So our heroes don't solve the problem and V'Ger fries Earth. V'Ger itself is screwed because it never can find its Creator and have nowhere else to go. What about of the rest of the Federation? Earth is gone. Are the Vulcans, Andorians and Telarites madly scrambling or meh? The enemies, Klingons and Romulans, did they threw a party or are afraid of V'Ger? Then the Whale Probe comes for its friends and finds the planet scorched and V'Ger still thinking about what to do with itself -- or not. What
No sequels. Crotchety V'ger skulking around space digitizing everything. I imagine that if Spock were digitized, he'd somehow have been able to bring V'ger down from within.
Who's to say that didn't happen? For all we know, the Enterprise was digitized by the first volley from V'Ger, and the rest of the movie--and everything that followed--was merely a false reality created by V'Ger's memory core. --Sran
Oh, I don't know. I think V'GER & The Whale Probe would find love, don't you? Here's V'GER chok full of misty loveliness, in violets and cyans. Then there's The Whale Probe, this phallyc symbol, with it's hanging ball. It wouldn't be all that impossible, really, if they joined and found a new sense of purpose, that way ...
What would have happened had the Enterprise not interfered? So V'Ger arrives at Earth, sends the signal and gets no response. What then? Digitize Earth? And then?
either they would all bid to have their homeworld become the new capital of the federation (and hq of starfleet) ... ... or they would all be bowing out as fast as they could, earth got stuck with "hosting" the federation capital because no one wanted it and earth got the short end of the stick.
The corpse of Jonathan Archer rolls in its grave, because that crap with the Xindi was all for nothing.
I'm pretty sure Paramount would have burned that script, killed the writers, anyone who's read it, and buried the bodies where no one could find them. You don't kill a possible gold mine like that by ending Star Trek on a downward note. Never, ever do that if you want sequels. The ashes of the script would have been loaded into a crate and taken to where only top men could look at them. Top. Men.
Also, after sorting through the data that he digitized, Vejur realizes the truth about his creator and ressurrects all x-billion humans (but maybe not the aliens--sorry) just long enough to merge with all of them. The entire human race thus ascends to a plane of existence that makes Kurzweil's singularity look like the 10th Circle of Hell.
Now, wouldn't this offer an interesting side point? Suppose Vejur whipped up Ilia-style androids of all the creatures on Earth and set them back, since, what the heck, what's it going to do with all that stored data after the merging?
He could take them with him and use them to populaute the 8th Dimension. These alt. Trek timeline creatures eventually evolve into Lectroids; indeed, that's why they eat electricty. Not so outlandish: Yoyodyne is in Trek, which puts Trek in either the Banzaiverse or the Pynchonverse.