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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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I appreciate the risk, but it seems that we’ve got a canon confirmation already.
There will be slippage. We already know that Voyager changed the timeline after the events of DS9. The Romulan Supernova and Picard season 2 perturbed it further.
The key thing is that there do exist some time crystals (as defined in physics not necessarily the glowing blue ones on Borath) which are events that are fixed points in the timeline. Those have to happen, like Pike’s injuries, and cannot slip too much without a fork.
Physics just doesn’t support the rigidity of precise dates in the timeline that would give many fans comfort nor does it support the infinite branching that makes everything meaningless.
This deserves a lot more looking into. Possibly a post in c/DaystromInstitute at some point, but, like Holmes, I cry out for more data before wanting to form a workable hypothesis. As a side note, I’m already gathering data for working out Una’s chronology. It’s filling out nicely.
We don’t disagree in broad terms. I just recoil from the easy (and potentially dismissive) answer if I don’t think it’s actually necessary for the most part, so I’ll stick to not futzing around with established dates until something really tells me otherwise. As someone who’s been playing around and figuring out Trek chronologies since the early 90s, this is where I’m most comfortable being.
A general observation: I think that this episode is consistent with the way time travel is seen to work in the Trek universe - that the timeline is overwritten rather than branched. The Kelvin Timeline remains the one sole example of a branched timeline that was created as the result of a temporal incursion. In all other cases, the timeline becomes (in my favorite comparison) like a palimpsest.
Our household has been coming at it from our understanding of physics, and have been since at least the 90s. It means that we’ve been watching through that lens for a very long time.
Without it, the episodes in Voyager where Harry Kim or Janeway came back to correct the timeline are meaningless. We would just assume that the unchanged timeline went forward offscreen.
This resilient river of time version offers a continuity where actions matter, and corrections to the timeline mean something more than just a shift in point of view.
As you note, multiple universes can exist but it takes something very large to do it. In Star Trek, we’re not in the infinite and ever expanding continuum of branching universes where every possible permutation of events exists. (And that version of the multiverse doesn’t stand up for hard scientists.)
So far we know that the Mirror Universe has different physics of light - something that’s so enormous that it’s hard to credit that it’s developed in any kind of parallel. It suggests some fixed events in the past development of the two universes that are extraordinarily resilient against branching.
The Romulan supernova is a major event but of a much lower order of magnitude than say the establishment of the physics of light. It seems like that would be a kind of lower bound for a branching trigger.
All to say that I agree that a Daystrom Institute deep dive would be worthwhile. In fact, it may be possible to go through onscreen canon and itemize the various events and inconsistencies that support this construct.
The Narada incursion had the benefit of three things - a black hole, a very intense ion storm, and the magical red matter. We can minimally accept that as a unique confluence of events that led to a branched rather than overwritten timeline, at least.
To support the resilient river of time model, when I was studying history in grad school I came up with this axiom: history isn’t inevitable, but it has momentum.
To put another way, any given historical event is the natural outcome of historical events before it, and therefore when changing history you’re not just trying to change the one thing, but dealing with the weight of everything before pushing the timeline in that direction. That’s why it’s so hard to change history, that - in Sera’s terms - it seems like Time itself is fighting you. Call it historical momentum, call it historical inertia, what you will. And so the more “momentous” the event, the harder it is to just change it - things will “want” to go back to the way it was.
I was considering your usage of ‘palimpsest’. It’s not a bad way of looking at what remains, net, after the incursions have taken place.
But the river, strong, advancing with force in its riverbed is a great analogy too. Its momentum is enormous, its course hemmed-in by some fixed geology. Only something near-catastrophic will cause it to divide or jump its course.
By the way, I have been thinking about the temporal accords and the prohibition against time travel in the 32nd century. This will mean that the far post-Burn era will be the only one where these kinds of perturbations shouldn’t be permitted. It would be interesting to hear more from Kovich on this.