Directors cut

[CorporalCaptain]

V'Ger didn't digitize whole galaxies out of existence, instead it made digital copies at a reduced scale if they fit inside V'Ger.

And V'Ger didn't visit those galaxies either, since it didn't have time to do so.



At an average speed of TOS warp seven - the fastest speed reported for V'Ger, V'Ger could travel about 102,900 to 137,200 light years in 300 to 400 Earth years. The far side of the galaxy should be about 26,000 to 76,000 or even up to 226,000 light years from Earth, depending on how you measure it, so V'Ger could not have had time to do much zig-zaging as it traveled back to Earth. So V'Ger's data about distant galaxies would come from studying them with the super advanced telescopes that the machine planet no doubt equipped V'Ger with.

1. Spock said:

I have successfully penetrated the next chamber of the alien's Interior, and I am witnessing some sort of dimensional image which I believe to be a representation of V'Ger's home planet. I am passing through a connecting tunnel. Apparently a kind of plasma-energy conduit. Possibly a field coil for gigantic imaging systems. Curious. I am seeing images of planets, moons, stars, whole galaxies all stored in here, recorded. It could be a record of V'Ger's entire journey. But who, or what, are we dealing with? The Epsilon Nine station, stored here with every detail. Captain, I am now quite convinced that all of this is V'Ger. That we are inside a living machine. Ilia. The sensor ...must contain some special meaning. I must try to mind-meld with it. Aaaaarhh.​

http://www.chakoteya.net/movies/movie1.html

Spock thought it could be a record of V'ger's entire journey.

2. Kirk's notion that that Voyager 6 fell into a machine planet on the far side of the galaxy was based on nothing.* But assuming that it's true, there's no reason why V'ger couldn't have gone off to travel through the universe until it thought it had amassed enough knowledge to report back to Earth about. As for your supposition that there wasn't enough time, see TNG "Where No One Has Gone Before." A few modifications keyed into the warp drive, and the starship is traveling faster than anyone thought theoretically possible. There's no reason to suppose that V'ger doesn't know how to circumvent the universe. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy even agreed that V'ger had learned all that was learnable within this universe. If that's literally so, then more likely than not V'ger also visited other galaxies.

3. Images were being projected inside the chamber that Spock had penetrated with his thruster suit. He even said so in the passage that I underlined. The idea of reduced scale is ludicrous, since everything Spock saw was just an image in the first place. Clearly at least some of the things he saw were images of things that we know had been destroyed in V'ger's scanning process. There's no reason to suppose that some things had been destroyed to be stored there, but others hadn't.


Ergo, the simplest explanation for what Spock was looking at in the image chamber is everything he saw had been scanned by V'ger, had been destroyed in the scanning process, and had been things that V'ger had encountered on its journey from the machine planet around the universe back to Earth. At some point on that journey it learned all that there was to know, at least as far as it could comprehend.


* - edited to add - Though maybe at some point scientists figured out where the black hole led at that time, and that was a detail that Kirk happened to remember. It's worth noting that V'ger had an image of the machine planet in the image chamber as well, which would imply that one of the very first things V'ger did after the machine planet had upgraded it from Voyager 6 was to digitize—and thereby destroy—the machine planet itself.

 

[David cgc]

There's one piece of evidence that counts against everything Spock saw having been digitized and destroyed; the two things we see that we know were digitized, Epsilon IX and Ilia, were both presented much more figuratively than the majority of the celestial objects we saw. The station was just a grainy image within another piece of inscrutable V'Ger structure, and Ilia was displayed as a sort of monument. To an extent, I suppose it depends on what exactly Spock was seeing, and why he was seeing it. He went through the same passageway that led to the core of the V'Ger spacecraft (though the DE does add an additional length of tunnel, which could've been intended to be the area Spock traveled through when the projectors are turned off), so it was definitely fake in some way. But why did it exist at all? It's not a required part of the ship's functioning, because V'Ger was still able to do its thing with it turned off. Was it trying to communicate with Spock, to answer his questions? Was the image the equivalent of V'Ger daydreaming, some kind of abstract thought given physical form for some reason? I suppose that could explain why the things V'Ger had directly processed were shown less literally. V'Ger didn't have to imagine/visualize them in such detail to analyze them, whereas it mulled over the planets, moons, stars, galaxies, and so on it'd only observed and not ingested.

 

[Workbee]

I think that it is safe to infer that there is a limit to the scale of what V'Ger could actually digitize. Things like ships and space stations seemed easily manageable for V'Ger with just a single plasma bolt. But when it came to planet earth, V'Ger had to launch several more powerful versions of those plasma bolts and do a maneuver of positioning them at equidistant positions, splitting each into three then re-positioning the smaller bolts. And after all that, Spock only indicated that they "could wipe out all life on Earth" rather than "digitize" or "destroy: Earth. Granted, the difference is pretty academic since either way everything dies, but Spock generally tends to be more precise with his phrasing. This happens after Spock saw those "planets and whole galaxies" on his spacewalk. I don't think Spock thought that everything he saw in that chamber was digitized by V'Ger. This kind of makes some sense -- as huge and powerful as V'Ger is - I have to think that there are limits to even his power. Maybe he could digitize a planet -- but galaxies? Every single star and planet in a galaxies? Plus, why would digitizing be the only way V'ger is able to study the universe? V'Ger has a whole array of sensors at his disposal. Each time we see V'ger destructively digitize or attack something, it is a response to an attack (Klingons) scans being perceived as hostile intent (Epsilon IX), unknown approaching object not responding to communications (Enterprise), access to information withheld (Spock), scan interpreted as hostile (Ilia using tricorder). And a security guard drawing a weapon if you count the book and deleted scene. Ultimately, I think the intent was to show that V'Ger had near limitless (if not unbiased) knowledge, not limitless power.

Plus, I don't see the machine planet.. machines letting their own planet get blown up by a piece of space junk from 20th century earth with the computing power of a Trash-80. Helping V'Ger complete his mission is one thing, but equipping it with the ability to destroy their own planet. I mean, that level of stupidity would be up there with giving some unknown refugee access to technical files of your ship...

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Earth was a special case. V'ger explicitly said through the Ilia probe that it just wanted to destroy life on Earth, but otherwise leave Earth intact. It thought that life interfered with the Creator. V'ger just wanted to sterilize Earth so that the Creator would, in its estimation, no longer be obstructed. V'ger had no intention of digitizing the entire planet.

"The carbon-units infestation is to be removed from the Creator's planet."​

We saw how V'ger digitized large objects when it digitized Epsilon IX. It's by a general field effect, or perhaps a rain of zillions of micro-bolts, that in any case does not originate from singular plasma bolts like the ones that ate the Klingon ships.

 

[MAGolding]

1. Spock said:I have successfully penetrated the next chamber of the alien's Interior, and I am witnessing some sort of dimensional image which I believe to be a representation of V'Ger's home planet. I am passing through a connecting tunnel. Apparently a kind of plasma-energy conduit. Possibly a field coil for gigantic imaging systems. Curious. I am seeing images of planets, moons, stars, whole galaxies all stored in here, recorded. It could be a record of V'Ger's entire journey. But who, or what, are we dealing with? The Epsilon Nine station, stored here with every detail. Captain, I am now quite convinced that all of this is V'Ger. That we are inside a living machine. Ilia. The sensor ...must contain some special meaning. I must try to mind-meld with it. Aaaaarhh.

Spock thought it could be a record of V'ger's entire journey.

Spock thought that it could possibly be a record of V'ger's entire journey at a time when he didn't have the faintest idea when and where V'ger began the journey.

2. Kirk's notion that that Voyager 6 fell into a machine planet on the far side of the galaxy was based on nothing.* But assuming that it's true, there's no reason why V'ger couldn't have gone off to travel through the universe until it thought it had amassed enough knowledge to report back to Earth about. As for your supposition that there wasn't enough time, see TNG "Where No One Has Gone Before." A few modifications keyed into the warp drive, and the starship is traveling faster than anyone thought theoretically possible. There's no reason to suppose that V'ger doesn't know how to circumvent the universe. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy even agreed that V'ger had learned all that was learnable within this universe. If that's literally so, then more likely than not V'ger also visited other galaxies.

Suppose that you see an arrow strike the ground near you. What do you do? You probably duck and check the angle that the arrow is sticking in the ground and look in the direction that the arrow came from to try to see who is shooting arrows at you.

Suppose that radar detected an ICBM warhead heading toward the USA. Wouldn't you hope that in such a situation the warning system would use a computer program to calculate the warhead's trajectory back to where it was launched from, so the USA would know which country launched the warhead and which country to retaliate against?

Is Earth at the center of our galaxy? No, Earth is 26,000 light years from the center of our galaxy. That means that relative to the galactic center, some places in our galaxy are on the near side of the galaxy and some are on the far side of the galaxy. So possibly V'Ger was reported to be coming from the direction of the Galactic center at a speed of warp seven, and then Kirk learned that V'Ger was actually a greatly rebuilt and enlarged Voyager 6, launched from Earth over 300 years ago (and thus less than 400 years ago). So then Kirk could quickly mentally calculate about how far V'Ger could travel at warp seven in that time span and deduce that the machine planet was probably on the far side of the galaxy.

Suppose that V'ger did take the long route and travel through the universe before returning to Earth. Suppose that V'ger had a method of instantly jumping from one point to another in space. Suppose that V'ger decided to jump to every point on a grid that filled the entire universe with each grid point 1,000 light years from the nearest other ones, and stay at each point for one year to make observations. The universe has a radius of 46.5 billion light years and thus a diameter of 93 billion light years. So the universe is 93,000,000 observation points long in each of three dimensions, and thus has a total of about 804,357,000,000,000,000,000,000 observation points in it. Thus V'Ger's journey would take 804,357,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

Suppose that V'Ger decided to spend only one second at each observation point to make observations. Since there are about 31,557,600 seconds in a year, that would reduce the time for V'Ger's journey to "only" about a few quadrillion years.

Suppose that V'ger spaced the observation points a million light years apart. Then the universe would have 804,357,000,000,000 observation points and the journey would take 804,357,000,000,000 years if V'ger spent one year at each observation point, and "only" 25,488,535 years if V'ger spend only one second at each observation point.

But the 93,000,000,000 light year diameter of the universe is only for the observable universe. The actual real universe could be millions, billions, trillions, etc. times larger than the observable universe, which would take V'ger millions, billions, trillions, etc. times as long to observe. The actual universe could even be infinite, which would take V'gr an infinite amount of time to observe.

And there is absolutely no evidence inthe movie that V'ger could travel any faster than TOS warp seven.

1. 3. Images were being projected inside the chamber that Spock had penetrated with his thruster suit. He even said so in the passage that I underlined. The idea of reduced scale is ludicrous, since everything Spock saw was just an image in the first place. Clearly at least some of the things he saw were images of things that we know had been destroyed in V'ger's scanning process. There's no reason to suppose that some things had been destroyed to be stored there, but others hadn't.

The energy cloud of V'gerwas either 82 or 2 AU in diameter, and thus V'ger was smaller than that. An entire galaxy would be many millions of times as large as the energy cloud, let alone V'ger itself. A full size image of a galaxy couldn't fit inside V'ger, and so the images of galaxies inside V'ger had to be reduced millions of times in scale. You may claim there is no reason to suppose that some objects had been destroyed when their images were stored in V'ger but others hadn't, but I claim that there is no reason to suppose that V'ger made parts of its journey traveling at TOS warp seven and other parts of the journey traveling much faster.

Dialog in some versions of the movie says that V'ger is 78 kilometers long, obviously far to small to contain life size images of planets and stars, let alone galaxies.

Ergo, the simplest explanation for what Spock was looking at in the image chamber is everything he saw had been scanned by V'ger, had been destroyed in the scanning process, and had been things that V'ger had encountered on its journey from the machine planet around the universe back to Earth. At some point on that journey it learned all that there was to know, at least as far as it could comprehend.

So how could a tiny thing like V'ger disassemble entire planets and stars with millions of times its diameter and mass, and what did it do with all their matter and energy?.And why would V'ger have to dissemble objects to scan them with more primitive vessels like the Enterprise had the ability to scan objects without dissembling them.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Dialog in some versions of the movie says that V'ger is 78 kilometers long, obviously far to small to contain life size images of planets and stars, let alone galaxies.

You don't seem to understand how images work. An image is something that is perceived. It doesn't have to be life-sized to be perceived as being life-sized. See virtual reality headsets, or holodecks.

 

[GNDN18]

You don't seem to understand how images work. An image is something that is perceived. It doesn't have to be life-sized to be perceived as being life-sized. See virtual reality headsets, or holodecks.

V’ger was bigger on the inside.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

V’ger was bigger on the inside.

 

[Workbee]

I have to admit, I was very resistant to the idea that everything Spock saw in the chamber was actually digitized by V'Ger. One thing I like so much about TMP is that, instead of a traditional villain is evil for "reasons", it presented us with an entity, that though dangerous and posing an immanent threat, is simply so different from us that its actions come more from a fundamentally different understanding (among other things) of the nature of the organic lifeforms it encounters.

Making V'Ger responsible for destruction on such an enormous scale changes its actions from misunderstanding to malevolence.

That being said, the movie makes it clear that V'Ger is effectively a child. So yeah, I can see V'Ger frantically digitizing half the universe in a desperate panic to find answers it yearned for when non-destructive means failed. One has to go no further than imagine if a 2-year old ever had the power to eradicate half the known universe -- we would all be toast.

But I don't believe that any of the film's creators intended that V'Ger was responsible for that much destruction. The spacewalk sequence was added very late in production to replace the scrapped memory wall sequence, which AFAIK would not have any visual or spoken reference to these whole galaxies V'Ger visited. As such it was conceptualized by Douglas Trumbull, and the images were presented more to build up the mystery of V'Ger and show the vast distances it traveled, as a contrast to the reveal of its humble origins as an Voyager probe from Earth.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Post mind-meld, Spock says [http://www.chakoteya.net/movies/movie1.html]:

"I saw V'Ger's planet, a planet populated by living machines. Unbelievable technology. V'Ger has knowledge that spans this universe. And, yet with all this pure logic, ...V'Ger is barren, cold, no mystery, no beauty. I should have known."​

The part about having knowledge that spans the universe is totally compatible with the idea that V'ger did in fact travel across the universe.

As to the question of whether Spock is simply speculating during the spacewalk, his dialog there constitutes an exposition info-dump that is never contradicted later in the film, and as I just cited it is in fact reinforced. As such, it has to be judged for serving the purpose of telling us what's going on. It would not have been included in the film, if we were not meant to believe the information presented.

 

[Therin of Andor]

"Continuing to attack" What? The Klingons just saw three torpedoes disappear and their reaction was utter confusion. They were FLEEING, not attacking.

The Klingon Commander is lodging his report. He's hardly going to admit to Klingon High Command that he is fleeing.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I don't see the machine planet.. machines letting their own planet get blown up by a piece of space junk from 20th century earth with the computing power of a Trash-80. Helping V'Ger complete his mission is one thing, but equipping it with the ability to destroy their own planet. I mean, that level of stupidity would be up there with giving some unknown refugee access to technical files of your ship...

Exactly what happened with the creators of "The Doomsday Machine", too, IIRC.

Making V'Ger responsible for destruction on such an enormous scale changes its actions from misunderstanding to malevolence.

If "In Thy Image" is anything to go by, Ilia was not killed, just digitized - ie. stored as "data patterns". The original probe, nicknamed "Tasha" by Chekov, reverts to a burnt-out light bee, and the real Ilia reappears at the end of the movie. Persis had a five-year contract to be in "Phase II".

So, presumably, the three Klingon ships, Epsilon Nine, and anything else digitized along the journey, were salvageable, at least until V'ger ended up joining with Decker to be reborn as a new entity.

 

[Maurice]

Exactly what happened with the creators of "The Doomsday Machine", too, IIRC.

That's just Kirk wildly speculating based solely on what the machine does. He just decides it's a "doomsday machine" and that its creators are long gone, but hes just pulling that out of his arse. Decker was right to yell, "Forget about your theories!"

 

[Kor]

The Klingon Commander is lodging his report. He's hardly going to admit to Klingon High Command that he is fleeing.

It's the stuff of epic Klingon songs.
He bravely ran away, away. When danger reared it's ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled.

Kor