diseases?
ARCHER: Along with genetically-engineered embryos left over from the Eugenics Wars. It's been kept from the public for obvious reasons.

TRIP: So there could be a bunch of Augments from the Eugenics Wars running around loose?
MAYWEATHER: Not a pretty thought.

PHLOX: This is extremely sophisticated work for 20th century Earth.
SOONG: Well, I made some modifications of my own.
PHLOX: Ah, really? What kind of modifications?
SOONG: I'd prefer to let my work speak for itself.
PHLOX: I think it already has.
SOONG: I didn't realize you shared humanity's reactionary attitude toward this field of medicine.
PHLOX: On the contrary. We've used genetic engineering on Denobula for over two centuries to generally positive effect.
SOONG: But you don't approve of what I've done.
PHLOX: You tried to redesign your species. The first time that was attempted on Earth, the result was 30 million deaths.

TUCKER: If I remember my history, these Augments you love so much had plenty of slaves.
SOONG: They were more like subjects.
TUCKER: Oh. They were just treated like slaves.

ENT: "Cold Station 12"

SOONG: Some claim humanity rose up against the Augments. Others say the Augments began fighting among themselves. Whoever started it, the war devastated Earth. Millions perished. And when it was over, people like you were feared.

ARCHER: It's the embryos from the Eugenics Wars that Soong's after.
TRIP: I thought Soong stole the embryos.
ARCHER: He took nineteen. But there are over eighteen hundred more.
TRIP: That's why he took the incubators with him.
T'POL: Why weren't these embryos destroyed after the war?
ARCHER: At the time, it was too controversial. Earth's governments couldn't decide how to handle the issue, so they put them into cold storage.

PHLOX: You might be interested to know Smike's become quite the student of Earth history. He's been reading up on the Eugenics Wars.
ARCHER: I doubt Soong gave him the whole story.
PHLOX: I'm quite familiar with the subject myself. Human intellect and human instinct were out of sync. So many people were killed.
ARCHER: The official number was 30 million. Some historians say it was closer to 35.
PHLOX: I understand why Earth banned genetic engineering.

ENT: "The Augments"

MALIK: Are you familiar with the name Botany Bay?
PERSIS: It's a penal colony on the shores of Australia.
MALIK: It's also the name of a pre-warp vessel launched at the end of the Great Wars. The ship carried many of our brethren, including Khan Noonien Singh.
SOONG: Botany Bay is a myth. There's no evidence it ever existed.
MALIK: All records of the launch were destroyed, they didn't want to be followed.
SOONG: Even if you're right, the ship was lost. Never to be heard from again.
MALIK: Exactly my point. Khan was a great leader but he made one fatal mistake: he ran from his enemies, rather than face them.

SOONG: If he deploys that weapon, he'll be confirming everything they've said about Augments for the last 150 years.

ARCHER: You didn't know. You had to see him murder someone in front of you.
SOONG: What do you want me to say? That you were right about them and I was wrong? Maybe things would have been different if I had been there for them. If Starfleet hadn't locked me away.
ARCHER: None of that would have mattered in the end. It's in their nature. They were engineered to be this way. "Superior ability bread superior ambition." One of their creators wrote that. He was murdered by an Augment.