In my opinion, this was one of the better episodes of the third season. But as someone has pointed out, the population of the doomed planet must have been relatively small. It would be pretty hard to evacuate several billion people, assuming that time travel into the past were possible.
shareThe episode doesn't tell us when the planet's population first knew they were in danger. Nor does it tell us how long they had been in the process of evacuating to the past.
Given enough advance warning, and assuming there was more than one atavachron to send people into the past, the episode's premise does not strain credulity.
I have to agree with all points.
A civilization with the technology to build the atavachron would surely have known it's star was dying for a very long time. For all we know (and it's unimportant to the story really), they could have been evacuating people to the past for years or even decades.
That's and interesting thought. If it were true, there would be a lot more people from the future than there were in the past.
The people from the future, or present, would be smarter and more able to find each other, collaborate and take over if they had been there for a long time.
Or what would be the point of escaping to the past if you have to hope to do nothing to affect the future? A lot of contradictions in that story ... but a good episode of ST.
Good points.
I suppose there could have been a contraction of population over the centuries, perhaps controlled population initiatives after a global nuclear type war. A far less dense but much happier population - until the sun goes nova anyhow.
I also think it was a good ST episode.
Or what would be the point of escaping to the past if you have to hope to do nothing to affect the future?
> I think it was to simply live on under any condition.
Even so, there is zero chance that the actions of all those people in the past would not affect the future, and probably catastrophically, Butterfly Effect and all.
Oh, OK. Misunderstood your question.
Going back to what I said to another poster, perhaps the Atavachron was a machine that was isolated from time itself, and as people went inside, it would compare the new timeline for each and every person who went back to the "original" timeline. Any person that would upset the future in a way that would change it enough to endanger the creation of the Atavachron would be "rerouted" to a different area or even time within their specified request.
Stretch? LOL, sure!
@stevewyzard & strntz
Yes, that's true. Further evidence that it was a scientifically-advanced society is that Mr. Atoz had lifelike replicas.
Even if the planet only had several hundred inhabitants prior to Beta Niobe going nova that is far too many chances to foul up the past so as to wreck the present. My guess is that in recent times the planet had a practice of minimizing the population for whatever reason and were far more successful at it than Earth was. Birth control was employed to an extreme and the ruling class decided who was allowed to reproduce. Anyways, the episode flies in the face of many earlier episodes such as Tomorrow is Yesterday and Assignment : Earth that caution against any time travel as it is likely it only takes one to change events.
shareMy thought was that one of the things the Atavachron did when "preparing" the people was somehow (we're talking about time travel which is impossible anyway) prevent anything the people did in the past from changing the future.
If we really want to stretch this, maybe the timeline *did* change constantly as people escaped to the past, but perhaps the Atavachron was isolated out of time and was therefore able to keep a constant watch for changes in the timeline as people selected their choice of time to return to. Anything that would affect the creation of the Atavachron in the future was denied or otherwise reconfigured.
The best way would be to do a memory wipe prior to going into the past. But we know that did not happen based on the people that Kirk, Spock, and McCoy encounter.
share
I guess the Atavachron could memory wipe as part of the preparation (remember, Spock, Kirk, and McCoy were *not* prepped), but even a memory wiped person could change the future just by living in the past.
A memory wipe certainly is not a perfect solution for the reason you cite but would be the best of a number of poor options. Like the OP said the Atavachron was simply a plot device like the library's time portal to launch the Enterprise characters into their stories. Also, the only instance known to me where a character reverts to the condition of the time they are sent to. Interesting for a discussion but the bottom line is All Our Yesterday's is at best a mediocre episode.
shareThe thing is though, you can have a time machine that can transport you back in time on your planet ... you have to realize that planets are both revolving and traveling through space at fantastic speeds, and that only is considering motion around their local star - they are also moving in the galaxy and the universe. So, if you actually have a working time machine, you also must have a space machine to that can send matter back through both time and space.
shareYes but as we think of time and space as one item (the time/space continuum) when you send someone back to say Atlanta Georgia on August 29th, 2008 at 9:00am EDT for their first day of Dragon Con in order to relive their first day ever of going to that convention and changing their life (Ok, it is not "someone", it me. You are sending me back) you would need to calculate where Atlanta was at that time on that day in the universe. It technically can be done and done to the detail of dropping me in the Sheraton hotel, 2nd floor near the stairs to go to my first panel. You do not even need to calculate where Earth is on a grid just calculate where it was relative to the position of the time travel device relative to the "Sheraton hotel, 2nd floor near the stairs"
If you think of time and space as one thing, it just reinforces my statement.
> It technically can be done and done to the detail of dropping me in the Sheraton hotel, 2nd floor near the stairs to go to my first panel.
Actually, it cannot be done because there are no absolute locations in space-time - that is you can calculate all the motions relative to the Earth and the Sun, and maybe the distance stars ... but certainly not to the tolerance of being able to drop someone into the place they want to be.
Especially because the universe is moving in ways we do not even understand or are able to compute, and expanding. Not to mention the land is shifting and the continents are drifting, and things are moving around that might be in the exact place you are aiming for.
All that leads up to proving as I have always thought that time travel is impossible.