Destiny/First Contact plot hole? (spoilers)

[F. King Daniel]

If the Borg's creation requires members of the NX-02 crew to be with whats-her-name in the past when the city crashes.... why were the Borg trying to prevent Earth's first warp flight in First Contact? Surely they'd be preventing their own creation?

 

[BillJ]

If the Borg's creation requires members of the NX-02 crew to be with whats-her-name in the past when the city crashes.... why were the Borg trying to prevent Earth's first warp flight in First Contact? Surely they'd be preventing their own creation?

Yeah. There'd be no Borg in the Delta Quadrant for them to contact if the first warp flight doesn't take place...

They probably just lost the information on how they were created to the annals of time.

 

[Timo]

Then again, at the end of ST:FC, Earth's first warp flight was not prevented.

In fact, we could argue that it was enabled by the actions of the Borg. Had they not brought LaForge and his team to the past, it might be Cochrane's contraption would never have had a chance of getting to warp. But if the Borg simply asked LaForge nicely whether he would like to bootstrap the invention of warp drive, it is possible LaForge might have said no... Hence a bit of harmless subterfuge.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Sci]

Perhaps the Borg did prevent their own creation in the Delta Quadrant when they assimilated 21st Century Earth, and so Earth ended up being their new home planet in the assimilated Earth timeline -- accidentally forcing themselves to start all over again.

 

[BillJ]

Perhaps the Borg did prevent their own creation in the Delta Quadrant when they assimilated 21st Century Earth, and so Earth ended up being their new home planet in the assimilated Earth timeline -- accidentally forcing themselves to start all over again.

That'd be one hell of an alternate-universe story to tell.

 

[Sci]

Perhaps the Borg did prevent their own creation in the Delta Quadrant when they assimilated 21st Century Earth, and so Earth ended up being their new home planet in the assimilated Earth timeline -- accidentally forcing themselves to start all over again.

That'd be one hell of an alternate-universe story to tell.

It would, wouldn't it? The Borg would almost certainly have needed to destroy the T'Plana-Hath during its passage through the Sol system if they realized they had erased their own history and had to start over on Earth -- because otherwise, letting the T'Plana-Hath go free would risk the Vulcans discovering the Borg just as they were trying to get themselves set up on Earth but before they'd really re-established their military capacities, inviting potential Vulcan attack and thus risking Borg extinction.

 

[Christopher]

If the Borg's creation requires members of the NX-02 crew to be with whats-her-name in the past when the city crashes.... why were the Borg trying to prevent Earth's first warp flight in First Contact? Surely they'd be preventing their own creation?

The Borg didn't remember how they were created. Nobody knew that until the characters in Destiny pieced it together in early 2382. The Borg had no idea that humans played a role in their creation, so they had no reason to believe that altering Earth's history would be a problem for them in any way.

Anyway, I don't think it would've prevented their creation, because (according to the model of temporal physics I established in Watching the Clock) the branch of history where the Destiny flashbacks happened would still be there as part of the tapestry of time, even if it ceased having a future after it merged with the new timeline the Borg created. So anyone who time-travelled out of a timeline that was later "erased" would still be able to affect the past. Indeed, we've seen this canonically, for instance, in "Visionary" on DS9: the O'Brien from a timeline where DS9 was destroyed came back and prevented DS9 from being destroyed. He still existed and had an ongoing effect in the altered timeline even though his original timeline had been cut off.

So even if the timeline in which the Destiny flashbacks occurred had been replaced with another timeline, the beings who went back in time from that timeline to a point before its divergence would still be part of the past, and any impact they had would still be part of history.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Ah, I'd forgotten that the Borg didn't remember their own origins. It's been ages since I read Destiny.

Trek's time travellers have never erased themselves, have they? Nor had their memories altered. You go into the past, and no matter what you do, you youself never change.

And since Trek time isn't really linear, cause and effect are meaningless. So the Borg beginning in the distant past would be unaffected by any temporal incursions occurring afterwards.

Sci's theory about the FC Borg creating a new beginning for themselves in the "Borgified Earth" timeline is still really cool, though.

 

[Christopher]

Trek's time travellers have never erased themselves, have they?

On a few occasions, yes -- in "Time Squared," the alternate Picard and shuttlepod from 6 hours in the future vanished, and in "Children of Time" the descendants of the Defiant crew vanished. The fate of the alternate NX-01 in "E^2" was ambiguous, but the same thing might've happened to it. Still, there are other cases where people or things from a negated timeline did remain -- O'Brien in "Visionary," the Doctor's mobile emitter, the future tech from "Endgame."

According to the temporal theory I worked out for DTI, they probably should have vanished, i.e. quantum-tunneled to merge with their alternate selves. But the people and things that remained after the timeline change were generally ones that didn't have alternate selves. The duplicate Picard and shuttlepod in "Time Squared" vanished because there was already a Picard and shuttlepod sharing the timeline with them, but the future O'Brien from "Visionary" took the place of his original so he was the only O'Brien around at the time, thus he survived. That doesn't explain "Children in Time," though. I never did quite sort out the physics there.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I think you did a damn good job tying together as many different versions of Trek time travel as you did, while making it sound plausible.