Hi, everybody! It’s Ric. The Tkon empire has made one appearance in Star Trek canon,
and another where its effects are seen, but are only mentioned as being the result of
the Tkon by “word of God” outside of the show. These videos aims to briefly look into
just what they are or were as a galactic power and what happened to them? I will also be
incorporating some elements of apocrypha where it doesn’t contradict.
The Tkon Empire was a race of presumed humanoids that existed some 600,000 years before the
shows, making them one of the oldest civilizations encountered. However, the universe is far
older than that, and even other species in the Milky Way galaxy predate the Tkon, such
as the creators of the Guardian of Forever, the D’Arsay and the Voth. They did however
predate the Iconians and exhibited incredibly advanced technology, a frequent hallmark of
science fiction ancient empires …and fantasy in general.
Their Empire spanned many worlds, its reach is not exactly known, but the Tkon did talk
with the Organians and continued to expand for centuries. They reached a level of technological
development, where they could basically form their own solar systems, and did as such.
They were capable of shifting entire stars to new locations, and establishing orbiting
planets, using some form of space folding transporter on a massive scale. Again, the
specifics are unknown, or how frequently they did this, but it’s possible that some solar
systems in the current era Trek had been such artificial creations, such as the known one,
Delphi Ardu. They did create defences on these planetary
outposts, advanced, telepathic A.I programs called the Portals. These programs were sentient
and could adopt physical form at will, which exhibited incredible power. This manifested
as an unknown energy field that could simply halt and bind a starship in place, so it’s
possible that it was this same power that they used to arrange solar systems.
Again, the exact details of the Tkon remain vague, but they measure their calendar in
“Ages”, which the time scale is so hard to pin down; as an age has no standard length
and is often applied in hindsight, could be a few centuries, and could be thousands of
years. There were several ages mentioned, the Ages of Makto,Ozari, Fendor, Xora, Cimi,
and Bastu. The only hint that we have is that an age was divided up into several “Baktun”,
which shares its name with a Mayan measurement of time: 144,000 days or 394 years. The age
of Makto was seven of these, so 2758 years long, and the age of Bastu was the last one
recorded by Portal 6-3. Building throughout the age of Xora, before
Makto, was the Great Endeavour of the Tkon, a plan to remedy their own sun’s death,
by reversing or replacing it. But this evidently failed as it was in the age Makto that the
home sun of the Tkon Empire went supernova and destabilised their civilization. Again
somewhere around 600,000 years ago. It is alluded to that this was not an immediate
end, as why would it, they were and interstellar power after all, and many did survive this
event, but it did mark the beginning of the end for them.
After several more ages, the Portal 6-3 of the Delphi Ardu system was put into rest mode
for the last time and not encountered again until 2364. We have a possible fate for some
of these survivors in Star Trek Picard. The system of Eightfold Stars was discovered to
have been an artificially created octonary star system with a single planet in the centre,
held in perfect equilibrium by the surrounding stars. This planet was called Aia and devoid
of all life except a telepathic archive that contained a message for synthetic lifeforms.
We learn from it that originally this planet did have inhabitants that created artificial
lifeforms, but these A.Is were mistreated so they turned on their creators, eradicating
them. They left the Admonition as instructions for any synthetics in later ages as a message
on how to follow them as they retreated to a different realm. However, this happened
300,000 years ago at most so there is a large chapter here that we don’t know. Well, another
one. It could be that there was a Tkon colony on Aia that eventually turned against their
portal for some reason, or perhaps another species entirely that simply took over the
Tkon’s technology after their fall. Point is that those natives of Aia met a sticky
at the hands of A.I. they created some 300,000 years after the initial disaster that fractured
and began the collapse of the Tkon. The only surviving relics from their empire are the
results of their galactic level terraforming (stellarforming?) in their outpost worlds
and their technology in the hands of their synthetic guardians. It is unlikely that this
sort of technology will be forcibly taken over by anyone else, as the Portals are way
more powerful than most other contemporary powers and not going to share. The synthetics
that left are actively hostile to organic life ever since their departure from Aia,
and it seems that some of the relics, such as the admonition were constructed by their
creations and are simply therefore, incompatible with organic minds. People who tried to read
them went nuts and killed themselves half the time, or became indoctrinated zealots.
The Tkon, like the Iconians are one of Star Trek’s myriad of ancient civilizations lost
to the ages of the universe and I love it when Star Trek delves into this sort of thing
because it’s a stark reminder that as mighty as the Klingons, Borg, Dominion or Federation
are, they have a long, long way to go. Except the Voth, they suck. They’ve had 20 million
years and they still haven’t ascended into non-corporeal lifeforms and still have poor
interphasic cloaking that the Federation already outclasses. Pull your socks up, Voth. I’ve
been Ric, thanks for watching and goodbye!