To: 
From: "Jay  P Hailey" 
Reply-To: trekcreative{at}yahoogroups.com

> Star Trek uses *both* of these concepts interchangeably, which is why it
> gets so convoluted.


A while ago I got GURPS Time travel,  because I lkike GURPS books.    One of
the largest parts of designing a time travel campaign is to set your rules
for time travel and stick to them.  There's rigid time, where history is
unalterable;  Elastic time where time can ccomodate changes,  Quantum time
where every choice and every change results in alternate universes
(essentially meaning you can never change your own past) and so on.  Then
there were collections of ideas about how changes in the time line worked
drawn from several popular time travel stories.

Current time travel theories indicate that the Universe won't tolerate a
paradox.  Example  Imagine a pool table woth a tiny worm hole leading a
second or so back in time.  One might try to slide a ball across the table
and into the worm hole in such a way as the ball would emerge earlier in
time and strike itself, preventing itself from entering the wormhole.  A
small scale grandfather paradox.

Apparently the way physics works in the real world,  the worm hole would
move back so that the ball could never have a chance of touching itself.

Trek has never *done* this,  that is, set up an official trek cosmology on
how time and time travel works.  and this hurts them.  Especially with the
attempt to move the series on to Time-Trek.

I should point out that James C Jones attempted to sell this concept to
paramount in the early 1990's with a Federation Starship as a time
traveller exploring history as well as space.

I hate time travel.  My opinion is, at the first blush - a writer would
have to be some sort of moron to look at the Trek universe and need time
travel to tell a story.

Especially when it involves a Trek crew going back in time and saving the
Earth.  What a writer is saying there is that he admits he could never
write a different world or any characters on it well enough to engage our
sympathy.  he has to metaphorically threaten us before he feels wed give a
damn what happens in his story.

This is my entire bitch with ST:FC.   STIV:TVH  avoids this *a little*
because Leonard Nimoy wanted to A) reduce production costs as sharply as he
could and B) wanted to make a political statement about Saving the Whales
here on Earth.

Even so, changing the story so that Earth-of-the-past  is actually a planet
far away on the edge of the Federation could work for both stories, if you
took care to write the people the Trek crews met sympathetically and
engagingly.

Jay ~meow!~


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