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Legends of the Ferengi wrote:17882 was a very interesing year on Ferengimar. In that year alone, over twenty thousand Grand Nagi held office; the Ferengimar Financial exchange crashed 3,152 times, while setting 12,322 record highs; there were 41,098 civil wars; an unknown number of Ferengi-incited interstellar wars (estimates are in the millions); and the Ferengi sun went nova at least once a week. In other words, 17882 was the year Ferengi discovered time travel.

An amusing bit, but it got me thinking. Time travel in Star Trek is really flipping easy, just look at how many times it happens by complete accident. Technically, anyone with a reasonably sturdy warp-capable ship and enough computer support (or a Vulcan friend) has everything they need to go forward or back as far as they please.

We know the Federation bans deliberate time travel, and has protocols in place for minimizing disruption to the time line if it should happen unintentionally. We also know that Starfleet captains are given license to break most or all of the rules in the event that earth or another Federation member is threatened. Kirk was even commended for going back in time to save the world, and mostly pardoned for a previous crime. We know the Federation is still actively researching time travel and temporal phenomena, and have a 'Temporal Affairs' department in Starfleet. We know this will eventually lead the future Federation to playing Time Lord, preserving the Web of Time.

And unfortunatly, most of us remember the Krenim.

What about everyone else, though? The Ferengi, Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Dominon, and many, many one-episode races? They live in the same universe, with the same physical laws. It's not like the ease of time travel is considered a state secret, I recall the Klingon ambassador storming out of the room in Star Trek IV, when Kirk was let off by reasons of time traveling heroics. Do these governments have policies against time travel to? Do they never consider the possibility of changing things, even when they're, say, losing a war for the Alpha Quadrant? Can they stop every freighter captain who lost someone they cared for from going back and trying to change it? Does the Future Federation stop them? Ok, the Borg do it. Once. And that turned out to be a sort of stable time-loop, so they probably should have known it wouldn't work.

Time travel in Star Trek is sporadic, chaotic and complicated to understand. The actual way they go about it isn't. I brought this up a while back and happened to watch the DS9 episode, Children of Time recently, and the majority of episodes seem to show that there is one universe, one timeline. And yet apparently, you can stand apart from the timeline if you are protected by chronoton radiation. It's about as messed up as the Federation economy, I'm afraid.

Anyway, we know the Klingons can do it because even a Bird of Prey can survive getting close to a star. We know the Borg can do it. We know the Bajorans are capable to a limited degree (Orb of Time). Wormholes can go to the past. Apparently the timeline is perforated by dozens of different ways in which an event can cause the other events to simply not happen by reason of no longer existing. So in theory, if you were to go back in time and bomb Kronos, Romulus, Cardassia Prime, the Borg, anyone, you could stop them from ever existing.

Which means that the first to develop time travel automatically wins.

So... why hasn't it happened? Because apparently, not only is it the same timeline, it's an alternate timeline, and it's its own grandpa. Why? Because fuck you that's why. I digress. The writers of the show (or movie) don't know what happens when you travel back in time. Modern science says it's impossible, their science comes up with a new method every other season that produces different results. We have three outcomes of every single time travel instance.

Everything happens for a reason (Effect causes the cause)
This is one that's a little hard to contemplate if you do it wrong. Apparently, we're all playing to the tune of a great and powerful puppet master, who says we can go back in time and fuck around, as long as things happen like they're supposed to. No matter what you do, things will work themselves out so that nothing has changed, and you're still just as screwed, but now realize it was your fault for causing the problems in the first place. This one sees quite a bit of comedy as usually we see people end up as their own grandfathers.

Click your heels to return home (Changes happen to the same timeline)
This one is the most common of Trek writers for obvious reasons. We want the heroes to return home triumphant, not to home where there's a copy of them already there. Apparently, if you go back in time, you're just moving backwards on the same stream, arriving at a point that, if you do absolutely nothing, will let you watch yourself go back in time, only this time you were the cause by telling yourself to go back in time just to mess with your own head.

Alternate clusterfuck (parallel realities occur)
This is the one that seems to be the most popular right now. You can go back in time but the universe will create a copy of itself and deposit you in the new one. Now you can fuck around and not worry about the consequences. This one makes the most sense logically because you can kill your grandfather and no one cares, because you are still alive. You haven't created a paradox because now a younger you won't be born, so you're the only one running around. There's not some divine plan, you're just some asshat who decided to shoot a man just to see if you could destroy the universe.

Ahriman238 wrote:It's not like the ease of time travel is considered a state secret, I recall the Klingon ambassador storming out of the room in Star Trek IV, when Kirk was let off by reasons of time traveling heroics.

You remember incorrectly. The Klingon ambassador stormed out at the beginning of the movie, after his demand for extradition was rebuffed by the president of the Federation Council. The ambassador was outraged that the "renegade and terrorist" was merely facing charges of violating Starfleet regulations.

We never saw the Klingon after that, and Kirk spoke not to the Council but to Starfleet Command regarding his plan; and in the Council session when the President exonerated Kirk and company, the President merely referred to "certain mitigating circumstances" and having "saved this planet from its own short-sightedness".

Everything happens for a reason (Effect causes the cause)
This is one that's a little hard to contemplate if you do it wrong. Apparently, we're all playing to the tune of a great and powerful puppet master, who says we can go back in time and fuck around, as long as things happen like they're supposed to. No matter what you do, things will work themselves out so that nothing has changed, and you're still just as screwed, but now realize it was your fault for causing the problems in the first place. This one sees quite a bit of comedy as usually we see people end up as their own grandfathers.

Time's Arrow, where they find Data's head in a cave, along with a gun. The episode where Sisko goes back and assumes the identity of his hero, who died because of him. It was never quite clear whether he changed things, or if it was always him.

Click your heels to return home (Changes happen to the same timeline)
This one is the most common of Trek writers for obvious reasons. We want the heroes to return home triumphant, not to home where there's a copy of them already there. Apparently, if you go back in time, you're just moving backwards on the same stream, arriving at a point that, if you do absolutely nothing, will let you watch yourself go back in time, only this time you were the cause by telling yourself to go back in time just to mess with your own head.

Debatably Cause and Effect. We'll always have Paris (I think.) Trials and Tribble-ations. City on the Edge of Forever. First Contact. Basically anytime changing the future was a serious concern, and if they changed something and then went back home they were screwed.

Alternate clusterfuck (parallel realities occur)
This is the one that seems to be the most popular right now. You can go back in time but the universe will create a copy of itself and deposit you in the new one. Now you can fuck around and not worry about the consequences. This one makes the most sense logically because you can kill your grandfather and no one cares, because you are still alive. You haven't created a paradox because now a younger you won't be born, so you're the only one running around. There's not some divine plan, you're just some asshat who decided to shoot a man just to see if you could destroy the universe.

Tapestry? Star Trek 2009, for sure. Endgame.

I'm just thinking that time travel is so easy in setting, it should be basically impossible to regulate or control. Yet it's never considered as a possible solution, say to the Terran Resistance in the mirror universe, where we wouldn't even have to worry about fucking up the continunity of the show.

Uraniun235 wrote:

Ahriman238 wrote:It's not like the ease of time travel is considered a state secret, I recall the Klingon ambassador storming out of the room in Star Trek IV, when Kirk was let off by reasons of time traveling heroics.

You remember incorrectly. The Klingon ambassador stormed out at the beginning of the movie, after his demand for extradition was rebuffed by the president of the Federation Council. The ambassador was outraged that the "renegade and terrorist" was merely facing charges of violating Starfleet regulations.

We never saw the Klingon after that, and Kirk spoke not to the Council but to Starfleet Command regarding his plan; and in the Council session when the President exonerated Kirk and company, the President merely referred to "certain mitigating circumstances" and having "saved this planet from its own short-sightedness".

You are correct. Still, it shouldn't be all that hard to figure out what went down, if you were curious. For that matter, they can't exactly cover up the sudden return of a previously extinct species.

It may be that other governments know that the Federation can perform time travel, but that they don't know how the Federation does it. I think the only mention of the slingshot effect aside from Kirk's crew is a throwaway reference by Picard in Time Squared.

Uraniun235 wrote:It may be that other governments know that the Federation can perform time travel, but that they don't know how the Federation does it. I think the only mention of the slingshot effect aside from Kirk's crew is a throwaway reference by Picard in Time Squared.

I believe on many ships the Captain and Commander both have safes to store documents that are for their eyes only. I would imagine that in this case, the physical safe has been replaced with exclusive clearance that only someone with the correct authority can use. An example that springs to mind is the Omega Directive, which locked out all the commands save for Janeway's authorization. I would imagine that when a Captain is given his fourth pip, he's handed a series of encrypted data rods with secret information, containing information that only they are permitted to know. It would certainly be something they would either commit to memory or store in a place where if they're captured, they're useless (such as failure to access correctly the first time). If so, they might entrust captains with the secrets to time travel but also with the added note that they will be held accountable for their actions.

Entrusting the secrets of time travel to every Starfleet Captain seems to be a recipe for disaster. Even if each and every Starfleet Captain is 100% trustworthy - and aside from a few exceptions Starfleet officers are pretty decent - the fact of the matter is that you have various aliens and hostile life forms that could compel the information out of them somewhat easily. The cardassians and romulans are each known to use 'chemical persuasion' in their interrogations (so does the Federation for that matter, as per Spock's line in 'Journey to Babel') and the latter have also used brainwashing techniques. Telepaths also exist, and not all of them work for the Federation. The borg can basically mindrape anyone they assimilate. Then you have the various highly advanced cultures whose capabilities are well above anything the Federation and its peers can match.

Each starfleet captain is entrusted with the secrets of 'The Omega Molecule', it could be there's some other things they're told about too.

Yeah, but that's Voyager and I try to ignore everything Voyager-related.

It just seems hazardous to entrust this shit with every Starfleet officer of captain-rank. Not because they are inherently untrustworthy, most are full of integrity, but the Federation's enemies are utter bastards and wouldn't have any compunction about using underhanded means to rip that information from a captain's mind.

I suppose all officers could be briefed on the theory but aren't told the practice. Guys like the romulans, cardassians, and klingons would get up to all sorts of shenanigans if they knew how to travel in time. The borg, well we saw what they would do with it in First Contact. It just seems to me that the Federation would have a vested interest in keeping this knowledge contained or secreted away somewhere.

The only other possibility I can think of is that the Federation has it as a kind of deterrent - don't do any sneaky shit or we will go back in time and nuke you. But that's completely absent in the canon and it's also antithetical to the Federation's character and values.

Perhaps it's a case of time cops showing up and putting a stop to this tomfoolery. According to ENT (I hate bringing that up but I must) at some point, some sort of Temporal Accord was reached, prohibiting time travel except to enforce the accord itself. No mention is made of when or how this treaty came about, but there are an interesting number of events involving temporal travel that may or may not have occurred before the accord, which I will list in somewhat chronological order.

1996 -> 26th Century (VOY: Future's End) Aeon Class starship destroys Sol System
2152 -> 31st Century (ENT: Shockwave)
26th Century -> 22nd Century (TNG: A Matter of Time) A timepod gets sent four hundred years into the past
2573 -> 2153 (ENT: The Expanse) A Xindi superweapon component is sent to the past
27th Century -> 2366 (TNG: Captain's Holiday) A device to halt all fusion in a star is sent to Risa, followed by two thieves.
2769~ -> ~5000BC (ENT: Cold Front) Federation anthropologists observe the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza
29th Century -> 1967 (VOY: Future's End) Aeon Class starship travels back and crashes on Earth.
29th Century -> 1996 (VOY: Future's End) Aeon Class starship travels back and attempts to stop Voyager from interfering.
29th Century -> 2371~2375 (VOY: Relativity) USS Relativity attempts to save Voyager from temporal destruction.
31st Century -> 2152 (ENT: Future Tense) A timepod arrives from the 31st century.

*Note: Official canon does not go beyond the 31st century without any clear dates. VOY: Living Witness explains events beyond those of the 31st century, but no dates.

Baffalo wrote:Everything happens for a reason (Effect causes the cause)
This is one that's a little hard to contemplate if you do it wrong. Apparently, we're all playing to the tune of a great and powerful puppet master, who says we can go back in time and fuck around, as long as things happen like they're supposed to. No matter what you do, things will work themselves out so that nothing has changed, and you're still just as screwed, but now realize it was your fault for causing the problems in the first place. This one sees quite a bit of comedy as usually we see people end up as their own grandfathers.

No puppetmaster required- the point is that if you're going to interfere with your own causal past, it's pretty obvious that whatever interference you did was already in your causal past. You can't have changed what's already happened to you and the world you lived in.

Granted, time travel doesn't "have" to work this way, but there's a strong philosophical argument behind it. Why, exactly, should time travel let you change your own causal past?

Getting around this problem is the thing that inspired people to come up with alternate realities.

Stofsk wrote:Entrusting the secrets of time travel to every Starfleet Captain seems to be a recipe for disaster. Even if each and every Starfleet Captain is 100% trustworthy - and aside from a few exceptions Starfleet officers are pretty decent - the fact of the matter is that you have various aliens and hostile life forms that could compel the information out of them somewhat easily. The cardassians and romulans are each known to use 'chemical persuasion' in their interrogations (so does the Federation for that matter, as per Spock's line in 'Journey to Babel') and the latter have also used brainwashing techniques. Telepaths also exist, and not all of them work for the Federation. The borg can basically mindrape anyone they assimilate. Then you have the various highly advanced cultures whose capabilities are well above anything the Federation and its peers can match.

Of course, we already know the Borg can time travel, and it's not unreasonable to assume that super-powerful "elder races" can do it too, especially if there's a trick as relatively easy as the slingshot maneuver to make it possible.

Honestly, the only explanation I can think of is that the Future Federation acts to enforce its control of its own causal past, by preventing any act of time travel that would prevent its own existence. Since their manipulation of time is far more sophisticated than that used by other time travelers in the series, they might even be able to do this untraceably- say, by subtle tampering that causes would-be chrononauts go badly off course and get lost or killed, creating a perception that time travel is insanely risky. If every time the Romulans try it their chrononauts (by all evidence) fail and never come back, they may conclude that the "obvious" methods for achieving time travel don't work, and that if the Federation can do it, it's because they have some unknown secret.

Also, there's what Stofsk points out. We know that attempts to travel into the past to 'fix' your timeline don't always work- it didn't work for the Borg. It's possible that the powers the Federation normally handles know they could use time travel to solve problems, but also know that there's a risk of touching off a time war that you might not win.

If you travel back in time, how can you be sure you won't have an interfering Captain Kirk/Picard/Whatever show up in the past to screw up your plans? What if he tries, and succeeds, and becomes convinced that you're too big a threat to his nation and decides to wreck your country in the past even more thoroughly than the wari n the present would have done?

So if you're dealing with a time-travel capable power, there may be a deterrent effect against using time travel to improve your own situation against them, because there's no way in hell to predict the outcome if both sides start using time travel.

Stofsk wrote:Yeah, but that's Voyager and I try to ignore everything Voyager-related.

It just seems hazardous to entrust this shit with every Starfleet officer of captain-rank. Not because they are inherently untrustworthy, most are full of integrity, but the Federation's enemies are utter bastards and wouldn't have any compunction about using underhanded means to rip that information from a captain's mind.

I suppose all officers could be briefed on the theory but aren't told the practice. Guys like the romulans, cardassians, and klingons would get up to all sorts of shenanigans if they knew how to travel in time. The borg, well we saw what they would do with it in First Contact. It just seems to me that the Federation would have a vested interest in keeping this knowledge contained or secreted away somewhere.

I think this is actually possible- certain captains (like Kirk) know all kinds of Shit They Were Not Meant To Know. The Federation tolerates this, possibly because there are big payoffs to having at least a few people around who know how to do strange things like travel back in time and save the planet. It's not ideal from the point of view of a modern military with the full range of secrecy regulations we know today, but the Federation just doesn't seem to think in those terms at all.

The only other possibility I can think of is that the Federation has it as a kind of deterrent - don't do any sneaky shit or we will go back in time and nuke you. But that's completely absent in the canon and it's also antithetical to the Federation's character and values.

Well, the Federation may enforce such a policy simply because widespread timeline disruption threatens the entire quadrant- or it might interfere less maliciously in an enemy's past development, say by strategically identifying a few brilliant scientists or leaders from your past and beaming them into their own ship's brig, then abducting them. That's nonlethal, yet devastating to your culture and progress.