When Picard states that she died at Wolf 359 the queen replies:
"You think in such three dimensional terms."
Which i fear is what every one in this thread is also doing. The co-existance of the kelvin timline shows that we are using a back to the future concept of time travel not a linear one. What dose this mean?
It means that when you travel in time, the timeline you travel from continues to exist, it is not destroyed by your actions in the past, it cant be, because your existance, and thus your ability to effect change is dependant upon its continued existance.
Within this paradyme time travel is not, and can never be a means of destruction. It is either a neutral act, within which both the time line you originate from and the one which you proceed into throgh divergent action have both always existed through pre-destiny, or its an act of creation, by which your will to change events promts the generation of a whole new trouser-leg in time.
Therefore: Time travel is compleatly harmless and no thret to any one who isnt iconian. The worst that can happen is that you may find yourself unable to return to your time line of origination, but even if this becomes the case, that timeline continues on without you.
So what have we learnt? The temporal accords are tyrany and we are the bad guys for helping to enforce them. Whoops.
So yeah, all of the above can be neetly sumerised as: Timey Wimey wibbly wobbly stuff. And while their are episodes of star trek that adhear to multiverse theory, and episodes that contradict it, they are all at least internaly consistant. STO though is inconsistant with which aproach to time travel paradoxes it wants to take. Either its destructive and necesitates a single time line, or its creative and generates new ones.
By intergrating the kelvin timeline the writers have demonstrated that within STO time travel is creative, thus not a threat. By demonstrating this they have renderd all the suposidly smart people in the future who are 'protecting' the timeline to be either fools or tyrants.
Congratulations fellow captains, if you participated in the temporal missions you are space hittler.
Except that every instance of time travel in Star Trek until Star Trek 2009 was linear time travel. If the past is changed, then the present is changed as well or it is based off of predestination. If it is not linear time travel, then there is no impact to the story.
There is no point for any of the protagonist crews to go back in time since their timeline is preserved not erased. All that happens is that they create a new timeline similar to the one they are familiar with and timeline they are trying to prevent still exists. The dilemma in Children of Time is meaningless since old Odo didn't erase the Defiant crew's descendants from the timeline. Therefore, if Star Trek 2009 followed the rules established by Star Trek, then the events of TOS, TNG, DS9, and Voyager are erased from existence.
STO has been consistent with its time travel, every single instance is based on the rules of if the past is changed, then the present is changed not creating a completely new timeline and predestination. There has never been an instance of a new timeline created in STO just the original being replaced. Also in the Terminal Expanse mission, STO has established that the Kelvin Timeline is a parallel universe not a new timeline created from destruction of the USS Kelvin. Of course, this only applies to STO and not the Prime Universe. There might be only one Kelvin Timeline or there might be a Kelvin-Movie Timeline and Kelvin-STO Timeline. We know that the Kelvin-STO Timeline existed before 2233, but we don't know if the Kelvin-Movie Timeline existed before 2233 since there has been no movie or TV show that specifically stated whether the Kelvin Timeline was a parallel universe or branched timeline by an expert on Timeline like Q or Daniels.
Actually.... it may or may not have been. It was presented as such but that was as seen by the characters in the story from their 3d point of view. Oh and in point of fact, there WAS a TOS ep where the bad guy came from the future of an alternate universe.
In TOS: "City On the Edge of Forever", McCoy's actions in the past deleted the Star Trek timeline. Kirk and Spock had to use the Guardian to stop him in order to restore it.
In TOS: "Assignment: Earth!", it was implied that if they hadn't interfered with Gary Seven's actions, that too would have erased their original timeline.
In DS9: "Trials and Tribble-ations", we were introduced to the "predestination paradox" - if Sisko et al hadn't interfered, Darvin's plan to destroy K-7 with an explosive tribble(!) would have gone off without a hitch. (They were also responsible for Kirk getting pelted in the head with tribbles in the original TOS episode...)
In TNG: "Parallels", we were introduced to an entire sheaf of multiverses, each with a slightly (or more than slightly) differing history, as Worf slid through them uncontrollably.
In DS9: "Past Tense", Sisko's presence altered history, but only to the extent that he was substituted for Bell in the history books.
In the last part of the Klingon War arc, the Federation player does see history being rewritten - when they arrive, the Worvig is about to destroy the Enterprise, which your new database informs you is the trigger event that will lead to the fall of the Federation and Klingon Imperial dominance in the quadrant. Your efforts are bent toward not merely rescuing Miral Paris, but also saving Enterprise so that the Federation is still there.
Basically, in Trek time travel works in whatever fashion the script demands. There is no consistent theory of time travel. (It's one way to avoid invoking Niven's Law of Time Travel, though.)
Basically, in Trek time travel works in whatever fashion the script demands. There is no consistent theory of time travel. (It's one way to avoid invoking Niven's Law of Time Travel, though.)
Star Trek is a fantastic show, and it often draws inspiration from science, but the ultimate arbiter of its reality is what the late grate Sir Terry Pratchett would term; 'Narrative Causality.' That is to say: Things happen because the narrative demands that they happen.
Another time line is another universe. Not all universes in star trek are divergent universes, one example being the mirror universe, but all divergent time lines are universes. They have to be, because the hero has to follow the villan into the past to stop them, and the hero cant follow them from a universe that no longer exists. Not every time line travel story in trek has fancy temporal shielding or happens to be within the mystical and magical eye of a temporal event.
In TOS: "City On the Edge of Forever", McCoy's actions in the past deleted the Star Trek timeline. Kirk and Spock had to use the Guardian to stop him in order to restore it.
In TOS: "Assignment: Earth!", it was implied that if they hadn't interfered with Gary Seven's actions, that too would have erased their original timeline.
In DS9: "Trials and Tribble-ations", we were introduced to the "predestination paradox" - if Sisko et al hadn't interfered, Darvin's plan to destroy K-7 with an explosive tribble(!) would have gone off without a hitch. (They were also responsible for Kirk getting pelted in the head with tribbles in the original TOS episode...)
In TNG: "Parallels", we were introduced to an entire sheaf of multiverses, each with a slightly (or more than slightly) differing history, as Worf slid through them uncontrollably.
In DS9: "Past Tense", Sisko's presence altered history, but only to the extent that he was substituted for Bell in the history books.
In the last part of the Klingon War arc, the Federation player does see history being rewritten - when they arrive, the Worvig is about to destroy the Enterprise, which your new database informs you is the trigger event that will lead to the fall of the Federation and Klingon Imperial dominance in the quadrant. Your efforts are bent toward not merely rescuing Miral Paris, but also saving Enterprise so that the Federation is still there.
Basically, in Trek time travel works in whatever fashion the script demands. There is no consistent theory of time travel. (It's one way to avoid invoking Niven's Law of Time Travel, though.)
And combine that with the fact that the "many worlds" versions, including the mirror universe, still tend to look like the prime universe at least a little bit. It's this kind of inconsistency that led me to completely discard all canonical explanations when I wrote "Brother on Brother, Daughter on Mother'' for a ULC a while back. (I was also partly inspired by the Farscape episode "... Different Destinations".)
Here's my theory: there is an overall timestream of an infinite number of timelines, each of them "strands" in a "rope" of infinite length (but a single point of origin, that being the Big Bang). The strands of a rope are all slightly offset from one another, but if you pull on the rope (i.e. the natural forward flow of time), the strands tend to move in the same direction, hence the "temporal inertia" property that's sometimes present (e.g. Annorax in "Year of Hell" complaining about it feeling like time itself was resisting him). Time travel is possible within a given strand, but if any changes made are small enough that the immediate result closely resembles the original version, future events will still play out the same (hence why Sisko impersonating Gabriel Bell and Kirk et al. ensuring Edith Keeler's death restores the timeline to its original form).
HOWEVER! A major change to past events, such as the STFC Borg incursion or Nero's little misadventure, will cause the timeline to split, or "fray". The new timeline is still attached at one end and so it still gets pulled along by the rope, but it's jutting out at an angle and so events are often very different.
You know what happens when a rope frays? It becomes weaker. You keep fraying it again and again and again, you'll weaken it further, and if you weaken it so far that it breaks? Well, according to the Starfleet temporal agent in my story, that's what happened to the timeline containing the canonical version of ENT and the Temporal Cold War: they caused so much damage to time itself that that entire timeline collapsed and therefore, from the POV of normal people in "my" prime timeline, never happened. ("My" timeline's corresponding events are a variation of the fanfic Reimagined Enterprise where Jonathan Archer is played by Mike Colter and is a UE ambassador-at-large attached to NX-01, which is commanded by a Taiwanese fellow named Chen Hwai.)
And this comes to the point of the story: I was trying to create a real imperative beyond mere regime protection for there to be timecops and a Temporal Prime Directive. This way, any hypothetical "time war" isn't just "good guys v. terrorists" or whatever, it's about protecting everybody in the universe from literally being erased from existence.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Here's my theory: there is an overall timestream of an infinite number of timelines, each of them "strands" in a "rope" of infinite length
Dose this have to be a rope? Could it be like Cheese string? Also are we sure that it is infinite? Because I like cheese but these days I really do need to think about my arteries.
Seriously though, Props on the temporal rope. I like it.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,595Community Moderator
The whole Multiverse Rope idea actually does make sense. I mean just look at the events of the Kelvin Timeline. Untill 2233 the events were the same, but one event split it off. But we still had one particular crew on one particular ship. What are the odds of that?
Another time line is another universe. Not all universes in star trek are divergent universes, one example being the mirror universe, but all divergent time lines are universes.
I thought the mirror universe was a divergent universe. Didn't they say that it was what happened when Zefram Cochrane panicked when he met his first Vulcan and shot him?
Another time line is another universe. Not all universes in star trek are divergent universes, one example being the mirror universe, but all divergent time lines are universes.
I thought the mirror universe was a divergent universe. Didn't they say that it was what happened when Zefram Cochrane panicked when he met his first Vulcan and shot him?
Only a theory. Mirror Cochrane could have shot his first Vulcan in a parallel universe without him having any connection with Prime Universe Cochrane. There are an infinite number of parallel universes. The similar universes might create a sort of attraction to each other so it is more likely to encounter a similar parallel universe than it is to encounter a foreign one. It could be the reason why the Parallels episode was full of familiar faces instead of having Gilbert Gottfried command the Enterprise-D.
Divergent universes just make things more complicated when they can be explained by parallel universes that have existed since the Big Bang instead of only a few years.
Another time line is another universe. Not all universes in star trek are divergent universes, one example being the mirror universe, but all divergent time lines are universes.
I thought the mirror universe was a divergent universe. Didn't they say that it was what happened when Zefram Cochrane panicked when he met his first Vulcan and shot him?
Only a theory. Mirror Cochrane could have shot his first Vulcan in a parallel universe without him having any connection with Prime Universe Cochrane. There are an infinite number of parallel universes. The similar universes might create a sort of attraction to each other so it is more likely to encounter a similar parallel universe than it is to encounter a foreign one. It could be the reason why the Parallels episode was full of familiar faces instead of having Gilbert Gottfried command the Enterprise-D.
Divergent universes just make things more complicated when they can be explained by parallel universes that have existed since the Big Bang instead of only a few years.
It's also stated explicitly in "In a Mirror, Darkly" by Mirror!Archer that the Terran Empire has existed for "centuries"; similarly Emperor Phillippa says in "Vaulting Ambition" that Terrans dumped the ideals of the Federation "millennia ago" (a statement which doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think about it, but Concepts Are Cheap and DSC's writing took a nosedive in general after the midwinter finale).
There's a lot of indications, in fact, that it's actually a continuation of the Roman Empire: they use a Roman-style salute (although Star Trek's writers probably thought of the 20th century fascists that cribbed it), Marlena Moreau refers to Kirk possibly becoming a "Caesar", and Emperor Pip's regnal name tacks on "Augustus Iaponius Centarius" to her birth name.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
In TOS: "City On the Edge of Forever", McCoy's actions in the past deleted the Star Trek timeline. Kirk and Spock had to use the Guardian to stop him in order to restore it.
In TOS: "Assignment: Earth!", it was implied that if they hadn't interfered with Gary Seven's actions, that too would have erased their original timeline.
In DS9: "Trials and Tribble-ations", we were introduced to the "predestination paradox" - if Sisko et al hadn't interfered, Darvin's plan to destroy K-7 with an explosive tribble(!) would have gone off without a hitch. (They were also responsible for Kirk getting pelted in the head with tribbles in the original TOS episode...)
In TNG: "Parallels", we were introduced to an entire sheaf of multiverses, each with a slightly (or more than slightly) differing history, as Worf slid through them uncontrollably.
In DS9: "Past Tense", Sisko's presence altered history, but only to the extent that he was substituted for Bell in the history books.
In the last part of the Klingon War arc, the Federation player does see history being rewritten - when they arrive, the Worvig is about to destroy the Enterprise, which your new database informs you is the trigger event that will lead to the fall of the Federation and Klingon Imperial dominance in the quadrant. Your efforts are bent toward not merely rescuing Miral Paris, but also saving Enterprise so that the Federation is still there.
Basically, in Trek time travel works in whatever fashion the script demands. There is no consistent theory of time travel. (It's one way to avoid invoking Niven's Law of Time Travel, though.)
And combine that with the fact that the "many worlds" versions, including the mirror universe, still tend to look like the prime universe at least a little bit. It's this kind of inconsistency that led me to completely discard all canonical explanations when I wrote "Brother on Brother, Daughter on Mother'' for a ULC a while back. (I was also partly inspired by the Farscape episode "... Different Destinations".)
Here's my theory: there is an overall timestream of an infinite number of timelines, each of them "strands" in a "rope" of infinite length (but a single point of origin, that being the Big Bang). The strands of a rope are all slightly offset from one another, but if you pull on the rope (i.e. the natural forward flow of time), the strands tend to move in the same direction, hence the "temporal inertia" property that's sometimes present (e.g. Annorax in "Year of Hell" complaining about it feeling like time itself was resisting him). Time travel is possible within a given strand, but if any changes made are small enough that the immediate result closely resembles the original version, future events will still play out the same (hence why Sisko impersonating Gabriel Bell and Kirk et al. ensuring Edith Keeler's death restores the timeline to its original form).
HOWEVER! A major change to past events, such as the STFC Borg incursion or Nero's little misadventure, will cause the timeline to split, or "fray". The new timeline is still attached at one end and so it still gets pulled along by the rope, but it's jutting out at an angle and so events are often very different.
You know what happens when a rope frays? It becomes weaker. You keep fraying it again and again and again, you'll weaken it further, and if you weaken it so far that it breaks? Well, according to the Starfleet temporal agent in my story, that's what happened to the timeline containing the canonical version of ENT and the Temporal Cold War: they caused so much damage to time itself that that entire timeline collapsed and therefore, from the POV of normal people in "my" prime timeline, never happened. ("My" timeline's corresponding events are a variation of the fanfic Reimagined Enterprise where Jonathan Archer is played by Mike Colter and is a UE ambassador-at-large attached to NX-01, which is commanded by a Taiwanese fellow named Chen Hwai.)
And this comes to the point of the story: I was trying to create a real imperative beyond mere regime protection for there to be timecops and a Temporal Prime Directive. This way, any hypothetical "time war" isn't just "good guys v. terrorists" or whatever, it's about protecting everybody in the universe from literally being erased from existence.
Nice explanation Starsword. Also, I think the idea of "slowing down" time is basically slowing your perception of time. I have 2 fanfics about my character and her mate going through time to save their kids (They become temporal agents in the 31st century due to time travel.).
"Simba, you have forgotten me. You have forgotten who you are … you are my son and the one true king." (Mufasa)
Time is a delicate thing, Doctor Who shows that. Prime example would when the Doctor saved a family in Pompeii who were supposed to die (Pompeii is a fixed point in time), that family bloodline was not supposed to exist and the consequences were played out in Torchwood. The 12th Doctor chose his face because it reminded him of the consequences of his meddling.
You could also argue Wolf 359 was a fixed point in time as well.
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
a) When first introduced in Doctor Who, those were supposed to be points it wasn't merely unwise but downright impossible to change. When Rose tried to change the moment her father died, the Langoliers started to eat reality and could only be stopped when she went back again to stop herself from trying.
b) If "fixed points" are merely points that can reverberate through time, almost every point is a fixed point. Interfere in any of a thousand points between 1638 (when an obscure English farmer moved from Hingham, Norfolk, to Hingham, Massachusetts) and 1830 (when another obscure farmer's hit-and-miss-educated son left the farm and eventually became a lawyer) and we wind up not having President Abraham Lincoln. They can't all be "fixed".
Essentially, it's a writer's excuse for not having to explore the implications of certain historical alterations. Alt-history fans can understand, I'm sure - tracking all the possible changes becomes difficult after a few decades, nightmarish on the scale of centuries.
Supernatural did something on meddling in time, one of the angels saved the Titanic. The descendants of those who were supposed to go down with the Titanic were soon being killed by Fate as they were not supposed to exist. Thankfully the angel that saved the Titanic went back and corrected his meddling by sinking the Titanic.
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
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.
Another time line is another universe. Not all universes in star trek are divergent universes, one example being the mirror universe, but all divergent time lines are universes.
I thought the mirror universe was a divergent universe. Didn't they say that it was what happened when Zefram Cochrane panicked when he met his first Vulcan and shot him?
Only a theory. Mirror Cochrane could have shot his first Vulcan in a parallel universe without him having any connection with Prime Universe Cochrane. There are an infinite number of parallel universes. The similar universes might create a sort of attraction to each other so it is more likely to encounter a similar parallel universe than it is to encounter a foreign one. It could be the reason why the Parallels episode was full of familiar faces instead of having Gilbert Gottfried command the Enterprise-D.
Divergent universes just make things more complicated when they can be explained by parallel universes that have existed since the Big Bang instead of only a few years.
It's also stated explicitly in "In a Mirror, Darkly" by Mirror!Archer that the Terran Empire has existed for "centuries"; similarly Emperor Phillippa says in "Vaulting Ambition" that Terrans dumped the ideals of the Federation "millennia ago" (a statement which doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think about it, but Concepts Are Cheap and DSC's writing took a nosedive in general after the midwinter finale).
There's a lot of indications, in fact, that it's actually a continuation of the Roman Empire: they use a Roman-style salute (although Star Trek's writers probably thought of the 20th century fascists that cribbed it), Marlena Moreau refers to Kirk possibly becoming a "Caesar", and Emperor Pip's regnal name tacks on "Augustus Iaponius Centarius" to her birth name.
Actually, one of the visuals in ENT suggested that the divergence point would have been back in the days of the Roman empire.
Another time line is another universe. Not all universes in star trek are divergent universes, one example being the mirror universe, but all divergent time lines are universes.
I thought the mirror universe was a divergent universe. Didn't they say that it was what happened when Zefram Cochrane panicked when he met his first Vulcan and shot him?
Only a theory. Mirror Cochrane could have shot his first Vulcan in a parallel universe without him having any connection with Prime Universe Cochrane. There are an infinite number of parallel universes. The similar universes might create a sort of attraction to each other so it is more likely to encounter a similar parallel universe than it is to encounter a foreign one. It could be the reason why the Parallels episode was full of familiar faces instead of having Gilbert Gottfried command the Enterprise-D.
Divergent universes just make things more complicated when they can be explained by parallel universes that have existed since the Big Bang instead of only a few years.
It's also stated explicitly in "In a Mirror, Darkly" by Mirror!Archer that the Terran Empire has existed for "centuries"; similarly Emperor Phillippa says in "Vaulting Ambition" that Terrans dumped the ideals of the Federation "millennia ago" (a statement which doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think about it, but Concepts Are Cheap and DSC's writing took a nosedive in general after the midwinter finale).
There's a lot of indications, in fact, that it's actually a continuation of the Roman Empire: they use a Roman-style salute (although Star Trek's writers probably thought of the 20th century fascists that cribbed it), Marlena Moreau refers to Kirk possibly becoming a "Caesar", and Emperor Pip's regnal name tacks on "Augustus Iaponius Centarius" to her birth name.
Actually, one of the visuals in ENT suggested that the divergence point would have been back in the days of the Roman empire.
And funnily enough, that jibes with one of the other things I said in the fanfic where I pioneered the "temporal rope" theory, which was that the mirror universe came from a timeline where the Western Empire lasted longer, in this case because General Flavius Aetius mounted a coup against Caesar Valentinian III after the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (rather than being murdered by Valentinian out of fear of such a coup as happened historically).
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
> @starswordc said: > gradii wrote: » > > Theres really no good answer. > > > > > Sure there is. Don't travel back in time in the first place so the question never comes up. And if you do so accidentally, don't make contact with down-timers. At all. Period. Seriously, that's exactly why the Temporal Prime Directive exists in Picard's present. > > See, this is where the timecops in STO's time war are failing at their jobs. They have, by the very act of allowing their actions to become known to down-timers, already altered the past from what they know. Ditto the "Professor" here. If he didn't want the past to be altered he should've kept his damn fool mouth shut and let Picard make the decision he did in the original timeline without interference. Whereas now, Picard knows that people from the Professor's future are d**ks and will likely attempt actions to ensure that future doesn't happen. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a future where the "correct" course of history is decided by a committee dedicated solely to the retention of its own power.
Thanks to the Temporal cold war the timeline and it's stability is swiss cheese, it's been so destabilized that only the big stuff matters that this point.
Another time line is another universe. Not all universes in star trek are divergent universes, one example being the mirror universe, but all divergent time lines are universes.
I thought the mirror universe was a divergent universe. Didn't they say that it was what happened when Zefram Cochrane panicked when he met his first Vulcan and shot him?
Only a theory. Mirror Cochrane could have shot his first Vulcan in a parallel universe without him having any connection with Prime Universe Cochrane. There are an infinite number of parallel universes. The similar universes might create a sort of attraction to each other so it is more likely to encounter a similar parallel universe than it is to encounter a foreign one. It could be the reason why the Parallels episode was full of familiar faces instead of having Gilbert Gottfried command the Enterprise-D.
Divergent universes just make things more complicated when they can be explained by parallel universes that have existed since the Big Bang instead of only a few years.
It's also stated explicitly in "In a Mirror, Darkly" by Mirror!Archer that the Terran Empire has existed for "centuries"; similarly Emperor Phillippa says in "Vaulting Ambition" that Terrans dumped the ideals of the Federation "millennia ago" (a statement which doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think about it, but Concepts Are Cheap and DSC's writing took a nosedive in general after the midwinter finale).
There's a lot of indications, in fact, that it's actually a continuation of the Roman Empire: they use a Roman-style salute (although Star Trek's writers probably thought of the 20th century fascists that cribbed it), Marlena Moreau refers to Kirk possibly becoming a "Caesar", and Emperor Pip's regnal name tacks on "Augustus Iaponius Centarius" to her birth name.
Actually, one of the visuals in ENT suggested that the divergence point would have been back in the days of the Roman empire.
And funnily enough, that jibes with one of the other things I said in the fanfic where I pioneered the "temporal rope" theory, which was that the mirror universe came from a timeline where the Western Empire lasted longer, in this case because General Flavius Aetius mounted a coup against Caesar Valentinian III after the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (rather than being murdered by Valentinian out of fear of such a coup as happened historically).
That also jibes with the claim of the Empire dropping Federation-style ethics "millennia ago" - about 1800 years give or take, so "millennia" is just rounding up.
Maybe democracy died in Persia taking out the Greeks as a possible explanation if the Greeks had fallen?
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Personally I like to consider time travel in the terms of multiple realities - in that each different subatomic (heck, energy fluctuation of the quantum level) differentation creates a reality of its own
The thing is, if you consider a branching tree diagram, its easy to go back...however its nigh impossible to return to their present due to the branches that would be infinite- this means the TDI is being selfless as they know going back in time will not alter their current, but will rectify it for all other realities diverging from that point - in other words, leaving their children, spouses, friends, ect to the future that made them go back in the first place
This though is not all - remember the butterfly effect; any changes in the past would affect multiple factors, multiplying to the present - for example, a temporal distortion might ripple and mean the sperm that made them them was a different one with a different chance to express x gene or some subatomic degredation affects the viability meaning they might not then exist
Regarding 'linchpin' theories, I believe linchpins only work in specifics; however they are created for convenience, not due to the nature of the universe (apart from the big bang, of course) - events that should not be changed to create y event makes sense...if you have a specific 'storyline' to follow
As we saw in survivor, the memories are reintergrated into a whole (or erased) - now what happens to those who in this timeline did not exist? As has been mentioned prior (in novel, I believe), suicide is seen better than corrupting the timeline
When you think of it like that, the TDI have a horrible job; knowing they left their family in hell created by the incursion then if they get back, theres no guarantee they could exist and those who cannot reintergrate have no recourse but to erase themselves
Maybe democracy died in Persia taking out the Greeks as a possible explanation if the Greeks had fallen?
That doesn't really work. Frank Miller's hilariously inaccurate comic book notwithstanding, as conquerors go the Persians were relatively nice (e.g. Cyrus the Great, the founder of Xerxes I's dynasty, was known for the abolition of slavery within Persian borders and is revered in Judaism for freeing them from the exile in Babylon), and there was significant cultural cross-pollination between Greece and Persia. There was also a problem in other Greek democracies that they would often give absolute power to a "tyrant" in times of national crisis, who would then refuse to relinquish power afterwards, and Athenian democracy ended up falling apart anyway due to the Peloponnesian Wars with Sparta.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Good point, another contender could be if the Byzantine Empire had been stronger and defeated the Fourth Crusade. It would have lasted longer.
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
I have a difficult time seeing the mirror universe as an alternate time line. It seems more like an inversion universe. Like a matter and antimatter universes, but instead of inverted matter its inverted mental states.
If the mirror universe is simply a divergent time line that shares a common point in time, then the divergence would need to be so far back as to be capable of effecting the cultural and social development of not just humanity, but the other races as well. Possibly an event during the time of the life seeding precursor species.
I just don't see the terran empire's influence being strong enough to account for selfless ferengi. I am thinking multiple species have been changed on the genetic level.
I have a difficult time seeing the mirror universe as an alternate time line. It seems more like an inversion universe. Like a matter and antimatter universes, but instead of inverted matter its inverted mental states.
If the mirror universe is simply a divergent time line that shares a common point in time, then the divergence would need to be so far back as to be capable of effecting the cultural and social development of not just humanity, but the other races as well. Possibly an event during the time of the life seeding precursor species.
I just don't see the terran empire's influence being strong enough to account for selfless ferengi. I am thinking multiple species have been changed on the genetic level.
Personally, I don't believe in divergent timelines. So every action or every major action doesn't create a new universe. However, given an infinite number of universes, every single decision that we could have made exists in a parallel universe. Even if the Mirror Universe had the Roman Empire, it doesn't mean it was completely identical to the Prime Universe until some action. For all we know, there were never Egyptian Pyramids or Ancient Egyptians in the Mirror Universe. Therefore, unless the Mirror Universe and Prime Universe were completely identical until a certain point, then there is no point of divergence.
Maybe democracy died in Persia taking out the Greeks as a possible explanation if the Greeks had fallen?
That doesn't really work. Frank Miller's hilariously inaccurate comic book notwithstanding, as conquerors go the Persians were relatively nice (e.g. Cyrus the Great, the founder of Xerxes I's dynasty, was known for the abolition of slavery within Persian borders and is revered in Judaism for freeing them from the exile in Babylon), and there was significant cultural cross-pollination between Greece and Persia. There was also a problem in other Greek democracies that they would often give absolute power to a "tyrant" in times of national crisis, who would then refuse to relinquish power afterwards, and Athenian democracy ended up falling apart anyway due to the Peloponnesian Wars with Sparta.
That's Cyrus, not Xerxes. Xerxes was known for forcibly annexing neighbors just because he could.
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My character Tsin'xing
"You think in such three dimensional terms."
Which i fear is what every one in this thread is also doing. The co-existance of the kelvin timline shows that we are using a back to the future concept of time travel not a linear one. What dose this mean?
It means that when you travel in time, the timeline you travel from continues to exist, it is not destroyed by your actions in the past, it cant be, because your existance, and thus your ability to effect change is dependant upon its continued existance.
Within this paradyme time travel is not, and can never be a means of destruction. It is either a neutral act, within which both the time line you originate from and the one which you proceed into throgh divergent action have both always existed through pre-destiny, or its an act of creation, by which your will to change events promts the generation of a whole new trouser-leg in time.
Therefore: Time travel is compleatly harmless and no thret to any one who isnt iconian. The worst that can happen is that you may find yourself unable to return to your time line of origination, but even if this becomes the case, that timeline continues on without you.
So what have we learnt? The temporal accords are tyrany and we are the bad guys for helping to enforce them. Whoops.
So yeah, all of the above can be neetly sumerised as: Timey Wimey wibbly wobbly stuff. And while their are episodes of star trek that adhear to multiverse theory, and episodes that contradict it, they are all at least internaly consistant. STO though is inconsistant with which aproach to time travel paradoxes it wants to take. Either its destructive and necesitates a single time line, or its creative and generates new ones.
By intergrating the kelvin timeline the writers have demonstrated that within STO time travel is creative, thus not a threat. By demonstrating this they have renderd all the suposidly smart people in the future who are 'protecting' the timeline to be either fools or tyrants.
Congratulations fellow captains, if you participated in the temporal missions you are space hittler.
There is no point for any of the protagonist crews to go back in time since their timeline is preserved not erased. All that happens is that they create a new timeline similar to the one they are familiar with and timeline they are trying to prevent still exists. The dilemma in Children of Time is meaningless since old Odo didn't erase the Defiant crew's descendants from the timeline. Therefore, if Star Trek 2009 followed the rules established by Star Trek, then the events of TOS, TNG, DS9, and Voyager are erased from existence.
STO has been consistent with its time travel, every single instance is based on the rules of if the past is changed, then the present is changed not creating a completely new timeline and predestination. There has never been an instance of a new timeline created in STO just the original being replaced. Also in the Terminal Expanse mission, STO has established that the Kelvin Timeline is a parallel universe not a new timeline created from destruction of the USS Kelvin. Of course, this only applies to STO and not the Prime Universe. There might be only one Kelvin Timeline or there might be a Kelvin-Movie Timeline and Kelvin-STO Timeline. We know that the Kelvin-STO Timeline existed before 2233, but we don't know if the Kelvin-Movie Timeline existed before 2233 since there has been no movie or TV show that specifically stated whether the Kelvin Timeline was a parallel universe or branched timeline by an expert on Timeline like Q or Daniels.
My character Tsin'xing
In TOS: "Assignment: Earth!", it was implied that if they hadn't interfered with Gary Seven's actions, that too would have erased their original timeline.
In DS9: "Trials and Tribble-ations", we were introduced to the "predestination paradox" - if Sisko et al hadn't interfered, Darvin's plan to destroy K-7 with an explosive tribble(!) would have gone off without a hitch. (They were also responsible for Kirk getting pelted in the head with tribbles in the original TOS episode...)
In TNG: "Parallels", we were introduced to an entire sheaf of multiverses, each with a slightly (or more than slightly) differing history, as Worf slid through them uncontrollably.
In DS9: "Past Tense", Sisko's presence altered history, but only to the extent that he was substituted for Bell in the history books.
In the last part of the Klingon War arc, the Federation player does see history being rewritten - when they arrive, the Worvig is about to destroy the Enterprise, which your new database informs you is the trigger event that will lead to the fall of the Federation and Klingon Imperial dominance in the quadrant. Your efforts are bent toward not merely rescuing Miral Paris, but also saving Enterprise so that the Federation is still there.
Basically, in Trek time travel works in whatever fashion the script demands. There is no consistent theory of time travel. (It's one way to avoid invoking Niven's Law of Time Travel, though.)
I think Jonsills disputes this nicely.
Star Trek is a fantastic show, and it often draws inspiration from science, but the ultimate arbiter of its reality is what the late grate Sir Terry Pratchett would term; 'Narrative Causality.' That is to say: Things happen because the narrative demands that they happen.
Another time line is another universe. Not all universes in star trek are divergent universes, one example being the mirror universe, but all divergent time lines are universes. They have to be, because the hero has to follow the villan into the past to stop them, and the hero cant follow them from a universe that no longer exists. Not every time line travel story in trek has fancy temporal shielding or happens to be within the mystical and magical eye of a temporal event.
And combine that with the fact that the "many worlds" versions, including the mirror universe, still tend to look like the prime universe at least a little bit. It's this kind of inconsistency that led me to completely discard all canonical explanations when I wrote "Brother on Brother, Daughter on Mother'' for a ULC a while back. (I was also partly inspired by the Farscape episode "... Different Destinations".)
Here's my theory: there is an overall timestream of an infinite number of timelines, each of them "strands" in a "rope" of infinite length (but a single point of origin, that being the Big Bang). The strands of a rope are all slightly offset from one another, but if you pull on the rope (i.e. the natural forward flow of time), the strands tend to move in the same direction, hence the "temporal inertia" property that's sometimes present (e.g. Annorax in "Year of Hell" complaining about it feeling like time itself was resisting him). Time travel is possible within a given strand, but if any changes made are small enough that the immediate result closely resembles the original version, future events will still play out the same (hence why Sisko impersonating Gabriel Bell and Kirk et al. ensuring Edith Keeler's death restores the timeline to its original form).
HOWEVER! A major change to past events, such as the STFC Borg incursion or Nero's little misadventure, will cause the timeline to split, or "fray". The new timeline is still attached at one end and so it still gets pulled along by the rope, but it's jutting out at an angle and so events are often very different.
You know what happens when a rope frays? It becomes weaker. You keep fraying it again and again and again, you'll weaken it further, and if you weaken it so far that it breaks? Well, according to the Starfleet temporal agent in my story, that's what happened to the timeline containing the canonical version of ENT and the Temporal Cold War: they caused so much damage to time itself that that entire timeline collapsed and therefore, from the POV of normal people in "my" prime timeline, never happened. ("My" timeline's corresponding events are a variation of the fanfic Reimagined Enterprise where Jonathan Archer is played by Mike Colter and is a UE ambassador-at-large attached to NX-01, which is commanded by a Taiwanese fellow named Chen Hwai.)
And this comes to the point of the story: I was trying to create a real imperative beyond mere regime protection for there to be timecops and a Temporal Prime Directive. This way, any hypothetical "time war" isn't just "good guys v. terrorists" or whatever, it's about protecting everybody in the universe from literally being erased from existence.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Dose this have to be a rope? Could it be like Cheese string? Also are we sure that it is infinite? Because I like cheese but these days I really do need to think about my arteries.
Seriously though, Props on the temporal rope. I like it.
I thought the mirror universe was a divergent universe. Didn't they say that it was what happened when Zefram Cochrane panicked when he met his first Vulcan and shot him?
Only a theory. Mirror Cochrane could have shot his first Vulcan in a parallel universe without him having any connection with Prime Universe Cochrane. There are an infinite number of parallel universes. The similar universes might create a sort of attraction to each other so it is more likely to encounter a similar parallel universe than it is to encounter a foreign one. It could be the reason why the Parallels episode was full of familiar faces instead of having Gilbert Gottfried command the Enterprise-D.
Divergent universes just make things more complicated when they can be explained by parallel universes that have existed since the Big Bang instead of only a few years.
It's also stated explicitly in "In a Mirror, Darkly" by Mirror!Archer that the Terran Empire has existed for "centuries"; similarly Emperor Phillippa says in "Vaulting Ambition" that Terrans dumped the ideals of the Federation "millennia ago" (a statement which doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think about it, but Concepts Are Cheap and DSC's writing took a nosedive in general after the midwinter finale).
There's a lot of indications, in fact, that it's actually a continuation of the Roman Empire: they use a Roman-style salute (although Star Trek's writers probably thought of the 20th century fascists that cribbed it), Marlena Moreau refers to Kirk possibly becoming a "Caesar", and Emperor Pip's regnal name tacks on "Augustus Iaponius Centarius" to her birth name.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Nice explanation Starsword. Also, I think the idea of "slowing down" time is basically slowing your perception of time. I have 2 fanfics about my character and her mate going through time to save their kids (They become temporal agents in the 31st century due to time travel.).
"Simba, you have forgotten me. You have forgotten who you are … you are my son and the one true king." (Mufasa)
You could also argue Wolf 359 was a fixed point in time as well.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
a) When first introduced in Doctor Who, those were supposed to be points it wasn't merely unwise but downright impossible to change. When Rose tried to change the moment her father died, the Langoliers started to eat reality and could only be stopped when she went back again to stop herself from trying.
b) If "fixed points" are merely points that can reverberate through time, almost every point is a fixed point. Interfere in any of a thousand points between 1638 (when an obscure English farmer moved from Hingham, Norfolk, to Hingham, Massachusetts) and 1830 (when another obscure farmer's hit-and-miss-educated son left the farm and eventually became a lawyer) and we wind up not having President Abraham Lincoln. They can't all be "fixed".
Essentially, it's a writer's excuse for not having to explore the implications of certain historical alterations. Alt-history fans can understand, I'm sure - tracking all the possible changes becomes difficult after a few decades, nightmarish on the scale of centuries.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
#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!"
My character Tsin'xing
And funnily enough, that jibes with one of the other things I said in the fanfic where I pioneered the "temporal rope" theory, which was that the mirror universe came from a timeline where the Western Empire lasted longer, in this case because General Flavius Aetius mounted a coup against Caesar Valentinian III after the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (rather than being murdered by Valentinian out of fear of such a coup as happened historically).
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
> gradii wrote: »
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> Theres really no good answer.
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> Sure there is. Don't travel back in time in the first place so the question never comes up. And if you do so accidentally, don't make contact with down-timers. At all. Period. Seriously, that's exactly why the Temporal Prime Directive exists in Picard's present.
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> See, this is where the timecops in STO's time war are failing at their jobs. They have, by the very act of allowing their actions to become known to down-timers, already altered the past from what they know. Ditto the "Professor" here. If he didn't want the past to be altered he should've kept his damn fool mouth shut and let Picard make the decision he did in the original timeline without interference. Whereas now, Picard knows that people from the Professor's future are d**ks and will likely attempt actions to ensure that future doesn't happen. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a future where the "correct" course of history is decided by a committee dedicated solely to the retention of its own power.
Thanks to the Temporal cold war the timeline and it's stability is swiss cheese, it's been so destabilized that only the big stuff matters that this point.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
The thing is, if you consider a branching tree diagram, its easy to go back...however its nigh impossible to return to their present due to the branches that would be infinite- this means the TDI is being selfless as they know going back in time will not alter their current, but will rectify it for all other realities diverging from that point - in other words, leaving their children, spouses, friends, ect to the future that made them go back in the first place
This though is not all - remember the butterfly effect; any changes in the past would affect multiple factors, multiplying to the present - for example, a temporal distortion might ripple and mean the sperm that made them them was a different one with a different chance to express x gene or some subatomic degredation affects the viability meaning they might not then exist
Regarding 'linchpin' theories, I believe linchpins only work in specifics; however they are created for convenience, not due to the nature of the universe (apart from the big bang, of course) - events that should not be changed to create y event makes sense...if you have a specific 'storyline' to follow
As we saw in survivor, the memories are reintergrated into a whole (or erased) - now what happens to those who in this timeline did not exist? As has been mentioned prior (in novel, I believe), suicide is seen better than corrupting the timeline
When you think of it like that, the TDI have a horrible job; knowing they left their family in hell created by the incursion then if they get back, theres no guarantee they could exist and those who cannot reintergrate have no recourse but to erase themselves
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That doesn't really work. Frank Miller's hilariously inaccurate comic book notwithstanding, as conquerors go the Persians were relatively nice (e.g. Cyrus the Great, the founder of Xerxes I's dynasty, was known for the abolition of slavery within Persian borders and is revered in Judaism for freeing them from the exile in Babylon), and there was significant cultural cross-pollination between Greece and Persia. There was also a problem in other Greek democracies that they would often give absolute power to a "tyrant" in times of national crisis, who would then refuse to relinquish power afterwards, and Athenian democracy ended up falling apart anyway due to the Peloponnesian Wars with Sparta.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
If the mirror universe is simply a divergent time line that shares a common point in time, then the divergence would need to be so far back as to be capable of effecting the cultural and social development of not just humanity, but the other races as well. Possibly an event during the time of the life seeding precursor species.
I just don't see the terran empire's influence being strong enough to account for selfless ferengi. I am thinking multiple species have been changed on the genetic level.
Personally, I don't believe in divergent timelines. So every action or every major action doesn't create a new universe. However, given an infinite number of universes, every single decision that we could have made exists in a parallel universe. Even if the Mirror Universe had the Roman Empire, it doesn't mean it was completely identical to the Prime Universe until some action. For all we know, there were never Egyptian Pyramids or Ancient Egyptians in the Mirror Universe. Therefore, unless the Mirror Universe and Prime Universe were completely identical until a certain point, then there is no point of divergence.
My character Tsin'xing