So in this episode they go into a cave, and can read some sort of energy field, as well as Troi having a sense that there are lifeforms present. Geordie explains that the people must be displaced in time, but only by a few milliseconds. If that’s true, how is there not overlap? Say the people are a few milliseconds ahead of the enterprise when they arrive, shouldn’t they appear a few milliseconds later, as they still would have had to be ‘present’ during that time? I don’t understand how they would be consistently invisible if time is a dimension like space that can be traveled through. Some past (or future) version of them would be present regardless of the desynchronization would they not?

Please if anyone could help me understand or shed some light on this I’d appreciate it.

  • Ensign_Seitler@startrek.websiteEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    My understanding of the concept was that it was something like multiple channels of data being sent along the same wire. So long as the frequencies are the right kind of different they’ll essentially exist completely independent of each other.

    Maybe this requires a minimum of two time dimensions so that the variance can result in the different beings following time along different “tracks”?

    I took Troi’s awareness of the beings to be a result of the intermittent overlapping bits of time where they did overlap. Like, it happened too quickly to perceive visually, but enough for the empath to have something to pick up on.

  • half_built_pyramids@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Here’s a shot at the balloon filling up with water explanation:

    It’s like two cars driving down a highway at night. You see the headlights from the car ahead of you illuminating the scenery, but you never catch up to them.

    • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      I think OP is implying that time works like a film strip, so that if I’m five minutes behind you, I see where you were five minutes ago.

      That’s the way time travel in Trek works. If you travel from Time B in the future to Time A in the past at a given place, you see the place as it was at that time, including the people who were there.

      I think that rather being just shifted in time a la time travel, they were actually dealing with a flex in spacetime, like a curve in the road you can’t quite see around, but Diana could see their essence like light from the tail lights, as in your example.

      In other words, they were caught in a time warp, again.

    • Lumidaub@feddit.deEnglish
      62·
      1 year ago

      The downvotes are because what you wrote is pointless. We all know it’s made up and in the end there is no actual, definitive, real answer. That’s not what we’re here for. We are here for the creative exercise of finding an answer that fits the universe of the show and episode. You just shut down that creative process.

    • emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
      51·
      1 year ago

      There’s a lot of made up nonsense in star trek, sure, but there’s also a reason they call it ‘science’ fiction. I guess my question had two points. Firstly to see if anyone more knowledgeable than ne could either confirm that it’s nonsense or give me a way that it’s actually potentially possible based on some legitimate scientific theory, or secondly, like the other person said, just to see how people could use their creativity to explain away the inconsistency in universe.

    • williams_482@startrek.websiteMEnglish
      22·
      1 year ago

      As other posters have pointed out to you, blithely dismissing OP’s question because they are asking about the meaning of “nonsense words made up by writers” is completely missing the point of this community. We all know Star Trek is fiction constructed by writers; pointing that out while adding nothing else of interest is both pointless and boring.

      We don’t expect or require all answers to be from an in-universe perspective, but we do expect everyone to engage in discussion politely and seriously. If this is all you have to say on the subject, don’t comment.

  • commander_la_freak@startrek.website
    1·
    9 months ago

    Huh. It occurs to me that the writers were treating the passage of time as though they were frame rates of film/ video.

    I’m not sure there’s anything to this but the concept of matter and energy in our observable reality “vibrating” at a certain frequency might have something to do with the episode. Putting this in film terms we would say that the universe runs at 120fps (or more) while the Enterprise, crew, et al, reside/ experience reality at 60fps, and the orifice aliens experience it on the alternating frames also at 60fps. We’re seeing two different narratives taking place on alternating frames.

    This doesn’t explain why the same planet is still there on the alternating frames.