I Agree...except for the last sentence.
Orci on Start Trek, timelines, canon and everything (SPOILERS)
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I Agree...except for the last sentence.
I agree with you.
It's foolish to have to go back and repeatedly edit the same post again and again just to add more replies to additional people. It's also silly to jump on someone and accuse them of doing something wrong for replying to different replies at different times.
Yet, it makes sense to the people running these boards to call multiple individual replies "spam".
I only comply now because of the threat of warnings and such. Not because it's right or makes sense.
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Oh, on the theme of the thread-
I've already started trying to figure out the new timeline and how it changes other things that'd come later (or came before, like Gary Mitchell apparently not being Kirk's original first officer in the movie timeline).
Once the film comes out, we should all work on this...
Or maybe wait for the Okudas to do the honors in a new version of the Compendium?
Yeah, but it's not my sandbox...
You may be assuming too much here. We know that Spock was only science officer (not first officer) on Pike's ship, which is consistent with what we know of the film so far. We have no reason to believe Gary ever served under Pike; again, no inconsistency.
Unless the film gives us an implausible transition at the end where Kirk is suddenly promoted over the heads of everyone around him and permanently takes over the captaincy from Pike -- about which I'm sure I'd not be the only one raising a hue and cry! -- there are still lots of things we can assume remain the same whether shown in this story or not.
Orci seemed to emphasize that: the main thing that changed in the timeline is Jim Kirk's personal history. (How that would've affected, e.g., the ENT's design, I have no idea... but let's not assume any more drastic ripple effects than what we're actually shown.)
That, I can agree with.
Although the Chekov problem will probably remain intractable...
No...She DOES die if Kirk is not there...
If your saying there's no Kirk there (I suppose your saying this because the Enterprise never goes to the Guardian Planet), then there is also no McCoy there to prevent her from getting killed -- most likely by the truck.
- She originally died in the unaltered timeline probably because she got hit by a truck (although we never found out for sure).
- She ended up living in the altered timeline because McCoy did something to save her (again, it most likely had something to do with that truck).
- Kirk restored the timeline by (presumadly) preventing McCoy from saving her from the "inevitable" truck accident.
I have a headache.
Psion's point is that Keeler actually made it all the way across the street unharmed before Kirk and McCoy fighting caused her to turn around and head back, when she then got hit by a truck. So, paradoxically, if McCoy and Kirk had never traveled back in time, she would have had no reason to dart into the middle of traffic in the first place.
But we know she did in fact die (somehow -- maybe by that truck?) without McCoy being there. If Kirk and the Enterprise never made it to the Guardian Planet, then McCoy probably would not have shot himself with cordrazine, thus would not have gone "cookoo" and somehow prevent Edith from dying.
Perhaps even without Kirk et al. in her timeline, Edith would have had some other reason to be crossing that particular street at that particular moment, then also have a reason to turn back (maybe she forgot her wallet or something).
Therefore, even without Kirk and McCoy, she perhaps still gets killed by that same truck. I know it's a longshot, but -- hey -- this is Star Trek.
We'll never know, because we are never sure how she was "supposed" to die in an unaltered timeline.
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Actually, we do. Spock's tricorder has the record of her death as being a traffic accident. Without the Enterprise and its crew finding the Guardian planet, Keeler dies anyway. There are enough potential paradoxes with time travel in Trek (or in general) that we don't need to invent more of them.
Right -- I started thinking about "what are the odds that Edith would have got hit by that same truck without Kirk and McCoy being there..."
...I figure the odds are about the same as (in Mirror Mirror), haiving the Mirror Universe Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura just "happen" to be beaming up from the exact same planet (Mirror version) at the exact same time as our Universe's Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura. Think about it -- events in the Mirror Universe transpired in such a way that the Federation is evil, but the eight of them happen to be beaming up at that exact same moment??
But I don't worry about "the odds" of something like that happening. It's sometimes best to suspend disbelief and go with the writers' intentions...TV shows and movies are sometimes best enjoyed that way.
Just wondering, what events from the original Trek universe should still occur in Abrams' new version? Myself, I would definitely include mostly everything up to the first couple of movies (excluding Spock's Brain, of course).
I guess it depends on when Kirk and crew become the command crew of the ship and also what missions Starfleet assigns to the crew as opposed to times when they are just randomly exploring. And of course, some things were already in motion and will occur at some point down the road.
Someone made need to go through a list of the original series episodes and movies, and figure out which events will occur no matter what (V'Ger), which missions may not be assigned to the Enterprise in the new timeline and which events were just pure random happenstance (i.e. finding the Botany Bay).
So, is it being argued that McCoy, Kirk, and Spock going back and getting Edith to wander out into traffic and get run over is a predestination paradox?
:::runs:::
:::runs:::
^Yes.
In fact, I would suggest that one of the Guardian of Forever's roles as, well, a Guardian is to make sure that history plays out in a self-consistent fashion. As such, it may have faked the loss of contact with the Enterprise and altered timeline in order to motivate Kirk and co. into traveling back to do what they had to do in order to create the future they were inhabiting.
In fact, I would suggest that one of the Guardian of Forever's roles as, well, a Guardian is to make sure that history plays out in a self-consistent fashion. As such, it may have faked the loss of contact with the Enterprise and altered timeline in order to motivate Kirk and co. into traveling back to do what they had to do in order to create the future they were inhabiting.
But, again, everything has to be caused by something. What would cause a single timeline to branch off into a "Y"?
What chain of events would cause the Enterprise-C NOT to fire torpedoes at the Romulans, and NOT form a spatial rift, which does NOT pull it into the future? (My answer: None. The Enterprise-C always had fought the Romulans, always fired torpedoes, and always had created the rift, which always sucked it into the future.)
From the episode, it would seem that the only branching point forming a "Y" in the timeline would be AFTER the Enterprise-C returns from the future (or fails to return -- those are the two branches of the "Y"). But the branch of the "Y" where the Enterprise-C fails to return (resulting in the Klingon war) is the branch where the Enterprise-C pops out of the rift 20 years later, and from which future Yar comes from. And from that future, the Enterprise-C is sent back to the branching point, thus CREATING the other branch, in which Yar is captured, has a half-Romulan daughter, and Worf joins Starfleet.
Therefore, the timeline branch would more resemble a "4" than a "Y," because the two branches are not spontaneously created at once -- the existence of one causes the existence of the other. They only seem spontaneous because they are simultaneous.
In other words, the timeline in which there are two Yars must logically come AFTER the timeline where there is only one Yar (speaking causally, not chronologically).
Temporal logic: not for the faint of heart.
So, if it's a new universe, then it's one where Kirk could live to a ripe old age. Kirk "being dead" is a question, not fact, in the future of this new universe. Perhaps the scene for Shatner that was not used was set in the future of this new universe. Perhaps a scene with Nimoy playing that universe's old Spock, too.
Abrams said the scene was a contrivance, and didn't add to the story. I could certainly see how such a scene would be considered contrived. So, maybe -- .
The discussion of "City" up above reminds me of what a friend said (facetiously) about the episode years ago. When they got back there, why didn't Kirk and Spock simply push Keeler out into traffic and get it overwith? Or, the episode could've been a comedy of errors of Kirk and Spock trying to get Keeler run over for the good of the future.
Abrams said the scene was a contrivance, and didn't add to the story. I could certainly see how such a scene would be considered contrived. So, maybe -- .
The discussion of "City" up above reminds me of what a friend said (facetiously) about the episode years ago. When they got back there, why didn't Kirk and Spock simply push Keeler out into traffic and get it overwith? Or, the episode could've been a comedy of errors of Kirk and Spock trying to get Keeler run over for the good of the future.
Oh....I don't know (although your theory is fun to consider
)...I just think the straightforward story as intended by the final script is interesting enough and has plenty of potential time paradoxes itself:
-Edith dies in the 'normal' timeline.
-McCoy screws up that timeline somehow by saving her life.
-Kirk and Spock Must go back even further than McCoy to a time before McCoy saved her life to prevent him from doing it agian.
That's enough for me.
Maybe that's how it happened in the "mirror" universe.
Getting back to Star Trek XI, I'm wondering if they need to explain the Enterprise's new appearance as a result of Nero's time travel. As I've said in other posts, I'm not opposed to the new look and actually think it's growing on me (I'm still not entirely satisfied with the bridge, but I can probably get used to that), and I personally would find it better if such things were left up to the individual moviegoer. On the other hand, things like the new careers of Kirk, Pike, etc will definitely need to be acknowledged as due to Nero.
I think in the Orci interview referenced above, the reason why the Enterprise looks so different is because of Nero's attack on the Kelvin. The Kelvin herself looks pretty old school (by that I mean, closer to TOS), and in the years since the attack, Starfleet engineers overhauled a few designs in response to the attack, kind of like how the Sovereign class would look and perform quite differently had it not been for Wolf 359.
As for careers, Nero's attack on the Kelvin affected the birth and life of Kirk. However, in terms of pre-Kirk years, everyone else in the main cast is unaffected.
If you think about the odds of any individual person EXISTING AT ALL in the Mirror Universe (let alone doing the same thing at the same place at the same time), it is quite clear that the laws of causality cannot operate the same in both universes.
Imagine if you and your spouse have a child (who has half of his DNA from each of you). Then imagine that you must go back in time, to about 10 months before your child was born, and you must re-create the child's conception. That means the child must be conceived at the same exact second, by the one sperm out of millions containing the child's same DNA, fertilizing the same egg. That would be an impossible task even if you traveled back in time with a dozen microbiologists and fertility specialists.
Then imagine if you got back in time, and found a war going on, and everyone in the universe had a different personality, and many people were being assassinated or tortured to death.
But somehow, not only would you and your spouse conceive the same child at the same moment, but 100 billion other people all over the universe would also have the same children with the same DNA over the course of 400 years on hundreds of planets, so that the same people are born in every generation, despite the fact that the history of every planet and the personality, vehicle, and clothing of every individual person in the galaxy is different. And those same children would grow up and find the same mates, and again conceive the next generation of children at the same exact moments with the same exact genetic code.
Think about it: If Kirk's parents conceived a child one minute sooner or one minute later, they could have had a daughter instead of a son. That's true of the hundreds of billions of other people in the universe, in every generation, from the 20th century to the 24th century.
Yet, in the Mirror Universe, every person is conceived by the same parents at the same moment, and grows up to meet the same partner and again have the same offspring at the same time, despite all of history being different in both universes.
We have seen that both universes have a Zefram Cochrane, and a Jonathan Archer, a James Kirk, and a Benjamin Sisko, in four different centuries. The genetic likelihood of that happening in two universes with wildly different events, personalities, and histories is approximately zero.
So there must be some force, besides causality and random chance, that somehow keeps both the Mirror Universe and the Federation Universe synchronized with one another at the genetic level. This makes the Mirror Universe unique among alternate realities in "Star Trek," since it is not just an alternate history branching off from another, but every person in each universe remains the same in every generation, at least until reproductive age.
3D Master
Rear Admiral
1. We follow only those people important to the story, so it doesn't strictly require to be billions, strictly speaking, it requires only those people on the screen, and their direct ancestors until the splitting point.
2. Nothing is required to keep things synchronized at all. If the amount of parallel universe that exist is large enough, then no matter how small the chance this particular combination occurs, the chance of it existing is exactly 1. If the sample size is large enough, it MUST exist, it cannot NOT exist.
3. Even if this sample size isn't large enough; it still does not require any mechanism of synchronization. Throw a a dice a billion times, note down the numbers you get. The chance that you got exactly that sequence of numbers is approximately zero; more precisely one in a billion. And you could do this with a 100 billion throws a billion billion throws a trillion trillion throws; the chance you got that one sequence gets ever smaller and ever more closer to zero. By your reckoning, you shouldn't have gotten that sequence; yet you still got that sequence. You can't say after the fact; hey, the chances of this occurring are all but zero, I got it anyway, so some unseen force must have made this sequence occur. Of course not, 1 sequence HAD to come up - you threw the dice all those times - it just happens to be this sequence. That sequence of dice throws just happened, it just is. There's nothing stopping the Mirror Universe from just having happened, just BEING.
Seriously, didn't I just explain this whole thing? Do I have to do it again?
Fine.
No. Since when do exploding torpedoes cause temporal rifts? This requires that something else is there, something unique, almost certainly something temporal, that was a catalyst for the rift to form. If this something temporal has its origin in the future, then there might have been a timeline where there was never a rift, and the Enterprise-C never came to the future. In fact, this is exactly how the episode plays it.
Unless you know ALL causal relationships, right down to the smallest particle in the mix, you cannot know whether or not the Enterprise came to the future always or not. All we know, that before the Enterprise came through that rift, there was a time line where there was peace between the Federation and the Klingons; this got changed by the Enterprise-C coming through the rift, and this got changed back by the Enterprise-C going back through.
In fact, if you look things through down to the nitty gritty, it could even be, that there was never a timeline with only one Yar.
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