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.
