YARN
Fleet Captain
But I am willing to apply it to all Trek stories. In situations where the stakes were at least as high as the destruction of a central UFP planet, this should have been a strategy on the table.
So why doesn't Spock save Vulcan?
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But I am willing to apply it to all Trek stories. In situations where the stakes were at least as high as the destruction of a central UFP planet, this should have been a strategy on the table.
I don't think it should ever be on the table. You could never, in good conscious, move forward after any and all tragedies. What makes the Vulcans more special than the crew of the Kelvin or those aboard the forty-seven Klingon ships that were destroyed? Pure numbers?
Nah, easy out. No drama. Reset button.
Losing 5 billion intellectual puppets should be fairly crippling to the Feds, especially at that point in history.
(Heh. Now's the part where we argue about Vulcan's contribution to The Federation for two pages)
But there's still, at least, ten thousand Vulcans out there and likely many, many more on colonies and ships.
YARN
Fleet Captain
In that case, how could Kirk and Spock risk going back in time to save the Earth in Star Trek IV? What makes Earthlings so special? Maybe it has something to do with losing an entire planet? Your own planet?
Shouldn't the crew have been punished even more? Instead they gave Kirk his command back and the crew a new Enterprise.
Kirk was the ringleader, of course. The man was a menace.
Roughly the same age as Chekhov, I'd say.
The Earth hadn't been destroyed in The Voyage Home, it was in the process of being attacked. Nothing was undone by the Time Travel. Its cheating, but its not rewriting events that have already taken place.
That's Generations - the destruction of Veridian III.
However First Contact is probably a better example of the rules being off with time travel involved - The Borg change history, Picard vows to 'repair what ever damage they've done' Fortunatly they do it right under his nose and he arrives before they've caused too much damage.
He doesn't have to undo anything, just steer events back on track.
Or play his part in the proceedings - that were always supposed to happen - depending on how you think about it.
Since Sulu was already a botanist in Where No Man..., I'd say he's a bit older than Chekov.
1. That depends. In the Countdown prequel comic, Narada underwent massive upgrades between the destruction of Romulus and Nero intercepting Spock. But even if you reject that, Nero's vessel was powerful enough to capture Spock's 24th century ship, which he described as "our fastest"
2. Not necessarily. I don't recall any method of time travel that Spock would know about being precise.
4. "...and that is why I will destroy all the remaining Federation planets, starting with yours." (Nero to Pike)
We never had conclusive proof that Trek's other lost technologies ceased to function, either. They just... vanished.
It's always possible that the technology for slingshot time travel does not exist yet in the alternate reality. We saw it done on the Enterprise (of different and much smaller design than the one in the movie) in the 2260's and a Klingon ship in the 2280's. We don't know that it can be done on any ship type.
But again, there's the Guardian and other time travel methods besides slingshotting. And the huge moral implications of pressing a big undo button whenever something goes wrong - we have seen a future where time travel is used to fix problems, where Starfleet's Temporal Integrity Commission arrests people for crimes that alternate future versions of them committed, and in at least one instance forced the (innocent) current version of Captain Braxton merged with his brain damaged alt-future self to be tried. Fast forward another century and a war rages throughout time. Where does it end?
I always assumed Kirk, Uhura and Sulu were about the same age. Scotty and McCoy older, Chekov and Rand younger.
But they didn't erase the damage that the Whale Probe did. Doing their best to maintain the integrity of the timeline.
You asked a question in the original post. Respondents are under no obligation to furnish answers that support your point of view.
The problem is that the specific reset button was used many many times in the original universe. Time travel is possible. And there is a clear and definite "natural" course of events that happened WITHOUT any time travel incursions. Nero was an invader from the future who fucked up the timeline in a HUGE way. Someone's gotta repair that, because we have already seen in many other episodes of the original universe that Starfleet protects the timeline.
Except other than Spock Prime everyone is in what they see as the right timeline and probably don't want to alter the lives of billions based entirely on the word of some old Vulcan Kirk found, and without their help Spock Prime can't really do anything now can he.
Besides in the TOS era lots of planets were destroyed and we didn't see Kirk going back in time to save them.
In TNG: Parallels, our prime universe heroes didn't seem too concerned about making sure each of the alternate universe matched theirs.
So, rather then thinking of Nero's time travel as being the event that creates an alternate universe, think of it instead as an already existing alternate universe in which Nero time travels. The distinction is subtle, but there is a distinction, nevertheless.
The distinction being that perhaps the alternate universe existed even before Nero time traveled -- perhaps created by the Romulan supernova/black hole that sent both Nero and Spock back in time and in an alternate universe.
YARN
Fleet Captain
I love responses like this, because they are evidence that members of the opposition can do no better than appeal to fallacies. No one is going to admit they're out of ammo, but when they start lobbing mud, you know they're running short.
Why would a full Lieutenant, with several years of experience be the same age a Ensign?
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