Would the following society be allowed to join the Federation?

[Doom Shepherd]

The problem with time travel in Star Trek is that they literally portray it in ALL the possible ways it could be portrayed.

BTW, technically the Guardian of Forever IS this kind of a portal. And we saw what happened when it was messed with.
So I suspect that upon the discovery of this wormhole, DTI and FutureFleet would show up and cause it to collapse or otherwise make it unavailable for use.

 

[Artoo Atari]

BTW, technically the Guardian of Forever IS this kind of a portal. And we saw what happened when it was messed with.

Yes, that was my point. I was stating that the Federation already has a portal (i.e. the Guardian) like that one, and interactions with it referenced in canon have not been positive. Yet, to my knowledge, the Guardian remains.

 

[Doom Shepherd]

The Guardian's status is unclear. (And the various EU stories don't help at all - put them together and the Guardian gets passed through just about every week). Probably at the very least it would be classified at the highest levels and strongly guarded. Now that we know DTI exists, I suspect by them.

Unless it decided that it didn't want to be. (Which was a scenario I wrote for a RPG game in which the Guardian 'recruited' various individuals to 'fix' some things that had gone wrong in time. (Kinda "Marvel's Exiles meets Star Trek meets Quantum Leap.")

 

[Grendelsbayne]

Personally, I would agree with most and say shut it down. The Federation has enemies that could exploit it. If the UFP from the 23-24th century didn't close it up, I'd bet the temporal busybodies from the 31st century UFP would.

But to play Devil's Advocate for a moment, I would mention that the span of distance as well as time would most likely make interference negligible. Also, what about the Guardian of Forever? The Federation has a portal sitting right there that can cause more trouble of a more local and recent scope, yet there it is, allowed to remain.

The Guardian is presumably classified and under guard. Starfleet historians likely use it to study the past (if they're allowed) simply by watching and recording. Starfleet may not even be capable of destroying it even if they wanted to. It's been there apparently forever, so it's pretty durable and definitely super-advanced technology.

I disagree. The results are exactly predictable. Since we would be living in this hypothetical present, that present would exist as the sum total of all actions taken in the past, including those taken by meddling time travelers.

How do we know the Romulans wont sneak through and destroy earth 1.5 billion years ago? Because of the fact that earth was never destroyed 1.5 Billion years ago.

If any nefarious party had ever been successful in their plot to destroy earth in the past then earth wouldn't exist. Because, it does in fact exist, we can know with a surety that no one will ever be successful in their plans to destroy earth in the past.

I know that's not how time travel is generally portrayed on Star Trek, but I think the way they do portray it is pretty dumb.

Kind of answered your own objection there...

 

[Kor]

Suppose a Federation ship somewhere stumbles over a (stable) portal that transports ships back and forth to another stellar neighbourhood, which is not recognised (at first). Upon arriving there, a peaceful race is found, approximately being on a Federation level of development. Their and Federation values seem to largely coincide so cordial relations are begun. They satisfy all conditions for Federation membership and after a short time they opt for it, so the admission process is begun.

However, some time into this process, it is discovered that the portal doesn't transport ships primarily through space, but through time, let's say to 1.5 billion years in the past (this isn't noticed at first since 1.5 billion years is enough to alter the stellar neighbourhood beyond recognition (*) ) -- in our time, the race proves to be long, long extinct. Would this be an obstacle for the Federation to admit said society given that all kinds of ties already have been established, or would the Federation still recoil because of "mucking with the timeline"?


(* Probably they would still immediately recognise the fact by comparing positions of other galaxies, such as M31 and other members of the Local Group, but let's disregard that in order for this scenario to work.)

So does this ancient space-faring society have some kind of colony established on "our" end of this portal?

In any case, our heroes would discover some anomalous temporal signatures and figure out what was going on, pretty early in the whole proceeding.

Kor

 

[at Quark's]

OK, so most people would agree that Starfleet wouldn't want to meddle in their pas to avoid the risk of altering it.

What about the reverse scenario, then? Suppose the portal leads to 1.5 billion years into the future, and everything else stays the same. The society on the other side is willing to join, and willing to risk changes to their timeline. There's no risk for Starfleet, Earth, or Humanity, except perhaps that learning tidbits about a future so far removed they can't possibly foresee what any of their actions would ultimately result into might still influence their own decision making in shaping their own future.

Would the Federation still refuse on basis of the general principle that one shouldn't muck with different eras even though there probably is no direct danger to themselves?

 

[Grendelsbayne]

Every minute of your life is 'interfering' with the future. If the future people don't care (which means they're either stupid or they know something about time travel that people in the past don't understand), I'm not sure why the people in the present should care. Think of it like Archer's response to the TCW: he was very concerned about any information from the future which could protect his crew, his planet, his people, or any innocents that he decided to protect. He didn't really care about protecting the future.