There can be no doubt as to the infiltration of Section 31 by the 'Time Corps'. In the far future they are certainly aware of Section 31's existence, and it is only logical to exploit an opportunity to establish shadow resources, bases, and agents in the time stream. A single agent placed in such an organization could be aware of, and in a position to counter, any temporal incursions in his assigned time. Indeed, such an organization could be used to constantly scan for temporal incursions without even knowing why or even being aware that is what they are doing, thereby increasing the effectiveness of his presence in stabilizing a portion of the timeline.
Perhaps Section 31 is entirely a creation of the future, as others have said, making use of the manpower and organization that existed in the past to maintain their future. Or perhaps the agents of the future simply make use of many such organizations, guiding them toward the future that creates Daniels. This seems more likely, as it would be effective as a tactic in any time period. By placing agents in powerful organizations which already exist in the chosen time, the effectiveness of each agent is magnified.
As for Daniels himself, perhaps he is a member of Section 31 or its daughter organization as it exists in the future. At the very least, he is not above using them for his own purposes.
That reasoning makes everything else irrelevant as every single thing that happens at any given point is simply the result of future operations. The future guys already know everything, nothing that happens at any point can surprise them and is controlled by them. Which makes the whole temporal war arc so stupid. What our characters do here and now is completely irrelevant, we just run errands for future people.
^ 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
That reasoning makes everything else irrelevant as every single thing that happens at any given point is simply the result of future operations. The future guys already know everything, nothing that happens at any point can surprise them and is controlled by them. Which makes the whole temporal war arc so stupid. What our characters do here and now is completely irrelevant, we just run errands for future people.
Exactly.
In a previous topic I posted the concept presented by Isaac Asimov in his novel, "The End Of Eternity" which I call the Tyranny of the End Of Time culture. When time travel allows the manipulation of the past to alter the future, the culture which exists at the end of time must control all such manipulations or they will eventually be erased from the future. To this end-of-time culture, anything which results in their existence is a good thing, and 'better' options cannot be acceptable because it would result in a different end-of-time culture.
All atrocities which lead to that culture must be allowed to happen, even when they can be avoided. Black Death? Yep, can't fix it. No modern flea repellent for the victims, because to those who exist at the end of time, the Black Death has to happen to result in their history unfolding 'correctly'. Hitler and Pol Pot must also exist, along with Valley Girls and Star Trek Conventions. It becomes a requirement of the end-of-time culture to 'preserve the past' at all costs, even if the people of another era desire alterations which would benefit the species by creating a 'better' end of time culture.
The inevitable result of such control is stagnation. If, for example, a genius of a particular era can potentially work on only one of two items, say a water reclamation unit which enables desert farming or a more luxurious style of automobile for the use of wealthy patrons, then the end-of-time culture must eliminate all the timelines in which the inventor made the 'wrong' choice to prevent altering the history of the end-of-time culture. As time travel technology becomes more and more available, the end-of-time culture must control time travel and its results to preserve their own existence.
As a side effect, it could possibly also have the effect of stopping evolution in its tracks. We already do this to a certain extent with medicine and technology. When a species is comfortably adapted to its environment, natural selection has far less impact. Add to this the potential of time travelers seeding their genes into the earlier population, and you have constant reinforcement of one genotype with no stress events to which a species must adapt to create niches for other genotypes.
The end result is bland, passive cultures which blindly march towards the end-of-time culture. In my opinion this is an unavoidable result of relatively easy time travel. It won't, it can't stop until time travel itself is rendered impossible. Until then everyone in every era is a slave to the end-of-time culture which has as its sole goal the prevention of alterations in the time line which alter their history in any way.
The only way to beat it is to go back to the invention of the time machine and prevent it. And do that again every time the time machine is reinvented.
@angrytarg Starfleet used military trappings despite not being a military. There's no amount of logic bending @oliviaclaire can do to change that. Explicit dialog from members of said organisation vs. military style trappings like the word navy is what this has boiled down to. All canon evidence points to a military flavoured non-military. Theres no way around that or any way to change the minds of people who are determined to get their space marines. I see a thread in General Discussion that seems to be an exstention of this so maybe this one can get back to S31.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
@artan42 fine with me. I have no idea why I even joined in again...
But the topic was about wether or not Daniels is S31 - a claim that is as waterproof as olivias "conclusions" so... /thread?
^ 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
I don't know if I've actually addressed the main point or not so; S31 seeks to make the Federation stronger/safer etc. Daniels seems to only be preserving the existence of the Federation. It may be that there's more danger with messing with time to ensure something than messing with, say committing genocide against a fanatical theocracy, but I don't think Daniels has done anything other than 'correct' the timeline.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
I don't know if I've actually addressed the main point or not so; S31 seeks to make the Federation stronger/safer etc. Daniels seems to only be preserving the existence of the Federation. It may be that there's more danger with messing with time to ensure something than messing with, say committing genocide against a fanatical theocracy, but I don't think Daniels has done anything other than 'correct' the timeline.
Now I am a little biased as Daniels work rubs me the wrong way but let me see if I can put this out clearly.
Kirk's first time travel incident with the guardian of forever. He goes back in time to prevent a change in time from the future.
His second time he goes back is an accident and he spends most of his time in the past trying to not damage anything. Return the SP and Mitchel etc.
Voyage home they really want to avoid messing the past yet can't help doing minor things. Fixing kidney failure, giving the transparent aluminium formula. And taking two whales to the future. Except for one whale expert all minor things. (Whale expert might have 'vanished' historically)
So ToS and Movie time travel is prevent polluting the natural occurring past. Even First Contact was make sure it all happened at least roughly the way it had without any temporal interference.
Daniels however is about preserving specific temporal incursions. And using pawns to do it as opposed to handling it himself.
K13, he did not have to say a word about the na'khul. All we know is unknown alien race brought the devanan parasites to the station. Alien vessel withstood our weapons, Mr Scott came up with a means to breech that shielding and we fired to disable. But some damage created an unknown temporal anomaly and swallowed the station. We evacuated who we could. After all Mr. Scott and two other starships were there to report. Daniels only told us not to say anything so we look awfully cagey.
Babel issue. Why did he need us? He treated us as already conscripted soldiers. setting us to fix something that looks like it is his job.
Tholians. Again as far as we see, we go back and at his orders keep lying to the captain of the Defiant till he is interphased away. No rescue permitted. And the loss of Defiant? Was due to a temporal event. So It should not have been lost.
Caleb IV. Timeline is going fine but Daniels gives us a long warning despite nothing being wrong yet? Okay initial battle okay. Oh Klingons have cloaks and these tractor beams disable weapons? (No hand wave here so I assume that is the edge Kor was given since the cloaks came from the romulans.) Daniels sends us as a boarding party to handle things for him. Sabotage and break free. Okay except for Daniels sending us in this still seems straight forward. Free other ships and blow Klingons away till they get clear. Then Told to 'Give them hell.' Okay blow away D5s, D7s, and B9s till suddenly Daniels tells me we died. I had 98% hull and my shields were still up. What? And he tells me that is how history will remember us? So now we a re new people go lie to 25th century Starfleet you belong to him now. The alternative is worse. This is what strikes me as S31 worthy. We did not volunteer. We were conscripted with an 'or else' speech.
In each instance Daniels was there he maintained the version of history that had meddling in it because it led to him. Not the version of history that had no meddling.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
We don't get to question Daniels' authority. Why do we implicitly trust someone whose only credibility is some fancy holographic equipment? We don't even get to challenge his assertions. We never have the opportunity to ask if Daniels is actually a bad guy trying to manipulate us into serving evil ends in the name of a greater good.
We never get the chance to resist the tide of events Daniels sends us into. We are denied an opportunity to even try and fail to achieve a different outcome. The only choice we're given is to do it his way. Imagine: "Daniels, I don't trust you, I'm going to do X instead of Y!" Then later, Daniels could say, "Yes, that's the way it's supposed to unfold," regardless of our decision to achieve a different solution. But we aren't even given the choice: we must meekly comply with Daniels' instructions because... why?
Given what we know about time travel at this point in the story arc, it would be a simple matter to drop back to a few minutes after we left and pick up our lives in our own time stream. Instead, we 'pollute' the future time stream by inserting ourselves into it with no objective measurement of the cost to do so. How does our jaunt outside the time stream affect the future in which we find ourselves?
Daniels' MO is clearly one with which Section 31 would agree. While Section 31 itself may be a relic of history by the 31st century, the organization from which Daniels derives his technology and 'authority' have adopted Section 31's tools for their own benefit at the potential cost of everyone who must be sacrificed along the way to achieve their view of what the 31st century should be.
End Of Time Tyranny: TRIBBLE The Past To Preserve Our Future!
I don't buy the arguement of an end of time culture.
1. Whose to say that the end of time has only a single unified culture. 2. If previous cultures have time travel, then they can go to the end of time. 3. The end of time cultures have a great reason to go back in time, to change the end of time or make it so there is no end to time. 4. It assumes the end of times cultures don't have temporal shielding to protect them from timeline changes. 5. If time ending can't be stopped, then it makes sense for the end of time cultures to go back in time moments before time ends to save themselves. 6. It doesn't take into account many worlds theory.
By End Of Time Culture, I really mean the end of time travel culture. The 31st Century is certainly not the end of Time; the universal clock will keep ticking away even after the elimination of sentience in the multiverse. But for our purposes, they are as far ahead as we can see in our limited view of future history. And they exert great force to maintain the timeline which leads to them.
It is heavily implied that there are forces which oppose the culture from which Daniels springs, but we know, because of the existence of Daniels, that they cannot prevent its appearance and ultimate dominance. Thus, while not a single unified culture of all beings, the era from which Daniels springs is certainly a dominant one in that time.
If one observes the holograms Daniels displays it can be seen that there are many timestreams represented, some of which end, some of which merge into one another, and some which turn off in random directions never to connect with the 'main timestream' which Daniels defends. Indeed, the Many Worlds theory is inherent in Trek's evolution of time travel, the first example of which is shown in "The Guardian Of Forever" and later reinforced by concepts such as the Mirror Universe. It appears that Daniels and his kind are not focused on one specific timeline, but upon the greater flow of time across the multiverse, and his holograms support this concept visually.
While Daniels may not come from the end of time itself, he does come from the culture which dominates the end of what we know of as the future. Star Trek has yet to show anything that comes after Daniels, and Daniels himself has not discussed the subject. For all practical purposes, Daniels is a member of the 'End Of Time Culture' because, as once was thought of China being at 'the end of the world,' it's as far as we can go in that direction.
I think Daniels is turning into the envoy... I haven't played Ragnarok yet, so I don't know if there's a resolution, but in the last episode/mission of the new AoY arc, their resemblance is extremely uncanny...
CM
"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science." - Edwin Hubble
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
Your suggesting the future 31st Century Alliance spans multiple realities.
That actually makes sense as I think it includes the Tholians Assembly which exists as a single unit in multiple time lines, plus they face threats from other universes like the mirror universe, and the possiblity of alternate timelines remerging into their own.
I don't get were this "Daniels is Section 31" came from but its wrong. If anything Daniels is part of The Federation Department of Temporal Investigations. Funnly Enough S31 and DTI were both introduced in DS9, most likely the reason that they were in ENT is just for a reference to DS9.
Comments
That reasoning makes everything else irrelevant as every single thing that happens at any given point is simply the result of future operations. The future guys already know everything, nothing that happens at any point can surprise them and is controlled by them. Which makes the whole temporal war arc so stupid. What our characters do here and now is completely irrelevant, we just run errands for future people.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Exactly.
In a previous topic I posted the concept presented by Isaac Asimov in his novel, "The End Of Eternity" which I call the Tyranny of the End Of Time culture. When time travel allows the manipulation of the past to alter the future, the culture which exists at the end of time must control all such manipulations or they will eventually be erased from the future. To this end-of-time culture, anything which results in their existence is a good thing, and 'better' options cannot be acceptable because it would result in a different end-of-time culture.
All atrocities which lead to that culture must be allowed to happen, even when they can be avoided. Black Death? Yep, can't fix it. No modern flea repellent for the victims, because to those who exist at the end of time, the Black Death has to happen to result in their history unfolding 'correctly'. Hitler and Pol Pot must also exist, along with Valley Girls and Star Trek Conventions. It becomes a requirement of the end-of-time culture to 'preserve the past' at all costs, even if the people of another era desire alterations which would benefit the species by creating a 'better' end of time culture.
The inevitable result of such control is stagnation. If, for example, a genius of a particular era can potentially work on only one of two items, say a water reclamation unit which enables desert farming or a more luxurious style of automobile for the use of wealthy patrons, then the end-of-time culture must eliminate all the timelines in which the inventor made the 'wrong' choice to prevent altering the history of the end-of-time culture. As time travel technology becomes more and more available, the end-of-time culture must control time travel and its results to preserve their own existence.
As a side effect, it could possibly also have the effect of stopping evolution in its tracks. We already do this to a certain extent with medicine and technology. When a species is comfortably adapted to its environment, natural selection has far less impact. Add to this the potential of time travelers seeding their genes into the earlier population, and you have constant reinforcement of one genotype with no stress events to which a species must adapt to create niches for other genotypes.
The end result is bland, passive cultures which blindly march towards the end-of-time culture. In my opinion this is an unavoidable result of relatively easy time travel. It won't, it can't stop until time travel itself is rendered impossible. Until then everyone in every era is a slave to the end-of-time culture which has as its sole goal the prevention of alterations in the time line which alter their history in any way.
The only way to beat it is to go back to the invention of the time machine and prevent it. And do that again every time the time machine is reinvented.
All canon evidence points to a military flavoured non-military. Theres no way around that or any way to change the minds of people who are determined to get their space marines. I see a thread in General Discussion that seems to be an exstention of this so maybe this one can get back to S31.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Referring to Defiant and then your ship at Caleb IV.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
But the topic was about wether or not Daniels is S31 - a claim that is as waterproof as olivias "conclusions" so... /thread?
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Quote from basic training: The most water proof object in the world is a brand new towel.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Now I am a little biased as Daniels work rubs me the wrong way but let me see if I can put this out clearly.
Kirk's first time travel incident with the guardian of forever. He goes back in time to prevent a change in time from the future.
His second time he goes back is an accident and he spends most of his time in the past trying to not damage anything. Return the SP and Mitchel etc.
Voyage home they really want to avoid messing the past yet can't help doing minor things. Fixing kidney failure, giving the transparent aluminium formula. And taking two whales to the future. Except for one whale expert all minor things. (Whale expert might have 'vanished' historically)
So ToS and Movie time travel is prevent polluting the natural occurring past. Even First Contact was make sure it all happened at least roughly the way it had without any temporal interference.
Daniels however is about preserving specific temporal incursions. And using pawns to do it as opposed to handling it himself.
K13, he did not have to say a word about the na'khul. All we know is unknown alien race brought the devanan parasites to the station. Alien vessel withstood our weapons, Mr Scott came up with a means to breech that shielding and we fired to disable. But some damage created an unknown temporal anomaly and swallowed the station. We evacuated who we could. After all Mr. Scott and two other starships were there to report. Daniels only told us not to say anything so we look awfully cagey.
Babel issue. Why did he need us? He treated us as already conscripted soldiers. setting us to fix something that looks like it is his job.
Tholians. Again as far as we see, we go back and at his orders keep lying to the captain of the Defiant till he is interphased away. No rescue permitted. And the loss of Defiant? Was due to a temporal event. So It should not have been lost.
Caleb IV. Timeline is going fine but Daniels gives us a long warning despite nothing being wrong yet? Okay initial battle okay. Oh Klingons have cloaks and these tractor beams disable weapons? (No hand wave here so I assume that is the edge Kor was given since the cloaks came from the romulans.) Daniels sends us as a boarding party to handle things for him. Sabotage and break free. Okay except for Daniels sending us in this still seems straight forward. Free other ships and blow Klingons away till they get clear. Then Told to 'Give them hell.' Okay blow away D5s, D7s, and B9s till suddenly Daniels tells me we died. I had 98% hull and my shields were still up. What? And he tells me that is how history will remember us? So now we a re new people go lie to 25th century Starfleet you belong to him now. The alternative is worse. This is what strikes me as S31 worthy. We did not volunteer. We were conscripted with an 'or else' speech.
In each instance Daniels was there he maintained the version of history that had meddling in it because it led to him. Not the version of history that had no meddling.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
We don't get to question Daniels' authority. Why do we implicitly trust someone whose only credibility is some fancy holographic equipment? We don't even get to challenge his assertions. We never have the opportunity to ask if Daniels is actually a bad guy trying to manipulate us into serving evil ends in the name of a greater good.
We never get the chance to resist the tide of events Daniels sends us into. We are denied an opportunity to even try and fail to achieve a different outcome. The only choice we're given is to do it his way. Imagine: "Daniels, I don't trust you, I'm going to do X instead of Y!" Then later, Daniels could say, "Yes, that's the way it's supposed to unfold," regardless of our decision to achieve a different solution. But we aren't even given the choice: we must meekly comply with Daniels' instructions because... why?
Given what we know about time travel at this point in the story arc, it would be a simple matter to drop back to a few minutes after we left and pick up our lives in our own time stream. Instead, we 'pollute' the future time stream by inserting ourselves into it with no objective measurement of the cost to do so. How does our jaunt outside the time stream affect the future in which we find ourselves?
Daniels' MO is clearly one with which Section 31 would agree. While Section 31 itself may be a relic of history by the 31st century, the organization from which Daniels derives his technology and 'authority' have adopted Section 31's tools for their own benefit at the potential cost of everyone who must be sacrificed along the way to achieve their view of what the 31st century should be.
End Of Time Tyranny: TRIBBLE The Past To Preserve Our Future!
1. Whose to say that the end of time has only a single unified culture.
2. If previous cultures have time travel, then they can go to the end of time.
3. The end of time cultures have a great reason to go back in time, to change the end of time or make it so there is no end to time.
4. It assumes the end of times cultures don't have temporal shielding to protect them from timeline changes.
5. If time ending can't be stopped, then it makes sense for the end of time cultures to go back in time moments before time ends to save themselves.
6. It doesn't take into account many worlds theory.
It is heavily implied that there are forces which oppose the culture from which Daniels springs, but we know, because of the existence of Daniels, that they cannot prevent its appearance and ultimate dominance. Thus, while not a single unified culture of all beings, the era from which Daniels springs is certainly a dominant one in that time.
If one observes the holograms Daniels displays it can be seen that there are many timestreams represented, some of which end, some of which merge into one another, and some which turn off in random directions never to connect with the 'main timestream' which Daniels defends. Indeed, the Many Worlds theory is inherent in Trek's evolution of time travel, the first example of which is shown in "The Guardian Of Forever" and later reinforced by concepts such as the Mirror Universe. It appears that Daniels and his kind are not focused on one specific timeline, but upon the greater flow of time across the multiverse, and his holograms support this concept visually.
While Daniels may not come from the end of time itself, he does come from the culture which dominates the end of what we know of as the future. Star Trek has yet to show anything that comes after Daniels, and Daniels himself has not discussed the subject. For all practical purposes, Daniels is a member of the 'End Of Time Culture' because, as once was thought of China being at 'the end of the world,' it's as far as we can go in that direction.
I think Daniels is turning into the envoy... I haven't played Ragnarok yet, so I don't know if there's a resolution, but in the last episode/mission of the new AoY arc, their resemblance is extremely uncanny...
CM
CM
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
That actually makes sense as I think it includes the Tholians Assembly which exists as a single unit in multiple time lines, plus they face threats from other universes like the mirror universe, and the possiblity of alternate timelines remerging into their own.