Is time travelling worth its inherent risks? Headache, Temporal Psychosis, the risk of altering the timeline etc.
Nope. In reality all the technobabble to explain how crewmen x,y,z, and a are still there when it's painfully obvious they would have bleeped out of the timeline along with every other change - with no explanation other than a one-liner of "Well obviously captain the makers of this had to protect the one going back in time", which is rubbish and everyone knows it.
Many people would see altering the timeline as a great benefit but even if you intend to do so it's a big risk, if you don't intend to do so, you see that as a terrible possibility, no way are its potential benefits worthwhile.
Interesting post. When I was a kid, the superpower I wanted most was the ability to time travel. Star Trek and movies like Back to the Future fueled that childhood fantasy. I always enjoy a good romp-through-time story. I suppose to answer the OP's question, you have to ask whether the situation requires time travel in order to resolve the problem. And whether the consequences of not time traveling outweigh the risks and are deemed acceptable. For example, in Star Trek IV The Voyage Home, time travel was required to resolve the problem, so it was definitely worth the risk when the alternative was Earth being destroyed.
it's the complete absence of negative results that gets me. imagine the tng enterprise returning to the 24th century, and data was suddenly gone. errased from existance. there's another character sitting at ops, and everyone treats this guy like he's always been there.
I think time travel involves going to a parallel universe. Perhaps extremely difficult to distinguish as different, but different nonetheless. You, as a time traveler, can affect the history of a timeline in any universe except the one that you originated from. From your perspective, you may be able to achieve your desired results, for all practical purposes, but not in your original universe.
Ooooh good one. All the fantasy /sci-fi I’ve read and watched has mixed messages. I know that if it were announced today or tomorrow that science has found a way to do so and testing will proceed; I’d be pretty terrified because I don’t feel like political, social and economic structures that are in place right now are equipped to handle it without it turning everything into a horrid dystopia. So maybe I consume too much fantasy sci-/fi huh? And in the slim chance that someone ever does figure it out and uses it; the likelihood anyone would be able to tell the difference or do anything about it seems like an even slimmer chance.
The nastiest consequence of time travel is touched upon by captain Braxton: I gave up trying to keep my tenses straight years ago. I presume that he is also one of the victims of Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's grammar book Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations and got stranded at the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional, just like all others who tried studying it.
Time travel(and the transporter) from a story telling point of view are good one offs and best forgotten. If it's a regular thing it just opens up to many problems to be worth it. Especially since they are open to abuse (transporter).