Do they have to close the loops

[Mikey]

who are the Mets though?

not funny.

And I tend to hold with the chaos-theory, divergent parallel branch idea of time travel... otherwise, all those open loops and other cock-ups would make it impossible to show time travel in 'Trek as it has been shown.

And I still agree with Douglas Adams that one of the biggest obstacles in time travel will (wioll haven be?) the grammar involved.

[Captain Picard's Hair]

Given all the time travel that's occurred, can we even be sure there is one Trek universe as we know it?

[Blackstar the Chakat]

who are the Mets though?

not funny.

I respectfully disagree

[Blackstar the Chakat]

Given all the time travel that's occurred, can we even be sure there is one Trek universe as we know it?

"It's the universe Jim but not as we know it."

[Captain Seafort]

Given all the time travel that's occurred, can we even be sure there is one Trek universe as we know it?

Not really. The big jumps I can think of are the pre- and post-YE universes, wherein the main difference is the presence of Sela, thepre- and post-"Year of Hell" universes with the changed state of the Krenim, and the (possibly pre- and post-FC) universes that produced Enterprise.

[Captain Picard's Hair]

Technically, all it takes is one change if the multiple universes theory is true (there must have been half a dozen different universes in "Year of Hell" alone!) - and to be really technical, the degree to which the two universes are dissimilar is irrelevant.

[Captain Seafort]

True, but the ones I'm talking about are where it's blatently obvious that something's changed, rather than the possibility of them jumping back into their original universe.

[Captain Picard's Hair]

On the plus side, it would render the lack of continuity issues moot if every episode occurred in a different universe! (I know, it's a wee bit extreme)

[Blackstar the Chakat]

One theory is that if two timeline universes are similar enough they merge back together at somepoint. I think that's just an excuse for people who misplace things. "I swear I don't know how the keys got in the fridge."

Of coarse, I still belive what I said before.

[sunnyside]

You'd think time travel would be a lot less popular in a multiple worlds setting.

People would say they're going back in time to change something, then they'd vanish and return, and to everyone else in the first universe nothing changed.

Of course Trek does have the idea of an infinite number of universes. But I think you might be able to time travel in each of them.

Meh.

[Mikey]

It doesn't matter what hypothesis you believe; when discussing time travel, "that way madness lies."

[Blackstar the Chakat]

It doesn't matter what hypothesis you believe

Unless you're a time traveller. But time travellers also have issues with people wanting the time machine to improve there own lives. Trust me it always backfires. And time travelling is unreliable. Not that I would know 8)

[Mikey]

Check out Philip K. Dick's "Waterspider" for the greatest treatment of time travel EVER.

[mlsnoopy]

Wasn't there an episode that involved Worf, coming back from some sort of a turnement, and the barrier among diffrent universes got borken and there were 100000000000000 copis of ED.

[Blackstar the Chakat]

Wasn't there an episode that involved Worf, coming back from some sort of a turnement, and the barrier among diffrent universes got borken and there were 100000000000000 copis of ED.

Ya. Worf broke the universe.