Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
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Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
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Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
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Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.
Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
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The interesting thing about cars like this, in which something is literally erased from reality, is that it's completely victimless.
One cannot destroy that which never existed to begin with. From that perspective, I'd say Spock made the right call.
I mean, that’s easy to say, because we’re not attached to the Leif Ericsson class or anyone onboard.
But would the same argument be made if instead it was Bajor, or Kronos that disappeared from existence?
Well that's the thing - something can't really "disappear from existence," unless we're talking about something that did exist and was destroyed.
But if it never existed at all...well, there's literally nothing lost.
The exception to this would be if Kirk and his crew remembered the Cerritos existing before the time travel shenanigans.
But from an objective, non-linear perspective, the USS Leif Ericson did exist, before it was erased. A temporal agent with a timeline map would be able to follow the ship across its own personal timeline, until the point where it abruptly ends because the timeline it is currently in caused it to be erased.
It's similar to the Federation and billions of Borg lives existing and not existing in First Contact, or any of the myriad times the Federation was erased by time travel, and then restored.
Even accepting this to be true, Spock sure wouldn't have any way of knowing, or any reason to care.
Where?
Spock just rolls with time travel ever since he went back, pretended he was his distant cousin, and saved his childhood self from venomous space wolves or whatever that was.