Cause and Effect

[Dan Gurden]

We went off on a tangent over here; http://forum.trek-rpg.net/showthread.php?t=15438

So lets set up a thread for discussion of the temporal prime directive, and its effects. Cor. Two whole active threads at the same time in here!

OK.

So in the discussion we have concluded that by the end of Voyager the Temporal Prime Directive was well and truely broken. But what to do about it, would the DTI/Federation knowlingly sit of the new-tech and take the doc offline because of the advanced tech, despite the fact that as an audience we know that S31 would have their grubby mits all over it and of course the Borg would already be atuning their next assault to account for it...

But what exactly is a breach of the TPD? Is any time travel a breach? Or just the ones where an alteration was made that changed history. What happens when another alteration is made to try and set things right?

We saw in the shows that most of the crews played relatively fast and loose with temporal physics, often on little more than a hunch/gut feeling, in some cases they altered entire timelines, now we (the viewer) knew that these actions often set things right for the primary universe... but it still required the essential deletion of a timeline?

Now we have Spock prime hanging out in his broken past with himself, and in so doing is breaking the temporal prime directive every single day. But what would happen if this somehow managed to correct back into the primary universe, again another thread of time is cut but the TPD would have been broken...

the floor is open for debate!

[The Tatterdemalion King]

would the DTI/Federation knowlingly sit of the new-tech and take the doc offline because of the advanced tech,

I wrote a response to this a couple years ago on RPG.net; I might as well just repost it here.

Though the thing that imediately comes to mind is: how do you explain away the "super-tech" that Voyager brought back with it? It would give the Feds a huge edge if they can take advantage of it.

I wrote this way back in the "Unknown Armies Trek rumours thread..." which devolved into sillines pretty quickly.

There's a whole bunker of hyperadvanced technology somewhere, hidden away on an asteroid they call Memory Omega. Tkon planet shapers, Orion windeaters, artifacts from dozens of different possible futures, all preserved in quantum stasis fields.

We're never going to use them. Why? The Prime Directive. You see, we're not hypocrites. If we're going to deny warp drive to a culture that hasn't developed it yet, we must be prepared to forgo the miraculous wonders we have, but do not understand. If it can be done, we will discover how, but by our own efforts, not through theft and appropriation.

Of course, when push comes to shove, there's always someone with Omega level clearance calling for the Orion windeater or the Singing Nanites to be deployed against the enemies of the Federation. And maybe, if the situation is ever desperate enough, the Federation might sell out its ideals to ensure its survival.

The irony is, if they ever do, the Federation has died.

despite the fact that as an audience we know that S31 would have their grubby mits all over it

Depends on who and what S31 really is. Among 900 billion individuals, there's room for lots of secret Federation conspiracies. Definitely enough room for more than organization to call itself S31, and at least one would

and of course the Borg would already be attuning their next assault to account for it...

Depends on how much R&D the Borg do, and whether there was any real workable artefacts left to assimilate.

But what exactly is a breach of the TPD?

This is what's been said on the show.

Is any time travel a breach?

Well, Federation policy has to take into account the accidental nature of many time-travel incidents.

Or just the ones where an alteration was made that changed history.

At least.

What happens when another alteration is made to try and set things right?

In practice, probably an escalating amount of timeline ripples based on how many times around the bend, and thus how many requisite paradoxes there are. Starfleet, however, seems to be lenient when it comes to successful interventions by non-natives taking action (cf. First Contact) .

We saw in the shows that most of the crews played relatively fast and loose with temporal physics, often on little more than a hunch/gut feeling, in some cases they altered entire timelines, now we (the viewer) knew that these actions often set things right for the primary universe... but it still required the essential deletion of a timeline?

Well, in Star Trek, these timelines still 'exist,' or at least, there are signifiers in the post-alteration timelines that indicate their existence (Yar from Yesterday's Enterprise, for example). Likewise, the crew of the Defiant remembered their time on Gaia. All of this points to a 2- or 3-dimension perspective of time (or a 'layered' timeline), where the linearity we each think we experience in our lives is but one possible configuration of events. Time for objects can have loops, whorls, splits and rejoinings.

[The Tatterdemalion King]

The Doctor's holoemitter is a different story; one could perhaps argue that, if the Doctor is a person, it would fall under his personal property. And, in this case, it would be like an individual whose legs were replaced by implants from the 29th century. Can you take the dude's legs away, even if you were going to give him new ones?

But that brings us even farther afield, since the Doctor isn't physically bound to anything anyway; his physical expression (the holoimage) is misdirection, since all the cognition and mental processes are occurring in distributed computational systems, probably decks away from the sickbay.

[C5]

For one thing, I expect all powers are very wary of tampering with the timeline. The Krenim are a good example of what could happen when you try to alter too much the timeline.
I always figured there was some sort of "no temporal altering" tacit treaty between the various powers similar to nowadays use of the nuclear weapons, as it could harm the "winner" almost as much as the "loser".
That's for the political part, and that's why Starfleet personnel may required to avoid tampering with the past (and also why only reckless or unaligned individuals engage in such attempts). You would not want to start an actual Temporal War with the Romulans for instance because a misguided Starfleet Captain decided to give a few quantum torpedoes to the Federation in the 2150 war.

Also, the "Butterfly effect" makes it very hard to exactly know what will happen when you try to chang the time (there was a good example of that in the "All our yesterdays" LUG supplement IIRC). So the TPD could simply be a way to ensure the Federation is not erased by some ensign stepping on the wrong insect.

Then there is the fact of paradoxes. Star Trek never was very consistent regarding time paradoxes - usually they seem to obey the "Back to the future" laws, but there are cases of predestination paradoxes (transparent aluminium comes to mind, or the Voyager episode happening in the 1996).
It might be that too much paradoxes can cause some subspace disruption or something (I don't remember if this is ever mentioned though - maybe I'm watching too much Doctor Who).
But maybe one goal of the Temporal Prime Directive is to prevent such paradoxes to occur.

Finally there is the "Prime Directive" part of the TPD - which is don't interfere in a less advanced culture (depending on the need of the plot too). In that case, not only is the past a less advanced civilization of some sort, but also the present compared to the future.

But I mainly see the TPD as a way to avoid too much mess with the timeline, and something to be used only in the last resort or when not having any other options.
A particularly sly Starfleet officer may also object that, when fixing the timeline to prevent the disappearance of the Federation (Kirk in "City on the edge of forever", Picard in "First Contact", etc), he's not violating the TPD since there is no Federation to have it ensured in the first place (maybe the 29th century TPD is more detailed to prevent such loopholes).

[The Tatterdemalion King]

A particularly sly Starfleet officer may also object that, when fixing the timeline to prevent the disappearance of the Federation (Kirk in "City on the edge of forever", Picard in "First Contact", etc), he's not violating the TPD since there is no Federation to have it ensured in the first place (maybe the 29th century TPD is more detailed to prevent such loopholes).

Hahaha... you've discovered the fundamental paradox of the Federations anti-paradox regulations. Awesome.

[Phoenix]

Wait... What... C5 just broke time? Well there goes the holidays.

Honestly, I think the TPD only comes up if the script (GM) calls for it, otherwise it's another one of those directives the characters (players) pay lip-service to.

[Dan Gurden]

Wait... What... C5 just broke time? Well there goes the holidays.

Honestly, I think the TPD only comes up if the script (GM) calls for it, otherwise it's another one of those directives the characters (players) pay lip-service to.

This is of course the whole point in the first place. Same is true of the Prime Directive... Even General Orders often fall into the guideline rather than rule area.

For the vast majority of us, with no military training this is fine, because lets face it, if you were to play the game with strict adhesion to the laws in the game setting it would not be that much fun...

OK, flip side.

Has anyone broken time/broken the Temporal Prime Directive in their gaming/setting? What happened and how did they fix it? (or did they?)

[C5]

Honestly, I think the TPD only comes up if the script (GM) calls for it, otherwise it's another one of those directives the characters (players) pay lip-service to.

As I tried to say rather fuzzily this morning, unlike the normal PD which is mostly used for plot, I see the TPD doubling as a sane warning in the same sense as "Don't try to overload your warp core to get faster".
Altering the timeline is extremely tricky (even the Krenim with their advanced knowledge of time were unable to correctly predict the full results of their changes), so I don't think anyone in Starfleet (or elsewhere) wants to risk being suddenly erased from existence because someone tried to go back in time to meet his ancestor.

On the other hand, I wonder what would happen should some galactic power discover a way to accurately predict the outcome of any change made to the timeline.
It would be fun to imagine a 29th century section 31 traveling in time doing subtle alterations here and there to be sure the Federation is always more powerful, no matter the costs...

Hahaha... you've discovered the fundamental paradox of the Federations anti-paradox regulations. Awesome.

And now I realize that this idea might have been partially inspired by Doctor Who...

Though I do wonder how the Federation (or any power, for that matter) could hope to ensure a TPD if it does not have some way to accurately detect changes in time (be they through a power similar to the El-Aurians or with a temporally shielded base).

And there are very interesting implications for TPD enforcers: what should they do if they learned for instance that the TPD they are following to is the side effect of a time alteration, with the original TPD actually allowing such alterations...

All this gives me a weird campaign idea: the PC discover a remote outpost, on a far-away planet. On it are equipments unknown to the Federation (including a strange shielding array), yet bearing the Federation symbols. The stations seems to be holding history records for the known galaxy, only its history diverge at some point in the past (leading to a rather different Federation, with a much more advanced knowledge of temporal physics anyway...). And then comes the last resident on the station, a ragged Federation officer who begs them to help him fix the timeline....

[Dan Gurden]

How do you predict/detect an alteration to the timestream.

See, this is a point I really like, and I have a plot partially developed over the course of the last few years based around the DTI's invention of just this technology. In my mind this has to be an organic technology and the solution involved a Chroniton field and Bio-Neural technologies to keep a 'master copy' of history, which is constantly compared to aan unshielded version to detect alterations... (oddly, the plot I had in mind was somewhat similar to yours C5, and would have required fixing the time-line mid Dominion war aboard the occupied DS9, one day it'll be finished...)

In Trek-nology however, a strong Psionic sense seems to be enough to give a 'feeling' that something is not right (Yesterdays Enterprise), meanwhile standing next to a strong temporal source seems to help make one immune to alterations, or at least slow their effect (The Guardian of Forever)...

And of course there is the old stand-by that being in the time period in question makes one immune to the changes (with comic effect upon your return).

Now the enforcers are another matter. As you say, they are clearly most likely to be enforcing their own timeline, sure you might want to fix it and make things better, but by the strict terms of the TPD yours actions are inherantly dangerous and could make things worse...

Which is just plain annoying when trying to restore the primary universe, and who knows... They may be right?

[C5]

Things can be very tricky for a TPD enforcer who lacks any way to check if the timeline has been tampered with. Actually, this could make for a very interesting investigation adventure: a Temporal Detective would have to interview any time traveler (like we saw in the DS9-TOS crossover), then very cautiously check whatever he did, try to infer the consequences and to guess how the timeline could have been changed. This would make a fun time travel "whodunnit" story if the time traveler is a dubious person and could be suspected to have altered time for his need.

Then there is the matter of paradoxes, and the inconsistent way they are handled on Star Trek (which makes it rather hard to devise a sound TPD). I don't think the first paradox of time travel, which is that going to the past to alter it creates a new timeline where you don't need to go to the past to alter it, has never been addressed in Trek (and it seldom is).
Can such a time travel be detected, does it create a "temporal clone", does it merge the two versions of the time traveler... Without some El-Aurian power or another device to detect time changes (I like your organic technology idea, by the way), such a self-serving time travel would be very hard to detect.

By the way, temporal shields seem to be in grasp of the Federation technology - I think Voyager could build one in "Year of Hell" (that's the one with the Krenim, right ?) and the DS9 crew could understand how the chronitons shielded them from the time changes caused by Sisko in "Past Tense". The fun would be that a temporally shielded ship would seem to appear out of nowhere in the new timeline if it is one it does not exist in.

With all that, I guess a Temporal Prime Directive would be either a very loose set of guidelines (mainly consisting of "Spare us the headache, don't travel to the past. Please. We mean it",) or an extremely precise and detailed ruleset taking into account the maximum of possibilities (for instance on how to decide which of two altered timelines is the "real" one). In game, this means it is as consistent as the warp travel times

An idea I was toying with some time ago was that too much changes of the timeline in the same spot somehow weakened the subspace, and could cause dangerous disruptions. I even wondered about a "Time Bomb" - something creating a really nasty paradox, creating a sort of oscillation between two timelines resulting in the total disruption of a whole area of space time. Maybe I should recycle these idea in a Doctor Who universe

(though I can't help sometimes viewing the El-Aurians as a sort of pre-Time Lords, explaining why the Borgs were so keen on destroying them).

[The Tatterdemalion King]

(though I can't help sometimes viewing the El-Aurians as a sort of pre-Time Lords, explaining why the Borgs were so keen on destroying them).

Incredibly long lived... mysterious time-based senses... homeworld destroyed by aggressive cyborgs...

Sounds like a match to me!

[C5]

Not to mention their habit of traveling in the universe and mingling with other species (including humans). And featuring mad scientists who don't mind killing people to meet their ends.

Makes me want to start (or thread-necromancy-fy) a thread on the crossovers you could do in Star Trek while not adding anything to the known Trekverse.

[Nuclear Fridge]

Didn't the DTI set up a 'paradox detector' platform to scan for the Orange Swirly
Time Thing in the All Our Yesterdays book? Cassandra Station, I think?

Of course, the Romulans believe it's really a project to locate cloaked ships and want to arrange a little 'mishap' for it.