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I like The Burn..... But I was also wondering this.

I disagree (sort of) - the primary focus is the characters. This may be splitting hairs, but my hubby often says there are plot-driven shows and character-driven shows. There is certainly crossover, but this is kind of a "primary thrust" thing. I tend to like character-driven stuff and will forgive plot holes, as long as they aren't bad enough to take me out of my suspension of disbelief while watching. My hubby isn't quite as forgiving. :)

The first season of Legends was very focused on the time travel. IMO, it was also a bit of a mess. I think focusing on the "band of misfits who become family" has worked much better.

OTOH, I also love Doctor Who, so time travel is okay by me. :hugegrin:

Both work for me, I enjoyed early Legends of Tomorrow and the current stuff.

As long as they're well executed and cohesive in it's internal logic, I'm all for it.
 
CW shows barring Arrow season 1 and most of season 2 are hot garbage that I can't bring myself to watch nor go into the forums of said shows to complain about.
 
So you like this Grim Dark future for the UFP / StarFleet that Discovery has jumped into?

It's not as dark as it looks.

The Federation is greatly reduced in size, true. but it still exists. The Federation has not collapsed or been destroyed. It is being rebuilt. (They have the technology.... ;) )

And given the discovery of that planet rich in dilithium, it seems that it will be. I'm sure Earth was one of the first worlds to sign back up again....
 
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It's not as dark as it looks.

The Federation is greatly reduced in size, true. but it still exists. The Federation has not collapsed or been destroyed. It is being rebuilt. (They have the technology.... ;) )

And given the discovery of that planet rich in dilithium, it seems that it will be. I'm sure Earth was one of the first worlds to sign back up again....
I think it would be really interesting, storytelling-wise, if Earth isn't. How would our characters feel about that?
 
I'm sure Earth was one of the first worlds to sign back up again....

I think Earth is potentially going to be a victim of the Gravitational Anomaly and the catalyst for Ni'var officially rejoining the Federation. I don't think Earth will be destroyed, but it will need help from the Federation to recover which will then lead to it also rejoining.
 
Earth should have realized by now that they can't stand alone. In a hostile universe, they need Federation protection now more than ever. Earth should know its place.

I mean, come on, Earth was a founding member of the Federation. They should bloody well act like it!
 
Earth should have realized by now that they can't stand alone. In a hostile universe, they need Federation protection now more than ever. Earth should know its place.

I mean, come on, Earth was a founding member of the Federation. They should bloody well act like it!
I liked that they were brave enough to be allegorical with an important world, rather than a planet-of-the-week.

The US and UK haven't acted much like themselves in recent years, either.
 
Earth should have realized by now that they can't stand alone. In a hostile universe, they need Federation protection now more than ever. Earth should know its place.

I mean, come on, Earth was a founding member of the Federation. They should bloody well act like it!
There's lots of things people should know. They do not always act on it.
 
Earth should have realized by now that they can't stand alone. In a hostile universe, they need Federation protection now more than ever. Earth should know its place.

I mean, come on, Earth was a founding member of the Federation. They should bloody well act like it!
Things change over centuries. During the American Revolution, Massachusetts was the intellectual and philosophical wellspring of the entire ordeal. The Revolution started there, on the backs of Massachusetts men before Washington came to their relief. Many of the leading intellectuals and political leaders of the period were from Massachusetts. The British garrison and hostage taking of New York City largely meant the war moved south, and as the richest and most populous colony, Virginia assumed political leadership. But Massachusetts was very much the "Earth" of the American revolution. And it kept a kind of primacy for over the next century.

That primacy faded over time as new states were admitted and populations grew elsewhere and its monopolization on industrial technology declined. Today, Massachusetts is one of the richest states in the union, and a leader in science, technology, healthcare, finance and education, but it does not wield the political power of California or Texas. And to a degree that's fine by us. Our state is generally superbly run and highly technocratic. It's hard to look at how Florida has shit the bed on Covid, and call it a shining example.

Earth in the UFP is probably the same way. When the UFP was 150 planets at the end of the 24th century, and Earth is among the most populous and it's people dominate Starfleet, yeah, that's going to translate into disproportionate power. But 600 years later when the UFP is 350 members, including the former Klingon Empire, probably ex-Romulan space, and likely countless more once great powers? It's stature wont be what it was. And that's probably fine. It's role will have changed, just like massachusetts did, from being a primary engine of the Federation to one of many.
 
Part of Time Travel is using it to fix the past or future, and once you include Time Travel tech, you can start changing the future since not everything is set in stone.

And one of the things that doesn't sit well with me is the abandonment of Time Travel tech including the Galactic Wide Ban. How would you enforce such a ban if a rogue party has Time Travel tech and you don't?

They could easily screw you over if you don't have the ability to Time Travel yourself.

So enforcing Time Travel and policing it would be a critical eternity wide responsibility well into the end of time where Time Travel is HEAVILY regulated for Educational and Good purposes.

Not for misuse or gross increases of power, affluence, wealth, etc.

The whole point of Star Trek is to explore, putting a ban on Time Travel seems to be the antithesis of exploring all boundaries of Space-Time.

Yes, using Time Travel to protect your own time-line and to prevent mis-use is critical.

We don't want to get lacksidasical like "Legends of Tomorrow" and turn into a comedy.

But there are plenty of ways of using Time Travel for the greater good without screwing things up for the better.

Imagine using Time Travel to save lives, prevent point-less deaths.

Imagine Homicide/Murder becoming a thing of the past.

Mass Terrorist attacks become preventable and avoiding the lost of life.

Incidents that trigger wars can be prevented, avoiding to massive loss of life.

Banning Time Travel tech would prevent alot of good that could be done with said tech, even with the adversaries that the UFP were dealing with.
I really disagree with this. Star Trek has been cautioning about the dangers of time travel since TOS. It's only in recent years has the dangers become more elaborate and specific. To this day, none have spelled it out quite like Annorax in "Year of Hell", who for 200 years tired to master the manipulation of time to a degree no one else we've seen in Star Trek ever has, but was still caught flat footed by butterfly effects they didn't account for.

Morevoer the Roddenberry/Berman humanist point of view about how exploration and advancement is perpetually good is laughable when looking at real history, and has been challenged by the parts of Star Trek both Roddenberry and Berman had lesser influence over. DS9 and Season 4 of Enterprise made it quite clear, for example, genetic engineering to redesign the species was the most dangerous road to walk down of all. In the real world, the "secret sauce" of how to turn nuclear weapons designs that you can find on the internet into a workably, deliverable system is aggressively surpressed and controlled, that the one time it truly got out in the last 50 years, with AQ Khan in Pakistan, it lead to a series of international incidents and him living under house arrest for a decade.

In fiction, the Federation could likely monitor its linear history for changes, much as the nuclear powers of the world monitor the atmosphere for radioisotope releases (indicating testing or an accident), and it could probably easily recreate time travel technology if it wanted to. But given that we know that, at the earliest, the Federation began experimenting with time travel technology in the 29th century (though it was probably earlier) and concluded by the mid 30th, there is no reason to think their mastery of it approached anywhere near Annorax, and he still screwed it up.
 
But given that we know that, at the earliest, the Federation began experimenting with time travel technology in the 29th century (though it was probably earlier) and concluded by the mid 30th, there is no reason to think their mastery of it approached anywhere near Annorax, and he still screwed it up.

Not to mention that Starfleet also seemed quite fascistic in their application of time travel. In 'Future's end pt 1' Braxton was willing to destroy Voyager to prevent the destruction of the Sol system. Later, in 'Relativity' we saw that people can be arrested for crimes that they weren't even aware that they would committed yet. I can imagine that upholding the temporal prime directive would have led Starfleet to undertake some dubious acts.
 
^ It may seem "fascist" for Braxton et al. to be arrested for crimes he's going to commit, but it only seems that way. By the 29th century an entirely new way of looking at the law would have to arise, in a society where time travel is so commonplace.

The fact that they haven't committed a crime YET, doesn't change the fact that they WILL.
 
The problem with that assessment is that history doesn't always follow a tautological path or linear direction; it only seems to do so with the benefit of hindsight. Saying the present day Braxton should be punished for stuff that one version of him did (from a future that might not come to exist) is very problematic for me. While I do think time travel can be a fun story element when used well, I've never felt comfortable with any group - even the Federation - having easy access to it in the future. There are too many potential problems with it, even if they come from future folks with the best of intentions (who want to fix "problematic" areas of history), and I think "Year of Hell" explores some very interesting ideas about the Krenim actually using such technology.
 
The fact that they haven't committed a crime YET, doesn't change the fact that they WILL.

How can someone be arrested for a crime they are unaware that they are going to commit? The future isn't pre-determined or fixed. The only reason Future Braxton tried to blow up Voyager was because he has temporal psychosis, which the Present Braxton did not have. Present Braxton also had no intention of destroying Voyager and was just as surprised as everyone else that his future self was the culprit. You would think an organisation as enlightened as Starfleet would choose to treat Braxton of his illness or prevent him from getting it in the first place to stop his future crimes
 
The future isn't pre-determined or fixed.

Again, this is a period in history where time travel is as normal as breathing. The very concepts of past, present and future might not even mean the same thing anymore.

In the end...the 'future' is just another name for somebody else's present. :shrug:
 
Again, this is a period in history where time travel is as normal as breathing. The very concepts of past, present and future might not even mean the same thing anymore.

In the end...the 'future' is just another name for somebody else's present. :shrug:

The future isn't a fixed outcome. If Braxton got treated for his condition once he knew about it, he wouldn't commit the crime in the first place. If we had time travel capability now, and the police came to your door to arrest and charge you because in some future timeline you killed someone. Would you be perfectly fine going to trial and sentenced to life in prison for a death that hasn't even happened yet and will never happen because you have been arrested for it?
 
^ It may seem "fascist" for Braxton et al. to be arrested for crimes he's going to commit, but it only seems that way. By the 29th century an entirely new way of looking at the law would have to arise, in a society where time travel is so commonplace.

The fact that they haven't committed a crime YET, doesn't change the fact that they WILL.
This is an excellent point that I think gets missed a lot in discussions about the future world of the Federation - history, technology and events will have moved forward to compel people of these time period to adjust laws and institutions to suit their needs that are inapplicable in the modern context.

Take the age old debate about "is Starfleet a military organization". There's actually a thread up about that. But that's a problematic, even irrelevant question from the perspective of this fictional universe. Within our own universe, what a "military" is has changed dramatically over just the past century, much less the the last 400 years. A "national military" for example, is a relatively recent creation, and to this day not universal (i.e. the Chinese People's Liberation Army is technically speaking, the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party). The US Military of 1900 is fundamentally different from the one of 1918, of 1944, of 1968, and then of 2021. Starfleet is Starfleet. It's not a military, but it's not-not a military either. The best thing we can call it in the modern context is a uniformed civil service (which is a thing), that has components that can engage in military action when needed. Just as something like "Starfleet" would make no sense in the world of the 21st century, we can only apply modern institutions to the 24th century (or the 32nd century) very imprecisely.

In the case of law, there are procedures, standards and norms that didn't even exist 60 years ago or a 100 years ago, much less 400. And there is no reason to thing they'll persist, unchanged, indefinitely. Everyone in the US knows the Miranda Rights warning ("You have a right to remain silent...") as a result of pop-culture. But that didn't even exist before 1966 and has been altered a few times.

Or let's talk specific crimes. In 2021, cyber crimes can levy very serious penalties. Computer Data theft can land you 15 years in prison, per charge. That crime, as we think of it, did not exist 50 years ago. You could have probably prosecuted it under other laws back then, but as a distinct category of crime, it dates to a series of legal developments stretching from the 1980s to the 2000s.

So by the 29th century? Yeah who the heck knows how they even think of crime in a non-linear manner. But that's probably perfectly normal from their perspective, even if it isn't for us. It would be like trying to explain data theft to someone living in the 12th century. You could probably explain theft, and document theft, but the mechanisms of "computer data theft" would be as alien to them as time travel is to us.
 
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