An early Captain's Log featured the chief engineer of a starship speaking in Scottie's accent.
Yeah well, there are a lot of Scotsmen. Not all of them are Montgomery Scott, former chief engineer, USS
Enterprise.
I wonder when we'll get the first temporal anomaly that involves a ship coming through from the future, rather than our ships ending up in the past.
Those are the ones Temporal Affairs hushes up
really hard and doesn't tell us about.
But wait, you ask, why would the commander of Starfleet not be informed about an event involving future Starfleet actions? When you think about it, the answer is obvious: the person who makes constant day-to-day critical decisions affecting the future of Starfleet is the LAST person you want to expose to the butterfly effect.
Suppose someone had told Admiral Sousa about the recurring 'ship of aeons' incident involving the
Enterprises and the Aga Carmide system early in her tenure. It is fairly likely that at some point during her admiralty, Sousa would have given different orders as a result. Say, because she believes the
Enterprise-B has to be kept safe at all costs, in order to avoid a temporal paradox. Thing is, those same orders would alter the history of the
Enterprise-B herself.
And then the ship's history would change. Say,
Enterprise might not have been assigned to lead Task Force 2, because risking the ship in battle might result in losing her before she went to Aga Carmide. But then the Battle of the Ixaria Approaches would never happen, or happen differently, because even with Nash present,
Enterprise being absent would have had effects. The emperor might have survived and wound up in captivity, or survived and escaped. Betarre might never have been motivated to rewrite history. Paradox!
It's a classic example of the old 'Oedipus's prophecy' scenario: by knowing in advance what is going to happen, you take steps that distort events in ways you never would have wanted, resulting in a tragedy that confirms (or
worse yet, destroys) the future you thought you had.
...
So basically, if you tell the admiral commanding Starfleet information that gives detailed information about the future of Starfleet,
and you have to worry about cause and effect leading to temporal paradoxes... You're creating a situation where things have a lot of potential to get screwed up, unless the admiral commanding Starfleet
never acts on the knowledge you've given them.
Much better to just never tell them what happened, or only tell them what happened after the event is safely "over" and the ship from 'the future' has returned home to its own timeline.
Thus, for instance, it may well be that Admiral Sousa was the
first commander of Starfleet ever to know what happened at Aga Carmide back in the Miocene. Telling any of her predecessors, or telling Sousa herself at any time prior to when the
Enterprise-B flew into a time portal and never came back out, could have led to paradox.
