How do you figure?
I mean, look at what Earth was like just 4 years before that, in ST:FC. There's no way you can go from that, to a functioning world government, in only 4 years.
Has Enterprise ever messed up the continuity?
- Thread starter Garren
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How do you figure?
I mean, look at what Earth was like just 4 years before that, in ST:FC. There's no way you can go from that, to a functioning world government, in only 4 years.
Friend One's official Name was UESPA-1.
UESPA means United Earth Space Probe Agency.
On Enterprise, UESPA is written on the patch of all the uniforms worn by the Starfleet people in Enterprise.
In 2063, it kinda looked like there wasn't any government anywhere.
Lilly talked about how difficult it was to get Titanium.
If infrastructure existed, she would have bought it.
She must have scavenged it from the ruins of a bombed out city full of dead people or something else equally as grassroots, that she was driving around in a pick up truck just tossing old bicycles in the back.
UESPA means United Earth Space Probe Agency.
On Enterprise, UESPA is written on the patch of all the uniforms worn by the Starfleet people in Enterprise.
In 2063, it kinda looked like there wasn't any government anywhere.
Lilly talked about how difficult it was to get Titanium.
If infrastructure existed, she would have bought it.
She must have scavenged it from the ruins of a bombed out city full of dead people or something else equally as grassroots, that she was driving around in a pick up truck just tossing old bicycles in the back.
On the whole matter of the Borg and Enterprise and it's implications in TNG, I probably have feelings in the minority. The reason Starfleet and the 1701-D crew didn't associate the Borg with Archer's encounter was because it hadn't happened yet. Even though it would have happened in a strict linear view of the time line, if you take a step back and think more 4th dimensionally, it couldn't have. The NX-01 would not have encountered the Borg until First Contact happened. In the time line before Q Who, no Borg had gone back to 21st century earth.
When you start involving time travel, concepts like "before" and "after" have to take on a more meta quality.
It's also kind of the all purpose get out of jail free card. You can always hand wave away continuity errors by blaming a slightly altered time line. Especially with Enterprise, where malicious time travel was a core premise of the show from the very pilot.
When you start involving time travel, concepts like "before" and "after" have to take on a more meta quality.
It's also kind of the all purpose get out of jail free card. You can always hand wave away continuity errors by blaming a slightly altered time line. Especially with Enterprise, where malicious time travel was a core premise of the show from the very pilot.
But it's too subjective to assume that something in the past "hasn't happened yet" just because one particular set of viewpoint characters isn't aware of it yet. The only meaningful, objective way to define "before" and "after" is relative to the universe as a whole, and by that standard, any time travel into the past has already happened even if the people involved haven't done it yet from their subjective viewpoint. It makes no sense to assume the entire universe's evolution is subordinate to a single individual's worldline, because that worldline is just one tiny, ephemeral thread within the universe.
I disagree completely. I wouldn't say a time line was subjective to a singular persons viewpoint. But if, let's say, a higher dimensional being was observing our time line, they'd be able to see that there was a sequence if A to B to C, before C traveled back to a point before A. There has to be time before the travel into the past happened. Although, It might appear to anyone living in that time line that anything that changed the past always was.
There's a continuity gaffe when you compare TNG season 4 episode "First Contact" and the ENT episode "Broken Bow".
In "First Contact", Picard says that first contact with the Klingons led to decades of war. However watching "Broken Bow" and the following seasons of ENT, we never see a war develop between the Earth and the Klingons. The history that Picard recites is different from the history we are shown in ENT.
Out of Universe: you can blame the writers and production crew for overlooking this one sentence; from an episode that came out in 1990.
In universe: you can blame it on the TCW. Perhaps Future Guy and the Suliban's attempts to rewrite history in their favor changed Earth's contact with the Klingons. It was the Suliban who caused Klaang to crash on Earth. Which led to human's first exposure to the Klingons. While Picard says that first contact with the Klingons resulted in a policy to observe before making contact. Suggesting that in Picard's version of history, there was no Klaang or Suliban crash in Broken Bow Oklahoma.
In "First Contact", Picard says that first contact with the Klingons led to decades of war. However watching "Broken Bow" and the following seasons of ENT, we never see a war develop between the Earth and the Klingons. The history that Picard recites is different from the history we are shown in ENT.
Out of Universe: you can blame the writers and production crew for overlooking this one sentence; from an episode that came out in 1990.
In universe: you can blame it on the TCW. Perhaps Future Guy and the Suliban's attempts to rewrite history in their favor changed Earth's contact with the Klingons. It was the Suliban who caused Klaang to crash on Earth. Which led to human's first exposure to the Klingons. While Picard says that first contact with the Klingons resulted in a policy to observe before making contact. Suggesting that in Picard's version of history, there was no Klaang or Suliban crash in Broken Bow Oklahoma.
The problem is that when you talk about time travel, you can't use terms like "before" and "after" the way you conventionally do. The very definitions of those concepts have to be questioned. Time and space are relative things. What's "before" an event to one observer can be "after" it to another observer, so if you use those terms as if they had any absolute meaning, you're failing to understand the situation on a fundamental level. It's just wrong to define the evolution of the entire universe from the perspective of a single subjective observer. You have to be able to step outside of any single reference frame and approach it from a perspective that recognizes any definition of "before" or "after" as subjective.
I've found that the best approach is to abandon any concept of time or change altogether and approach it simply as geometry. You step back and perceive all of spacetime as a single whole, a map of branching timelines with the "past" and "future" simply being different directions on the graph. A movement backward in time is simply a worldline looping back onto itself. In this perspective, any two versions of the same moment in time are merely parallel points on the graph. Neither one comes "before" the other; they are both simply there, and it's only from the perspective of a single observer moving through their life, along their worldline, that one seems to come before the other because of the looping path their worldline follows through the graph. Whereas from the perspective of an observer whose worldline moves strictly forward, they appear simultaneous (or would if that observer could perceive them both).
No, it isn't, and for a very simple reason that most people overlook: Picard never said he was talking about Earth's first contact with the Klingons. We just assume he was because we're so used to taking a human-centric point of view for granted. But for all we know, he could've been talking about the Vulcans' or the Andorians' first contact with the Klingons. (In my novel Rise of the Federation: A Choice of Futures, I went with the interpretation that it was the Vulcans' first contact.)
Fair enough. It makes for sense for the Vulcan's to be the ones to make first contact with the Klingons. The Vulcans in ENT were far more accustomed to Klingon practices, rituals (regarding death) and their reaction to a Klingon dying on Earth provoking a war with Earth. The Vulcan's were the intermediaries on behalf of Earth, regarding Klaang. Also Archer and co deployed the tactic of observing a culture in secret several times in season 1 and 2.
So there is no continuity snaffu, like you said. Thanks hombre.
I don't think so. I just re watched "First Contact" and Picard noted that there was quite a bit of disagreement regarding the policy when it was first adopted (Picard made it sound like the vote to approve it was something along the lines of 9 to 8), which doesn't sound like the a Vulcans were the first to make contact with the Klingons on a solo basis.
Forgive me, because I'm trying to understand this.
But the way you describe it, it seems to take for granted that there is only one time dimension. I think very existence of time travel would suggest otherwise. The fact that someone can be aware of a change in the timeline, implies that, at least for them, there were times when an effect predated a cause.
Now, I admit that is based on a subjective observer inside the timeline. But if you take a step back, and look at space-time as a whole, you should see a second time dimension in which all events happen. Someone outside space-time should be able to see a series of events leading up to TNG in which the Borg never traveled back to earth, and "then" a new series of events after they had.
Or there's a similar situation with Spock and Nero. The two of them traveling back in time changed the nature of the timeline as we normally perceive it, but that didn't erase the 150 years from the time they left until they arrived. All those events still happened. TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY all still took place. They had to have, the characters still remember it. It's just impossible to perceive those events from a standpoint of having one time dimension.
Dealing with a fictional universe with it's own space-time allows us to explore this idea fully. We get to observe their timeline from the outside. We get to have the same view as someone in their universe who can perceive 5 dimensions. And from that perspective, the events we saw on ENT, all took place after First Contact.
The statement came from Q, and is therefor suspect as far as being completely true.
It's unlikely given the death toll of the war that the third world war was in fact world wide, nor do I think the "post atomic horror" was either. The PAH existed in some areas only, and any growth/participation in United Earth in those areas would have had to wait until those peoples got their act together.
Beverly used 2150 to refer to the formation of a "world government," she never refer to United Earth in connection to that date. That the body that was formed in 2150 was in fact "United Earth" is both possible and debateably not the case.
In 2150 the mentioned world government and United Earth could have been (at the time) two entirely separate organizations.
We're only told that the European Hegemony was formed in the early 22nd century, but were not given an exact year of the formation. 2123 refers to the beginning of the use of the distress beacon.
It wasn't my intent to suggest that United Earth was a world government in 2067, only that it already exist in some form.
Okay, I'll give you that one.
It couldn't literally have been a United Earth project, as that government didn't exist yet (United Earth wasn't formed until the 22nd century, we've seen confirmation of this).
There were very few governments left (not *none* - very few) so soon after WWIII, so I assume UESPA-1 was a joint project coordinated by these few surviving nations. That's probably how UESPA - and maybe United Earth itself - got started.
Extremely unlikely.
(United Earth was already in existence in 2123, that's when the Traite d'Unification was signed. )
And remember, Beverly didn't specifically say that Australia refused to join until 2150. She just used it as a hypothetical example of what WOULD have happened if one nation had stayed away. For all we know, each and every nation on Earth joined up at the same time and there were no holdouts. She was just speaking off-the-cuff.
There are still nations that do not belong to the United Nations, and even some nations that are "currently" forbidden to join the United Nations.... China has a problem with Taiwan.
Gotta wonder about Vatican City joining the United Earth?
The only way around it, other than that Vatican City is a hole in the ground after WWIII, is that the President of the UFP is also Pope.
Gotta wonder about Vatican City joining the United Earth?
The only way around it, other than that Vatican City is a hole in the ground after WWIII, is that the President of the UFP is also Pope.
Actually I'm positing a 2-dimensional graph here. Treat the Y axis as time, moving upward from past to future, and the X axis as, for want of a better term, probability. Different timelines exist alongside each other as parallel vertical lines.
We also have to get into the concept of a worldline, which is a term from relativity referring to the path an object or a person follows through space and time -- or in this case, through time and probability. Normally a person's worldline will move straight upward through the timeline they occupy. But if they go back in time, then their worldline will loop back downward, going in the opposite direction from an objective observer's worldline, so they will perceive "before" and "after" differently from other observers; what is "after" for them will be "before" for everyone else, because they're going backward. If they then end up in the past and "change" history, i.e. alter probability, then they move sideways along the X axis into another timeline, and then move upward again through it -- but in parallel to the timeline they originally came from.
This is where it's crucial to remember that perceptions of space and time are relative to the observer. You're using terms like "when an effect predated a cause" as if they were universal absolutes, but there are no such things in physics. Everything is relative to the observer. "Before" and "after" are just different points on an individual's worldline. A time traveler's worldline includes backward loops, so that will make their perceptions of "before" and "after" differ from everyone else's perceptions. If you go through life normally, 1955 will come before 1985 will come before 2015. But if you travel through time and loop your worldline back on itself, then you can perceive 1955 coming after 1985 and 1885 coming after 2015. (Just to toss out some dates totally at random...
) But that doesn't mean they "actually" take place in that order, because there is no absolute right or wrong frame of reference. It just means that the time traveler perceives them in that order while someone moving linearly through time without the benefit of a flux capacitor will perceive them in a different order. And the student of temporal physics examining the whole pattern of travels and interactions will have to abandon any absolute sense of the passage of time and see all times as just different points on a graph, and "before" and "after" as just successive points along a worldline.But those two things are not before and after each other. They're alongside each other, existing simultaneously. It's only from the perspective of an observer whose worldline moves from one to the other that one appears "old" and the other "new." By insisting on using those words as if they had absolute meaning, you're trapping yourself within time and thus can't understand how it looks from.
Also, it doesn't follow that there ever was a timeline without interference just because you weren't aware of it. Because you're blinded by a temporal viewpoint, you make the unquestioned assumption that any time travel is a "change" from what came "before," but that's not true. The laws of temporal physics absolutely do allow for a self-consistent time loop where an event in the past was always caused by an event in the future. Sure, it defies our intuition of causality, but that's the whole point -- our intuition evolved for linear time and is useless and misleading when dealing with time travel. Before you do anything else, you have to take a good look at your own concepts, figure out what it is you're taking for granted and assuming without question, and toss out every last bit of it.
Sure, there can be situations where there's one timeline that's unaffected by time travel and another, divergent branch that is affected by time travel. But that isn't the only possible circumstance. A timeline that was always the result of time travel is completely permissible.
In fact, strictly speaking, it's the only kind of time loop that would be allowed to exist physically. Quantum physics says that you're already correlated with the events of your own future, so if you go back in time, you will correlate the past with that future and ensure that it's the future you bring about. So time travel that creates a new history is a fictional conceit that probably can't really happen, whereas time travel that self-consistently causes its own past (and "always" did) is the one kind that is theoretically possible in real life. So the common fictional conceit that it can't exist, that any and every time travel must be a change from some pure "original" history, is getting it backward.
I want to see if I understand your point, and correct me if I'm wrong. But essentially the entirety of space-time is static as a whole. An effect can predate a cause, as long as it's contained in a self preserving loop. Or that a future cause can create a past effect, as long as that effect also ends up leading to the original cause. Or maybe even more simply put, paradoxes are impossible. So even if from your viewpoint as a time traveler, the enchantment under the sea dance happened after you kissed Jennifer in front of the clock tower, but that's not the how the sequence of events would look to an observer viewing the timeline from start to finish. Is that more or less right, in a nutshell?
Edit* And maybe more to the point, the laws of temporal mechanics prevent the idea of there ever even being an "original" timeline. By definition, the timeline would have to be self consistent and preserving, otherwise it couldn't possibly exist at all.
Edit* And maybe more to the point, the laws of temporal mechanics prevent the idea of there ever even being an "original" timeline. By definition, the timeline would have to be self consistent and preserving, otherwise it couldn't possibly exist at all.
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The presence of timelines multiversally requires a three dimensional graph to account for converging and diverging parallel universes.
The change in Borg special effects suggests that TNG TV Borg and Voyager Borg are not from the same universe.
The change in Borg special effects suggests that TNG TV Borg and Voyager Borg are not from the same universe.
You're close enough.
Actually, no, it doesn't. TOS Klingons are in the same universe as TNG/DS9 Klingons, this is no different. It's just a question of more money for effects.
But the UN is not a world government. It doesn't have the "teeth" to be one. The UN has very little actual power.
Yes, there is more money for effects, and yes new effects are invented as a years go by, but there still has to be an in-universe explanation for these changes if your audience are canon fixated assholes.
The in-universe explanation for the change in Klingons is not because there was more money and better effects available because out-of-universe does not exist. In 1996 Worf explained that it was because "We don't like to talk about it" but in 2004 it was because of an augment plague that turned the Kingon's into Human hybrids.
We don't know why Borg technology suddenly looked cooler after 1996, or why the flash back to the best of Both world had cool Borg tech and not funcky 80s Borg tech, but there should be an in-universe explanation forthcoming in the next thousand years or so.
The in-universe explanation for the change in Klingons is not because there was more money and better effects available because out-of-universe does not exist. In 1996 Worf explained that it was because "We don't like to talk about it" but in 2004 it was because of an augment plague that turned the Kingon's into Human hybrids.
We don't know why Borg technology suddenly looked cooler after 1996, or why the flash back to the best of Both world had cool Borg tech and not funcky 80s Borg tech, but there should be an in-universe explanation forthcoming in the next thousand years or so.
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