I found out something interesting this week. Something I didn’t know. And not only is it new information, the impact of this info drop is so huge it cannot really be overstated. I mean that from my heart. The significance of this event is staggering and many are completely unaware of this important detail in human history.
What I’m saying is Star Trek dropped some knowledge on me this week. Good ‘ol Chris Pike and the crew of the Enterprise may have saved humanity and they definitely altered our current time line. And you won’t find this in any of the history books.
The shocking truth of it all is the Federation has been covering it up. Sure, broadcasting it to the entire nation doesn’t do much for secrecy, but it does put the truth out there for those who are paying attention.
And I was paying attention. Star Trek, Strange New World, Season 4, Episode 1 made this information available to me. Star Trek drops some knowledge. Let’s back up and break it down.
It begins with a massive steller storm. And as the crew encounters this storm, they pick up a distress signal. Next, in a pretty reckless move that many would question (I know I did), the Enterprise enters the storm only to get sucked 65 million years into the past.
Bummer! Interestingly, the distress signal would turn out to be their own signal, beaming to them from an ancient earth century. Oh how the plot thickens, doesn’t it?
If you know anything about me, it should be that I’m a sucker for time travel content. So it immediately caught my attention when the crew is sucked to a time when dinosaurs wandered around our planet. And naturally, basic time travel good hygiene says when traveling into the past, you should always be concerned about the “Butterfly Effect”.
The “Butterfly Effect”, for you time travel newbies is you must always be careful when traveling back in time to not change anything, because one small change can have an enormous and maybe disastrous ripple effect on the future. If you doubt this, watch any time travel Star Trek, Back to the Future, or basic science fiction time travel show, and you will see I speak the truth.
I’m not exaggerating. Changing the past will change the future. Many of us old timers have seen this before, so we are aware of the need to be careful when traveling back in time.
And much to our surprise, just one of the new historical things we learn near the end of the show is the Enterprise is also responsible for the destruction of dinosaurs. That’s right. It turns out when returning to this time zone, a big chunk of the planet Pike strategically blew up follows them and hits the earth.
I get that Captain Pike is trying to keep the past unchanged, but this was a real mistake and that’s a fact. Can you say, “Unintended consequences”? But we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves a little here.
Because of the storm, the Enterprise not only travels to the past, the ship’s propulsion and weapon systems are also offline. This turns out to be unfortunate when a Martian ship claims the Enterprise as salvage.
The Martian warrior general seems to be a pretty reasonable alien, but is in a tight spot, She is desperate for weapons she can scavenge to help in a war between Mars and a bunch of nasty insects from the “fifth planet”. This planet is located between Mars and Jupiter and is inhabited by a bunch of bug people. This planet is unknown to modern earthlings because Pike blows it up (ignoring the Prime Temporal Directive about the Butterfly Effect).
Pike’s crew are able to get the ship running again and are about to destroy the Martian ship before she can use the stolen warp core to destroy the bug planet, when Pike realizes he has to blow up her ship instead for our time to advance properly.
At the last minute, he blows up the planet instead of her ship and uses the force of the blast to travel back to the current time. He and the crew are clearly second guessing this decision, but the Federation advises it’s all good and going to be kept under wraps because it was necessary for our time line to unfold correctly.
So there it is. Pike and the crew of the Enterprise, though they went rogue, did so for a good reason- to create our current timeline. I’m still processing this new historical information and it may take me while to sort through my emotions. But I never really liked bugs that much and they did seem the aggressor in the war with Mars, so I guess it turned out okay.
Have a great week!
Ernie
