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Using the Krenim Time Weapon -Is- -Not- -Wrong.-

I can't wrap my head around why people think the Krenim time weapon would be wrong to use.

It's a basic fact of morality, of any plausible conception of morality, that for something to be wrong, it has to affect something or someone which actually exists.

Say a woman is being pursued by two men, she likes them both, but can only marry one. When she chooses one man over another, she is not 'killing' the children she would have had in the future if she'd chosen differently. She's not acting in a way that is wrong, since the children she would have with the other man don't exist, and never exist at any point in time.

Understanding this is important to understanding the implications of the Krenim Time Weapon. It works by erasing the target from all time. It functions to make it so that there is never any point in time at which the target exists.

If the people targeted never exist at any point in time, it is impossible for any action to be wrong in relation to them.

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Comments

  • bobs1111bobs1111 Member Posts: 471 Arc User
    They would have existed if you took no action... there for it is exactly the same thing as ending them at a particular point in their timeline. Its pretty basic logic. Being really really good at hiding evidence does not mean a crime did not take place.
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  • woodwhitywoodwhity Member Posts: 2,636 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    Sigh. They exist. They exist right till you pull the trigger. Thats why its wrong. And for everyone on the timeship and for beings outside the timestream as well as beings on Q-Level, the Iconians will have existed, making your whole argument fall apart. Firstly, they exist till you pull the trigger, secondly, someone will remember them, giving proof to their existence.

    Its the same as murder, the difference is you dont undo life, but existence. But thats pretty much semantics. By undoing existence you undo life too.


    Of course there is no natural law that forbids murder. Even genocide is allowed. Thats were ethics and morality come in. Of course you can throw it out of the airlock when threathened. But considering the nature of the temporal warships, your crimes are -ethically- even worse than committing genocide.



    Say a woman is being pursued by two men, she likes them both, but can only marry one. When she chooses one man over another, she is not 'killing' the children she would have had in the future if she'd chosen differently. She's not acting in a way that is wrong, since the children she would have with the other man don't exist, and never exist at any point in time.

    Wrong picture. Lets say woman marries and has kids with man A. Something happens and time travel is possible, she goes back and changes the course of destiny, making her former self fall in love with man B, marrying him. Now, obviously, the former woman -the one who fell in love- didnt commit a cime. But obviously the "incarnation" that went back in time did, since she undid the existence, and as such the lives, of her first marriages children.

    Of course we dont have a law against such a thing -hence it would not be a crime in name- but if the possibility arrises, laws about this will be made. Its not like we had car traffic laws in the middle ages...
    But the federation has laws against temporal incursions, so ingame you commit a crime.​​
  • vampire8245vampire8245 Member Posts: 1 Arc User
    Please let me draw your attention to the Temporal Prime Directive. This directive forbids Starfleet Officers from interfering with historical event and are required to maintain the timeline and prevent history from being altered.
  • bobs1111bobs1111 Member Posts: 471 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    Please let me draw your attention to the Temporal Prime Directive. This directive forbids Starfleet Officers from interfering with historical event and are required to maintain the timeline and prevent history from being altered.

    Exactly the hypothetical that is posed by the OP, is 100% forbid in the Trek world, if the choice is influenced. It is considered a crime. Down the line in the trek world the federation will even fight on the side of not making changes in the temporal cold war.

    If time traveling and making changes is the equivalent of firing bullets in the temporal cold war. Then using the Krenim weapon is analogous to dropping a step up from a neutron bomb. Instead of leaving nice buildings you can take over heck you can leave yourself an entire fresh uninhabited world.

    Frankly the idea that the federation would be ok with that type of WMD is just really really really bad writing. It is like the Cryptic folks just unzipped their flies and relieved themselves on Roddenberrys memory.
  • foolishowlfoolishowl Member Posts: 102 Arc User
    I have several objections.

    First, the "Year of Hell" described a paradox -- as Star Trek often does with time travel. In the real world, true paradoxes are impossible, and demonstrate an imperfect understanding. In Star Trek, they're routine plot premises. I'm reminded of Kant's antinomies here -- pairs of perfectly intelligible rules that, followed to their obvious conclusions, lead to paradoxes. And I'm reminded of a criticism of a 19th century writer who "resolved" them by simply picking the rule he liked better and ignoring the problem. That's no good; it's cheating.

    The paradox in question is that the targets of the Krenim Weapon both did and did not exist. If you try to resolve this by insisting that the targets never existed, then it follows that it would not have been possible to take any action against those targets. If the targets never existed, then the Weapon was never used. But, accepting the paradox, they both did and did not, and the Weapon was used and not used.

    However, the real question is whether it would be ethical to use the Weapon. At the point of asking this question, there is no paradox. The potential target exists, and the possibility of using the Weapon against it exists. That's where the ethical question occurs.

    Second, I think you're sorely underestimating the significance of what the Weapon is supposed to do. Horrible as it would be to kill all the members of an entire culture at once, the Weapon does far, far more than that. It destroys absolutely everything that culture accomplished throughout its history -- all its art and literature, all its philosophy, all its science, all its influence on other cultures and all the outcomes of cooperative ventures or conflicts with other cultures. (Preventing that last was, after all, the purpose for which the Weapon was used.)

    Imagine that faced with invasion by TRIBBLE-controlled Germany, some nation used the Krenim Weapon to remove the culture of Germany from history. Not only would that mean eliminating the TRIBBLE, that would mean eliminating all the Germans who opposed the TRIBBLE. And every German who ever existed. And everything Germany or anyone German ever did. No Bach, no Beethoven, no Marx, no Freud, no Kant, no Goethe, no Schiller -- just to list some famous people who created influential works.

    One shortcoming of the "Year of Hell" premise is that it would have been impossible for Krenim culture to remain the same, with the complete elimination from history of the surrounding cultures with which it interacted. The world that Annorax hoped to return to would have been unrecognizable.

    And similarly, it can't be predicted what the Federation, Klingon Empire, and Romulan Empire, would be like, or if they would have existed at all, if the Iconians had never existed.
  • coupaholiccoupaholic Member Posts: 2,188 Arc User
    I'll just sum up with a quote from the immortal G-Man. "Prepare for unforeseen consequences".​​
  • protogothprotogoth Member Posts: 2,369 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    Wow. Alluding to the Temporal Prime Directive as an argument? Wow, that's just ... so, so, so wrong. Petitio Principii and Argumentum ad Verecundiam wrong, in fact.

    But I disagree with the notion that no wrong can be done to someone who has been erased from history. Obviously once they have been erased, no further wrong can be done to them, but the erasure itself has to be taken into account (and not merely the act alone, but the motivations for it, the context of it, and, perhaps, the consequences which result from it). "But it never happened, because they don't exist!" Yeah, no. Temporal paradox is not a get out of jail free card.
  • nikephorusnikephorus Member Posts: 2,744 Arc User
    I can't wrap my head around why people think the Krenim time weapon would be wrong to use.

    It's a basic fact of morality, of any plausible conception of morality, that for something to be wrong, it has to affect something or someone which actually exists.

    Say a woman is being pursued by two men, she likes them both, but can only marry one. When she chooses one man over another, she is not 'killing' the children she would have had in the future if she'd chosen differently. She's not acting in a way that is wrong, since the children she would have with the other man don't exist, and never exist at any point in time.

    Understanding this is important to understanding the implications of the Krenim Time Weapon. It works by erasing the target from all time. It functions to make it so that there is never any point in time at which the target exists.

    If the people targeted never exist at any point in time, it is impossible for any action to be wrong in relation to them.

    Your example about the woman with the two possible lovers is flawed. The reason I say this is because the children she doesn't have with the person she didn't choose never existed in the first place. The krenim weapon on the other hand would be removing her children from existence. They existed, but the weapon removed them from the timeline.
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  • mustrumridcully0mustrumridcully0 Member Posts: 12,963 Arc User
    nikephorus wrote: »
    I can't wrap my head around why people think the Krenim time weapon would be wrong to use.

    It's a basic fact of morality, of any plausible conception of morality, that for something to be wrong, it has to affect something or someone which actually exists.

    Say a woman is being pursued by two men, she likes them both, but can only marry one. When she chooses one man over another, she is not 'killing' the children she would have had in the future if she'd chosen differently. She's not acting in a way that is wrong, since the children she would have with the other man don't exist, and never exist at any point in time.

    Understanding this is important to understanding the implications of the Krenim Time Weapon. It works by erasing the target from all time. It functions to make it so that there is never any point in time at which the target exists.

    If the people targeted never exist at any point in time, it is impossible for any action to be wrong in relation to them.

    Your example about the woman with the two possible lovers is flawed. The reason I say this is because the children she doesn't have with the person she didn't choose never existed in the first place. The krenim weapon on the other hand would be removing her children from existence. They existed, but the weapon removed them from the timeline.

    So would going back in time and convincing her self to marry the other guy mean she commited murder of the children that now will no longer exist?​​
    Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
  • nikephorusnikephorus Member Posts: 2,744 Arc User
    nikephorus wrote: »
    I can't wrap my head around why people think the Krenim time weapon would be wrong to use.

    It's a basic fact of morality, of any plausible conception of morality, that for something to be wrong, it has to affect something or someone which actually exists.

    Say a woman is being pursued by two men, she likes them both, but can only marry one. When she chooses one man over another, she is not 'killing' the children she would have had in the future if she'd chosen differently. She's not acting in a way that is wrong, since the children she would have with the other man don't exist, and never exist at any point in time.

    Understanding this is important to understanding the implications of the Krenim Time Weapon. It works by erasing the target from all time. It functions to make it so that there is never any point in time at which the target exists.

    If the people targeted never exist at any point in time, it is impossible for any action to be wrong in relation to them.

    Your example about the woman with the two possible lovers is flawed. The reason I say this is because the children she doesn't have with the person she didn't choose never existed in the first place. The krenim weapon on the other hand would be removing her children from existence. They existed, but the weapon removed them from the timeline.

    So would going back in time and convincing her self to marry the other guy mean she commited murder of the children that now will no longer exist?​​

    The person convincing her to marry the other guy is effectively murdering her children.
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  • angrytargangrytarg Member Posts: 11,016 Arc User
    I cannot wrap my head around the fact that the OP is unable to understand the basic plot of the Voyager episode in question pig-17.gif​​
    lFC4bt2.gif
    ^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
    "No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
    "A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
    "That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
  • protogothprotogoth Member Posts: 2,369 Arc User
    angrytarg wrote: »
    I cannot wrap my head around the fact that the OP is unable to understand the basic plot of the Voyager episode in question pig-17.gif​​

    I did try to warn people about going mad with attempts to work out temporal mechanics, twice (once a year or two ago, and the second time was rather recent). Batten down the hatches. It's beginning.
  • angrytargangrytarg Member Posts: 11,016 Arc User
    protogoth wrote: »
    I did try to warn people about going mad with attempts to work out temporal mechanics, twice (once a year or two ago, and the second time was rather recent). Batten down the hatches. It's beginning.

    It's either madness or just business as usual from some professional rioteers on the forum with a liking of watching the (forum)world burn pig-2.gif

    ​​
    lFC4bt2.gif
    ^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
    "No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
    "A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
    "That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
  • foolishowlfoolishowl Member Posts: 102 Arc User
    If you try to draw reasonable inferences from Treknobabble, you're going to have a bad time.
  • gradiigradii Member Posts: 2,824 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    It might not be WRONG but it is STUPID. that is enough of an argument on it's own.

    even if somehow you manage to use it without wiping out a race it's too dangerous to even build without being considered insane.

    Hint: Annorax was not sane.

    "He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
    Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
    he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
    In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
    He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
    He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
    He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
    He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
  • shpoksshpoks Member Posts: 6,967 Arc User
    angrytarg wrote: »
    I cannot wrap my head around the fact that the OP is unable to understand the basic plot of the Voyager episode in question pig-17.gif​​

    Uhm......have you noticed who the OP actually is??
    I personally can't wrap my head around the fact that so many people take bait to such low grade and obvious trolling.
    HQroeLu.jpg
  • coupaholiccoupaholic Member Posts: 2,188 Arc User
    shpoks wrote: »
    angrytarg wrote: »
    I cannot wrap my head around the fact that the OP is unable to understand the basic plot of the Voyager episode in question pig-17.gif

    Uhm......have you noticed who the OP actually is??
    I personally can't wrap my head around the fact that so many people take bait to such low grade and obvious trolling.

    Because it's fun. Trolls and knights love to dance, and I refuse to think there are people out there who would mistakenly fall for such obvious baiting. It would make me sad if it were true.​​
  • duncanidaho11duncanidaho11 Member Posts: 7,983 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    I can't wrap my head around why people think the Krenim time weapon would be wrong to use.

    It's a basic fact of morality, of any plausible conception of morality, that for something to be wrong, it has to affect something or someone which actually exists.
    Another word for "causing people to stop existing" is killing them. That should hopefully straighten things out. The Krenim weapon is doing in a very fundamental way, but its effectively still the same action (particularly from the point of view of the one using the weapon.)

    It might, to get your head around the temporal side of it, help to state it like Terry Prachett would. Say you remove the Iconians from the timeline. They will have never existed, but they only started never existing when you used the weapon. Before that they existed. Therefore whatever you do to change time doesn't change the absolute fact of time but its shape from your point of view (see. Year of Hell.)

    The Iconians will have existed despite the weapon. We would have killed them, all of them, and there's another word for that too (which has a lot to say for why the Timeship is very likely a red herring for the current series.)
    Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
    Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
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  • leviathan99#2867 leviathan99 Member Posts: 7,747 Arc User
    For the record, we are wiping out an artificially created species that in its entire history only ever had around 12 members, right?

    The Iconians we see in the cutscene in Time In A Bottle should account for, if not the entire species, ALMOST the entire species.

    They have no ancestors, no evolutionary course, no parents aside from The Preservers.

    How do we know this? Because we know that in their entire history, M'tara is the only Iconian to ever die. None died in the bombardment of Iconia. If there are others, it's a splinter group.

    This is a species whose entire population is 12 or so. It's never been in the thousands or millions.

    What we're talking about may be genocide but it's taking fewer lives than a Federation player takes in the first regular mission "Stranded in Space".
  • bobs1111bobs1111 Member Posts: 471 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    protogoth wrote: »
    I did try to warn people about going mad with attempts to work out temporal mechanics, twice (once a year or two ago, and the second time was rather recent). Batten down the hatches. It's beginning.

    There really isn't anything to work out.

    The weapon is morally wrong period. There isn't anything to work out. In order to Push the button on the weapon, the target must exist. There for by pushing the button you are in fact committing genocide. The fact that pushing the button also erases the evidence of your crime does not change what was in your heart at the time you push the button. By pushing the button we KNOW your intent is murder. Period. No temporal conundrums need be considered.

    When the Pharaohs would kill a people/person and then go back and scratch all written record of those people from their hieroglyphics. They where NOT erasing the act. The fact that the Krenim weapon would do a perfect job of erasing the evidence would not absolve someone using it of the crime of using it.
  • duncanidaho11duncanidaho11 Member Posts: 7,983 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    They have no ancestors, no evolutionary course, no parents aside from The Preservers.

    That's expliticly refuted in the intro blog to the Herald. The two are closely related species, MEANING that there are long-standing phylogenetic differences between them. THAT MEANS that they've evolved over some probably geologic timespan and what we see now as "Iconian" is the product of that plus some engineering. Like corn, but angrier (but no less "a species" than anything else).

    AND SINCE WHEN in STAR TREK has "being the direct product of organic evolution" been the ONLY factor worth considering in how we treat someone (see. Data, Data's "Mother", The Doctor, The Doctor's torpedo friend, Moriarty, V'Ger, Bashir, Sim, the lost little computer program that infected DS9, its pretty much the second main thesis of the series behind "let's try not killing them for a change.")
    Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
    Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
    Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
  • angrytargangrytarg Member Posts: 11,016 Arc User
    shpoks wrote: »
    Uhm......have you noticed who the OP actually is??
    I personally can't wrap my head around the fact that so many people take bait to such low grade and obvious trolling.

    It took me a while but I guess you are true. That being said, the persistence in the issue doesn't actually favour them at that point. Even professional forum-arson has to follow some rules to be clever pig-2.gif​​
    lFC4bt2.gif
    ^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
    "No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
    "A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
    "That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
  • meimeitoomeimeitoo Member Posts: 12,594 Arc User
    bobs1111 wrote: »
    They would have existed if you took no action... there for it is exactly the same thing as ending them at a particular point in their timeline. Its pretty basic logic. Being really really good at hiding evidence does not mean a crime did not take place.

    ^^ This. /thread
    3lsZz0w.jpg
  • duncanidaho11duncanidaho11 Member Posts: 7,983 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    angrytarg wrote: »
    . Even professional forum-arson has to follow some rules to be clever pig-2.gif​​

    There's also a difference between being subversively pedantic and trying to make a joke. If I say "you know what, arson is fun" (which I say only in place of some other remark that genuinely would be tasteless) I'm still responsible for the opinion presented by that statement. Even if its not one I actually have, the image presented still needs to be smacked down because that's how an open society works. We don't put limits on what people think to themselves but instead what they do.
    Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
    Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
    Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
  • jbmonroejbmonroe Member Posts: 809 Arc User
    Before we start worrying about how we defeat the Iconians, the question must be answered regarding whether we must defeat the Iconians.

    Their behavior thus far (and stretching back for quite a few decades now) indicates that they're rabid dogs. They seek to punish entire species for crimes those species didn't commit. (None of the Alpha and Beta quadrant races were space-travelers 200,000 years ago, nor under Iconian rule.) According to the story, their agents are committing wholesale slaughter across our galaxy while we ponder morality and ethics. What a luxury!
    It destroys absolutely everything that culture accomplished throughout its history -- all its art and literature, all its philosophy, all its science, all its influence on other cultures and all the outcomes of cooperative ventures or conflicts with other cultures.

    Yes, it does. Are you just going to quote facts, or do you have a point to make? As regards the Iconians, all those things have led to nothing but pain and death. They were largely exterminated for their crimes, we're told. I'm prepared to forego the presumed scientific and cultural benefits of their existence. The argument about eliminating German people in order to avoid the National Socialist Party (see what I did there?) starting World War II, and how that would cause the loss of Bach, Goethe, and Freud (I'm prepared to forego Karl Marx) is an argument from a privileged position that would no longer exist. That world would never have had them, and therefore they wouldn't be missed. Other artists, musicians, and philosophers would arise in their place. That world would be as fully rich as our own--just different. (Look, if you're allowed to use Hypothesis Contrary to Fact as an argument, so am I.)

    Somewhere in the Gamma Quadrant, about a billion years ago, there was a highly-developed civilization capable of wondrous things. Unfortunately, one of those wondrous things wasn't being able to survive when their sun went supernova half a billion years ago. Nothing of what they were survives today. We can't access their history, their art, their technology--because it all went kablooey. Do we miss them? No. We never knew they were there. (Only I, in my Q-like omniscience, am able to divine their former presence and tell you about them.)

    While I was in college, I had a friend tell me that she was opposed to violence in any form, and would not defend herself if someone attacked her because she'd violate her moral code by doing so. I told her that in an extreme case that could be viewed as suicide, and asked if she considered suicide to be morally defensible. I'd like to say I recall her answer, but 35 years later I can't. I know what my answer is, though: if someone is trying to injure or kill me, or my family, or even another living creature at all, I'm for damned sure going to intervene and I'm not going to be too worried about what methods I employ. If the miscreant escalates, then so do I.

    A philosophy professor posed this question in one of my college courses: if you heard a baby screaming in pain from a nearby house, and looked through the window to find a man frying a baby on the stove, what would you do? I didn't hesitate: I'd kill or incapacitate the man and get the baby into medical care as quickly as possible. (Gasps of horror from some of the other class members.) "You wouldn't just try to get the baby out of there?" he countered. No, because I expect that the man would try to stop my efforts, and I would have to deal with him in order to get to the baby. "But what if you could get the baby out without him intervening?" I told him he was changing the conditions of the scenario--permission denied. I also wasn't going to turn my back on a man frying a baby, especially in an environment full of potential weaponry. Furthermore, while getting the baby to safety was a priority, keeping a madman off the streets was important as well. (This was prior to the wide-spread use of wireless phones by a large margin, so that couldn't have been part of the answer.)

    Sometimes the otherwise unthinkable is the only course of action, and you must take action.

    Tomorrow, or the next day, we might have the opportunity to eliminate all the remaining Iconians by facing them singly or in a group--and that would constitute genocide, as they're the remaining members of their species. I don't hear many high-falutin' arguments about that. I think it's a given we can't contain them in any way. From my perspective it hardly matters--they're guilty of so many murders that termination seems to me the only just punishment. But that aside--we're arguing about whether we put down the rabid dog with a bullet or a grenade.

    As the story has been told thus far, the Iconian "family business" was galactic domination and enslavement on the grand scale. (I agree there's no nuance there, but in this sort of fiction, there rarely is.) That makes every Iconian an accessory to murder, not to mention any number of other war crimes. Their willful actions--no matter how long ago--led to this outcome. They're an acceptable target.

    (Time out: I agree that we only know the story as told by those who originally deposed the Iconians. For all I know, the several races that rose against them are the actual villains of the piece. That's intellectually interesting, but from a practical standpoint the Iconians are killing us now, and have been killing us for decades through the use of their servitor races. They practically eliminated the Romulans and Remans by proxy. Based on that alone, I am not predisposed to be merciful.)

    The Temporal Prime Directive (such as it is), does not exist to forbid us from manipulating the timeline to our advantage. It exists as a means of inhibiting sloppy writing, the same way there are implicit rules about what you can and can't do with the transporter as a means of getting around clumsy plotting.

    And while we're here, I'd like to point out that these arguments are all very abstract and noble, but several facts pertain:
    1. The Krenim Weapon isn't finished.
    2. The Krenim Weapon (therefore) hasn't been used.
    3. We may never actually use the Krenim Weapon.

    As we're reasonably assured that the Department of Temporal Investigations continues to exist into the 29th century, it's a given that we find a solution to the Iconian problem--because if we don't, we're all dead and there's no DTI in the 29th century. (And they aren't allowed to come back to help in order to preserve themselves, because of the Temporal Prime Directive. Right. Pull the other one--it's got bells on.)

    The best argument against using the Krenim Weapon has already been made: unintended consequences. Annorax could never quite get things right because--I presume--no matter how well you calculate, there's always another decimal place, and missing that extra digit might cause unpredictable divergences from your intended outcome. That's how it worked out in practice, and removing the Iconians from history might well produce an enemy vastly more powerful and effective. (In fact, the current galactic races might not exist at all--which I take to be an undesirable outcome.) We're better off taking them out in our current time, perhaps using offshoots of Krenim tech, than we are pulling out that Big Gun, because we can better predict the outcome (hopefully).

    It's still genocide--but it's us or them at this point, and I'd prefer that we survive. I have no interest in whether it's a more moral form of genocide than the Krenim weapon, because as things stand, survival trumps morality. We can feel guilty about it later.
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  • leviathan99#2867 leviathan99 Member Posts: 7,747 Arc User
    They have no ancestors, no evolutionary course, no parents aside from The Preservers.

    That's expliticly refuted in the intro blog to the Herald. The two are closely related species, MEANING that there are long-standing phylogenetic differences between them. THAT MEANS that they've evolved over some probably geologic timespan and what we see now as "Iconian" is the product of that plus some engineering. Like corn, but angrier (but no less "a species" than anything else).

    AND SINCE WHEN in STAR TREK has "being the direct product of organic evolution" been the ONLY factor worth considering in how we treat someone (see. Data, Data's "Mother", The Doctor, The Doctor's torpedo friend, Moriarty, V'Ger, Bashir, Sim, the lost little computer program that infected DS9, its pretty much the second main thesis of the series behind "let's try not killing them for a change.")

    No Iconian has ever died of any causes. That refutes evolution or the idea that there were more of them than there are now or that any died in the bombardment.

    Presumably, the Heralds were created by the Iconians as an artificial race that can die much easier and are more fragile but they almost have to be a failed/imperfect cloning experiment, not a natural offshoot. Because Heralds can die and there's never any surprise at that whereas no Iconian ever died in 200,000 years and they don't seem to be aware that they can die until very recently. (Again, also implied is that they didn't think destroying Iconia underneath their feet would have killed them if they just decided to sit out in the bombardment and have a picnic. They didn't think it was possible for them to be injured or killed so they couldn't have registered the devastation of Iconia as a meaningful threat to their lives. It was just having their toys broken.)
  • sunfranckssunfrancks Member Posts: 3,925 Arc User
    This is why I hate temporal mechanics.

    You would create a paradox if you were to remove the Iconians from existence. How did you build the timeship, if the reason why you built it, no longer exists?
    If they no longer exist, you didn't build the timeship to erase them from time..

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    What I feel after I hear about every decision made since Andre "Mobile Games Generalisimo" Emerson arrived...
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  • leviathan99#2867 leviathan99 Member Posts: 7,747 Arc User
    sunfrancks wrote: »
    This is why I hate temporal mechanics.

    You would create a paradox if you were to remove the Iconians from existence. How did you build the timeship, if the reason why you built it, no longer exists?
    If they no longer exist, you didn't build the timeship to erase them from time..

    I don't have a huge issue with this. Things don't need to be justified within the current timeline to exist. They just need to be justified by a potential timeline to exist.

    You have a sheet of paper. You alter history? That's like folding the sheet. Now what's on top may look different but the prior version of things still exists underneath the current layer. The latest revision is what's on top but things can exist without any sequence of events leading up to them existing in the CURRENT universe.

    The issue is in assuming that the existence of something needs to be justified within the universe it exists in and not just within the set of all possible states for the universe.
  • adamkafeiadamkafei Member Posts: 6,539 Arc User
    So let me just get this straight, killing billions of NPCs for the sake of marks and amusement is fine and in fact should be encouraged (See the ever increasing dps records)... Arranging for a group of Iconians to never exist as a last resort in self defence is wrong?

    I really don't understand this community...
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