LoneStranger said:
Dradin said:
I hadn't thought of that - yes, in Heroes, it makes more or less sense, especially because they make a point of how Hiro Nakamuras attempts to make things right just don't work that way. If Trek XI would do something similar (With Spock realizing that you cant simply make everything "right" again), then it might actually be an interesting premise ...
Very much like H.G. Wells'
The Time Machine. I think the hardest part to reconcile with this would be how to do a sequel to the movie in a way that makes sense. At the end of XI, if we are left with a Spock who is resigned to the fact that he can't change the past, it sort of leaves us in the 24th century.
Hmm, actually I think this is not what I meant. I assume you 're referring to the recent movie adaptation of Well's Time Machine (which has preciously little in common with Well's novella), where, in the beginning, the time-traveller tries to save his wife only to learn that she will simply die another way if he saves her. This concept is based upon the notion of fate, that the general direction of events is predestined. I don't like this concept too much, because it is so highly metaphysical: It seems to assume that there is some supernatural force that "decides" what is going to happen, regardless of human actions.
What I wanted to say is that, if you take a more "materialistic" view, there are two believable alternatives, none of which has anything to do with the scenario in the Time Machine movie: Either you can't change the past
at all , because time and space are stable continuums where everything "has already happened" in a specific way. This still allows for interesting stories in which we find out how exactly something came to pass.
The second possibility would be that you actually can change things in the past, but that it is simply impossible to "engineer" the timeline. Every change you make, however minor, would lead to a vastly different future. Once something has been changed, there's no way back. The reason for this lies in the assumption that the universe as a whole is a chaotic system. Such a system has two important features: One thing is that you can't calculate its outcome in any shorter way than simply "watching" the process itself. This means that in a chaotic system, you can't plan the outcome of your action in the long run, you can only act ans see what happens then. The second feature is that small changes, in chaotic systems tend to have big repercussions, which, again, can't be calculated in advance.
To give an example for the second model: In "City on the Edge of Forever", the whole Federation disappears into non-existance after McCoy went through the Guardian (we can rationalize the fact that the crewmembers on the surface of the planet are still there by some kind of "temporal field" around the guardian which has protected them). Then, Kirk and Spock go through the Guardian and see to it that McCoy doesn't save Edith Keeler. When they return, everything is restored to "normal". However, I'd argue that if such changes are possible, there would be no way to get the "old" Federation back after time travel has occured (except for the possibility that it still exists in some parallel Universe). McCoy, Spock and Kirk have influenced are number of small events in the past simply by being there and breathing the air. This small changes will accumulate over time and create a future that is vastly different from the one we knew before. That's what I meant by "making it right is impossible". You could change all kinds of things, but you could never "restore" a certain timeline.
The other variation is that it "always happened this way", put differently: That Kirk, Spock and mcCoy went back and got involved in a chain of events that lead to Edith Keelers death anyway. However, then it would make little sense that the Federation "disappeared", because all the events were already part of the causality of that timeline from the start.
