So the Enterprise crew go back in time to near the end of the age of dinosaurs, and we don't see any signs of Voth anywhere. If there was any signs of a species on Earth at a minimum of near to space-faring levels of development it would have been stated in the episode, but we get nothing. Assuming this wasn't simply due to time constraints or a massive oversight by the production crew, the lack of acknowledgement of the Voth does leave an even bigger mystery about their origins then we've had since the VOY episode: Now while it's not directly stated in the episode it's at least a bit implied that the Chicxulub impact happened pretty shortly after the events of the episode, so how did the ancestors of the Voth escape? To me it seems like the episode gives two likelier possibilities or at least leaves open the option for two less likely possibilities, but they all have holes in the logic:
Option 1: Stolen Dol'drm tech - If we give the concept that the KT event wasn’t immediate, but a fragment orbited the Sol system for potentially thousands of years, then Proto-Voth could have had time to develop into a space faring society. While they could have simply naturally progressed in this scenario, it's possible they could have leap frogged thousands of years by reverse engineering the tech from the crashed Dol'drm ship. It could also explain why the Voth, while extremely advanced compared to 24th century Federation, they’re not where you’d expect a species with a at least 66 million year head start to be at (32nd century star fleet had time travel tech for centuries and had a general working knowledge on multiversal travel, even if by the 32nd century these techs were banned) and the lack of fossil evidence of Voth society. They arose quickly in the region immediately surrounding the ship, maybe came into enough contact with fleeing Martians to get a rough idea how the tech works, and advanced just enough to get out of Earth when the time came. This would mean they’d have a hyperspecialized tech tree, with really high levels of engineering skill and practical knowledge about how to make the tech work but not how it works. They’d be a monoculture (due to not arising fast enough to develop into other cultures or the high tech Voth simply steamrolling everyone else) so would have a rigid way of thinking (which is the case with modern Voth), and the lack of a theoretical framework for the tech would likely mean they’d struggle with progressing past Dol'drm level of tech, and a rigid social order that imposes doing things the “proper way” would compound the issue. Since this would mean they’d not be likely to develop warp on their own, they’d only be able to leave the system on massive sublight ships, which would explain why all Voth live in a massive city-ship. With no outside contact and a single slow moving ship they’d likely be able to exist indefinitely, drifting across the galaxy and only barely advancing technologically.
Option 2: Slaves - If the KT extinction is too close to the events of the episode, then the only way out would be if Martians take some Earth life with them on their way out. The biggest hurdle to this is why bother? Mars was dying, so I'd understand if they supplemented their resources with Earth biota, but dinosaurs are huge and are resource hogs, so not the kind of things you bring with if it's just for terraforming or farming them. Plus if Capt. Cassell’s view of “Alien to me means evil” is the norm for her people; they'd have to be truly desperate to harvest from Earth. This may be a leap, but the only possible reason I could think of to justify Voth existing in this scenario is if there were proto-Voth already on Earth, at a stone-age level of tech, and the Martians enslaved them out of a need for manpower. I could see the Martians temporarily ending up on Earth after Mars died, but post-KT Earth would have been a hellscape for thousands of years, so it wouldn’t have been viable long term. So the Martians take what they can, and leave. The proto-Voth spend an indefinite period of time with the Martians, and then either escape, overthrow, or are simply given their freedom and either integrate into Martian society or leave and start their own. Considering the Voth are seemingly contained to one city-ship and aren't spread out, I'd lean on their ancestors having escaped in one single go and taken what they could with them. It would explain their insular nature and their lack of records, as they'd probably would only have they tech they fled with and not the sum total of the Martian recorded history. Any still enslaved Voth ancestors would have died out with the Martians, leaving this single group to continue on in isolation.
Option 3: Intermediate homeworld - Now if KT happened fast and Proto-Voth slaves weren’t what happened, then maybe the Martians did take samples of Earth life and used them in terraforming or agriculture. I’m leaning towards it not being the Martians, because if Martian DNA is all over the galaxy, they surely Earth DNA would have been spread by them too if they were relying on Earth biota for resources, yet no mention anywhere in canon of this being the case. This would leave it to some other species like the Preservers or the Nacene to have come along and saved Earth biota and seeded it elsewhere in the galaxy. If it was someone like the Preservers then it could have been a single seeding event, saving the biota of a “dying” world and putting it elsewhere while not leaving a trail of seedings like the Martians would have. This would allow for the dinosaurs to flourish somewhere else for millions of years, and overtime give rise to the earliest ancestors of the Voth. It would explain why Voth historical records don’t go back 66 million years: in Voyager they say their recorded history only goes back 20 million years and they were already in the Delta quadrant. They’d have a homeworld, and for whatever reason in the intermediate millions of years evolved naturally, became space faring, lost contact with their home, and evolved into the Voth we see.
Option 4: Already gone - the only other option left that is the least supported by anything in the episode would be that by the events of the episode the Voth were already gone. The hadrosauridae group of organisms arose about 80 million years ago, so it’s possible that in that window the Voth evolved and left and there was no trace even by the time of the events of the episode. This is the least likely to me simply because I don’t feel like Voth could get to space faring levels naturally without leaving serious evidence in the fossil record. While the Martians are a seemingly obvious counter example to this, they did reveal they have the tech to rip chunks of their planet off the surface, so while a stretch, it’d possible Martians simply took what they could of their planet and brought it with them to preserve what they could of their culture, leaving nothing but craters. A naturally evolving Earth based Voth almost certainly would have been globe spanning, so the idea that the evidence of their existence being in some sunken continent seems too far fetched for me. Granted, the franchise isn't exactly above delving into unrealistic writing, but since we haven't been given an answer I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this.
Am I missing anything? Does anyone else have any theories about them?
M-5.
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I mean we already knew an asteroid hit Earth 65 million years ago. Nothing has changed there. Janeway speculated that some dinosaurs survived the extinction event, that would place the Voth evolving after the Martians left the system. The Martians don’t change much. Maybe they took Dinosaurs off Earth and they evolved to sapience elsewhere, but really any alien from outside Sol could have done that too.
The Preservers would be a possibility too. It's not clear when they started doing their thing, but we know they had a habit of moving groups of sapient or near-sapient species from their homeworlds to other M class planets to give them a chance. The Voth may have been pre-technological when this occurred.
The Voth evolution timeframe in-universe is merely speculation by the characters, and 65 million years is a *very* long time. There could be a million years between the Martian civilization and the Voth and it wouldn't make a single difference to previous canon.
I think the best answer here is 4: Already gone (given the potential descent from Hadrosaurs, who were earlier than Chicxulub. But you are correct- there's plenty of time for whole civilizations to evolve and depart in a few million years, then have a few more evolve after. It's odd that two evolve at the same time, with quite a bit of evolutionary divergence, but earlier Voth presence (and remnant tech) could support the unusual timing, and Sol is apparently extremely fecund, with at least 4 independently evolving tool using civs capable of space flight in less than 65 million years time.
It could be that the timeframe between the fifth plant exploding and the Voth leaving might have been longer than a commercial break. Spock did describe the image of the asteroid impact as a simulation. Humanity went from caveman to warp capable maybe 10,000 years. A casual scan with the damaged sensors of the Enterprise would probably miss a Neolithic level civilization. I posit that 1 The asteroid took time to move from the point of the explosion, potentially even hitting the Earth on the far side of its orbit. The far orbit distance would be potentially over 600 million kilometers. This would give the Voth the time to finish evolving before the impact. 2 The Voth were not warp capable upon leaving, and instead used generation ships. Most descriptions of warp evolution suggest a longer period between a species being space fairing and warp capable than humanity took. 3 As for archeological evidence of the Voth, we know that Earth has been visited by multiple warp fairing civilizations just across the time of humanity. It is possible that any Voth relics that did survive were in an Arretian museum when the planet was destroyed.
My personal headcanon is that the Voth are the descendant of the dinosaur punched by La'an
That actually makes sense as everything saurian related in the future, so to speak, is linked to Enterprise's trip back to 65 myo. Maybe she literally knocked sense into that species. 🤣
IIRC, there was speculation in “Distant Origin” that there were hadrosaurs that survived the Cretaceous extinction event and that they eventually evolved into the Voth on a landmass that no longer exists. If that’s true, it’d mean that the Voth left Earth a long time after the Cretaceous extinction event.
Exactly. A lot of comments about the Voth over the last couple weeks since this episode seem to miss the fact that our entire civilisation is a rounding error over a timeframe measured in millions of years. The Voth could have spent 50,000 years inventing warp drive after the asteroid hit and it'd still be 65 million years ago.
they eventually evolved into the Voth on a landmass that no longer exists
This is something that I think a lot of sci-fi fans and writers alike seem to forget - an alien civilisation doesn't necessarily have to spread out evenly across the surface of a planet. It's entirely possible all permanent settlement could be confined to one landmass, and the rest of the planet only having transient settlements for resource extraction and research.
But 65 million years ago isn’t that long ago geologically. Most major land masses we know today were , so there’s no real hidden continent for them to have evolved in. they’d have to have been restricted to a region the size of a modern country at most for their entire evolutionary history if they evolved right after the KT event happed
The problem with non-avian dinosaurs surviving the KT event is that if they did, *they'd still be here*.. they'd be far more adapted to survive and thrive in the early cenozoic once the damage from the asteroid receeded than any of the avians, reptiles, and mammals that survived. They'd have had a population boom and would have spread world wide with major radiation of new species, and would have been dominant species in most ecosystems. Yes chakotay talks about a "lost continent" but earth doesn't have that sort of thing, we'd have found it. "Lost continents" are a pre-plate tectonics idea that existed to explain why species could be found on different continents without evidence they'd spread beyond those specific places. The Voth had to have either evolved before the KT event, or be the result of a relocation of a portion of the mesozoic ecosystem to another world.
Yes chakotay talks about a "lost continent" but earth doesn't have that sort of thing, we'd have found it.
We have, it's called Zealandia. It subsided after breaking away from Gondwana and most of it is below sea level now. Zealandia would be one of the obvious candidates for where non-avian dinosaurs could have survived into the Cenozoic due to being far away from the impact site and thus relatively less exposed to severe weather.
I think the Cenozoic survival concept for the Voth requires them to be about as sophisticated as very early hominins - with a tendency to create shelters/burrows or inhabit caves, with a tendency to stockpile food and other resources and adapt their feeding strategy during times of extreme scarcity. This could also allow for them to have survived along with a few other non-Avian dinosaur species but later hunted them to extinction, similar to how human settlement across the world was often followed by extinction of local fauna from overhunting and habitat disruption within thousand or even hundred year timescales.
Option 4 is the one that goes better with recent real-life developments. In VOY, the extinction event was 65 million years ago. Recent science dates it to 66 million years ago. There's absolutely no way for hadrosaurs to evolve in those 1 million years between the adjusted extinction event and Janeway's timeframe.
Janeway was just guessing. All she had concretely was a DNA comparison that showed the last common ancestor between the Voth and Humans, the rest was her extrapolating, with even them being Hadrosaurs (or even dinosaurs at all) being only assumed because the hadrosaurs were the “most advanced” dyapsid she had record of. No reason to take the 65 million years as hard fact.
Option 5: The Voth weren't from Earth, and the cast of Voyager were wrong in their conclusion they were.
The entire idea that a spacefaring civilization could emerge on Earth, and build to the point of interstellar travel without leaving a single detectable relic that would show up anywhere on Earth, or anywhere in the solar system, always seemed utterly silly to me.
Simple: The Voyager crew were wrong, the Voth weren't from Earth.
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I think there's something worth considering in this.
The Humanoid Progenitors, similarly to the Engineers in Ridley Scott's universe, were masters not only of genetics but of directed evolution. Their modeling of species evolution over billions of years must require computational power and data beyond imagination in order to go from black goo (or whatever the Humanoid Progenitors used) to go from early life or even abiogenesis to intelligent, social humanoids.
While I think it's unbelievably novel that humanoids developed on different planets with so little phenotypical variation in the Star Trek universe, it's also worth considering that non-humanoid animals tend to also be similar on the home worlds of the humanoids seeded by the progenitors. Targs of Qo'noS are shockingly similar to Earth boars. Le-matya on Vulcan are clearly similar to Earth's big cats.
While anyone is allowed to dismiss anything out of hand, I can't imagine considering the similarities between humans and Vulcans as it pertains to the Progenitors without also considering the similarities between mountain lions and le-matyas.
What if, in the modeled and directed evolutionary process which is meant to result in humanoids, you must similarly map out millions or even billions of other evolutionary trees which result in necessary ecosystems in order to yield humanoids?
If that's the case, and I think it's reasonable, that means there may have been dinosaurs or dinosaur-like animals on thousands and thousands of worlds. I think this lends your hypothesis a great deal more weight and I think it should be taken serious instead of (currently) being downvoted.
It wasn't just the Voyager crew, the Voth approached them first because their genetic scans showed they had a shared evolutionary history.
I agree that spacefaring species would have left evidence, but that doesn't mean they had to have been space faring when they left Earth. We have multiple examples of entities like the Preservers pulling species from one planet and transplanting them elsewhere to spare them from dying out, so it's possible Voth are descended from one such group. Or hell, maybe their ancestors were at a cave man level and barely surviving the KT event and the Martians saved them out of pity or to exploit them
After seeing the episode, I saw Option 4 as being the only solution. By the time we hit the episode, the Voth had already left.
What people often forget in paleontology is a couple of things:
My theory is that the Voth left entirely before either the Martian or Dol'drm became space-faring. Their reasons for leaving could have been some ecological disaster of their own making or some requirement that everyone leave.
With their rigid social structure and authoritarianism, my guess is that some decision required all the Voth to leave on generational ships. It could have been a religious mandate that they leave for the stars which has now been lost in the Voth's history. There was a drive for modern humans to leave their homeland in Africa to find new places to settle. It's possible that some drive for the Voth to expand into the cosmos was coupled with incredibly strong familial ties which required that everyone go too.
Yeah but even if say no human fossils remain in say 65-100 million years from now, the amount of accumulated debris of artificial minerals from the last few millennia but especially the last 2 centuries has already left a permanent band in the rock layer of Earth that would be detectable for likely billions of years. A species that evolves to the level of space flight would have to be industrial, and would be detectable.
Well, its possible that the Martians saw what happened to Earth and took samples of the various different dinosaur species that survived the immediate impact in a "We destroyed your world, least we can do is make a zoo for you to survive in" and it went from there.
Based on a quick google: Hadrosaur existed between 85 and 66M years ago, trex between 68 and 66M years ago. The mass extinction event was 66M years ago. That's 19M years between Early and late Hadrosaur evolution. Humans have evolved for 6-7M years with modern humans being around 300k years. So imo there is significant time either side of Hadrosaur evolution to fit two sentient species in. Certainly much like we have apes and monkey offshoots there's room for the both with the voth evolving and leaving, and leaving their unevolved cousins behind.
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4 is the most likely. This episode occurs during the Maastrichtian. The Hadrosaurs that the Voth evolved from were Campanian dinosaurs (Likely Parasaurolophus or a closely related genus). By the Maastrichtian, the Lambeosaurs (of which Parasaurolophus was a member of) were on a steep decline, if not entirely extinct. Janeway theorizes that some Hadrosaurs survived the KT impact but... That is probably the least likely group to actually survive. These were huge, grazing animals living on a world where primary production shut down for a long time post impact. It doesn't matter that conditions in the early Cenozoic were ripe for non-Avian dinosaurs if they couldn't survive the post impact catastrophe to get there in the first place. There are millions of years between the Campanian and the very end of the Maastrichtian. More than any member of the genus Homo has existed on Earth. Plenty of time for the Voth to evolve, leave, and no traces of their civilization to remain. Janeway was working with incomplete information when she made her supposition.
Or the distant origin theory was wrong. Or the events of 4-1 took place in an alternate dimension.
This is less a theory than a wild fanfic idea, but I could see some fun story potential in establishing the Voth's origin in a branching timeline, one where either the Enterprise didn't stop the Martian ship, or it wasn't present in the first place. A group of Voth travel back in time, the same way the Enterprise did, but when they return to their future, it's on our timeline instead of their original one. You could feature their captain making the opposite choice that Pike did.
The Voth claim to be 20 million years old. That means they left earth 45 million years after the asteroid. Plenty of timr
The Voth were still about a few million years in the future. VOY merely theorizes that the Parasaurolophus partly survived the extinction event and continued to evolve for a few million year. Then left the planet at the next extinction event.
My new head canon is that Martians would probably have kept dinosaurs as pets and/or working animals. When some future Martians eventually spread out into the galaxy, they would have brought their pets with them. Same as humans will eventually bring dogs and cats (and cows and pigs and chickens) to Alpha Centauri. Then at some point the Martians passed into history, and surviving populations of dinosaurs would have evolved on those colony worlds and eventually developed warp technology. They would have found their own origin story very confusing once they reconnected with other dinosaur populations, but it all happened before they had any ability to make their own records about it, and there would have been only a scattered remnant of Martian artifacts to fill in the gaps.
I strongly believe they planned to have the Voth but at one point decided it would just be too much for new audiences to swallow