From: jeh@cmkrnl.com
Newsgroups: rec.arts.startrek.current
Subject: Re: What happens to BOSEMAN now in TNG-Time Line?
Date: 12 Apr 92 04:05:29 GMT
Organization: Kernel Mode Consulting, San Diego CA

In article <53903@hydra.gatech.EDU>, ccoprdj@prism.gatech.EDU (Jorge Diaz) 
writes:
> In article <1992Apr7.190817.415@cmkrnl.com> jeh@cmkrnl.com writes:
> 
>>Time travel into the future causes no paradoxes -- and, as Larry Niven pointed
>>out (you know, sometimes I think that *everyone* who wants to make comments on
>>time travel episodes should be required to read his "Theory and Practice of
>>Time Travel" first; see the _All the Myriad Ways_ collection),
> 
> Oh, is this the authority on time travel?
> I'll bet this guy really knows what he's talking about, eh?

He has been writing award-winning hard sf for nearly thirty years, and has been
reading it voraciously for much longer.  The article is a survey of "types of
time travel in sf", with comments on the implications of each.  Does this make
him an authority?  Well, I think he'll do until someone better comes along. 

Why don't you read the article before implying that it isn't even worth
reading?  In addition to being thought-provoking, it's tremendously funny! 

Same comments for "Theory and Practice of Teleportation" and "Man of Steel,
Woman of Kleenex", which are also in the same collection.  Oh, and the short
stories which form the rest of the book are pretty good too.  

>>time travel into
>>the future need involve nothing more than suspended animation techniques and a
>>very reliable, durable time capsule.  WHich is, in effect, what the Boseman
>>became for her crew. 
> 
> How can you say time travel into the future causes no paradoxes?  What if
> they hadn't traveled into the future?  Those 400 or so crewmembers would
> probably have had children, who would have had children.  Who knows, one of
> them may have been an ancestor of Soong.  But now that they aren't there,
> they can't have those children, effectively changing the past of the people
> in TNG.

You might as well ask "what if <any apparently-random event in the past> had
happened differently", or even "what if <any decision in the past> had been
made differently".  These changes would have created a different past for us. 
But there is no paradox there.  Nor is a paradox caused by the Boseman's
80-year absence. 

I never said that time travel into the future makes no changes in the lives of
those who don't make the jump.  Heck, if I disappear for thirty years without
telling anyone where I'm going, I'll make changes in people's lives that way,
too (at least I'd like to think so).  But when I say "no paradoxes", I mean no
violations of cause and effect, e.g. the Grandfather Paradox, which make time-
travel-into-the-past stories so much fun to read (and write, so I hear).  

From: tonyd@ssc60.sbwk.nj.us (Tony DeBari)
> 
> Surviving into the future (via suspended animation) and travel into the
> future (via a "time machine") are very different.  In the former, the
> traveler never leaves his time line; he just sleeps during the years
> between his departure and destination.  In the latter, the traveler
> actually jumps from one point on the time line to another, resulting in
> a discontinuity that can change the history of the people in the future.

This appears to be true in the Star Trek universe -- see the opening teaser of
"Yesterday's Enterprise" (which, imho, would have been better if it had simply
opened on the "still at war with Klingons" version of the -D).  

However, in "the real world", I don't see this.  Suppose I steal a suspended
animation unit, power pack, and time capsule, move them to a secret cave in the
mountains, and *without telling anybody*, "cold sleep" for a hundred years or
so.  The effect on the time line is *exactly* the same as if I walk into a
forward-only time machine, set the dials for "+100 years", and press "start": I
and my equipemnt have disappeared for 100 years, as far as the rest of the
universe is concerned. 

Yes, there's some fuss and commotion when I reappear, and that changes the
present at the time I reappear -- as does ANY decision or action -- but the
same thing happens with both methods of "time travel". 

(No, I'm not planning to disappear, even for a year.  Think how long it would
take to catch up on news afterward!) 

If you're going to postulate that the very appearance of an object "out the
future end" of a time warp really would cause changes in the past, unlike the
discovery of an object that's simply been lost for a while... just as was shown
in "Yesterday's Enterprise'... well, I can't refute that, but you can't prove
it either.  :-) 

	--- Jamie Hanrahan, Kernel Mode Consulting, San Diego CA
Internet:  jeh@cmkrnl.com, hanrahan@eisner.decus.org, or jeh@crash.cts.com
Uucp:  ...{crash,eisner,uunet}!cmkrnl!jeh
Newsgroups: rec.arts.startrek.current