The Burn and Time Travel Ban are incompatible

[Christopher]

Something like the Time Travel Ban requires large centralized governing bodies to enforce it. But The Burn not only destroyed those, it also created a resource scarcity based situation that would encourage separate parties to use Time Travel to solve it.

You're missing one key thing. What Book said in the season premiere was that all known means of time travel were already destroyed at the end of the Temporal Wars, well before the Burn happened. It's not just a "ban" -- the means simply does not exist anymore. They couldn't go back in time even if they wanted to. There just aren't any time machines around anymore.

Although, of course, there are logic holes with that idea. Theoretically, any warp-capable ship is a time machine, with the slingshot effect. But I'm partial to the idea David McIntee (our own Lonemagpie) put forth in the novel Indistinguishable from Magic -- if slingshot time travel were easy, people would be changing history all the time, so it's probably a lot more difficult to do successfully than TOS and The Voyage Home suggested.

Plus, of course, there are naturally occurring time warps and anomalies and such, plus the Guardian of Forever. But I would guess that in the wake of the time war, the Temporal Accords signatories took steps to eliminate natural time warps or make them inaccessible. And maybe they put some kind of defenses in place to shut down time travel attempts. (Readers of my DTI: Watching the Clock will know what I'm talking about.)

Whatever the reason, the intent of the show's writers is that time travel is not merely outlawed, but unattainable. After the Temporal Wars -- and before the Burn, so the galaxy's governments were still in place -- time travel was deemed so dangerous that all existing methods were destroyed or blocked. So by the time the Burn happened later in the 31st century, it was already impossible to use time travel to undo it.

 

[fireproof78]

Dismantling the spore drive does not mean dismantling the Discovery.
Starfleet rebuild the primary and secondary hull of the Discovery in 3 weeks. Shipbuilding doesn't seem to be a problem in the 32nd century.
Why put so much emphasis on pointing out to the audience that time travel technology is banned, but don't bring the issue up at all with the spore drive?

Ship building is a problem, which is why Discovery is valuable. Second, can the spore drive consistently time travel? Discovery didn't mean to do so coming back from the MU. Finally, there is no guarantee that spore drives can be manufactured in a way that consistently works.

 

[Christopher]

Second, can the spore drive consistently time travel? Discovery didn't mean to do so coming back from the MU.

I don't even consider that time travel -- more like time dilation, or time flowing differently between universes. It's just going forward in time at a different rate. It's only "time travel" in any real sense if you can go backward.

 

[Noname Given]

If time travel technology is banned, why isn't the spore drive getting dismantled?

In what way does the spore drive allow time travel? The wormhole the ship traveled through was created by Burnham's Red Angel time suit not the spore drive

When has the spore drive itself ever been shown taking the ship through time.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Other than Disco's short jaunt and then her big one, have we ever seen forward time travel in Trek? Other than returning to your own time from the past? I recall a few "fake futures" , but that's about it.

 

[Christopher]

Other than Disco's short jaunt and then her big one, have we ever seen forward time travel in Trek?

Well, leaving aside the obvious joke that they're always traveling forward in time one second per second, there's O'Brien's near-future hops in "Visionary." There was Daniels taking Archer forward to his time in "Shockwave," though that would be a return trip from Daniels's point of view.

You could say that any instance of cryogenic suspension as in "Space Seed" or "The Neutral Zone" or constitutes traveling forward in time, as would Scotty's transporter stasis in "Relics," or the backup EMH's reactivation in "Living Witness."

 

[valkyrie013]

I agree with Christopher,
the only caveat is the Disco and red angel time travel to the 32nd century, as the admiral said, they are criminals if they are found out to have time traveled. So it is still "Possible" maybe a "net" as DTI suggested doesn't allow backwards travel, but if something is coming from the past, its still okay?

 

[Christopher]

So it is still "Possible" maybe a "net" as DTI suggested doesn't allow backwards travel, but if something is coming from the past, its still okay?

Well, sure. It's only backward time travel that creates any risk to reality. Going forward in time is what we all do anyway.

 

[KirkusOveractus]

I agree with Christopher,
the only caveat is the Disco and red angel time travel to the 32nd century, as the admiral said, they are criminals if they are found out to have time traveled. So it is still "Possible" maybe a "net" as DTI suggested doesn't allow backwards travel, but if something is coming from the past, its still okay?

This part I really am having trouble with in that episode, in that Michael and Discovery traveled forward in time hundreds of years before time travel was banned. How can they be breaking a law that didn't exist when the action occurred?

It isn't like they stopped every so often to see what regulations have changed on the way.

 

[Nerys Myk]

This part I really am having trouble with in that episode, in that Michael and Discovery traveled forward in time hundreds of years before time travel was banned. How can they be breaking a law that didn't exist when the action occurred?

It isn't like they stopped every so often to see what regulations have changed on the way.

Sam Cogley IX is on the case.

 

[KirkusOveractus]

Sam Cogley IX is on the case.

Good. If anyone will stop the wheels of justice from running over their client in their undue haste, it will be Sam. He still uses books, my boy, books.

 

[Jackson_Roykirk]

Other than Disco's short jaunt and then her big one, have we ever seen forward time travel in Trek? Other than returning to your own time from the past? I recall a few "fake futures" , but that's about it.

Matt Frewer's character in TNG: A Matter of Time traveled forward into the future from the past. Of course it was our heroes' present, but it was forward time travel from Frewer's character standpoint.

 

[fireproof78]

This part I really am having trouble with in that episode, in that Michael and Discovery traveled forward in time hundreds of years before time travel was banned. How can they be breaking a law that didn't exist when the action occurred?

It isn't like they stopped every so often to see what regulations have changed on the way.

He does say it is a technicality. Likely they would not be found guilty due to it being ex post facto, if that still applies under Federation law. But, it would mandate an investigation, a case, being relieved of duty until it is determined what the process was.

 

[Agony_Boothb]

This part I really am having trouble with in that episode, in that Michael and Discovery traveled forward in time hundreds of years before time travel was banned. How can they be breaking a law that didn't exist when the action occurred?

It isn't like they stopped every so often to see what regulations have changed on the way.

Vance said this when he still suspected the Discovery crew of being possible temporal agents, I imagine he just said it to gage their reaction.

 

[Christopher]

This part I really am having trouble with in that episode, in that Michael and Discovery traveled forward in time hundreds of years before time travel was banned. How can they be breaking a law that didn't exist when the action occurred?

Well... Let's say that you, for instance, take fireworks across state lines from a state where it's legal to do so to a state where it's illegal to do so. I think that would be considered breaking the law even though it wasn't illegal in the place you left. And even if you didn't know it was illegal where you were going, because ignorance of the law is no excuse.

 

[KirkusOveractus]

Well... Let's say that you, for instance, take fireworks across state lines from a state where it's legal to do so to a state where it's illegal to do so. I think that would be considered breaking the law even though it wasn't illegal in the place you left. And even if you didn't know it was illegal where you were going, because ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Apples and oranges. The laws apply in that case, since I'm transporting those fireworks from one state to the other the same day, not hundreds of years before it became a law.

If it were a timeframe when I was taking the fireworks across state lines and it was legal in both states, then were sent forward in time in between states to the present where it became illegal where I was taking them, how would there be reasonable cause for me to think I was breaking the law, when at the time I was doing it, it was not illegal in either state?

You're equating something that is happening in the same stretch of time. Discovery left a century when time travel happened (or will happen in known instances) with no formal law forbidding it, into a time when it's been forbidden - they were travelling forward in time at the time it became illegal. They weren't going from one star system to another - they were going from one century to another.

 

[Christopher]

Apples and oranges. The laws apply in that case, since I'm transporting those fireworks from one state to the other the same day, not hundreds of years before it became a law.

Yeah, but if we're talking about temporal laws, then "before" and "after" become relative terms, not absolute ones. If you can move freely between times, then times become the functional equivalent of places, and the laws would have to adjust to account for that. Imagine how easily time travelers could abuse a legal system that didn't adjust its definitions of simultaneity and causality to account for time travel. A plagiarist could go back and publish other people's stories or patent other people's inventions before they originally came out. A sexual predator could take underage victims into the future past their 18th birthdays. A murderer could go back to long before the murder and claim no crime had been committed yet. The laws would need to abandon a strict calendrical definition of the order of events, otherwise all those criminals would get away with it. You'd need to base the laws on the logical progression of cause to effect rather than a falsely absolute definition of "before" and "after."

 

[Guy Gardener]

The 32nd century is not a temporal power.

They are not signitiries of the temporal accords.

They lost that status when they stepped back and gave up time travel.

Local rules however do apply.

If you see a time traveller, break their time machine. No one goes back to tell the past about the burn, because those dillithium munchers will assuredly derail this warp speedless almost future, and over turn (murder) a century of history.

All your babies will be unmade.
.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Matt Frewer's character in TNG: A Matter of Time traveled forward into the future from the past. Of course it was our heroes' present, but it was forward time travel from Frewer's character standpoint.

But that was using tech from the future not from his own time.

 

[Tim Thomason]

According to the preview of the next episode, there's going to be more discussion of the Temporal Wars, plus a soldier from that war. And with Georgiou's problem, more and more it seems likely that time travel will play a factor.

I don't think the Time Travel Ban was introduced to wipe away that storytelling possibility for future writers. I think was an explicit Chekhov's gun, something that will be explored and take high precedence in the back half of the season and perhaps the series going forward.

The Time Travel Ban and the Burn could very well be one and the same: A specific event from a specific power to achieve a specific goal. Time travel seems like it should be easily doable with warp ships, so if you cut off the ability for most ships to warp, then you lessen the amount of successful time trips. They're not incompatible.

This is, of course, assuming that there is a higher force enforcing the time travel ban. Which I think is ludicrously likely. A being or polity or group that can create the Burn should be sufficient to stop most time travel attempts.