2024 Bell Riots were the tipping point[0], but there was still World War 3 a few decades later. A global nuclear exchange probably helped a lot in kicking human civilization off the dystopian but locally optimal path it found itself stuck on[1]. Meeting a technologically superior alien race a decade later also helped solidify a different perspective :).
But yeah, I too was disappointed when 2024 came and gone without the Bell Riots - Star Trek came this close to accidentally turning prophetic, as in the months prior things really felt like the Riots are going to happen on the date.
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[0] - In that timeline, at least. We've already past several important world events that originally happened in Trek timeline, so the show keeps shifting the dates to keep with the overall premise of being imagined future of real humanity.
IIRC the writers now settled on "Romulan temporal agents meddling with timeline, desperate to stop the Federation from forming, and failing because apparently the cosmos really wants UFP to be a thing" as a convenient explanation to push WW3, Eugenics Wars, etc. forward every once in a while.
[1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me.
> [1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me.
There is always the "it wasn't as bad as in Mad Max/Fallout/..." explanation. Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s, or nonexistent. Nuclear weapons will kill people and destroy cities, but if they aren't aimed at people or cities, but at military installations such as the US nuclear sponge[0], death toll and destruction will be far less severe. Things like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower might be left standing, as seen in a few Star Trek episodes. Which would also mean that humanity would be in less of a severe turmoil than other nuclear war SciFi might have imagined.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/18e01zh/would_t... https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/nuclear-sponge/
> Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s,
Back in the 80s. In the 60s it was just megadeath, with a chance of mutants.
(The Krakatoa movie was in 1968, but the winter thing took a while to sink in)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter <- look at "Early work".
But you are right that the concept was only made popular in the 80s, and a lot of the earlier works were classified or unknown and obscure to the public.
Back to the future 2 called a Chicago cubs World Series win in 2015. It actually happened in 2016.
My favorite fan theory as to why they went to a future of flying cars that’s so different from our own is that it was the events of the first movie (going back there and changing history) that ultimately led us to that different path.