Meet the Vulcans!

Hey! In 56 years we'll discover faster than light travel! We just have to get through a pesky nuclear war and a "post-atomic horror" to manage it.) And then the pointy-eared people will come down and say "Congratulations you smelly emotional losers! You're the latest of hundreds to solve the intergalactic equivilant of the rubic's cube!" Well, new school, that's the way it went down. OLD school, Zephram Cochrane was the equivilant of Chuck Yeager, Wiley Post, Newton, and Einstein (Hawking hadn't been invented yet - well, not so's anybody had noticed). Entire planets were named for him, he was such a big deal. Spock was even impressed. (Granted, he was impressed with Richard Daystrom, and he was a freaking LOON.) The Discoverer of the Space Warp. Oooooooh! And Zeph wasn't from Earth. He was "of Alpha Centauri". So TNG went and made him FROM Earth, and almost by default, that makes him not as big a deal as we thought before. Weird.

Happy First Contact day!