Future Starfleet - timeships

[Unicron]

I'm posting this here rather than in Tech or VOY because I want to discuss the idea of a future Starfleet having timeships like we saw with the Aeon. It's an interesting idea, but I've never been too comfortable with the execution. Even though Starfleet are the good guys, I don't trust that sort of power with most species.

I'm also unclear how some of the apparent tenets of the Temporal Prime Directive are supposed to work. A good example is the VOY ep (whose name escapes me right now) where Seven of Nine is sent back in time to prevent Voyager's destruction. It turns out the villain is an evil future version of the Aeon's captain, Braxton, who is determined to prevent the circumstances that led him to becoming an unstable villain. After this is learned, the first officer relieves Braxton of command "for crimes you're going to commit."

This was obviously done more for story purposes than anything else, but it doesn't make sense to me. The only way such "crimes" would be capable of judgment is if the Aeon crew believes time is a fixed loop, and they obviously don't since they're trying to stop Evil Braxton. Therefore, the first officer can't know whether Present Braxton will ever arrive at the same set of circumstances.

Plus, I hate temporal mechanics. I guess I'm mainly asking whether you feel like this sort of thing is a good idea, or not. Or if the idea is okay but the execution was lacking.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

The only type of time travel that has ever made sense to me - and works okay as a story - is the type they're using in Heroes.

The characters are in Timeline A. Someone goes back in time and changes something. Timeline A goes POOF, never to return. If you change anything about it, so much as stepping on a bug, it's no longer Timeline A and you can't ever get it back. Just being in the past of Timeline A guarantees you've destroyed it.

So the notion of trying to get a specific timeline back is impossible. You could have a Trek series that uses this timeline logic - basically trying to prevent Timeline A or things like Timeline A, from happening - but what Trek usually does is trying to "restore" Timeline A or cause it to happen, and that's the part that I can't buy.

The whole Temporal Cop idea is silly under the Heroes Timeline logic, since timelines are extremely fragile and preventing a bad one is child's play, you can do it by sneezing, while destroying a good one is inevitable if you engage in time travel at all. Temporal Cops should simply not travel in time at all, if they're so worried about it.

 

[sbk1234]

A time travel Federation is a can of worms that I hope they never play with again. The only practical use of temperal anything for the Federation would be some kind of time window, where they could observe the past, but not have the risk of interfearing with it.

 

[Unicron]

I sometimes wonder if "timeline" is really the best term when it comes to discussing temporal matters. Is it really correct for us to assume that time has to be linear, just because that's how we experience it? As I said, I hate temporal mechanics but sometimes the concept of a loop in time travel seems far to restrictive, and unrealistic because it requires variables that can't be changed.

To use your example, Temis, stepping on a bug wouldn't dramatically change the timeline. Not unless it were a very important bug. There are an infinite number of possibilities for any given moment, therefore only a certain number would be capable of causing significant changes in history. The others would either make a much smaller impact, or simply have none at all. Just as my day wouldn't have been significantly different if I ate a sandwich earlier instead of bread.

 

[captcalhoun]

it was the Relativity, not the Aeon. Aeon is the piddly little stealth-like ship from "Future's End". Relativity is the big-ass ship in "Relativity" - funnily enough

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I think Braxton was Future Guy.

 

[Unicron]

You're right, I got the ships mixed up. Aeon was the only one I could remember when I was typing last night.

 

[sbk1234]

See? Had someone stepped on a different buttefly a million years ago, you would have remembered it.

 

[Garibaldi O'brien]

I don't want StarFleet to be Timelords.
Trek has had enough time travel for my taste.

/What if bananas weren't a great source of potassium? Think about that!

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I think the Relativity is the coolest ship I have ever seen in Trek.

 

[TowerPower]

In the movie Deja Vu scientists were able to view the past - four days ago. Interesting movie. I did not know that it was a scientific-type movie before reading the back of the dvd. I liked it. I won't spoil the end but let's say we were able to do more than just observe the past.

 

[DarthTom]

sbk1234 said:
A time travel Federation is a can of worms that I hope they never play with again. The only practical use of temperal anything for the Federation would be some kind of time window, where they could observe the past, but not have the risk of interfearing with it.

Agreed. In the film Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home we're lead to believe that time travel is as simple as warping around the sun. Then suddenly 100 years later it gets difficult?

 

[TGTheodore]

DarthTom said:
In the film Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home we're lead to believe that time travel is as simple as warping around the sun. Then suddenly 100 years later it gets difficult?

Well, obviously someone came back in time and made it difficult again.

--Ted

 

[DarthTom]

TG Theodore said:

Well, obviously someone came back in time and made it difficult again.

--Ted

Or should we classify this is plot hole solution #3,456 to make an episode or movie interesting all but to be forgotten in the future. Kinda on par with how Star Fleet engineers also lost the diagrams on how to build a circuit breaker in the future?

 

[RaulMacca]

Babaganoosh said:
I think the Relativity is the coolest ship I have ever seen in Trek.

As cool as the Voth city ship? that even had the same paint job.

 

[cybersoldier]

If there is a future trek show based on time travel use the temporal cold war it was a good idea and would be a good plot device for a temporal show and use the time ship Relativity or name the ship enterprise, and its crew is an assembling a crew members from different time periods. Trip from Enterprise, Riker from TNG, Dax from DS9, and 7 of 9 from Voyager

 

[LiChiu]

I like the idea of there being timeships employed by starfleet but then I am biased towards time travel stories.

 

[Plum]

Well, the Enterprise was the first ship to actually use time-travel in a mission. To Earth, in that case (Tomorrow is Yesterday).

A starship as a timeship is a solid Trek idea and a natural progression for this theme. Voyager, I thought, had opened a can of worms with Braxton and such yet played it out well (I wonder if Braga did that one). But time-travel in the TOS era was different than the TNG era.

I think it was Braga who used theories of the day to present time as a structure of time-lines. These can diverge (and do all the time), creating new time-lines. Of which there are infinate. BUT, this assumes there is one 'correct' time-line. The 'real' one. That's somewhat inconsistent and science from the 80s. Today, time theory is a bit different. If anything, I would like to see a trek story that abandons this time-lines thing. It's old, we've seen it before. We knew capt. Archer and Daniels would 'fix' the timelines like old eps of DS9 did a decade earlier... and we didn't care. Too bad, the temporal Cold War could have been a great thing for ENT, but it was in fact the same old time-line story we'd seen before.

 

[Brolan]

I think it could be done well. The crew would fix temporal incursions AND do all the regular stuff Federation crews do. The writers could pick the story they wanted to tell for any particular episode.

You could use any of the characters of the preceeding Treks as guest stars. You would just adjust the time of the story to fit their age. It could be a lot of fun.

 

[FordSVT]

Unicron said:
I sometimes wonder if "timeline" is really the best term when it comes to discussing temporal matters. Is it really correct for us to assume that time has to be linear, just because that's how we experience it?

The problem with Trek is that its time-travel has never been consistent. Sometimes they act like they follow the many-world/infinite universe interpretation of time travel, but most often there's some kind of "master time line" they're always trying to change or restore, which is probably the least possible likelihood in a universe where time travel is possible at all. In order to avoid causality and conservation of energy problems, I think the only way to travel backwards in time (if it's possible at all) would be to in effect tunnel into or create a new, parallel universe. If you go back in time, all you're doing is effecting the "new" universe you're in, but the one you left continues on but now you're not there. If you travel forward, it's still within the confines of universe "B". You can't kill your grandfather because it's not "your" grandfather.

Or think of it this way. "Future Janeway" didn't go into her own past, she went into an alternate past that is 99.9999...% identical to her own. She manipulated events to lead to an outcome different from the one she experienced, but in reality, the future she left, the one in her universe, still continues on but without her. So really, all she did was to allow a parallel universe to her own to experience a different fate than her own, and get herself killed.

So it's hard to transfer current theories on time travel and extrapolate them into the Trek universe: it will never match up. It's like trying to figure out what state Springfield is in, you just can't because it will never make internal, consistent sense. Time travel stories in Trek are fun, but there has never been much thought put into the "how" of it.