All Our Yesterdays

You managed to take care of the complaints here that I could remember, that I wanted to address. Humans had no great change as Vulcans did, we're basically the same as thousands of years ago. There were many other complaints about logical flaws here that I think are just as easily dealt with. I'll just add that the writers of Trek were smart people, and make a lot more sense than we seem to realize. I know that as the years go on, I think of ways that "errors" I've spotted do make sense after all.

 

I think the best explanation might be to base it on what likely actually happened in the episode:

IOW, Spock was already under the psychic influence of millions of pre-Surak Vulcans and couldn't get his words out straight!

 

Answered.

That's what I've always understood. Vulcans are telepathic on a low level and sense each other all over. That's why weird ones like Sybok are so uncommon and unwelcome.

1. Buried like a dinosaur, I'm sure wherever she dropped had stuff fall on it. But certainly no funeral.
2. Already answered but everyone already left.
3. Silly fan theory here, but I think that's why this planet had such advanced time travel but no spaceflight.

The big problem with time travel is, if it was ever really invented, it would have already happened. Because as soon as it is, everything else is never the same again. I think the few first travelers probably paved the way by doing those things time travelers do and made it easier for the originators to develop it even further so that it was very advanced by this episodes time. Don't forget, they had a deadline, they knew their world would end, so they made sure it was advanced enough for all of their people to escape. The strange thing to me is the excess population returning that then had children then made an even bigger need to evacuate more people but then advances taken back would have perfected the machine even more.

As far as preparing. My thoughts were that Atoz prepared Kirk but it didn't take because he didn't go through. Not going through doesn't mean anything but if he did, he couldn't return. The preparation is kind of like indexing a person to that time so that if they came back through the portal, they would be dead of old age before they get back because they were from their new prepared time. So not going through doesn't finish the indexing. And McCoy certainly could have treated any other problems.

 

Are we though really?
We speak a different language. We are much more healthy, more intelligent, probably less fi, less superstitious, less judgemental.
If we were sent back 5000 years in time we'd probably wouldn't survive unless we bought our superior technology with us.

 

We never actually saw Mr.Atoz preparing Kirk for the Atavachron did we! And if he had was Kirk going back to the Cavalier era with it's Morts and Anglers?
JB

 

The issue of time travelling Sarpeidonites changing the history of their planet has been raised by a few posters so far.
However, I think this is an instance of the "predestination paradox" style of time travel where the people sent through the Atavachron can't actually affect the past because they were always destined to be part of those events:
The situation presented in Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban is an excellent example of this type of time travel.

I also believe that there's an argument to be made for ALL major time travel events in Star Trek to be of the predestination paradox variety, but that's another story

 

This is essentially the same as saying "...but time travel ought to have massive consequences!". Sure it does; it's just that what we get as the final product is the sum total of those consequences from every time travel adventure ever performed (including those that will be performed in the future of our viewpoint).

Perhaps the other way of saying this is "time in Trek is robust": no matter what you do, it will all be lost in the noise of a gadzillion other time travel shenanigans, with half a gadzillion nutcases trying to blow up Earth and half a gadzillion ones trying to preempt that and the sum total always ending up reflecting the human(oid) psyche and the end result it naturally desires. (No wonder Gabrielle Burnham characterized time as "savage" - time is essentially us!)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Edit] I thought I read a Star Trek novel that explained what happened with the time travel consequences on Sarpeidon.But I'm searching through my 10s of novels here at home and can't find the reference

Another possibility.
I'm thinking though if just a few people went back in time their wouldn't be too may consequences but if you consider say conservatively 500 million people sent back in time. Really would anyone want to go back more than 500 years. That's a million people per year added to the population, then another million the next year and so on. How could it not affect the future? Optimistically the science improved so much with people from the future that they managed to invent space flight and everyone took a rocketship off the planet 50 years before the supernova happened.

 

Maybe there was once an unexplained population surge in Sarpedion history, which was later discovered had to have been the result of a bunch of people arriving from the future...

 

Those aren't deep, fundamental changes in a species' nature. Not like the massive change Vulcans went through.

 

McCoy's actions in City At The Edge of Forever would sort of argue with this and Spock's experiences in Yesteryear!
JB

 

Not at all - in fact it was clearly shown in the episode that the only reason Edith Keeler got killed was by distractedly crossing the street to meet up with Kirk - remove those distractions and she would have lived on to initiate that troublesome peace movement (a parallel universe, details of which the Guardian Of Forever helpfully loaded into Spock's tricorder). Spock, Kirk and McCoy were always required to make these events happen, as without McCoy jumping into the past there would be no reason for the others to follow, and without Kirk to woo Edith she wouldn't have been so spaced out as to not cross the street safely!

This is a classic case of a predestination paradox and all the GOF had to do to ensure that it happened was spout a few poetic lines to the landing party and block off their communications to the Enterprise. In fact, I would go so far as to propose that the GOF exists in order to perpetuate predestination paradoxes, which would explain why it seems so free and loose in letting interlopers trespass in past events. Otherwise its not much of a guardian, is it?

By the time of Yesteryear the GOF is apparently being used for limited time travel related research by a science team, perhaps under the belief that history can be altered otherwise. However, the GOF knows that there is still one more predestination paradox involving Spock that it needs to perpetuate and this time a simple communications blackout won't cut it! Instead, on Kirk and Spock's return journey from ancient Orion the GOF diverts them to a close parallel universe, one where Spock died as a child, an Andorian named Thelin is first office of the Enteprise and NOTHING ELSE HAS CHANGED. I guess Spock wasn't that important after all, eh?
Under the impression that history has changed, Spock again ventures through the GOF to perform his pre-ordained tasks.

 

My somewhat similar theory is that the Guardian of Forever was created by superpowerful Star Trek fans and its mission was to trick people into traveling to alternate universes and changing the histories of those universes to make those universes resemble the Star trek universe more and more.

 

Touche!

I have a similar theory about how the mirror universe came to be - its people are just way too similar to our own to be a coincidence

 

Why does it matter if the Sarpeidions change their history? I'm sure they do, so what? The planet ends at a certain point, what does it matter what happens until then?

And I HATE predestination paradoxes.

 

He was going back in time to a year when his nightclub act was at its peak...

 

Well the person who invented the atavachron parents married other people, never met, starved...

 

No I was reasoning that McCoy went into the past on earth on his own and stopped Edith Keeler from being killed in the road accident, but it took Kirk and Spock to go in after him and put things back to normal! Even though they didn't know exactly what their mission was..?
JB

 

No that's an alternate reality my Lord not ours!!!
JB

 

The road accident only happened because she and Kirk were on their way to movies, then Kirk dashed off to meet McCoy, started shouting excitedly causing enough distraction for Edith to cross the road without looking first.
Without Kirk, Spock and McCoy's joyful reunion, why would the accident even have happened?

I suppose there could have been another road accident where Edith absent mindedly wandered across the road and another bad driver cut her down - anything's possible!