Star Trek IV kills me
- Thread starter Captain Nebula
- Start date
Knight Templar
Commodore
That assumes the damage is the kind that is repairable by the ship crew itself.
Or that the damage is not exponentially cumulative.
Just look at the dilithium crystal decrystalization in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The BOP would've been dead in the water with not even Scotty able to repair it had Spock not remembered a theory about causing the process to reverse.
It was destroyed by the probe after Kirk & co vanished, never to be seen again.
But they saved the new timeline they created, so who cares about the old one?
I think it's a win, win.'
Not so win-win. If this happened, then Kirk would have gone home as an Admiral and been depressed over his desk job and eventually beamed himself into space. He would not have saved the Earth and been given a new command. All the things you suggest they undo had to be done for Kirk to be happy. He didn't want to be stuck with retroactive child support payments anyway.
Intentionally or not, he made the right decision all around.
Could a starship fit inside a TARDIS? Best solution.
I think it's a win, win.'
Not so win-win. If this happened, then Kirk would have gone home as an Admiral and been depressed over his desk job and eventually beamed himself into space. He would not have saved the Earth and been given a new command. All the things you suggest they undo had to be done for Kirk to be happy. He didn't want to be stuck with retroactive child support payments anyway.
Intentionally or not, he made the right decision all around.
And it's all about making Kirk happy. It's Shatner's universe and we just live in it.
And it's all about making Kirk happy. It's Shatner's universe and we just live in it.
Two thumbs up!
Not necessarily. A hypothetical alternative:
1) Glasses made in the 19th century. In, for example, London.
2) Glasses remain in Britain for a few centuries.
3) McCoy buys them as a birthday present for Kirk.
4) Kirk's birthday, receives glasses.
5) Kirk travels back in time to 20th century San Francisco.
6) Kirk sells glasses.
7) Same pair of glasses now exists in two different places simultaneously, San Francisco and Britain. Odd, but if time travel works then possible.
It needn't be London of course, that's just an example. But the glasses could well exist in two locations.
Trek has never really followed through with many of the discoveries that they've made. If you can travel in time and "correct" the timeline in a creaky old BOP, why isn't it done more often? Go back to just after the discovery of the wormhole and tell Sisko about the Dominion.
Inform Picard of the Borg. Prevent Voyager from being taken to the Delta Quadrant by the Caretaker. Solve any number of life and death situations and save millions or billions of lives.
In JJTrek, why would't Spock slingshot around a star and stop Romulus from being destroyed when he realized he would be late?
The fans remember more of the past than the characters do. If a solution exists from a previous show or movie then they conveniently don't think about it. Trek is only about the current story. The back story is usually only window dressing.
Inform Picard of the Borg. Prevent Voyager from being taken to the Delta Quadrant by the Caretaker. Solve any number of life and death situations and save millions or billions of lives.
In JJTrek, why would't Spock slingshot around a star and stop Romulus from being destroyed when he realized he would be late?
The fans remember more of the past than the characters do. If a solution exists from a previous show or movie then they conveniently don't think about it. Trek is only about the current story. The back story is usually only window dressing.
Because there's no way of guaranteeing that "correcting" any timeline will actually yield better results.
Sure, you can stop the Borg invasion of the AQ in "Destiny"...and then they'll overrun the entire galaxy later on.
Plus if you buy into multiverse theory, you're not "changing" anything, you're just jumping tracks. Whatever happened, happened.
Sure, you can stop the Borg invasion of the AQ in "Destiny"...and then they'll overrun the entire galaxy later on.
Plus if you buy into multiverse theory, you're not "changing" anything, you're just jumping tracks. Whatever happened, happened.
Trek has actually been pretty consistent in that the characters are absolutely opposed to altering the timeline, even if doing so could yield major benefits. There are exceptions to this, of course, such as when Janeway decides to alter all of recent history in "Endgame" or when Scotty decides it's okay to give up the formula for transparent aluminum in TVH. But, by and large, Trek has stuck to this rule. It's not so much that they "forget" time travel is available, but that they consciously choose not to use it, even when it would be beneficial.
I also wonder, in-universe, just how many people know how to travel through time. Have we ever seen any indication that time travel is commonplace? Even in "Assignment: Earth," when Kirk's log casually mentions they've traveled through time for historical research, it's still the ship that originally discovered how to do it. Maybe Starfleet doesn't share that information with others.
Aside from Kirk and company, have we ever seen anyone use the slingshot method for time travel? Pretty much all other time travel, as I recall, has been either unintentional or the result of some outside force, like the Bajoran Orb of Time or the Borg's temporal vortex.
I actually don't apply the multiverse theory to most anything prior to Abrams Trek simply because that's not what the writers and producers at the time were intending.
Trek has made it clear time and again that there is a single linear timeline that our characters are moving back and forth within and that changes ripple through that timeline. When alternate universes, parallel realities, etc. have been part of the equation, from "Mirror Mirror" to "Parallels" to Abrams Trek, it's been specifically pointed out and treated as abnormal.
Therefore, I tend to think that most of the time traveling we've seen in Trek's history (e.g. "City on the Edge of Forever," TVH, "Time's Arrow," etc.) have been of the linear, single timeline variety and only isolated incidents, such as Abrams Trek, have been of the multiverse variety.
Well, they don't actually 'correct' the timeline in TVH. They do not, for example, ensure that all whaling is halted, and that whales survive naturally to the 23rd century. Instead they take a mere two whales, ones that without their intervention would have been butchered, from their native time. No significant change to history. The disappearance of a marine biologist would likewise have little impact.
The introduction of the formula for transparent aluminium is potentially significant, but it is implied (and, in the novelization, stated outright) that the chap at the plastics firm was the original inventor.
Yup, if you can affect your own past, imagine if the Borg incident had been prevented. Then Starfleet wouldn't have been forced to buff up, and wouldn't have been ready for the Dominion War.
doubleohfive
Fleet Admiral
The answer is simple. McCoy bought the glasses originally and gave them to Kirk before they traveled through time. Somewhere, there was a universe where this one event took place minus before being affected by the time travel or looping.
Once Kirk and crew went back in time, the loop began.
Just because it's looping, doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't already possible McCoy got the glasses from some antique dealer to give to Kirk before they'd even had a chance to go back in time. Eyeglasses don't just pop up out of thin air, you know.
Quite true. We've seen the universe change when McCoy went through the Guardian and when the Borg created the Vortex. If they were simply jumping tracks they both would have simply disappeared as Spock apparently did.
Would the death of a soup kitchen preacher have no effect either? You can not just look at what someone has accomplished up to that point in their lives, you have to know what they have yet to do.
Also, little, apparently insignificant changes can have a ripple effect. Suppose just after Scott & McCoy got the plexiglass form Nicholls that a large order for that particular size came into the office. Since Plexicore couldn't fill it all they needed to get some from another company. While the driver for that company is delivering it he's involved in an accident that kills someone. Ever hear of the Butterfly Effect?
As far as the multiverse theory goes, if you're facing a choice then you've already made both of them. Multiply that across the universe and it's hopelessly complex before humans even start walking upright.
In Christopher Bennett's DTI novel, by the 24th century all the major powers have an equivalent to the Bureau of Temporal Investigation. For all we know the Klingons have been travelling in time for centuries. Unless Kirk and company are unique, there's been lots of trips into the past.
Just had to read and interject on this part. The novelization delves more into the subject and takes longer than the film implies...as it takes Scotty an half hour to type in the formula. He also knows that Nichols had invented Transparent Aluminum. But in the film Scotty is not so sure who invented it.
So I go on the assumption that Nichols unverifiable had the formula for years until someone close to him eventually invented it.
But if this is true, then somehow the glasses crossed from one universe to another universe.
There are a couple of different ways for this to work, but none of them make sense according to what is seen in the movie...
1. McCoy could get the glasses, with the glasses having been made in an alternate universe. However, there is nothing to suggest that the glasses were ever in an alternate universe. And how did they get into our universe in the first place.
2. There was never an alternate universe, but the glasses were actually made in the 18th century (or whatever), and they ended up in McCoy's hands. They all go back in time, and the instant Kirk and Co arrive in the 80s, there are TWO copies of the glasses on Earth. The trouble with this is that the timeline will continue along with two copies of the glasses until time eventually gets to the time of Star Trek 4, and then Kirk will take the glasses back, resulting in THREE copies of the glasses. And every time this happens, a new copy of the glasses will appear. Sooner or later, someone's going to wonder where all these glasses are coming from.
3. The cross into the alternate universe happens when Kirk and his team go back in time. Think of it this way. If you invent a time machine tomorrow and go back to meet yourself yesterday, is this possible? Right now, you have no memory of any such meeting occurring yesterday. So if you do go back and meet your past self, then there are two alternative timelines. The first is the original one, in which you have no memory of meeting your future self. The second one is the one you created by altering yesterday's events by saying hello to yourself. But if this was what happened in Star Trek 4, then Kirk and co went into the past of the original timeline, but then (since they created a new timeline at the instant of their arrival in 1986), they would have taken the whales into the FUTURE of the alternate timeline. Now, this is quite plausibly what happened, but it would mean that the inhabitants of Earth at the beginning of the movie all died, because Kirk never returned (returning instead to an alternate Earth).
These are valid points, and may be applicable if time travel is in reality possible. As portrayed by Star Trek, however, there is nothing to suggest that that anything that happened in the 20th century in TVH made any change to the timeline. The Federation still exists as our heroes remember it, nobody has apparently popped out of existence as a result of great-great-great-great-great-grandma Gillian the marine biologist disappearing before she could meet her future husband.
Now admittedly TVH was intended to be an enjoyable adventure with a strong vein of humour, not an in depth examination of temporal physics. But as there is no mention of any change to history, and this is the source of such information, I think it reasonable to accept that there was no significant change to history.
Yes, I accept what you say about the 'soup kitchen preacher'. But it was made clear in the episode that this was not just some random person, like the drunk who zaps himself with McCoy's phaser. Had Edith lived she would have influenced American foreign policy to a significant degree. Her life and death affected history to a degree that the disappearance of Dr. Taylor apparently did not.
And yes, I understand how small changes can cause ripples. But Star Trek style time travel suggests these don't have any real effect. You mention the Butterfly Effect. In it's literal sense, this refers to the idea that the air currents from a single beat of a butterfly's wings can subtly affect air currents, leading to changes in weather thousands of miles away. Now consider the passage of a cloaked Klingon BoP through the atmosphere. Hey, the damn thing even warped out of the atmosphere near the end of the film. If our heroes did nothing else in this movie, no transparent aluminium, no regenerated kidneys, no kidnapped biologists or whales, this alone could have made major changes to history. Yet, apparently, did not.
The time line, as presented in Star Trek at least, seems to be a sturdy beast. It can be changed, quite significantly. But it seems only certain points or people are important enough to make such change possible.
I'm not sure I understand this. Why would there ever be more than two?
I addressed this matter earlier in the thread, but for convenience I'll summarise my view here. The glasses were originally made in, for example, 19th century London. They stay there for the next few centuries, until McCoy buys them as a present for Kirk.
Kirk then takes them back in time to 20th century San Francisco. So one pair of glasses exist in two places, London and San Francisco. After this, whatever happens to the San Francisco pair is irrelevant. They could be destroyed in an earthquake, or world war 3. They might even continue 'till Kirk's time, and beyond. Doesn't matter. Because it's not the San Francisco pair McCoy buys, it's the London pair.
So at most there are two copies at any one time. The London pair, and the San Francisco pair.
Ah, I see what you mean...
But, what would happen if the glasses that McCoy bought were the San Francisco pair, and not the London pair? After all, the SF pair could continue to exist into the 23rd century just as easily as the London pair.
