Surviving Vulcan Elders.

[Mage]

It strikes me that, in order to survive something, you have to be there. So I'm guessing the 10.000 survivers are actually people that were on the planet at the time of destruction.

[King Daniel into Darkness]

According to Alan Dean Foster's novelization of Star Trek, Old Spock was gonna make his future knowledge freely available. Bob Orci said on Trekmovie around that time that that was an addition of ADF's.

According to issue #15 of the Star Trek Ongoing comic (with it's Observer-like Bad Robot Bob Orci OversightTM), he's keeping his mouth shut, citing a non-interfence directive.

From what I gather of the unreleased novel The Hazard of Concealing, Old Spock was keeping his mouth shut in that too, although word about him gets out and all hell breaks loose, with several Alpha Quadrant powers coming after him for his juicy future knowledge.

[King Daniel into Darkness]

Aboutthe surviving Vulcans, Spock says he estimates 10,000 have survived. At the end he's leaving SF to help rebuild the Vulcan race until Old Spock (who says "there are so few Vulcans left, we cannot afford to ignore each other") convinces him otherwise.

Old novels and FASA manuals put off-world Vulcans in the millions, with entire colony planets. But if Bad Robot have decided Vulcan's colonies are limited to a few hundred each... it's their Star Trek.

[Mach5]

Arpy wrote:

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Temporal Prime Directive and all that.

Bullshit concepts like "Temporal Prime Directive" died with Braga-Trek. Good fucking riddance.

[Robert Maxwell]

I don't see how polluting the timeline could be a concern, anyway, given that Nero showed up, destroyed sizable Klingon and Federation fleets, blew up Vulcan, and killed billions of people. It would be hard for anything old Spock said to cause more profound changes to the timeline than all that.

[chardman]

Mage wrote:

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It strikes me that, in order to survive something, you have to be there. So I'm guessing the 10.000 survivers are actually people that were on the planet at the time of destruction.

I'm guessing this is correct. You don't count people who weren't directly involved. For example, I've heard it said that about 15,000 people in the World Trade Center escaped before the towers collapsed on 9/11. If you were asked "How many people survived", would you limit your answer to the 15,000 who were actually there and escaped, or would you also include the nearly 7 billion of us who survived the event because we weren't even there?

[Arpy]

If the Federation use Spock's knowledge of the future to its benefit, why the hell wouldn't the Klingons send their own emissary back earlier still to undo him and do even more to its own benefit. Same with the Romulans, Tholians, or Borg?

With Spock's knowledge the Federation wouldn't merely deal with the space amoeba and save a redshirt or fifty, but they could take over the galaxy. THAT's why the JJ-verse won't have him spill too much of what he knows: because it wouldn't be about giving the writers room for new developments in the Trek universe, it'd be them having to create a Trek universe too divergent from what they're looking for.

[Set Harth]

Arpy wrote:

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If the Federation use Spock's knowledge of the future to its benefit, why the hell wouldn't the Klingons send their own emissary back earlier still to undo him and do even more to its own benefit.

Sending them back the same way as in STXI wouldn't undo anything in the Abramsverse, it would just create another branching timeline.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Arpy wrote:

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If the Federation use Spock's knowledge of the future to its benefit, why the hell wouldn't the Klingons send their own emissary back earlier still to undo him and do even more to its own benefit. Same with the Romulans, Tholians, or Borg

Because those would create yet MORE alternate timelines, while not supplanting the original. Remember, Worf (on that DS9 ep where they meet tribbles) said that the Klingon Empire actually did try that very thing - sending temporal assault teams back in time to blow up their enemies' homeworlds. Obviously this didn't succeed in changing the regular timeline...

[Arpy]

Yeah but do you think that's what the writers are looking for? They just created THIS timeline. They're looking to play with IT, NOT the gimmick of perpetual time travel. Trek, not Who.

And re Trek, the branching off universe is a new way of looking at time travel in Trek. Obviously in the past it was the same timeline they looked to alter, which again says something about why they wouldn't jump to use future Spock's knowledge right off the bat: there must be some Mutually Assured Destruction thing going on where no one does it for fear of everyone doing it. Either that or some timecops keeping things kosher.

[King Daniel into Darkness]

I like Watching the Clock's interpretation of things - that it was the method of time travel in Star Trek that caused the alternate reality to split off. The black hole was a strictly one-way transfer, so the resulting timelines weren't entangled and so don't merge as the ones using two-way time travel ("Yesterday's Enterprise" etc) do. That way classic Trek's myriad time travel stories (and future ones in the novels) aren't rendered obsolete.

[teacake]

Every time I see the title of this thread I think of Vulcan Elders coming at me with canes, ready to beat me.

[YARN]

There are two problems that I see with the "Temporal Prime Directive" argument.

1. The events of the new films take place before Starfleet had developed TNG-style rules about changing timelines.

More importantly...

2. The characters in the film themselves recognized that they were in an alternate timeline caused by Nero's intervention.

Nu-Trek is not part of the old timeline, but is boldly going in its own direction. There is not future to screw up or ruin. They are on a brand new branch in a branching timeline. Their timeline is already radically different from that of old Trek. They've learned that their technological disadvantages can result in entire planets getting destroyed while their fleets are blasted apart like toys.

Their future is open (that was the whole point of the reboot). Spock would simply be like encountering an alien with superior technology the UFP with whom the UFP commonly interacts to get more tech. Spock is THE surviving elder. He may save countless lives, prevent countless wars, cure countless diseases.

[BillJ]

YARN wrote:

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There are two problems that I see with the "Temporal Prime Directive" argument.

1. The events of the new films take place before Starfleet had developed TNG-style rules about changing timelines.

Well, Spock was the very first character to warn us of the dangers of contaminating the timeline back in 1966 with Tomorrow is Yesterday.

But we've seen multiple contacts with the Narada by 23rd century forces. The first contact in 2233 obviously altered the way Starfleet designs and constructs ships as we see the Constitution-class get a much later start in the divergent timeline. I would also think that some scans from both the Klingon and Starfleet encounters with the ship in 2258 would have survived as well.

[Sindatur]

teacake wrote:

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Every time I see the title of this thread I think of Vulcan Elders coming at me with canes, ready to beat me.

Heh, you're not the only one

I too believe, the 10,000 survivors are 10,000 survivors of the specific event of Vulcan blowing up, rather than only 10,000 total of the Vulcan people being left alive.