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The Burn and Time Travel Ban are incompatible

This part I really am having trouble with in that episode, in that Michael and Discovery traveled forward in time hundreds of years before time travel was banned. How can they be breaking a law that didn't exist when the action occurred?

It isn't like they stopped every so often to see what regulations have changed on the way.
Technically they wouldn't be in violation of the accords; and the reason is that because in the era they were from; there were no temporal accords; or if there were the federation of the 23rd century was not a signatory to them.
 
According to the preview of the next episode, there's going to be more discussion of the Temporal Wars, plus a soldier from that war. And with Georgiou's problem, more and more it seems likely that time travel will play a factor.

I don't think the Time Travel Ban was introduced to wipe away that storytelling possibility for future writers. I think was an explicit Chekhov's gun, something that will be explored and take high precedence in the back half of the season and perhaps the series going forward.

No, I think they intend to use time travel for one purpose only: to get Georgiou back to the 23rd century for her Section 31 spinoff. Once she goes back, Discovery will stay permanently in the 32nd century.

After all, according to the preview scene,
Georgiou's condition is the result of traveling both through time and between parallel realities. And they made a point of establishing that it's impossible to return to the Mirror Universe in the 32nd century. Therefore, her only option is to go back to her own time. The fact that they made it a problem unique to Georgiou means that it's not likely to affect the rest of the cast and the rest of the series premise.


The Time Travel Ban and the Burn could very well be one and the same: A specific event from a specific power to achieve a specific goal.

You're falling prey to the trap of assuming everything in the past happened at the same time. The point was that the destruction of time travel technology (again, it was not merely a "ban," it was a wholesale eradication) happened significantly before the Burn, so that by the time the Burn happened, there was no way to undo it. They both happened in the 31st century, yes, but then, the Wright Brothers' first flight and the Moon landing both happened in the 20th century. A century is a long time.


Time travel seems like it should be easily doable with warp ships

As I said above, if that were the case, random people would be playing havoc with history all the time. So it can't be "easy." Both "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and The Voyage Home portrayed a slingshot effect as a difficult, dangerous thing, one where the calculations had to be just right.


This is, of course, assuming that there is a higher force enforcing the time travel ban. Which I think is ludicrously likely. A being or polity or group that can create the Burn should be sufficient to stop most time travel attempts.

Once again, it is misremembering what was stated onscreen to interpret it as a "ban." It was stated to be a comprehensive destruction of all methods of time travel. You don't need to enforce the non-use of something if it doesn't exist anymore. Yes, that does have logic holes, but what is "true" in a story is what the writers say is true, regardless of its logic problems. The writers' stated intent here is that all known means of time travel are completely gone, not merely prohibited.
 
As I said above, if that were the case, random people would be playing havoc with history all the time. So it can't be "easy." Both "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and The Voyage Home portrayed a slingshot effect as a difficult, dangerous thing, one where the calculations had to be just right.
And in Assignment: Earth they did it offscreen -- but it still might have been a difficult and dangerous thing to do, even offscreen and even if they didn't specifically mention the difficulty and danger.
 
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The Burn - An event that caused Dilithium to become a scarce resource and broke apart all large centralized governing bodies.

Time Travel Ban - A generalized agreement that bans the use of time travel.

These two things are in fact completely incompatible.

Something like the Time Travel Ban requires large centralized governing bodies to enforce it. But The Burn not only destroyed those, it also created a resource scarcity based situation that would encourage separate parties to use Time Travel to solve it.
There are probably still people doing a bit of illegal time travel here and there
 
And in Assignment: Earth they did it offscreen -- but it still might have been a difficult and dangerous thing to do, even offscreen and even if they didn't specifically mention the difficulty and danger.

It's annoying how they just tossed it out there as some casual thing, as a throwaway setup for the backdoor pilot. In my novel DTI: Forgotten History, I depicted the events leading up to that and tried to fill in more detail about the reasons for the mission and the difficulties they faced.
 
The Burn - An event that caused Dilithium to become a scarce resource and broke apart all large centralized governing bodies.

Time Travel Ban - A generalized agreement that bans the use of time travel.

These two things are in fact completely incompatible.

Something like the Time Travel Ban requires large centralized governing bodies to enforce it. But The Burn not only destroyed those, it also created a resource scarcity based situation that would encourage separate parties to use Time Travel to solve it.

Well, call it unintentional plot hole that nobody in Kurtzman's team aware of; or maybe aware, but ignore it, for the sake to avoid the limitation of "plot" creativity.
 
It's not a plot hole, it's an explanation for why they can't be back and stop the Burn from happening while also tying into the fact that Star Trek established that time travel was the norm in the future. Eventually there was a Time War, which was established in Enterprise and the end result was banning all time travel to prevent a similar war from happening again since it seemed to cause a lot of problems like alien Nazis in WWII and damage to the timeline. Then sometime later, the Burn happened and they had to deal with it. It just means they aren't going to rewrite the timeline, this is just how the future is and the Federation is going to have to rebuild from there.
 
It's not a plot hole, it's an explanation for why they can't be back and stop the Burn from happening while also tying into the fact that Star Trek established that time travel was the norm in the future. Eventually there was a Time War, which was established in Enterprise and the end result was banning all time travel to prevent a similar war from happening again since it seemed to cause a lot of problems like alien Nazis in WWII and damage to the timeline. Then sometime later, the Burn happened and they had to deal with it. It just means they aren't going to rewrite the timeline, this is just how the future is and the Federation is going to have to rebuild from there.
Cool.

And what's stopping a 2nd non-federation party from putting together a time machine and using it to steal Dilithium from the distant past?
 
It's not a plot hole, it's an explanation for why they can't be back and stop the Burn from happening while also tying into the fact that Star Trek established that time travel was the norm in the future.

It's probably more the latter. I think that from a storytelling perspective, they didn't want time travel to be an option, because they wanted the show to remain permanently set in the 32nd century from now on. And having a Federation that can time travel as freely as Voyager and Enterprise indicated would just get in the way of their stories, as well as creating the false expectation that Discovery's jaunt to the future would be temporary. So just wiping away the whole problem with a throwaway line about time travel being eradicated at the end of the Temporal Wars was a handy way to deal with that.

Although I note that David Croenenberg's character said in this week's episode that the Temporal Accords were so rigorously enforced that Starfleet couldn't send someone back to his home timeline even to save his life. That was during the wars, apparently, but it suggests that maybe the Temporal Accords are enforced by a much higher power than the Federation. That could answer the question of why things like slingshot effects or building new time machines are out of the question. After all, some of the Accords signatories could be from much, much further in the future and be far more advanced than the Federation, and might still have the power to enforce a ban on time travel. (I indicated in my DTI novels that Gary Seven's employers the Aegis were Accords signatories, one of the most ancient and powerful members as well as one of the most mysterious.)
 
Cool.

And what's stopping a 2nd non-federation party from putting together a time machine and using it to steal Dilithium from the distant past?
Well none of it's real, so that would only happen if they wrote it into a story. Seems like a shit story and pretty boring, so I don't think it will happen. You're trying to treat this as reality, but it's fiction. So you're just worrying about nothing.

Also Time Cops would stop it.
 
Although I note that David Croenenberg's character said in this week's episode that the Temporal Accords were so rigorously enforced that Starfleet couldn't send someone back to his home timeline even to save his life. That was during the wars, apparently, but it suggests that maybe the Temporal Accords are enforced by a much higher power than the Federation. That could answer the question of why things like slingshot effects or building new time machines are out of the question. After all, some of the Accords signatories could be from much, much further in the future and be far more advanced than the Federation, and might still have the power to enforce a ban on time travel. (I indicated in my DTI novels that Gary Seven's employers the Aegis were Accords signatories, one of the most ancient and powerful members as well as one of the most mysterious.)
Of course then the question becomes "Why wasn't Discovery stopped from traveling into the future?".


Well none of it's real, so that would only happen if they wrote it into a story. Seems like a shit story and pretty boring, so I don't think it will happen. You're trying to treat this as reality, but it's fiction. So you're just worrying about nothing.

Also Time Cops would stop it.
If you aren't going to participate in good faith, why are you here?
 
Nothing in fiction exists, but we still find it entertaining to think and talk about it. Nothing wrong with exploring hypothetical questions about a fictional universe.
You can write about it. But to throw up your hands and claim the whole thing is impossible doesn't produce anything. It's just complaining about things you don't like. What would happen if you broke the law and tried to travel back in time, explore that. Don't declare that it's impossible to enforce so it's a terrible show. It's just thoughtless, empty hate.
 
Sorry I live in reality. You're asking nonsensical questions.
Actually I am asking questions relevant to the workable narrative of Discovery.


Why would it be stopped? Traveling into the future is harmless. It's what everyone does already. Only backward time travel poses any threat to the timeline.
Because it's not harmless.

Someone from the past time traveling to the future removes that person from the timeline. That creates a change in the timeline from what it would have been if they had not done so.

Mind you, and this is something I forgot in my previous response to you. We know for a fact there's nothing actually preventing traveling to the past, because Burnham sent her Timesuit back.
 
Someone from the past time traveling to the future removes that person from the timeline. That creates a change in the timeline from what it would have been if they had not done so.

Not if that was the way it "always" happened. And from the perspective of people in the future they arrive in, that is how it happened. Naturally they'd want to preserve their own timeline, including any past time travels that shaped it.


Mind you, and this is something I forgot in my previous response to you. We know for a fact there's nothing actually preventing traveling to the past, because Burnham sent her Timesuit back.

To preserve the history that she already knew had happened. Again, any temporal enforcers in this version of the timeline would want to allow any time travels that created this version of the timeline.

After all, remember why Discovery and Burnham came to the future in the first place: because Gabrielle Burnham found a future where all life in the galaxy was destroyed, and the only way to prevent that future was for Discovery to travel forward in time. So the only futures where life in the galaxy continues to exist are futures where Discovery went forward in time, and that requires the Red Angel suit going back in time to establish the seven signals. Therefore, no temporal enforcers were going to interfere with that particular time travel, since doing so would wipe out their own existence.
 
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Rachel Garret.

She didn't change future-history by travelling into the future.

She changed future-history because it was uncertain if she was going to go back to the past.
 
Rachel Garret.

She didn't change future-history by travelling into the future.

She changed future-history because it was uncertain if she was going to go back to the past.
Time Travel in Trek is like Warp travel in Trek. Temporal mechanics exist to serve the plot of the story they're using it in this week. ;)

It's why the Universe changed in TNG S3 - "Yesterday's Enterprise" when the 1701-C came through a rift, yet stayed the same in TNG S6 - "Time's Arrow II" when Samuel Clements (aka mark Twain) walked through to the 24th century.
 
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