Yesterday's Enterprise Episode question

[YARN]

Suppose Starfleet were winning the war, suppose it was almost over - or suppose that the loss of the C made no large impact on history either way.

Would Picard still be obligated to send her back to her old timeline?

[R. Star]

YARN wrote:

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Suppose Starfleet were winning the war, suppose it was almost over - or suppose that the loss of the C made no large impact on history either way.

Would Picard still be obligated to send her back to her old timeline?

Hard to send them back to a death sentence when everything on this side is going well. Picard was already on the fence about that when things were going badly.

[DonIago]

Good thing Picard didn't get interviewed by DTI after this incident.

[The Wormhole]

DonIago wrote:

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Good thing Picard didn't get interviewed by DTI after this incident.

Nothing to interview him about. The DTI can't hold Picard Prime accountable for what an alternate timeline version of himself did. And since alternate Picard was presumably killed, he can't get interviewed by the alternate DTI.

YARN wrote:

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Suppose Starfleet were winning the war, suppose it was almost over - or suppose that the loss of the C made no large impact on history either way.

Would Picard still be obligated to send her back to her old timeline?

Not likely. If there was nothing wrong with the timeline, why alter it. Even if Guinan still sensed the timeline had changed, I doubt she'd want to mess with the timeline that wasn't that bad. And besides, the Bozeman didn't get returned to its original time.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

DonIago wrote:

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Good thing Picard didn't get interviewed by DTI after this incident.

Maybe he did.

At the very least, the DTI would want to talk to him after word got out about Sela.

[Lance]

Mr. Laser Beam wrote:

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Maybe he did.

At the very least, the DTI would want to talk to him after word got out about Sela.

It would be an easy defence though, wouldn't it?

"It wasn't actually me. It was another me. You know, from another reality altogether. Why don't you go ask him what he thought he was up to sending them back?"

[Mr. Laser Beam]

The DTI has shielded records which are protected from temporal erasure, so they could actually access data from the timeline that was the alternate one with the Klingon war. They just might ask Picard that very thing.

[R. Star]

Lance wrote:

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It would be an easy defence though, wouldn't it?

"It wasn't actually me. It was another me. You know, from another reality altogether. Why don't you go ask him what he thought he was up to sending them back?"

This didn't stop Captain Braxton from getting arrested for "crimes you are going to commit" in Relativity.

[Christopher]

R. Star wrote:

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This didn't stop Captain Braxton from getting arrested for "crimes you are going to commit" in Relativity.

But that wasn't by the (civilian) DTI, but by the Starfleet Temporal Integrity Commission five centuries in the future. In my novel DTI: Watching the Clock, I paint the TIC as coming from a time when the Federation's ethical standards have eroded considerably.

[Sector 7]

Mr. Laser Beam wrote:

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The DTI has shielded records which are protected from temporal erasure, so they could actually access data from the timeline that was the alternate one with the Klingon war. They just might ask Picard that very thing.

Awww... c'mon... you made that up!

[Timo]

Yeah, various professional writers (resident ones included) have made that one up... But it seems that somebody has misunderstood what they concocted. An organization operating out of the "regular timeline" would only protect knowledge of that timeline from corruption such as the sudden emergence of a Klingon War timeline or the sudden erasing of toothpicks from history, and would not have access to the multitude of other possible courses of history, including the 2½th Romulan War, the Clone War (with custard pies) or the Terminally Dull Peace, all of which also involved a Picard of some sort.

Timo Saloniemi

[Christopher]

Sector 7 wrote:

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Awww... c'mon... you made that up!

Actually William Leisner made it up in his story "Gods, Fate, and Fractals" in the anthology Star Trek: Strange New Worlds II. I then elaborated on it in my novel DTI: Watching the Clock. However, Timo's right -- the shielded records can't access information from alternate timelines. They're nothing more than what the name says. The DTI keeps records of events in its own timeline, and if that timeline is changed, the records are shielded against alteration, so the DTI agents in the altered timeline are able to discover that it's been altered (assuming the alteration takes place after the creation of the shielded records). They're just a protected archive of data from the "home" timeline. They aren't some crystal ball that gives the DTI knowledge of events in every timeline.

The loss of the Enterprise-C took place decades before the shielded records came into use in the novel continuity, so it's not a timeline that the DTI would have any knowledge of, except through Sela's unverified testimony to Picard in "Redemption, Part II."

[DonIago]

I am vaguely amused by the notion of Dulmer and Lucsly chewing out Picard for sending the E-C back into the rift though.

[Edit_XYZ]

Christopher wrote:

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But that wasn't by the (civilian) DTI, but by the Starfleet Temporal Integrity Commission five centuries in the future. In my novel DTI: Watching the Clock, I paint the TIC as coming from a time when the Federation's ethical standards have eroded considerably.

DTI, as depicted in the similarly named books, is a gathering of elitist a$$holes (despite the obvious intent to the contrary):
They immediately and utterly rejected the idea of saving, by temporal intervention, tens of billions of sentients (just recently killed), but when it came to the death of a single one of their own, temporal intervention to save her life was suddenly on the table as a viable option.
There's not much ethical standard there to be eroded.

[R. Star]

Edit_XYZ wrote:

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DTI, as depicted in the similarly named books, is a gathering of elitist a$$holes (despite the obvious intent to the contrary):
They immediately and utterly rejected the idea of saving, by temporal intervention, tens of billions of sentients (just recently killed), but when it came to the death of a single one of their own, temporal intervention to save her life was suddenly on the table as a viable option.
There's not much ethical standard there to be eroded.

Stalin did have a point when he said, "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."

You can personally identify with that single person, whereas a million dead it's hard to wrap your mind around. Whatever else you want to say about Stalin, he understood the human nature that much.