What happened to 'time travel at will'/slingshotting?

[blssdwlf]

Timo wrote:

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Who says the Bozeman wasn't sent back eventually?

I got the impression that they would not have sent the Bozeman back unless there was a critical need to do so, like say a war with the Klingons that put the Federation on the losing end ala the Enterprise-C.

Timo wrote:

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So the mission to observe Earth in the 1960s was so super-secret that not even all that many in Starfleet were told of it?

Sounds a bit dubious, when we think how unimportant that mission appeared. Our heroes didn't exactly achieve anything they could plausibly have set out to achieve - they just had random adventures in the past. Why study the 1960s?

They had cited a reason for the 1960s trip and it is entirely possible there were other missions carried out by other ships. And let us not forget about anyone stationed at the Guardian of Time could act as sentries for detecting major timeline changes.

But, what I was getting at based on Mytran's post was the idea that a ship must be modified in some way like with a unique intermix formula to be able to time travel otherwise we'd have lots of random cases where ships that got too close to a star and pulled away shot back (or forward) in time.

The knowledge that time travel is possible likely existed in TOS but the actual knowledge on how to do so probably was limited to a select few.

[Christopher]

Dale Sams wrote:

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I thought they turned that cloaking device over to the Feds. I thought that was the whole point.

As for Post TNG eps where a crew was stuck after time-travelling. I was also thinking of the Bozeman, but the circumstances of their arrival is so damn confusing...and seems to be a predestination one as the universe doesn't change ala' "Yesterday's Enterprise"...sending them back would probably be too dangerous.

Actually the situation in "Cause and Effect" is quite simple compared to "Yesterday's Enterprise." In YE, the "main" timeline turned out the way it did because the Enterprise-C's time travel was two-way -- they were taken into the future, saw how it turned out as a result of their disappearance at Narendra III, and went back again to defend the Klingon colony and thus avert the war, leading to the history we know. The situation in C&E is nothing more than the Bozeman effectively being stuck in stasis for 90 years and then coming out of it. It's not really time travel, more an elaborate form of time dilation. It was effectively a one-way trip as far as the rest of the universe was concerned, so there was no alteration of history; there was just the single history where the Bozeman disappeared in 2278 and reappeared in 2368.

[Mytran]

Timo wrote:

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So the mission to observe Earth in the 1960s was so super-secret that not even all that many in Starfleet were told of it?

Well, maybe! Perhaps the race that Gary7 came from contacted Starfleet Intelligence in the 23rd century and requested that the Enterprise be despatched on this specific research mission. They would of course have foreknowledge of the outcome, but hey...

[jayrath]

From a storytelling standpoint, later series had the holodecks. So they could do "time travel" episodes anytime they wanted, without the slingshot.

[YARN]

jayrath wrote:

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From a storytelling standpoint, later series had the holodecks. So they could do "time travel" episodes anytime they wanted, without the slingshot.

Yeah, watching some of these old episodes makes me wish that they had better back lots when they were originally filming Trek. It's too bad they didn't have a Kubrick or Ridley Scott set to hijack every once in a while. Instead it was, "Ah yes, we're stuck in the old west... ...again."

[Christopher]

Timo wrote:

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So the mission to observe Earth in the 1960s was so super-secret that not even all that many in Starfleet were told of it?

Is this surprising? Classified missions happen all the time in the military. Any potentially dangerous information is probably kept on a need-to-know basis. Probably quite a few missions we saw in TOS were classified. "The Enterprise Incident," obviously. No doubt the orders to go to Organia in "Errand of Mercy" were classified so that the Klingons wouldn't get word of it. Same for other overtly military missions like "Balance of Terror" -- which has the added issue of the Romulans' relationship to the Vulcans, which was probably kept secret at first out of fear of racial backlash against the Vulcans (and which, according to some tie-ins, had been known as far back as the Earth-Romulan War but kept secret ever since for just that reason).

Given the dangers that time travel poses, it's just common sense that the details of how to travel in time, or the location of something like the Guardian of Forever, would be highly classified. Certainly a free society couldn't and wouldn't restrict theoretical research into temporal physics, but there could be legal restrictions on actually attempting time travel or possessing a time machine -- analogously to how there's no US law against studying how to build a nuclear bomb or publishing the instructions, but it is highly illegal to possess unlicensed nuclear material or explosives in general.

[YARN]

Christopher wrote:

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Is this surprising? Classified missions happen all the time in the military. Any potentially dangerous information is probably kept on a need-to-know basis.

Star Trek was more Athens (an open society willing to deal with the risks of being an open society - see Pericles' funeral oration) than a paranoid postwar nuclear power. There were some secrets, but the federation was constructed around openness, trust, and free exchange.

It's saddening that we now take it for granted that governments of, by, and for the people regularly keep secrets from them on the grounds that they "know best." It is hard to see how a democracy can really work when the population is so easily kept in the dark whenever governments play the national security card.

As a writer, it is disappointing to me that you appear to accept such "realities" so casually. I'd recommend reading books like Bomb Power by Gary Wills which discuss how our sensibilities about gov't policies have been warped by perpetual "exigencies" which have licensed all sorts of secret programs.

One thing I give props to TNG narratives for is there exploration of the dark side of privileged secrets in the name of security.

[Timo]

Is this surprising? Classified missions happen all the time in the military.

The surprising thing about it is the apparent low priority of the 1960s mission. The heroes aren't explicitly about to do anything comparable to their other time travel hijinks - no saving the universe, no saving the Earth, even. There should be a thousand time travel sorties more pressing than that. So the implication is that Starfleet is sending thousands of time travelers to do things ranging from the fantastic all the way down to this ho-hum observation mission. Which makes secrecy unlikely, and any uniqueness of the Enterprise or its heroes in time travel ability implausible.

As for the need for secrecy, well, there does factually exist something of a gulf between those who really know the best, and the downright idiotic bulk of the population. It's just a question of whether the better-knowers are actually in charge of the secret things, or whether a sub-group of the idiots is... Democracy and openness doesn't help in that respect a bit.

Timo Saloniemi

[UssGlenn]

Timo wrote:

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The surprising thing about it is the apparent low priority of the 1960s mission. The heroes aren't explicitly about to do anything comparable to their other time travel hijinks - no saving the universe, no saving the Earth, even. There should be a thousand time travel sorties more pressing than that. So the implication is that Starfleet is sending thousands of time travelers to do things ranging from the fantastic all the way down to this ho-hum observation mission. Which makes secrecy unlikely, and any uniqueness of the Enterprise or its heroes in time travel ability implausible.
Timo Saloniemi

The other possibility is that The Enterprise trip was the first attempt at a sanctioned starfleet time travel mission, and they chose a simple observation mission to see how it would work. The fact that it got complicated may have convinced Starfleet not to try again.

[Timo]

Observing the nineteen-sixties is wrought with complications, as the people of the era would be exceptionally wary of space invaders: the civilians, from the red planet, the military, from the red continent. Observing the eighteen-sixties would have been safer: still well within the historical period so that observation results could be compared against existing records, but without the risk that the observers would end up being credibly recorded themselves (few cameras around, none that could take snapshots of aliens in the cornfield or flying saucer sections; no radars). Both periods would perhaps have had world history hanging by a thread, but the 1860s still quite a bit less so...

Nevertheless, perhaps Starfleet had good reasons to pick the 1960s Earth as their proof-of-concept target. For all we know, it was the only time in world history when the skies above Earth were not crowded by alien spacecraft...

Timo Saloniemi

[blssdwlf]

Well apparently the deflector shields of the Enterprise allowed them to "remain unobserved". That's pretty impressive considering that the world powers of Earth at that time had orbiting nuclear weapons and would've had their sensors aimed up at the sky to monitor an attack!

[E-DUB]

The size of the ship might be an issue. The BOP was unscather. The Enterprise was a little beaten up. Maybe the D is just too big.

[MacLeod]

Well it would certainly have got Voyager home in "Future's End" a quick sling shot around Sol and hey presto 24th century Earth.

[Silvercrest]

I imagine Bateson's ears pricked up when he heard the Enterprise-E had traveled back into the past following the Borg attack. "A way back to my own time? Tell me more!" Remember, the Bozeman was right there at the scene.

Whether Starfleet would let him do it is another question, of course.

[blssdwlf]

Silvercrest wrote:

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I imagine Bateson's ears pricked up when he heard the Enterprise-E had traveled back into the past following the Borg attack. "A way back to my own time? Tell me more!" Remember, the Bozeman was right there at the scene.

Whether Starfleet would let him do it is another question, of course.

No kidding. There really isn't any difference being shot forward in time like Enterprise-C or getting stuck in a time loop and coming out of it in the future. Imagine what TNG could be like if the Bozeman went back to when it left. Who knows, they might've done something to cause Q to meet up with the E-D at a later time thus allowing more time for the Federation to get stronger before encountering the Borg...