Whatever happened to the Federation in the future...

How can we be sure it wasn’t because of that shiny time travel tech the Federation collapsed?

 

I suspect this might have something to do with it.

Based on Daniels and the other future temporal visitors in TNG and VOY, it seems like time travel has really gotten out of hand.

If it can completely warp the universe in the hands of only one person, imagine how crazy things could get with that technology widespread.

One of my hopes for S3 is that they dial back the ubiquity of time travel and make it into something broken/taboo.

 

It seems like the goal of the Temporal Cold War is to eventually wear down the time line of the Federation through repeated violations of hostile threat forces. Time travel is much the same as driving a horse and buggy on a paved road. Eventually the buggy wheels wear a deep rut in the paved road and have too be filled in.

Time travel does basically the same type of damage to the time line. The more that you try to change the time line, the deeper the rut gets. You might be able to repair or fill the timeline in by ensuring the original course of events take place, but the damage has already been done. The rut will re-emerge due to normal time line traffic. Once the surface of the time line has been broken there really is no way to keep a total collapse in the time line from happening.

I think its just a matter of time before the repaired time line ruptures and creates a super galactic tear in space time. A tear that nobody knows what the ^%$$ might decide to crawl out from. We would probably know that something was seriously wrong and that the time line was about to collapse if we started seeing Species 8472 from Fluidic Space suddenly start to appear in normal space time.

 

The Temporal Cold War was an ill-conceived plot device that went nowhere and is not going to show up in Star Trek ever again. Ergo, it has nothing to do with anything.

 

The temporal cold war had potential that sadly went nowhere. However, I won't rule it out.

 

Build 150 suits and they can all come home.

 

Like "All Good Things..." they can always say later that that was one possible future. Nothing set in stone. So I go into S3 of Disco with the feeling that nothing they do in the future will matter much since the reset button can be pressed at any time and very likely will be pressed at some point.

 

Do you really think they will reset and go back in time? While the reason to do it did not always make sense (e.g. Georgiou had ended Control), I thought it was an exciting premise never seen in Star Trek to go and stay in the future. I'd hate for them to undo it.

 

I've always disliked the time-travel thing. Even outside of Star Trek. Before it just seemed that 'big, old, powerful polities' either shut themselves up (first federation) or evolved to be beyond 'normal things' (Organians, Apollo's ilk, Q). And it's not like Star Trek is bereft of dead, old empires; it's what Picard is into.

I can find it totally reasonable that the Federation just...reached its limit. Travel speed is too slow to maintain control of the Federation even with Slipstream or Transwarp drive; or rather, it becomes a bit too hard to expand. Empires contract. People leave or die out (Vulcans and Andorians are my primary suspects for each case). Things change. Maybe the Klingons and Xindi turned back to their old ambitions. Maybe Humans just used up the goodwill they had by trying to be 'better'. It can be as simple as 'we've run out of dilithium mines and thus have run out of fuel for our interstellar ships, and we've tried using Romulan tech but it's a slow going'.

 

I have no idea what they will do with the show. But any current or future show, including Disco, can at any time say, "that was one possible future". And I suspect that that is going to happen. I personally regard Disco has inhabiting it's own timeline anyway. But we'll see.

 

we are assuming she traveled forward through her own time stream (federation may actually exist )and not an alternate reality

 

Agreed, but Trek has brought back bad ideas before. If Archer is somehow around in the 32nd century to see his beloved Federation in ruins, it is possible he would time travel to make the Federation "tougher" to prevent its destruction, ironically becoming Future Guy in the process. With Pike and Spock and Number One gone, Discovery needs new anchors and Archer would be great. Scott Bakula is already with CBS on NCIS I think anyway?

Although I still think the Talosians could have read Pike's mind, frozen him until the 32nd century, then the Discovery crew revives and cures him of the delta radiation damage with 32nd century tech. Then Pike could continue with Discovery as before.

 

Maybe the Starfleet of the 32nd Century did try to prevent the near-collapse of the Federation, but an entity from even further into the future stopped them because they claim the near-collapse is supposed to happen - it's a part of "their" history and they're trying to preserve it. Remember, if Discovery does stay in that time period, then Star Trek actually stretches as far into about the 42nd Century if you consider the Short Trek episode "Calypso".

 

There's an exchange of dialogue toward the beginning of "Return to Tomorrow" (TOS), that's very interesting.

Sargon: Records of our travels were lost in the cataclysm which we loosened upon ourselves.

Kirk: A war?

Sargon: A struggle for such goals and the unleashing of such power that you could not comprehend.

Kirk: Then perhaps your intelligence wasn't so great, Sargon. We faced a similar crisis in our early nuclear age. We found the wisdom not to destroy ourselves.

Sargon: And we survived our primitive nuclear era, my son. But there comes to all races an ultimate crisis which you have yet to face.

I think I'll make those last two lines my signature when the third season starts. I'll be able to point to them every time, because I know "What have they done?!" will come up a lot.

 

That is interesting.

One thing that stands out in ST is that any races/empires more advanced than the Federation and its contemporaries either are extinct (Preservers, Kalandans, Sargon's people, Iconians) or have withdrawn to the area around their home planet to ponder their navels (Organians, Metrons).

It seems that once a Trek culture has warp drive, transporters, shields and photon torpedo/phaser-like weapons, they tend to stagnate technologically for centuries before ultimately withdrawing from the galactic stage prior to disappearing completely.