Living Witness

[Timo]

...destroying (it's not murder if they're not sentient)...

More interestingly, the EMH isn't exactly an individual, especially if copied thousandfold. Instead of destroying him, our heroes would have a range of options that wouldn't apply to a live doctor. They could for example merge the inconvenient 10,000 doctors into one; the "averaging process" might amount to losing perhaps 0.003 doctors' worth of identity, as most of the material would be common already between the clones.

(logically) it's a violation of the Prime Directive to steal/acquire technology through timetravel.

Our heroes didn't object to using Borg technology, even though it was for all practical and theoretical purposes "stolen", too. And one might argue it was also acquired through "time travel", because the Borg represent future technologies from the UFP point of view...

In backing up the EMH, I think our heroes would have used any means necessary and justified it as being a life-saving measure for a fellow hero creature.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[The_Baroness]

What part of "things change" did it make it seem that I didn't already say what you just said?

Message in a bottle was half way through season 4.

Besides after they got the 29th century codecs they were easily able to reduce the doctor down to portable size and every thing he claimed about his program being bound to sickbay in eye of the needle was moot.

Something to consider, in Message in a Bottle, the doctor was absent. Harry was trying to build a replacement from scratch.

Once the doc was back aboard, it would likely have been much easier to simply copy the program, and store it, rather than write an entirely new one.

 

[Guy Gardener]

The taboo against accepting gifts form timetravellers is purely a case of self preservation, that in no matter what way you think your are ahead of the game compared to a future person you might as well be a monkey because these gifts come with strings (Ask the Trojans!) and force you to behave in ways that are in benefit to future people above your own no matter how your own limited short-sightedness accesses the playing field that you do not understand how you are being manipulated.

Note how Berlinghoff Rassmussen thought he was running the show but wasn't.

The Borg aren't all that manipulative, and what they have is advanced but native to this timezone and the federation is at war with them according to Nechayev so what they have is booty.

The regular Prime Directive (a novel told me once) stops more powerful races (hopefully if they respect the Federations moral stand) meddling with the federation and the federation meddling with younger races that every one gets to grow up at their own pace without homogenisation and mass replication of identity.

The Temporal Prime Directive does the same thing with time. Cutting down on contamination and pollution. It's all really necessary when you consider how colonization destroyed all the aboriginal and indigenous cultures (eventually) over the last 500 years as whitey went looking for places to dump his religion.

Though not canon, this all should make perfect sense to anyone but the Voyager writing room.

 

[Guy Gardener]

What part of "things change" did it make it seem that I didn't already say what you just said?

Message in a bottle was half way through season 4.

Besides after they got the 29th century codecs they were easily able to reduce the doctor down to portable size and every thing he claimed about his program being bound to sickbay in eye of the needle was moot.

Something to consider, in Message in a Bottle, the doctor was absent. Harry was trying to build a replacement from scratch.

Once the doc was back aboard, it would likely have been much easier to simply copy the program, and store it, rather than write an entirely new one.

If at the time they could copy the program, why would they send the original?

And if on back in the aq they could copy the doctor, why wouldn't they copy him before sending him back?

Have you tried to copy a DVD with your home computer?

Patents and copywrites?

maybe these buggers were made in a way that some one didn't want them copied?

Maybe the union lobbyists for the flesh and blood doctors who didn't want to be supplanted and replaced ut their 2 cents forward on this issue? They had to maintain their value by artificially deflating the supply of EMHs and LMHs, otherwise no one would want a doctor that didn't know EVERYTHING and no one would train to be a doctor who no one wanted.

Replacing all Doctors with holograms is a hop skip and a jump to Talos IV country.

 

[Kai Winn]

What part of "things change" did it make it seem that I didn't already say what you just said?

Message in a bottle was half way through season 4.

Besides after they got the 29th century codecs they were easily able to reduce the doctor down to portable size and every thing he claimed about his program being bound to sickbay in eye of the needle was moot.

Something to consider, in Message in a Bottle, the doctor was absent. Harry was trying to build a replacement from scratch.

Once the doc was back aboard, it would likely have been much easier to simply copy the program, and store it, rather than write an entirely new one.

so why wasn't he backuped before he left? i think the computer of voyager couldn't handle that much information, the one of ds9 which is probably more advanced than the much smaller voyager's overloaded once when it stored four crewmembers.

 

[Guy Gardener]

That was 50 year old (plus?) Cardassian technology mostly.

The Doctor was positively condescending when he was telling Denora pel how minuscule a dent her personality made in the sickbays holobuffer. How often does one get laid after telling some girl she has pea sized brain?

 

[USS Excelsior]

Actually it's because the Federation was too caught up in the Temporal Cold War to bother with people like that and so far away.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Wow.

The Doctor is Future Guy?

I might have heard that before.

 

[hux]

As interestng as the doctor disscusion is, i'm more interested in why the federation hadn't made contact with the kyrians and vaskans within 700 years time - the argument that the federation only make contact with species they want as members is just plain wrong - as far as i was aware, the critera for contact is being a warp capable species which they were (though this is never officially confirmed, they are both space travelling species even 700 years ago so i think it's fair to make the assumption)

plus, the federaton would be aware of voyagers interaction with them so it would be reasonable for them to make contact again - for me, the only explanation could be that the federaton haven't travelled that far in 700 years which would suggest something nefarious has occurred (though the various time travel episodes would suggest that the federation is alive and well in the 30th century so this seems to contradict that theory)

just seems odd to me that the kyrians and vaskans would not have bumped into the federation in some form or another 700 years on

 

[Guy Gardener]

It's kinda said in Insurrection when they invited those munchknis who had only had warp travel for a single year.

The federation doesn't want to fuck with younger lesser junior child races. It's just a dick move. They think of you as a god, you think of them as a subspecies who has to be raised up by their bootstraps godwilling whether they want it or not... By degrees and bench marks the federation is going to evolve and become more complex until they finally decide that even merely warp capable species are younger lesser junior child races.

Check the script for the episode episode First contact, not the movie. And I'm sure they said in Bread and Curcuses as well as a Piece of the Action in TOS that they leave the Younger races alone... What about the episode with Nikki Cox?

Consider the English who sailed the world building Empire 3 hundred years ago. If a new civilization of that complexity would suddenly just "found" would the modern day English treat them as equals or as a younger lesser junior child race?

The prime Directive is going to evolve. It has to.

Lets anthropomorphise this bastard in "your" image.

When you were four you made friends with four year olds.

When you were six, you still made friends with four year olds.

When you were 10, 4 year olds were a commodity to be exploited.

When you were 20, 4 year olds were a burden to be looked after.

When you were/will be 35, 4 year olds were/are thank god 95 percent of the time some one elses problem and you will go/went to great lengths to maintain that they are and always willbe someone elses problem.

The older you get the more chance some one is going to mistake you for a paedophile if you keep treating 4 year olds like equals.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I don't think we've ever seen a future (or rather, future-future) in Trek that'd been "the" future. Who's to say "Living Witness" is any more the "real" future than the various alternates seen in "All Good Things", "Endgame", "Shockwave", "Azati Prime" etc? Heck, even Voyager itself isn't "the" future anymore after Nero and Spock went back in time, any more than Old Janeway's future was after she went back and changed things. From any point in time (the viewers POV), the futures seen are just one of infinite billions of possibilities or alternates.

For all we know, in the "Living Witness" future, the Federation was destroyed in the "galaxy threatening" STXI supernova, or maybe the Borg assimilated it, or Shinzon fired his Thaleron weapon at it, or the Dominion took over, or...

Or maybe the "Living Witness" people, after suffering so much after Voyager's interference, hide their world like the aliens in TNG's "When the Bough Breaks"