Why exactly did the Prophets create a wormhole?

[blackzoid]

This is something that I was going to put into the "Terminus of Bajoran Wormhole" thread but decided not to.

My question is: why is the Celestial Temple a wormhole at all?

The Prophets are the gods of Bajor, so why create a wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant out of their temple? Theres no need. All they need is a location in space for it, to send out the Orbs. It doesn't have to be a wormhole. Of course this drives the Ds9 story, but in-universe wise, it doesn't make sense.

I think a wonderful DS9 story would have explained this, by having the Prophets be the gods of another world on the Gamma Quadrant end.
The Prophets goal was for the two peoples to eventually meet up. But something happened and the Gamma Quadrant civilisation was wiped out (a religious civil war maybe?) and so the Bajoran's would have to learn from their "brothers" fate and not repeat their mistakes. It would have explained the idea of a temple/wormhole perfectly. Pretty good episode too.

 

[Navaros]

The problem with your idea is that the Dominion and wormhole aliens would have been hostile with each other if the wormhole aliens were considered GQ gods. That wouldn't have worked with the show as they made it.

I do agree that there is no good explanation for why the wormhole aliens live in a wormhole, and indeed the writers should have made some effort to explain this. Then again, they should have made some efforts to define the wormhole aliens as characters rather than generic talking heads who don't even make sense on that level (i.e. they don't know what a human is yet they have already possessed and got Sisko's mom pregnant decades ago ).

In other words, the problem your post brings up is symptomatic of the much larger problem of the wormhole aliens being very poorly-written in general. They needed to be improved in the way you suggest, and also in many other areas as well.

 

[RegFan]

Then again, they should have made some efforts to define the wormhole aliens as characters rather than generic talking heads who don't even make sense on that level (i.e. they don't know what a human is yet they have already possessed and got Sisko's mom pregnant decades ago ).

I agree that they could be written better but I think it's best to keep them as mysterious.

 

[TheGodBen]

i.e. they don't know what a human is yet they have already possessed and got Sisko's mom pregnant decades ago .

They don't exist in linear time, they sent Sarah to Earth at the same time that they first met Sisko, which was the same time that they destroyed the Dominion fleet, and the same time that they fought the pah-wraith, and the same time that Sisko joined them in the wormhole.

Why is the Celestial Temple a wormhole? I don't know. Maybe the Bajorans actually come from a world in the Gamma Quadrant but they had to escape a hundred thousand years ago, so the Prophets built a wormhole to a perfect garden world in the Alpha Quadrant, then the Bajorans gave up their technology and forgot all about their true home. Ron Moore did write for the show, after all.

 

[Crewman47]

What if the Wormhole aliens have no understanding that they live in a wormhole and the AQ and GQ terminus are just like the front and back door to there house?

 

[TiberiusMaximus]

They don't exist in linear time, they sent Sarah to Earth at the same time that they first met Sisko, which was the same time that they destroyed the Dominion fleet, and the same time that they fought the pah-wraith, and the same time that Sisko joined them in the wormhole.

Why is the Celestial Temple a wormhole? I don't know. Maybe the Bajorans actually come from a world in the Gamma Quadrant but they had to escape a hundred thousand years ago, so the Prophets built a wormhole to a perfect garden world in the Alpha Quadrant, then the Bajorans gave up their technology and forgot all about their true home. Ron Moore did write for the show, after all.

So they met Sisko and yet created Sisko and yet met him before they created him which was at the same time that they met him. And they won the war with the Pah-Wraiths before and after it happened and the Pah-Wraiths still didn't know that they were going to lose. Confusing...although I guess it's no different than the various factions in the Temporal Cold War trying to alter history in their favor...the Prophets just do it without really understanding that that is what they are doing.

I like your idea about the Bajoran's arrival on Bajor. However, the Prophets say they are 'of Bajor', which I always took to mean they lived on Bajor and somehow went on to a higher plane of existence and now take care of the new dominant species on their home planet...but I guess both explanations could be true. They lived on Bajor, moved away from Bajor, became 'gods' to the original Bajorans, moved the Bajorans to Bajor, and sent them Orbs to communicate with them.

 

[Smiley]

This questions was tackled in Rising Son and other post-series novels. Basically, the Prophets do reach out to more than one race, and there is a very good reason why we never saw them on the show.

 

[Joeman]

I was never under the assumption that they created the wormhole. I figured that that's just where they happened to exist. Never gave it too much thought though... hmmmm.

 

[ClayHefner]

Even if there is no linear time, there should still be some causality. If the Prophets create Sisko, how can they not know him as he enters the temple?
"Sacrifice of Angels"says, the Sisko (and maybe the other Prophets too) can somehow "choose another path", but that may only apply to the linear universe. If it doesn't, the existence of the Prophets change "once" Sisko enters the wormhole. In essence, he should have made the Wormhole Aliens into the Prophets. On the other hand in "Emissary" they tell him they 'already' did look for life forms ("but not corporeal beings"), implying they sent the Orbs "before" they met Sisko.
Maybe Sisko created that wormhole, the orbs etc., "when" linear and non-linear worlds came together. But the question remains: How can they not know who he is? They sent someone into his world to create him after all. Confusing.

In any case, I wish they had played around with strange, puzzling concepts like this more than they did. They could at least have established that the Sisko created the PW/Prophet split. Because if they knew of linear existence only because of Sisko, the wish to interfere more with linear Bajor can only be a result of that.

tl: dr version: I don't think they really thought this through. But I wish they had.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

There's a great post on Siskoid's blog that covers the nature of the Prophets...

http://siskoid.blogspot.com/2009/09/on-nature-of-prophets.html

This...is AWESOME.

 

[ClayHefner]

Yea, good article. Seems this is more consistent than I thought. What we saw in Emissary was only how Sisko experienced it after all. "The moment" he entered the wormhole, their existence changed. They were forced into new existences by contact with the outside world and somewhat adopted linear thinking in the process. If Sisko traveled back 1000 years and confronted them again, they would "still" know him.
DS9 is so awesome.

 

[Timo]

Given the noncausality of all things Prophetary, we could easily argue that the Temple was created in the form of a wormhole because this would allow/force the existence of the Sisko, or of the Dominion War, or of some future event of positive or negative-but-educational nature. The event took place, the Prophets saw that it was good, and thus the Prophets created the circumstances where the event could take place!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kai Winn]

Maybe Sisko created that wormhole, the orbs etc., "when" linear and non-linear worlds came together. But the question remains: How can they not know who he is? They sent someone into his world to create him after all. Confusing.

that could be explained by sisko's prophet mom residing in the missing orb ever since she abused the body of his biological mom for mating with that cranky cook. if they experienced time like we do, but the issue remains that they know what happens at any point in time.
residing in or even creating the wormhole makes some sense if you understand a wormhole as a shortcut in time rather than space, and it might be the ability to create wormholes that liberated the aliens from linear time, rather a technological achievment than evolution.

 

[neozeks]

The Prophets are the perfect example of truly alien aliens, maybe most alien of all the Trek's races. Non-linear existence is something we, whose entire world-view is based on causality, simply cannot understand. The Prophets are meant to be mysterious, unexplainable and weird.
Not that I don't find attempts to explain them fascinating...
My pet theory is that the Prophets are actually future Bajorans (just for the weirdness factor) that somehow managed to 'step out' of causality and exist at all times simultaneously. God knows how many paradoxes that brings.

As for the wormhole, I agree with Crewman47. We perceive it as a wormhole with two ends. But who knows how the wormhole looks to beings on an entirely another plane of existence? Our-universe wormhole may be only a projection of something completely different.

EDIT: I've just read that blog post and really, WOW. That's quite fascinating. And it agrees with many of my musings about the Prophets, including that they come from the future.

 

[Nightdiamond]

I often wonder how can they exist this way without experiencing short term memory loss the way they do.

They helped to create Sisko, and then fail to recognize him when they first meet him.

They communicated with Bajorans for centuries , but don't know what humanoids are when they first encounter Sisko also.

My theory is that since the Prophets exist outside of time, the phenomena associated with them is time related or distorted.

Hence the wormhole is a point in space out of sync with time, taking only a few seconds to travel to the Gamma Quadrant whereas it would take 70? years.

I'm really intrigued by their abilities though- when they 'studied' the entire Ferengi's history in a less than seconds and then decided to change the Zek for example...

 

[flemm]

There's a great post on Siskoid's blog that covers the nature of the Prophets...

Excellent! I was just going to say that the Prophets are meant to be enigmatic and leave it at that. Now that feels so... inadequate by comparison

The analogy between the Prophets' perception of time and our perception of space is an especially helpful one for understanding their actions and resolving apparent contradictions (which are only contradictions from the point of view of linear time).

The theory that the Prophets are "of Bajor" because they are actually Bajorans that have transcended linear time is, quite frankly, brilliant, and something that had never occurred to me.