Think you made my point. We already have precedent for Spock Prime going back in time to fix things of a personal nature.
Why doesn't Spock Prime go back in time to save Vulcan?
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Think you made my point. We already have precedent for Spock Prime going back in time to fix things of a personal nature.
It's all fiction. And regardless of what "current scientific theory" may be, the simple fact is nobody really knows how time travel works. So honestly, all the arguing is really rather pointless.
I'll live with the explanation for the events of JJ Trek, because it's really all we've got. I will not be retconning the last forty odd years of Trek stories to to fit Orci and Kurtzman's thinking because, as others have said, it draws all the drama out of some really great stories.
As for linear timeline versus multiple worlds, there's no reason why both can't exist side by side in a fictional work.
I'll live with the explanation for the events of JJ Trek, because it's really all we've got. I will not be retconning the last forty odd years of Trek stories to to fit Orci and Kurtzman's thinking because, as others have said, it draws all the drama out of some really great stories.
As for linear timeline versus multiple worlds, there's no reason why both can't exist side by side in a fictional work.
My point is, he doesn't go back and fix the pet problem, despite realising that time is still not properly reset - although he acknowledges that such a (minor?) change would matter more to some than others.
So you want Spock Prime to go back in time again and save only another timeline's version of Vulcan, or the deceased crewmembers from the USS Kelvin, or everyone who dies between those two events? Some people were born who shouldn't have been, and others died who should hae lived. Isn't this the same conundrum that Sisko faced in "Children of Time"? That resetting the timeline to satisfy themselves (and restore Kira to life) and be able to reunite with their loved ones back on DS9, destroys the lives of their new offspring, in the new timeline, on the planet upon which Sisko, Odo, Dax, Worf and O'Brien were marooned upon?
You're talking about a pet. I'm talking about six billion people. I think the stakes are a touch different, don't you?
I-Am-Zim
Captain
Spock Prime doubtless knows of a number of ways to travel back in time and prevent Nero from embarking on his rampage resulting in the destruction of Vulcan (e.g. slingshot around a star, Guardian of Forever, etc). So why doesn't he do this?
Because then we would not have the Abramsprise, the iBridge, or the Titanic Boiler Room/Budweiser Brewery/Water Treatment Plant Engineering, Vulcan would still exist, Kirk's father wouldn't be killed which would allow JTK to develop into the fine captain we all know instead of "Kirk the Jerk". We'd never know about the ludricoulsy stupid "transwarp beaming" nonsense. Etc. Etc. Yadda yadda. And so forth and so on. Oh, worst of all, we wouldn't have Keesner!
In essence, if OldSpock had gone back and corrected the timeline, JJA and his crack team of so-called Trekkie writers and set designers may have actually had to make the end of the movie actually look like something out of Star Trek. That would have been horrible.
Assuming for now that the original timeline has survived, I wonder if people like Daniels and the temporal police of the 31st century are aware of this freak divergent reality? Coming from the distant future of the Trekverse, Spock Prime's disappearance in 2387 would be a documented historical fact to them.
That method of time travel is not absolute. There are instances in Trek where time travel has changed events in the character's time line.
That's a red herring. They ended up in an alternate reality every time without realising it, just an alternate reality very similar to the original one.
Time's Arrow appeared like a time loop so I think that one is an exception.
BINGO !!!!
And that was the precise point of the closing lines in "Yesteryear". To some people, the death of one domesticated animal is as horrifying as a planet of billions of sentient humanoids.
You really wanted people screaming "RESET BUTTON!!!!" in the cinemas during the closing credits of the 2009 film?
So why didn't Spock Prime (in TOS) also take a starship around a sun and restore the planets destroyed by "The Doomsday Machine"? The Starfleet starships destroyed by "The Ultimate Computer"?
Maybe it's just too risky, and they were incredible lucky in ST IV? Meddling in time is probably rarely work the trouble, as the bad guy learned in VOY's "Year of Hell".
Are you asking this seriously? I'd have thought the answer here was self-evident.
To wit: those disasters were not the result of time manipulations in the first place. The ethos we've seen consistently throughout the history of Trek is that time travel intended specifically to alter the past is bad (even for desirable ends), but that time travel intended to correct or minimize alterations of the past is a worthwhile endeavor.
It's a matter of being sensitive to context. By way of analogy, we all understand why it's considered wrong to initiate violence against someone, but it's permissible to engage in violence if it's a defense against a threat to self or others.
(Philosophically speaking, the underlying view would seem to be that at any given moment in time, the future remains to be shaped, but the past is a known quantity that should be left alone. Presumably the idea is that the unintended consequences of trying to change time can dwarf any positive change one might hypothetically achieve.)
I can only think of two clear counter-examples, or perhaps I should say "violations," of this ethos. One was STIV:TVH; the trip back to retrieve the whales was technically intended only to bring something forward that could preserve the future, and the stakes were certainly high, but it's undeniable that while in 1986 the Enterprise crew didn't take the kind of pains they should've to avoid creating paradoxes and/or unpredictable side-effects. The other was the finale of Voyager, which was IMHO a far more serious breach of "protocol" inasmuch as Janeway's actions knowingly and deliberately wiped out sixteen years of Federation history just to get her ship and crew home sooner, without any apparent concern for what the indirect consequences might be.
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(BTW, just as an aside... those here who keep insisting that the Many Worlds Interpretation is the only "scientific" approach to understanding time travel, and who are anxious to reinterpret and retcon the entire history of Trek in light of same, really ought to take a step back and read up on the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle. Google is your friend.)
Cool - and I thought my own views no longer had any scientific merit! I've always believed that you can't go back in time to change the past because the past has already happened. Any changes that you make while in the past have already been carried forward to the present at the time you go backwards so all you are doing is creating events that already exist. Warnings, messages etc can make no difference because the time loop is fixed so it is often the warnings that cause the events that people were trying to avoid. This is why I love Time's Arrow as a piece of storytelling and get a headache from Voyager's time travel stories. I'm willing to concede that the Krenim's temporal shielding might be able to make some kind of bizarre exception but not that Kes wasn't present on the ship in order to be infected with Chroniton particles in order to travel backwards through time.
lawman, I would google Novikov Self-Consistency Principle but for the fact that doesn't actually change anything.
Okay, I googled it. Got the Wikipedia information. It changes nothing.
Actually, this is how it works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
Yeah, that's more or less the situation as described by Novikov (and Kip Thorne, et al.). It's not that time travel is impossible; it's just that you can't create self-negating paradoxes.
Just to complicate things, there are also theoretical approaches that combine the MWI with the SCP. (You can go back and do any number of things with your grandfather, you can have beer or wine over dinner with him and otherwise introduce differences, but you can't kill him and thus negate your own birth.) It all gets rather complicated... I'm not a physicist and don't claim to understand all the intricacies... but it's certainly not as clear-cut as O&K and their advocates here would have us believe.
I must've given up on VOY before that episode aired, because I have no idea what you're talking about. I always did get the idea that B&B had a somewhat shaky grasp of science in general, though, never mind time-travel logic. (The episode where Janeway & co. visited 1996 was in many ways a breaking point for me.)
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