All Good Things was an illusion. The anti-time eruption and time travel never happened in any sense. Not only is there no evidence that Q created the antitime eruption if it had happened, but if any of those events were real then the TNG era and TNG+20 era would have been affected by the changes in the timeline.Lord Pounder wrote:I'm sorry but where have you gotten the laughable idea that the Q are humanities guardian angel? Point in question, who introduced the Borg to Picard and company? Who set up humanity for trial in the first TNG episode and destruction by their own hand in All Good Things? And most importantly who sat on their hands while the Federation was about to be wiped out by the Dominion?Metrion Cascade wrote:Federation. On Earth nobody starves, while off Earth you can indulge in capitalism. If Shinzon can secretly build the Scimitar, I want something like a Sovereign with Janeway's armor and torpedoes.
And Q isn't really going to let anything truly heinous happen to humanity. They've gotten fucked with, but they're still around after facing the Borg multiple times and then the Dominion. More than you can say for Arturis' race or the El-Aurians or the Cataati or the Promellians or the Kataanians or the Iconians. How many human races in how many sci-fi franchises have been in so many utterly fucked situations and gotten out of them?
Besides. We've seen futures centuries ahead of VOY and the Federation is still around in damn near all of them. Never mind Temporal Investigations looking out for us.
Federation Earth may be a bunch of pussy communists who won't admit they have a military, but it's a more open society and probably easier to improve without bloodshed (compare the US to, say, Iran). And they may not have the Empire's forces (yet), but they don't have the Empire's enemies either. The Borg are the worst corporeal race Trek has (if they're still around), and there's at least one Fed ship that can eat them for breakfast. And for damn sure I'd do a better job than Starfleet of capitalizing on whatever new tech I found, since earth-shaking discoveries seem to be at the fingertips of anyone with warp drive in Trek.
Of course the Federation is going to exist in any flash forwards, it's a bloody show about the federation. However given the way quantium physics is suposed to work, every possible conclusion branching off infinately, how can you count something that isn't there?
The entire time, Q has been putting humanity (and, individually, Picard) in tough situations to make the most of their potential. He's got the ability to travel through time at will, does so just for fun, and probably knew the Dominion wouldn't destroy the Federation. He'll let bad things happen to humans out in space, but none of his interventions have ever led to anything bad happening on Earth.
Sure, we haven't seen every possible future. But every future we've seen where the Federation made it to the 24th century had them still around 500-700 years later. They've got time travel by then and are using it to ensure the Federation's survival in as many timelines as possible. And I'm probably only going to live 120 years anyway unless I find some really tight tech or decide to find a way into the Nexus. Yeah, there'll be timelines where I die horribly from a metrion cascade or a thalaron pulse ten minutes after being born, but all are highly unlikely.
