What was the rush?

[BillJ]

So I'm watching A Matter of Time this morning and was wondering why was Picard willing to risk the entire colony population?

I point to two pieces of dialogue:

PICARD: I'm faced with a dilemma. There is a planet beneath us which is slowly turning to ice, and unless we do something about it, I'm told that in a matter of weeks thousands, maybe tens of thousands, will die.

PICARD: Oh no, I'm not. Everything that Starfleet stands for, everything that I have ever believed in, tells me I cannot ask you that. But at the same time, there are twenty million lives down there, and you know what happened to them. What will happen to them.

So I imagine that the thousands that would die, would probably do so while Starfleet worked on another solution or an evacuation.

So why did they gamble millions more lives than they needed to?

 

[Timo]

Well, every gamble within the next couple of years would involve 20 million anyway, but every delay would mean assured death of thousands per the first weeks (and probably a rising rather than dropping death toll in the following weeks). Delaying would gain them nothing tangible in terms of lives, and would explicitly cost them lives.

We never learn there would exist a non-gamble option. Evacuation might theoretically be considered one, but we've never heard of Starfleet successfully evacuating millions. Probably evacuation would sit somewhere between doing nothing (thousands dead per week, things gradually getting worse) and pulling one of those technobabble stunts (20 million might die), as the chaos of evacuation would probably kill a lot of people while not stopping the deaths-from-waiting.

I guess the bottom line there is that Starfleet would look a heck of a lot better letting nobody die than letting 170,000 die - whereas if Starfleet ended up killing 20 million, those 20 million would not be there to complain!

Timo Saloniemi