List of nuTrek references

[F. King Daniel]

I've fallen way behind in my Treklit, have there been any more?

-Beaming three people from two targets onto one pad in TP: Zero Sum Game ("It's been done before")

-The icy Delta Vega is mentioned in TP: Paths of Disharmony

-Red Matter is given an origin, and black hole time travel and alternate realities are explained in DTI: Watching the Clock.

-Transwarp beaming is used at the very end of TNG: Indistinguishable From Magic (which also touches on alternate realities)

-STO: The Needs of the Many is packed with overt mentions of Nero, the supernova, the Countdown backstory and Vulcan's destruction.

-TOS: Children of Kings is said by the author to exist in a "might have been" combination of TOS and nuTrek. Klingon Warbirds are mentioned (and explained to be a more heavily armed version of a Battlecruiser), and the new warp effect is used on the cover.

-Uhura mentions an Orion roommate in the Star Trek/Legion of Super Heroes crossover comic.

-The USS Kelvin is given the classname "Einstein" in Federation: The First 150 Years, and Kirk's birth in space is mentioned.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

The Struggle Within features working-class Romulan miners among whom Nero would fit quite nicely.

 

[F. King Daniel]

^Looking forward to reading that one!

 

[KRAD]

Mention of alternate realities hardly constitutes a reference to the two recent movies, considering that there have been alternate realities in Trek since the original series' second season, and it's been a component of every single Trek series............................

 

[Christopher]

^Yeah, but my discussion of the physics of alternate realities in Watching the Clock was implicitly intended to explain how the Prime and Abrams continuities could coexist, though of course I didn't mention the Abramsverse overtly because nobody in Prime knows it exists.

 

[Enterprise1701]

Has there been any instance besides Star Trek 2009 where a time travel event resulted in the travelers ending up in a "new" quantum reality?

 

[Christopher]

Has there been any instance besides Star Trek 2009 where a time travel event resulted in the travelers ending up in a "new" quantum reality?

Alternate Tasha Yar, "Yesterday's Enterprise." It's disputable whether her reality was the original one, but she started in one timeline and ended up taking actions in the past that generated a different timeline in which she spent the remainder of her life. Also near-future O'Brien from "Visionary," though there the timelines only diverged by a few hours. And one could make a case for Kes in "Before and After," though that was more mental time travel than physical.

Although really what you're describing is the result of any time travel that alters the past -- the travelers create a new history in which they live out the rest of their lives. McCoy went through the Guardian and lived his life in a new history where the US never entered WWII and the Federation never existed. The Borg went back in time and created a new history where they assimilated Earth in the 2060s and Earth was a Borg world in the 24th century. It's just that most time-travel stories only show these realities briefly before the characters go back and undo them, restoring their original histories.

Perhaps what you're talking about, though, is a case where the new timeline coexists with the old rather than being presumed to overwrite/be overwritten by it. But those are just variations on the same process, and ideally, coexistence should be the norm with overwriting an improbable exception.

 

[Enterprise1701]

Wait, so you're saying that alternate timelines are synonymous with alternate quantum realities?

 

[F. King Daniel]

Has there been any instance besides Star Trek 2009 where a time travel event resulted in the travelers ending up in a "new" quantum reality?

Yep. In the DS9 Millennium trilogy, they speak of Klingon war fleets sent back in time via slingshot to conquer Earth in the distant past. These fleets were never heard of again. Some believed they were destroyed, but others hypothesised that they survived and succeeded - but in doing so created an alternate reality.

 

[Christopher]

Wait, so you're saying that alternate timelines are synonymous with alternate quantum realities?

Of course they are. Alternate timeline, alternate universe, alternate quantum reality, parallel any of the above, these are just interchangeable terms used by non-scientists who write fiction to describe what Many-Worlds quantum theory would refer to as independent measurement histories or macrorealms.

I mean, fans seem to have this perception that timelines that branch off spontaneously are somehow fundamentally different things from timelines created by time travel -- just because "Parallels" used a different label for them, I guess -- but really that makes no more sense than assuming that, say, there's a fundamental difference between a naturally occurring lake and a lake created by damming a river, or between a naturally conceived child and an in-vitro fertilized child. Physically they're the same thing even though their origins are different. And the same goes here. A timeline is a timeline. It's just a series of observed events and interactions. The only thing that differentiates one timeline from another, regardless of how it was created, is that their respective measurement histories are correlated with different particle states and thus they're non-interacting, even though they're made of the same actual particles.

And "quantum reality" is not a narrow or exclusive label. All realities are "quantum" because all physics is quantum. Even gravity, almost certainly, although we're still working on explaining it in quantum terms. Sci-fi writers like to toss "quantum" around as if it were some fancy esoteric thing, but everything in the universe is made of quanta and obeys quantum physics. Calling something "quantum" is so generic as to be effectively meaningless. So a "quantum reality" is just a reality, described a bit more pretentiously.

 

[Enterprise1701]

Wait, so you're saying that alternate timelines are synonymous with alternate quantum realities?

Of course they are. Alternate timeline, alternate universe, alternate quantum reality, parallel any of the above, these are just interchangeable terms used by non-scientists who write fiction to describe what Many-Worlds quantum theory would refer to as independent measurement histories or macrorealms.

.....................................okay sure I guess.

Perhaps what you're talking about, though, is a case where the new timeline coexists with the old rather than being presumed to overwrite/be overwritten by it. But those are just variations on the same process, and ideally, coexistence should be the norm with overwriting an improbable exception.

And yeah, this is what I meant. Any other cases besides Star Trek 2009 and King Daniel Into Darkness's example?

And I another question that you could probably answer best. Star Trek has had instances of time travelers disappearing (you term it quantum tunneling) when they live to see their points of origin once again (i.e. alternate Picard in "Time Squared" or Timeship One in Forgotten History) Suppose Tasha Yar from "Yesterday's Enterprise" or Kathryn Janeway from "Endgame" had lived to see 2366 or 2404 again. Would they disappear? But more to the point, what about Spock Prime? Suppose he could be kept alive until 2387. Would he remain or quantum tunnel into his counterpart?

 

[Christopher]

And I another question that you could probably answer best. Star Trek has had instances of time travelers disappearing (you term it quantum tunneling) when they live to see their points of origin once again (i.e. alternate Picard in "Time Squared" or Timeship One in Forgotten History) Suppose Tasha Yar from "Yesterday's Enterprise" or Kathryn Janeway from "Endgame" had lived to see 2366 or 2404 again. Would they disappear? But more to the point, what about Spock Prime? Suppose he could be kept alive until 2387. Would he remain or quantum tunnel into his counterpart?

In preface: If I had my druthers, there'd be no disappearing at all, but "Time Squared" forced my hand and I had to come up with an excuse for that particular bit of silliness.

My model is that when you go back in time, say, ten years to change the past, then for the intervening ten years both the original and altered versions run in parallel, because of course something that's happened can't unhappen. But when the moment of the original time travel is reached, the original undergoes quantum collapse and merges with the new one, effectively ceasing to exist from that point forward. So anything from that effaced timeline, like "Time Squared"'s extra Picard, merges with its counterpart, if any, in the revised timeline. If it has no surviving counterpart, though, it can continue to exist within the new timeline.

In alt-Tasha's case, her original was dead by 2366, so I daresay she would've survived. Admiral Janeway... well, she'd be continuing to age for all that time, so her body would be considerably different from the other Janeway's, and that difference might be great enough that the merger wouldn't happen.

But Spock Prime's timeline did not cease to exist. The Prime reality continues on beyond 2387, so there's no quantum merger and thus no reason for Spock Prime to disappear. Not to mention that the two Spocks are 129 years apart in age, so again, there's a major physical difference in their bodies, making them dissimilar enough that there'd be no merger.

 

[Enterprise1701]

If it is alright with you, Christopher, I have a few more temporal physics questions. Everybody else, I hope you don't mind and I promise to not abuse this thread for temporal physics in general.

1. You state that spontaneously diverging timelines share their pasts prior to the divergence. Would the events of "Mirror, Mirror" be on the historical record in the A Gutted World, Brave New World, The Embrace of Cold Architects, Honor in the Night, and The Last Generation realities?

2. Suppose someone from after the 24th century traveled back in time (two-way exchange of quantum information) and blew up U.S.S. Voyager just before "Scorpion". How would that affect history for normal space and fluidic space?

3. How can it be that the Guardian of Forever generates a time portal, a phenomenon visible to naked humanoid eye, that no one on the other side notices?

4.

Spoiler: revelation of Forgotten History

if Kirk and his crew obtained the equation for a time field from the DTI in the subspace confluence crisis of 2275, then would The Voyage Home have still occurred in say, the A Gutted World reality?

5.

Spoiler: the Sponsor's motives

Does Jamran Harnoth's actions to ensure his and the Order of Omega's existence constitute a predestination paradox?

 

[Christopher]

1. You state that spontaneously diverging timelines share their pasts prior to the divergence. Would the events of "Mirror, Mirror" be on the historical record in the A Gutted World, Brave New World, The Embrace of Cold Architects, Honor in the Night, and The Last Generation realities?

Sure, why wouldn't they? Those all diverged after its events, and the Mirror Universe is a pre-existing spontaneous parallel (at least, it's spontaneous as far as we know).

2. Suppose someone from after the 24th century traveled back in time (two-way exchange of quantum information) and blew up U.S.S. Voyager just before "Scorpion". How would that affect history for normal space and fluidic space?

From fluidic space's POV, it would simply mean there was another parallel timeline in which Voyager didn't exist, which would coexist with the other timelines up until the moment of the initial time travel, at which point the other timelines would collapse into that one.

3. How can it be that the Guardian of Forever generates a time portal, a phenomenon visible to naked humanoid eye, that no one on the other side notices?

It's advanced enough to do pretty much whatever it wants. It could be employing the type of quantum time travel used by Daniels and Noi's agency, in which arrival in the past is a sort of quantum reality shift that nobody can directly perceive; the travelers are just suddenly there as if they'd been there all along. Or maybe there's simply some kind of cloaking field around the portal.

4.

Spoiler: revelation of Forgotten History

if Kirk and his crew obtained the equation for a time field from the DTI in the subspace confluence crisis of 2275, then would The Voyage Home have still occurred in say, the A Gutted World reality?

Probably, because nothing that happens can unhappen. Parallel timelines don't erase each other until after the future event that causes the divergence. And we know that the present can be affected by events from more than one different future -- e.g. the future that influenced Voyager in "Timeless" was different from the future that influenced it in "Endgame."

5.

Spoiler: the Sponsor's motives

Does Jamran Harnoth's actions to ensure his and the Order of Omega's existence constitute a predestination paradox?

I reject the term "predestination paradox," because a self-consistent time loop in which an event causes itself is not actually a paradox at all. A paradox is a self-inconsistent event, something that would have two incompatible outcomes. For instance, going back in time to prevent your own birth is a paradox, because it doesn't resolve to a single outcome. But going back in time to cause your birth, however much it may defy everyday assumptions about causality, is not a paradox and is not forbidden by physics, because it is self-consistent. (For that matter, going back in time and creating a parallel timeline in which you're never born, alongside the one in which you were, is not a paradox either, because it does resolve into a consistent outcome as long as the two timelines remain separate.)

And "predestination" is a silly word for it too, because it implies some kind of mystical cosmic intent. It's just retrocausality. It may look "predestined" from a certain subjective point of view, if you look at it in a certain way, but that's just relative to a particular frame of reference.

 

[Enterprise1701]

Thank you very much, Christopher.

 

[BobtheGunslinge]

I just want to jump in here and mention that Watching the Clock is why I'm back into Trek. That book blew my mind and changed how I watch Star Trek (especially Enterprise), and I joined this board because I was so jazzed up about it. Thank you, Mr. Bennett. Please write more about the DTI!

Back on topic, I think you made at least three oblique references to NuTrek in that book, one of which made me laugh out loud and have a very hard time explaining it to my wife.

 

[Christopher]

I just want to jump in here and mention that Watching the Clock is why I'm back into Trek. That book blew my mind and changed how I watch Star Trek (especially Enterprise), and I joined this board because I was so jazzed up about it. Thank you, Mr. Bennett. Please write more about the DTI!

Thank you! And my new DTI e-novella, The Collectors, will be out in December.

 

[Enterprise1701]

What if someone in Abramsverse 2265 slingshots to 2151 and retroassassinates Jonathan Archer before Klaang's arrival on Earth. How would that work out?

 

[Christopher]

No story ideas!

 

[Kruezerman]

What if someone in Abramsverse 2265 slingshots to 2151 and retroassassinates Jonathan Archer before Klaang's arrival on Earth. How would that work out?

My brain hurts.