HOW TO CHANGE A TIMELINE

[Dax Orien]

Yes, that Enterprise has got to go out with a bang. BTW, what is the classification of the Enterprise NX-01?

[Lindley]

[Link, the Hero of Time]

Wierd.. before the constitution class and the others

[Andrew Paris]

Here is how I see it.

You are here, and want to go back in time to change something in your history. So you go back in time and make the changes, but then the person that went back in time never existed, because that persons life played out differently and you never went back in time, the timeline would snap back to how it was before and changes were made. So the whole time travel would need some sort of temporal shield or something. Think, End Game, Janeway comes back in time to help Voyager, and the future Janeway infects the Borg. But the present day Janeway goes back to the Alpha quaderent, all fine and dandy, but she never has the experiences of the future Janeway that came back, so the future Janeway never existed to go back to help Voyager out of the Delta quaderent. Time goes back to how it was to start with. Does that make any sense, ??? Please reply and help me, before I go INSANE!

Also, we don't know if people have been coming back in time and altering the time line now do we?

[Commander Ranahan]

Yes oh yes, but what is the main therioe

[Link, the Hero of Time]

thinking about it in those terms is what drove people insane

[Commander Ranahan]

yeah....im one of them

[Lt.BirdGod]

My Theroy on Temporal Disturbances and thingies is:


The Time Line is already written out. If you go back in time, you were meant to go back in time. If you find something from the past (like Data's Head from Time's Arrow) and you go back into the past with that object, chances are, you will lose it in the past, and find it in the present (the future from the past). I love temporal Anomalies.

[Commander Ranahan]

i got done reading that voyaer book on timelines...its about a away team goes back in time like a million trilon years ago..its along story, but ist #2 in the series

[Link, the Hero of Time]

Time anomoly's and Paradox's.. it's enough to drive a man insane..
trust me i'm completely nuts. j/k

[Commander Ranahan]

thats were if i went to star fleet acadmy i would go into medical or temporal mechinics

[ensighnkim]

It shows Link. j/k Scientist say that time travel is more realistic than warp speed at this point.

[Rose_218]

Actually, the best Voyager episodes deal with time travel....

[MT39503]

[Commander Ranahan]

this is all right

[parkan]

[Commander Ranahan]

i think you are thinking of when the hirogen take over voyager and use holodecks and make a WWII

[parkan]

[Commander Ranahan]

ohh yah never mind

[MT39503]

The way I see it is that it would be next to immpossible to prevent a time paradox. No matter what you did there would be some consequences.

[StartrekFan76]

I'm not sure if I'll explain this very well since it's 5:00 AM, but I'll give it a try. We'll say there are 2 basic theories as to how time travel works. We'll call them theory A and theory B. In theory A, paradoxes are a problem and in theory B they aren't. Ok, here's why:

Theory A: Time is mono-linear and looks like this:

PAST------------------------PRESENT---------------FUTURE-------------------->

It is all 1 piece. Creating a paradox is either impossible ("Time" will not let you do it) or if you create one you will destroy the universe. For example, you go back in time and accidentally kill your parents when they were kids. Now you were never born. Since you were never born, you sure can't go back in time and kill your parents. So, your parents live and give birth to you. So, you go back in time and kill your parents etc. etc. You have created 2 mutually exclusive possibilities at THE SAME TIME (you are both alive and dead). The universe doesn't like that and goes BOOM. Many people who subscribe to this theory insist that the mere possibility of paradoxes proves that time travel is impossible.

Theory B: Time is multi-linear and can look more like this:

PAST A----------------------PRESENT A-----------------FUTURE A----->
|
|-----------------------------PRESENT B------------------FUTURE B------>

In this case, by going back in time and changing history, you don't create a paradox, you simply create a new timeline that exists parallel to the previous timeline. (ie a "parallel universe")

Consider the previous example. You are born in PRESENT A and grow up into FUTURE A. You go back in time to PAST A and kill your parents. Now instead of creating a paradox, you've simply created "TIMELINE B" in which you were never born, but in which the "you" from TIMELINE A now exists. You have "jumped" from one timeline to the next. It would now be very difficult to get back to your original FUTURE A where you first went back in time because if you tried going into the future you would go to FUTURE B, not FUTURE A.

From the point of view of someone else living in TIMELINE A, you simply went back in time and never came back again. Fom the point of view of someone else in TIMELINE B, you appeared there one day, but you have no birth parents or birth records because they all exist in TIMELINE A.

There are also different ideas on what happens to you in the new timeline. For you fans of the Back to the Future I, crossing from one timeline to another in which you no longer exist means that after a short while, you vanish.

Star Trek has avoided these issues with some success by good writing (such as in Star Trek IV, which creates no pradox problems) or by using technology to protect people from the effects of changing history, most notably in First Contact and in Voyager's Year of Hell episodes.

I'm no quantum physicist, but that's the best I can do. Hope it makes some kind of sense!

[PrankishSmart]

theres really no theory behind time travel, it will never happen

[StartrekFan76]

Actually there are several "real" theories about time travel. Although I was mainly talking about the ficitonal theories that writers use as a dramatic device in the science fiction world, there are actual theories about how we experience and travel through time.

Einstein's theories about time and time travel are probably the most well known. His theory of relativity (very, very paraphrased) claims that people and objects do not move through time at a fixed rate. Other influences such as gravity and the speed of an object can affect how fast something "moves" through time. The faster an object travels through space (not just outer space, but through any space) the slower it travels forward through time relative to a stationary object.

This doesn't mean time travel is ever going to happen on any observable scale. In fact I believe Einstein thought it was impossible to travel backwards in time because as one gets closer to the speed of light (at which time stops) one also gains more and more mass. To break the speed of light and actually go back in time, you would have to accumulate infinite mass. This may be where Star Trek came up with the ficitonal idea that at warp 10, you acheive infinite speed. (I'm not sure about that, though). However, it's incorrect to say that there are no theories about time travel.

In fact, you might be interested to know that Star Trek writers did not make up the term "tachyons" for particles that move faster than light, scientists did. Webster's dictionary defines a tachyon as, "a hypothetical particle held to travel faster than light." There is an article about tachyons at the Scientific American website listed below.

http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_question.cfm?articleID=000657D8-67D9-1C71-9EB7809EC588F2D7&catID=3

There was also an experiment done earlier this year (2002) in which scientists think they may have been able to get a pulse of light to travel faster than the actual speed of light itself. Basically, they think they got the pulse of light to come out the end of a tube before it entered it. Here are a few quotes from an article on that experiment:

"Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton have carried out an experiment in which a pulse of light appeared to emerge from a cloud of gas before it even entered."

"In the NEC experiment, the peak was seen exiting the cell 60 nanoseconds before entering - which sounds like an extremely short time gain, until you put it in context. The light pulse would have taken only 0.2 nanoseconds to travel the width of the cell in a vacuum, so comparatively speaking, the time gain was very large."

"Although the experiment doesn't show us how to move back in time, such an effect might be helpful in speeding up signalling in electronic circuits. Lijun Wang, who performed the experiment with colleagues Alexander Kuzmich and Arthur Dogariu, has applied for a patent. The full consequences of the experiment are not yet understood, and research continues."

The full (albeit confusing) text of the article can be found here along with a FAQ section about the experiment:

http://plus.maths.org/issue12/news/fasterThanLight/

So, we're still a long way from ever traveling through time ourselves, and it may indeed be impossible to do so. But, that doesn't mean that scientists have dismissed the possibility completely or that there are no current theories about it. And it certainly doesn't mean that it isn't fun or worthwhile to hypothesize about it!

Hope this is interesting!

[MT39503]

Actaully, theortically, one could go back in time. All you have to do is move fast enough!

To the post eailer, I agree with creating a seperate timelin, allthogh a paradox does seem plauasbable!

[Borg771]

well... a time machine would affect everyone and everything and it would also kill the person using it if they went back to far in time or farward in time. I dont think time manuplation on a large scale or even a small scale can be achieved.