Star Trek and History (26 page)

Cochrane:
That's rhetorical nonsense. Who said that?

Riker:
You did, ten years from now.

—Star Trek: First Contact
(1996)

Although Starfleet has made a commitment not to interfere with other cultures or with history, the characters in
Star Trek
routinely find themselves in situations where they must disturb both. Breaking Starfleet rules is, after all, some of the most fun a captain can have. The decisions of our heroes are, without fail, the “right” thing to do within the viewpoint of the show and its audience. The results of the intrusion are shown only in their immediate effect, and we do not have to see the paperwork involved in justifying the interference to commanders.
1

The Prime Directive is clear:

As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Starfleet personnel may interfere with the normal and healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes introducing superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely. Starfleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship, unless they are acting to right an earlier violation or an accidental contamination of said culture. This directive takes precedence over any and all other considerations, and carries with it the highest moral obligation.
2

However, the application of the Directive is far from clear. We often see captains violating it to save their crew, although this is explicitly forbidden.

Captain Jonathan Archer may be forgiven for his violations because the Directive doesn't exist in his time: “Someday, my people are gonna come up with some sort of a doctrine, something that says what we can and can't do out here, should and shouldn't do. But until someone tells me that they've drafted that . . .
directive
, I'm gonna have to remind myself every day that we didn't come out here to play God” (
ENT
, “Dear Doctor”). He and James Kirk also seem immune to the charges of violating the
Temporal
Prime Directive, which forbids the interference with historical events, requires maintenance of the timeline, and cautions people with knowledge of the future from disclosing it, because this Directive doesn't seem fixed until
Voyager
's time.

Some fans claim that the Temporal Prime Directive wasn't created until the twenty-ninth century, after Starfleet developed technology making time travel “practical” and formed the Department of Temporal Investigations (DTI) to police it. Nevertheless,
Voyager
's crew cites it routinely, and the DTI investigates Deep Space Nine crewmembers. Paradoxical interventions by DTI agent Daniels enforce compliance with the Temporal Directive on Archer and his crew, even though most of Archer's Starfleet does not believe in time travel, since the Vulcan scientists of Archer's period have declared it impossible.

“I hate temporal mechanics.”

—present
and
future O'Brien,
DS9,
“Visionary”

“In the event of a wormhole sending us back in time, do not kill your parents. If you are traveling with small children, help them not to kill you before not killing your own parents.”

—Bender,
Futurama,
“Neutopia”

While the position of the series is clearly that time travel
is
possible, some of our twenty-first-century scientists maintain the twenty-second-century Vulcan position.

As William J. Devlin, in “Some Paradoxes of Time Travel in
The Terminator
and
12 Monkeys
” reminds us, there are three views of temporal influence or interventions. Eternalists believe that the past, the present, and the future are fixed and unchangeable. People traveling through time in this scenario are “fated” to do so; their journeys to the past preserve the past as it was “supposed” to be.
3
Possibilists believe that the past and the present cannot be changed, but the future can. Devlin argues that the two films he discusses are both possibilist, since the past and the present are not changed by time travelers—the time travelers were always part of the story—although the future is alterable. Finally, there are presentists, who believe that only the present is set and that it is possible both to change the past and to affect the future.
4

Star Trek
's view of time travel is presentist.
5
There would be no need for the DTI if it weren't possible to change the past and future. Nevertheless, both captains and writers apply the directives inconsistently, and metaphysical assumptions about time travel are equally variable. A few episodes seem to represent, at least for a moment, the other two viewpoints. For example, in some episodes, the past is not altered by travel, or the time traveler was always implicit in the historical record, yet such episodes do not invalidate the presentist assumption that changing the past or future is possible.

For example, a transporter malfunction strands several
Deep Space Nine
crewmembers in 2024 in “Past Tense.” They inadvertently alter history enough to have to put it right. Thus, Sisko becomes the historical hero he had read about. The audience sees Starfleet disappear and reappear, indicating that the past was changed although history stays the same. We might compare this to “Little Green Men” on
Deep Space Nine
, in which an accident causes the Ferengi to become the history we know—the Roswell crash that resulted in the capture of aliens from outer space. Since we do not see the “future” repercussions from the past, we might assume that they were always “meant” to be the Roswell aliens. Yet the episode reinforces presentism when Nog sees Sisko's heroic picture in an Earth encyclopedia (an allusion to “Past Tense”).

An ever-present practical and ethical problem for time travel stories, especially presentist ones, is the Grandfather Paradox. The Grandfather Paradox is this: if someone travels back in time and kills his own grandfather, then he would never have been born, and thus he could not have traveled in the first place.

Yet David Lewis in “The Paradoxes of Time-Travel” argues that this paradox does not exist. He posits the following explanation of what would happen if “Tim” traveled back in time with the intention of killing his grandfather:

Either the events of 1921 timelessly do include Tim's killing of Grandfather, or else they timelessly don't. We may be tempted to speak of the “original” 1921 that lies in Tim's personal past, many years before his birth, in which Grandfather lived; and of the “new” 1921 in which Tim now finds himself waiting in ambush to kill Grandfather. But if we do speak so, we merely confer two names on one thing. The events of 1921 are doubly located in Tim's (extended) personal time, like the trestle on the railway, but the “original” 1921 and the “new” 1921 are one and the same. If Tim did not kill Grandfather in the “original” 1921, then if he does kill Grandfather in the “new” 1921, he must both kill and not kill Grandfather in 1921—in the one and only 1921, which is both the “new” and the “original” 1921. It is logically impossible that Tim should change the past by killing Grandfather in 1921. So Tim cannot kill Grandfather.
6

This explanation of the paradox would seem to be against the presentist position, but Lewis goes on to say that one can have both 1921s if one accepts “branching time.”
7

One way to explain a presentist system is through multiple universes and quantum theory.
8
David Deutsch and Michael Lockwood in “The Quantum Physics of Time Travel” support this view: “Quantum mechanics can resolve the paradoxes of time travel. . . . Rather than predicting with certainty what we shall observe, it predicts all possible outcomes of an observation.”
9
Star Trek
clearly shows a mirror universe. The existence of multiverses is explicit in some episodes, like
Next Generation
's “Parallels.” However, although theorists posit that changes to a timeline might result in the further splintering of the multiverse, this particular causal effect of time travel is not explicitly explained in earlier incarnations of
Star Trek.
When the timeline is altered in later versions, as in the 2009 movie
Star Trek
, two parallel realities can be created: one with Vulcan and one without.

Homer Simpson
[after time traveling and finding himself in the dinosaur era]: Okay, don't panic! Remember the advice Dad gave you on your wedding day.

Grandpa Simpson:
[Flashback] If you ever travel back in time, don't step on anything. Because even the slightest change can alter the future in ways you can't imagine.

—The Simpsons,
“Treehouse of Horror V”

For the sake of the show, Starfleet must not be concerned with the Observation Effect, the scientific principle identified in quantum physics that an observer affects whatever is being observed. Since Starfleet supposedly depends on quantum mechanics for power, it should be especially sensitive to potential observation repercussions.

However, Starfleet orders observers to study untouched cultures in their own time and to observe events in the past, despite routine cultural corruptions and timeline disruptions. The original series' “Assignment: Earth,” for example, features the crew observing the events of 1968.
10
They feel obligated to go down to the planet, as they observe someone who may be about to alter the timeline. Presumably, however, their being captured by the United States temporarily either was always meant to happen or was actually inconsequential.

If mere observation does not affect the timeline, then arguably butterflies do not, either. In Ray Bradbury's 1952 story “A Sound of Thunder,” the destruction of one butterfly in the past changed everything in the future: “The stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our earth and our destinies down through Time, to their very foundation.”
11
This was one of the first science fiction stories to grapple with chaos theory, now popularized in culture as “the Butterfly Effect.”

Although Starfleet officers understand that violating the timeline can have adverse effects, some crews are more careful than others. Kirk's officers are aware of the dangers, but they behave in careless ways, at least in comparison to other crews. In “City on the Edge of Forever,” for example, although Spock warns, “No past, no future,” after McCoy alters the timeline and erases Starfleet, Spock and Kirk manage to exist in the past for a week without affecting the future in any significant way (other than to “right” the timeline) (
TOS
, “City on the Edge of Forever”). They steal clothes, have many encounters with other people, and significantly affect Edith Keeler, but her falling in love with the Casanova of the Stars does not change anything. Her failure to die at the “right” time, however, will. In fact, although no small changes have any effect here, if one considered the death of one important person a “small” change in the grand scheme of history, one could argue that Edith is the butterfly in the story. However, the Butterfly Effect would be better illustrated if what made the difference to the future was not whether Kirk let her die but whether ever getting to see the Clark Gable movie Kirk and Edith were on their way to see would have led to the peace movement that would have allowed the Nazis to prevail.

Other paradoxes are at play in several
Star Trek
episodes. For example, in
Voyager
's “Future's End,” Braxton of the DTI creates the explosion he was investigating
during
the investigation. Interestingly, this does not make him question the wisdom of attempting to use time travel to “fix” the timeline, perhaps because the initial theft of a time ship could still be blamed on someone from the “past.” Similarly, in “Time and Again” Janeway's inquiry into a time fracture and planetary extinction event leads her to realize that the inspection (in the past) caused the future event she observed. Even though she was “meant” to be there in the past, as her presence there was requisite for what she observed in her present, she is still able to change both past and future.

Janeway discovers a similar problem in “Parallax” when her ship is trapped in a singularity and she hears a distress call that the crew of the ship would send later. “Effect can precede cause” in temporal mechanics, she explains. In
Next Generation
's “Cause and Effect,” a causality loop causes déjà vu, leading the crew onto a path to discover the loop and to break free. As in many other distortion episodes in
Next Generation
, the crew must decide whether to stay on course, although the end seems disastrous. Because they worry that altering their course might have caused the disaster in other times through the loop, they decide to remain on course in every instance (for example, in “Time Squared,” which postulates a Möbius time loop), as the cause for the effect is not clear. The episode “All Good Things . . .” features another example, as Picard experiences three time periods at once. In trying to avert catastrophe surrounding an anomaly in the future, he must decide whether staying on course or deviating from it causes the anomaly. However, the anomaly is antitime, created in the future and growing in the past in such a way that life on Earth would be destroyed. Understanding backward causation allows him to prevent the anomaly in all three times.