Visitors from Deep Space Nine arrive today

On this date three visitors from the future were due to arrive in San Francisco.

Benjamin Sisco, Julian Bashir, and Jadzia Dax (respectively a normal human male, and augmented human male, and a Joined Trill) were accidentally sent back from 2371 to 30th August 2024 by a transporter malfunction.

Their communications badges having been stolen and having no other forms of ID, Sisco and Bashir were mistaken for vagrants and placed in the gigantic informal prison called "Sanctuary District A" consisting of 20 city blocks of San Fransisco with a wall around it, like a ghetto for the poor and dispossessed.

The story is told in the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episodes "Past Tense" parts one and two.

At one point during their visit to the past, Bashir asks the question

    "...there is one thing I don't understand: how could they have let things get so bad?"

Sisco replies:

    "That's a good question. I wish I had an answer."

Fortunately in real history over the thirty years since the programme was made, not even Trump and Biden were daft enough to wall off 20-block sections of  major US cities in order to lock up the poor. 

On this issue at least, things were not allowed to get so bad, so Sisco, Dax and Bashir arrived in a different timeline to ours.

In the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episodes, a change to the "Bell Riots" which in their history were due to happen in the coming days resulted in different timeline in which the Federation never came into existence.

Obviously we are not in either of those timelines, let's work to make sure our future is better rather than worse and things like World War III can be avoided.

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