How did Nero know when Spock Prime would show up?

[scottydog]

I have no problem making a leap of faith here. Let's face it, there are dozens of episodes (and movies) where Spock calculates remote odds of success and yet they are successful every time. Statistically, this is virtually impossible and yet I can easily suspend my disbelief and just enjoy the show.

 

[Jeri]

well he had plenty time to learn...etc.

To reiterate:

Peter the Younger, a black hole is something different; if the two ships had not caught their respective eddies, they would have been crushed -- not pulled into a different time.

This is not garden-variety time travel. There is no way for either of them to know where they'd wind up.

I got this from Orci's Q&A.

 

[T'Cal]

At CHUD.COM, the reviewer wrote this:
Also hurting Nero is the decision to cut a key sequence from the movie. As the film stands now, Nero appears 25 years before the film's present and kills Kirk's father. It then skips ahead 25 years where Nero comes out of nowhere in an attempt to kill Spock from the future, who is also time traveling by accident. Audiences have to wonder 'What the f**k has Nero been doing for the last quarter of a century? Just sitting around?'

I have to agree here. I wasn't sure if I missed a line, but apparently not. Not a huge deal, I guess. But it's one of the small things that brings my rating of the film down to very good rather than great. I enjoyed it a lot and hope that, now that the origin stories are done, the story for the next film will be better.

 

[Peter the Younger]

well he had plenty time to learn...etc.

To reiterate:

Peter the Younger, a black hole is something different; if the two ships had not caught their respective eddies, they would have been crushed -- not pulled into a different time.

This is not garden-variety time travel. There is no way for either of them to know where they'd wind up.

I got this from Orci's Q&A.

And yet, it was Orci and Kurtzman themselves who wrote the line in the script stating that Ayel had calculated the time and place of Spock's appearance, so they themselves are saying this is calculable. I take his statement to mean there is nowhere to know where they would end up in advance, i.e., to aim at a particular time period.

I also don't see anything in his statement from the Q&A that would suggest this isn't garden variety time travel (man, only in Star Trek can we use that phrase!) Generally speaking, relativity is relativity, the same basic rules apply, and when you're dealing with singularities, we're almost certainly talking relativistic time travel. Bend spacetime enough in the right way, and it folds back on itself. Move one apature at velocity while the other stands still, and viola, you've made a time machine. Enter at this trajectory or that trajectory, and you come out at Point X and Time Y. It's entirely possible to calculate it. Hell, there are physicists within an hour's driving distance from me who could calculate all sorts of whacky time travel scenarios - they won't admit it's physically realistic, but they can sure as hell do the math.

Any spacefaring civilization that bends spacetime as their primary means of travel is going to have many, many people with a working knowledge of this sort of physics. Sure, they may not have personal experience with time travel, that doesn't mean the math is completely alien to them.

 

[Jeri]

Peter the Younger, it was not Ayel who made the calculation. It was Ayel who told Nero they had arrived at Nero's coordinates.

The fact that it was by chance they weren't crushed makes it clearly not garden-variety time travel. And that is said in the Q&A. The latest thinking on black holes is that they crush everything. Black holes are not for time travel.

The fact that they entered at the same time and one arrived 25 years before the other clearly indicates its unpredictability. The fact they had Nero calculate Spock's arrival is an exigency of the plot, not of logic.

 

[Anticitizen]

The only way it makes sense is if Spock's ship went in first. You could then make the argument that the larger the black hole, the further back in time it sends you, and the Narada, going in afterward, went further back in time. But if the Narada went in first, they would have no way of knowing where Spock would end up because they would have no evidence to analyze (being already gone by the time Spock went through and all).

 

[Captrek]

Simple piece of advice: if you want to enjoy Star Trek ’09, do not try to make sense out of it. Logic was not high on the screenwriters’ list of priorities. In fact, it wasn’t on the list at all.

 

[M'Sharak]

Peter the Younger, it was not Ayel who made the calculation. It was Ayel who told Nero they had arrived at Nero's coordinates.

The fact that it was by chance they weren't crushed makes it clearly not garden-variety time travel. And that is said in the Q&A. The latest thinking on black holes is that they crush everything. Black holes are not for time travel.

The fact that they entered at the same time and one arrived 25 years before the other clearly indicates its unpredictability. The fact they had Nero calculate Spock's arrival is an exigency of the plot, not of logic.

Didn't Nero enter first, though? Not by 25 years, of course, but the time differential between Nero's entry and Spock's would appear to be proportional to the time differential between their exits, and thus calculable (if one possesses the proper Trek-verse equations and understanding of the Trek-verse mechanics at work, that is.)

 

[Jeri]

Well, if the Narada went in first, then how does Nero even know the Jellyfish entered?

My point has always been that black holes are not time traveling devices; they crush matter to smitherines. No one is going to even know that two guys in a bar supposed a ship might survive if it caught an eddy and was taken around the destruction.

This is essentially the loophole that Orci said in the Q&A that they found. He said really everybody agrees that black holes just destroy matter; but there were a couple of dudes somewhere that chew over the idea there might possibly be a way to survive it. It's just hypothetical -- and just these couple guys. And just what Orci and Kurtzman needed.

So no one is going to have calculations for this; no one. No one goes around making black holes with red matter to find out.