An interesting thought experiment has popped up occasionally on the internet: if one were to go back in time and kidnap a baby, to raise it in present day society, how far back in human history could one go before modern humans would notice that this child was ‘different’? Anthropologists and scientists have weighed in with some surprising conclusions. Overall, we weren’t that different from even our most ancient ancestors. A cave baby could fit into modern society just fine, intellectually and physically, but they may lack some more recently evolved genes, such as the one that allows us to digest milk. To the contrary, would we be able to survive the challenges of prehistoric life? Kirk and Spock get to find out, when they haphazardly jump through a mystery portal.
Upon visiting the doomed planet Sarpeidon, Kirk and crew discover a ‘library’ portal of the planet’s entire past. As the Sarpeidon sun is about to go nova, all inhabitants of this world take refuge within different time periods to live out their lives on the anterior side of the apocalypse. A curious solution, as the most obvious escape plan would be to simply leave the planet. Instead, the natives devised a way to stay on their home world, essentially reshuffling their timeframes, so the civilization will have died out by the time the planet is destroyed. Each person must be biologically altered to suit the target time period before entering the portal. Preparation or not, Kirk hears a woman scream and jumps right through, ending up in medieval England. Spock and McCoy run after him, but as the portal is shifty and unpredictable, they land in the ice age.
The screaming woman was a thief, and as Kirk was still able to hear Spock and McCoy, he is accused of being a witch by the arresting officer. He finds out that, because he wasn’t biologically prepared for time travel, he can only spend a few hours in the past before dying. Meanwhile, Spock and McCoy are rescued by a cave-dwelling woman who was exiled in the ice age. While Kirk just wants to find the portal again, Spock and McCoy wrestle with misinformation on whether they are able to go back through the portal. Since the Sarpeidons cannot return once they are altered to match the past, the cavewoman tells them they are trapped there forever.
The most interesting scientific concept here is the idea of biologically manipulating cells to match a time period, but it is unexplored. There is no explanation of what this preparation entails or why it is not reversible. Kirk and crew are just trying to get back through a portal after some minor delay, and hopefully before a star goes nova. As explored earlier, there was not much genetic difference between prehistoric humans and modern ones, and certainly no difference between us and our medieval counterparts. Whether this biological preparation involves activating some mechanism to prepare the body for the challenges of the past is unclear. It is interesting that Spock seems to revert to his prehistoric, meat-eating roots the longer he spends in the cave, but he was not altered before entering the portal, so it is uncertain as to what is causing this. Would Kirk start to believe in witches the longer he stays in the Middle Ages?
Perhaps the most obvious difference between modern and prehistoric populations is in immunity. The anthropologists speculating on the opening question were all keen to note that a Neanderthal introduced into modern society would suffer from many diseases to which it was never exposed. Our immune systems have undergone significant changes, and modern microbes have mutated into some formidable antagonists. It is also possible that there were deadly microbes in the past against which modern humans have no immunity. Perhaps this is the reason why Kirk and crew would have died in a matter of hours. Instead, everyone finds the portal and jumps back home, and the Enterprise speeds away just as the sun goes supernova. Maybe Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are all infected with some ancient disease, but that’s nothing a little Star Trek magic can’t cure.
Hopeless Trekkie 