How much will Spock Prime tell Starfleet?

[Timo]

What mystery would there really be that Spock does know about?

Space is full of beasts, but that comes as no surprise to Starfleet in TOS. Pretty standard measures are taken in dealing with them: no matter who ran into the Space Amoeba, he or she would sooner or later use an antimatter bomb to destroy the beast. And Spock couldn't tell where and when these beasts would be found, because all of that would already have changed after the 2230s.

Romulans might make a sneak attack against the NZ outposts in 2268. Or then not. Their invisibility would not come as a surprise, as invisibility was already a known technique for the STXI Starfleet (and part of the Kobayashi Maru simulation, with the Klingons "decloaking"). Klingons might try to poison the grain at Sherman's Planet. Or then not. But they'd do something dastardly somewhere, being Klingons - and probably it would be very different from what Spock Prime knows, considering the Klingons lost 47 warbirds and would have to have rethought a thing or two.

What would Spock Prime really know that would make a difference? That the Borg exist? The Feds had eyewitness reports available to them in ST:GEN already. Didn't help them much against the Borg when they finally came.

Apart from that, every political and tactical detail after 2258 would be in a state of flux, and Spock Prime's knowledge of them would be more or less worthless.

At most, Spock might tell that the Kelvans are coming. That event wouldn't be much affected by internal Milky Way politics...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[EJA]

Space is full of beasts, but that comes as no surprise to Starfleet in TOS. Pretty standard measures are taken in dealing with them: no matter who ran into the Space Amoeba, he or she would sooner or later use an antimatter bomb to destroy the beast. And Spock couldn't tell where and when these beasts would be found, because all of that would already have changed after the 2230s.

How would the events of ST XI prevent the space amoeba from entering Federation space at the exact same time it did in the prime universe? It wasn't exactly concerned with galactic politics.

 

[Timo]

Yet it did stop to dine on that star system. If things are altered, the beast would be likely to find other things to dine on, at other times, in other places... Say, star systems could be evacuated, or receive more population, and thus lose or gain in palatability. Or they could have more or less comm traffic, thereby exposing them to the hunter more or less. Or the amoeba's appetite and thereby its actions might be affected by the number of ships it encounters.

The DDM did not seem to have any strategic plan, or anything akin to appetite, that changed events would affect. But its course and actions were significantly affected by mere starships buzzing it.

The lights of Zetar hunted for starships after sighting them. Definitely vulnerable to change, then. The Beta XII cloud thing also went prowling. Indeed, I can't think of any pure "force of nature" events in TOS that would not have been affected by changed galactic politics between the 2230s and the 2260s.

On the "impure" or "unnatural" department, the arrival of the Kelvans and the fight of the two Lazari would probably qualify as events of importance that would take place regardless of whether our heroes were there or not, and regardless of preceding historical events. Whether our heroes were the right people to handle them is debatable, and whether vectoring them or some other Starfleet assets to those specific locations at that specific time would be a good idea is matter for another debate.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[shanejayell]

Spock might well give Starfleet a full debrief since he knows the data will be increasingly useless anyway.

Consider: Trek XI has already diverged from Trek's original timeline with the early death of George Kirk and now the destruction of Vulcan. Those events will already be causing ripples that may change future events, making Spock's info irrelevant.

 

[Timo]

...Unless there's some sort of scientific basis to Spock's idea about "destiny". And he personally might have a reason to think that there is. After all, he has personally ventured to the past several times, changing a thing here, another there - and the present has remained unharmed by such action. Granted that he hasn't personally blown up important planets in the past before, but the rules of nature might be the same: the timeline might be prone to "mending" itself.

It sounds like gobbledigook - but the idea that Spock helping steal a few whales from the 1980s would not significantly alter the future, for example preventing the birth of all of his human friends, is equally impalatable by common sense. The butterfly effect is common sense. If "destiny" works on small things like Kirk being born despite extensive meddling, why wouldn't it work on bigger things?

Timo Saloniemi